Plot bunnies, breeding
Mar. 13th, 2026 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseThe book got a full edit yesterday and a new ending; the original ending was more like a chapter ending than a proper book ending - it set things up nicely for the sequel but didn't really work other than that. The new ending is very much better. It frames the entire set of events in that book between two significant, contrasting, and related deaths, and also provides a decisive break point; for the entire book there has been a telepathic link between Nivaunel and her (effectively) adoptive mother Lady Chioreth, via a pair of magic rings, and at the end of the book that link is transferred to two other characters who have recently married, but one of them needs to travel a lot and the other needs to stay in the capital city. So today's job is to get the whole lot on AO3, which basically means lightly HTML-ing it; things like italics and centred section dividers don't copy over automatically, so you have to re-insert them.
Today I am also hoping to get some of the little boxes painted. The little boxes are going to Coronation with me in June to get handed out to new members (a tradition which I thought our current monarchs had established, but no; it's been going for years - I just didn't get anything), so I need to adorn them with knotwork. It's easy and looks a great deal more impressive than it really is.
I shall also be trying very hard not to start on the third book, which will be called The Grey Cleric. The second book ends with Nivaunel and her friends escorting Edelna (Nivaunel's half-sister) and her baby to the province of Chiderene in the north-east; Chiderene is large and important enough to have, basically, regents, though they haven't yet been explicitly called that (they're a High Lord and High Lady). The baby is going to be the next heir to the province after the current regents' daughter, because she is the daughter of their son, who was originally the heir but got booted out of the succession due to the fact that he didn't take responsibility for Edelna's pregnancy (in fact he dropped her like a hot brick). So in the third book they get to Chiderene and discover there's a war on. Big Bad (name to be determined) is attacking from the north, with his sidekick, a one-eyed half-orc cleric who used to worship Gruumsh (hence the one eye) but is now in the service of a sinister new god. (As if Gruumsh wasn't bad enough.) The basic idea is that there's an ancient prophecy which both sides know about, and it turns out to be 100% accurate, but both sides have entirely misunderstood it. In particular, for most of the book everyone thinks that "the grey cleric" is the terrifying half-orc. It's not.
That will have to wait. I have too much other stuff to do, including writing a script for the readthrough; I am still trying to pin d'Artagnan to a list of dates (he's in Canada at the moment, as he quite often is - he's doing a St John Passion). When I mentioned to Porthos last month that I was trying to get dates for this out of d'Artagnan, his immediate reaction was "I can't do June or July", which made me laugh. He knows d'Artagnan very well. :-) I should perhaps have started around Christmas; my birthday is actually at the beginning of April...
Today I am also hoping to get some of the little boxes painted. The little boxes are going to Coronation with me in June to get handed out to new members (a tradition which I thought our current monarchs had established, but no; it's been going for years - I just didn't get anything), so I need to adorn them with knotwork. It's easy and looks a great deal more impressive than it really is.
I shall also be trying very hard not to start on the third book, which will be called The Grey Cleric. The second book ends with Nivaunel and her friends escorting Edelna (Nivaunel's half-sister) and her baby to the province of Chiderene in the north-east; Chiderene is large and important enough to have, basically, regents, though they haven't yet been explicitly called that (they're a High Lord and High Lady). The baby is going to be the next heir to the province after the current regents' daughter, because she is the daughter of their son, who was originally the heir but got booted out of the succession due to the fact that he didn't take responsibility for Edelna's pregnancy (in fact he dropped her like a hot brick). So in the third book they get to Chiderene and discover there's a war on. Big Bad (name to be determined) is attacking from the north, with his sidekick, a one-eyed half-orc cleric who used to worship Gruumsh (hence the one eye) but is now in the service of a sinister new god. (As if Gruumsh wasn't bad enough.) The basic idea is that there's an ancient prophecy which both sides know about, and it turns out to be 100% accurate, but both sides have entirely misunderstood it. In particular, for most of the book everyone thinks that "the grey cleric" is the terrifying half-orc. It's not.
That will have to wait. I have too much other stuff to do, including writing a script for the readthrough; I am still trying to pin d'Artagnan to a list of dates (he's in Canada at the moment, as he quite often is - he's doing a St John Passion). When I mentioned to Porthos last month that I was trying to get dates for this out of d'Artagnan, his immediate reaction was "I can't do June or July", which made me laugh. He knows d'Artagnan very well. :-) I should perhaps have started around Christmas; my birthday is actually at the beginning of April...
