Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be making daily posts about Midnight Never Come, but if yesterday was “I had inspiration for breakfast” day, today is “And Clio has decided she loves me” day.

When writing a historical novel, one rapidly discovers, history frustrates you to no end by not lining up the way you want it to. (Dammit, why hasn’t Walsingham’s daughter married Essex yet? Or if she has — which she may — why hasn’t it become public knowledge yet? This book may be over by October 1590. Etc.)

But then, every so often, history decides to hand you exactly what you need, with a red bow on top.

Without realizing I was doing it, I set this scene in the very month when Fitzwilliam accused Perrot of treason. And — if that wasn’t enough — Perrot is Walsingham’s client.

I do not expect this to mean anything to any of you, and I will be surprised if it does. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The point is, when I went looking for some reason to have Deven investigating the current status of Irish politics in the English court, I discovered the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland leveling accusations of treason at the previous Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose patron happens to be the guy I wanted to be sending Deven off on that investigation.

All hail the Muse of History. She’s a bitch most of the time, but then she does something so nice that, for a little while, you forget about all the other frustration, and you remember why historical fiction can be awesome.

Authorial sadism: making Deven talk politics while his pants are trying to fall off.

LBR quota: I’d say accusations of treason count as blood and rhetoric both.

I don’t want to subject you all to daily progress reports on Midnight Never Come, because let’s face it, that would be three months of numbers posts, and I can’t find a way to make them all witty. But I’ll post every so often, because public accountability is good for my productivity, and it helps me feel less like I’m writing in a total vacuum.

So this post is prompted by a milestone: the twenty thousand-word mark. A fifth of a book, that is, should I be so lucky as to have this cap out at 100K. (I’m not holding my breath.) 20353, to be precise, not counting the flashbacks that I will probably be inserting into it; in addition to the Leicester scene I mentioned before, there’s also a brief account of the Armada that I’m quite pleased with.

I’m very nearly done with the 1588 segment of the story. The shape of this is weird; I’m going to have about 20-25K in 1588, and then jump ahead a year and a half to 1590, when the rest of the book will take place. It’s weird enough for me to bear in mind the non-trivial possibility that I will have to do some Very Ugly Revision down the road, wherein I will rip out this entire opening chunk and replace it with something in 1590. I can’t just change the dates; the reason this is happening in 1588 is so the characters have time to plausibly reach the positions at Court they will be occupying in 1590, since one does not earn that kind of trust in a few weeks. If I decide to make the novel more unified in time, I’ll have to come up with a new opening entirely, that shows Deven and Lune already in place. But that’s the kind of judgment call I can’t make without writing more of the book, and I can’t do that without having written this beginning (even if it turns out to be the wrong beginning), so there’s no way to get around the possibility of twenty thousand words down the drain.

Sigh.

But that sounds overly angsty. Things are going decently at present, and I’m looking forward to some upcoming scenes. So I am not having book-angst on a grand scale. I am instead, I think, having pragmatic book evaluation, so I don’t get taken by surprise if I have to make some major changes.

There is a difference, I promise.

Authorial sadism: just describing what happened to the Armada would have been sadistic enough. But then I went and added stuff to the history. ^_^

LBR tally: mostly rhetoric, and a bit of political blood. Love is definitely going to be the underdog in this novel.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have ten thousand words of book.

(Actually, we have 10172. Not counting the 2124 of Gifford flashback, that isn’t really in the book yet.)

This is the point at which I start believing I’m writing a book. Ten thousand is a nice round number; it convinces me I have something of substance on my hands, rather than flimsy shreds. Unfortunately, soon after this we hit the stretch where adding a thousand words doesn’t seem to make much difference in the total, where I run and run and get no closer to the end. We call this the “hamster on a treadmill” stretch.

But let’s not race to meet future miseries.

Authorial sadism: making Lune be wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong. But it’ll be fun for her later.

LBR tally: love. The Goodemeades are so sweet.

I may or may not write one more scene this weekend; we’ll see. But then it’s off to London, and then I’ll be trip-blogging. It’s all Midnight Never Come, all the time, here at Swan Tower! (I promise I’ll try to have some other content, really I will.)

I think I’ll call it quits for the day, at 2683 words. I kept going because I really really want to write a certain upcoming scene, but this story calls for a richness of detail beyond what I tend to default to, and that means after 2683 words Lune’s only just now gotten to the Angel Inn. (With a lengthy break in there to try and determine just when that thing got built. Best I could find was that it was around by Jacobean times; I’m going to assume it was there a little earlier, and if anybody can dig up the evidence to prove me wrong, more power to them.)

So no encounters yet with our favorite batshit-crazy seer. He’ll have to wait for another day. But some turns of phrase I’m rather proud of.

If I can get in another solid day of work tomorrow, I think I’ll call it quits for a while. I know better than to think I’ll write steadily while in London, but I wanted to get the beginnings of Lune’s and Deven’s plots on the page, and let that compost in my head while I’m gone. Then, come June, we’ll really get to work.

Authorial sadism of the second part of the day: poor little mortal pets.

LBR tally: a bit of metaphorical blood, a bit of rhetoric. We’ll have some love tomorrow.

Eh-heh-heh-heh.

I know what I’m doing with Lune, at least to start with. (Though I don’t actually know how she got herself disgraced, and should probably figure that out.)

Authorial sadism of the day: the country mice don’t realize the city mice are cannibals.

LBR tally: today it’s been blood, though not of the physical sort.

I may write some more. I mean, I don’t have anything to do until the game tonight, except clean up my office or unpack more stuff or get myself together for the trip or finish the book I’m reading or —

I still may write some more, anyway.

I should mention, I suppose, that I have begun tiptoeing my way delicately through the beginnings of Midnight Never Come.

I’m tiptoeing for a lot of reasons. Frex, I know where the plot is going, but not how it’s getting there, which is a weird situation for me. (Normally I know where I’m starting, and I follow the plot to see where it goes.) Also, I’m only just now getting to know the protagonists; Invidiana’s been in my head for a good year and a half, but Deven and Lune are new to me. I had to rewrite the beginning of Chapter One twice, proceeding a little further into the scene each time, before I started hitting the right version of Deven. (And I still don’t think I have his first name right, though he seems okay with that surname.)

Also? Historical fiction is slow. There’s a bit of Received Wisdom that says something like, do your research, and then use twenty percent of it. I disagree. Use a hundred percent of it, and then go do more and use that, too — but only make a point of telling your reader about, oh, maybe three percent. If that. The rest of it should be used in a pervasive, background kind of way, but it should most definitely be used. I should be thinking, as I write, about how old Walsingham is in 1588, and what he looked like, and how he dressed, and what his family background is, and what he would be doing on an average day at Hampton Court, and that he and Burghley both studied at Gray’s Inn, and oh is this in the period when he and Burghley had fallen out with one another? And also about gentleman ushers, and the protocols of the presence chamber, and how one played tennis in the sixteenth century, and the recurrent problem at Court of how the kitchens ended up feeding more people than they were supposed to (because people would bring their families and servants and third cousins’ friends’ roommates, which they weren’t supposed to) and so regularly went over budget as a result.

I shouldn’t make a point of telling you about any of that unless it’s important to the plot. But I should mention in the natural course of things, if it’s relevant, and I should be keeping it in the back of my mind all the time, so that the shape of the story I’m telling flows through and around it.

. . . which is hard.

My hope is that it will get easier as I go.

Anyway, I can’t remember who I ganked this icon from, but lots of people have it. Seems a pretty appropriate work-in-progress icon, especially since I think this novel will have all three, concurrent and consecutive.

Today’s work: rhetoric, I suppose. The love and blood will come later.