This is it: the final installment of the Floodtide teasers! Carefully selected to avoid any spoilers at all. As I've mentioned previously, for several of the novels I've "bookended" the stories with a pair of short passages in a different narrative style. As for Mother of Souls, the bookends for Floodtide echo each other in theme.
Teasers
Blog entry
While the Alpennia series has focused largely on characters who have significant mystical talents, Floodtide gives us a larger window into how "ordinary" people experience the magic that pervades the world. I've made previous reference to the climax of a Great Mystery feeling like a shiver down your spine, and to how even those who don't have measurable mystical talent can contribute power to the working of a mystery.
Have you ever been on one of those road trips where you're driving all night and it feels like there's nothing left in the universe but you and the road? When time loses all meaning? When past and future merge into an endless now? Now imagine you're in a boat, moving through the flooded streets. That was the feeling I was aiming for in this passage.
When the world turns upside down, those who are thrown together can feel like all barriers and differences have been erased in the common struggle. At least, it can feel that way to those who don't worry as much about consequences once the crisis is past. I picked this scene because it illustrates Roz and Iuli's different takes on potential consequences. Iuli thinks she can make everything right once the crisis is over. Roz knows that some people are held to stricter standards of accountability than others.
One of the hazy images that came to me when I was first plotting Daughter of Mystery was a system of nearly forgotten catacombs under the city of Rotenek. I think the original image was in connection with Margerit and Barbara fleeing when the mystery guild was betrayed. That vision of the scene was discarded, but I kept a vague fondness for the idea of underground passages. The image merged eventually with the developing idea of the chanulezes and the thought that some of them had been covered over and nearly forgotten.
Possibly the hardest thing in trying to write a stand-alone story within an existing series is trying to find the tricky balance between writing for the readers who don’t know any of these characters, and establishing the right dynamics for pre-existing characters who still need to “act in character” even in front of readers who don’t know what “in character” means for them.
Quite some time ago, I pulled out the passages I wanted to use for the teaser series and set them up in a separate file. That way I didn't need to hunt around for something every week and there was no risk of messing with the master file by accident. But that means that for the last few months I've been setting up the teasers while looking at snippets of text in isolation. This past Saturday, I did the review of the final page proofs, which is as close as I've come so far to reading the final novel straight through.
Disasters aren't always sudden and extreme -- sometimes they creep up on you slowly, like the water rising along the steps of the plaiz one at a time. Sometimes disasters consist of tedious waiting as the news dribbles in from those who are harder hit. Sometimes disasters are mere inconveniences to be avoided until they ebb away again. Floodtide in Rotenek has always shown different faces to different people. In the previous Alpennia books, we've mostly seen the "inconvenience" side. Floodtide as a holiday excuse to leave the city.
Even in this modern age of broadcast communication and instant messaging, there are places in our lives where simple, loud, public sounds carry essential meaning. Most of the time, we experience them only in “test” mode—checking on their functionality and accustoming us to the particular form of the alert and the expected response. In my own everyday life, there are fire drills at work, the monthly ammonia-release alert siren test, the interruption of tv or radio shows with the Emergency Broadcast System horns and message, "This is a test.
As Floodtide approaches the events that form the climax of Mother of Souls, I can't escape the need to fill the reader in on a bunch of activities that my protagonist Roz is not only unaware of, but is mostly uninterested in. Roz knows, in theory, that her employer is the royal thaumaturgist and that means she makes up mysteries for Princess Anna. But the details? Not something that touches her directly. And the part being played by Luzie Valorin's magical opera is entirely outside her everyday experience.
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