Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Making it Real

I am determined to finish Heirs of Mâvarin this year. It's lots of fun to go over it and over it, and tinker and tinker, improving the wording and catching the occasional typo; and there are times when I add or overhaul whole scenes. The books get better and better as I do this, but there's obviously a problem. At some point, I have to concentrate on coming up with a final version of each chapter and each scene - or, at least, as final as it's going to get before being turned over to an agent or editor, one last time. Leonardo Da Vinci wrong, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." I really believe that. At some point a piece of art needs to be pushed out into the world and abandoned, to be discovered by others.

RutanaBut I'm not quite there yet. There are still a few scenes to be written, a few improvements to be made. For example, in re-reading a Patricia C. Wrede novel last week, I realized that not one character in the Mâvarin books, aside from the people in the Palace, has even one servant. Is that realistic for my society at this stage in its history? It's true that I've more or less consciously created a milieu that was far more egalitarian than most historical, pseudo-historical and fantasy realms. Have I overdone it? Probably. Certainly Rutana, an elderly mage in uncertain health who lives alone in a fair-sized house, needs and deserves a servant to help her out, at least a few days a week. She'll get one. And here's a related point. Can she afford a servant? What does she do for a living? If she's retired, where did she make her money before that? So I've had to figure that out, not just for Rutana but for Fayubi as well. Robert Young's character in Father Knows Best rather famously had no apparent job or source of income. I don't want that sort of stumbling block in the way of my books' verisimilitude.

Another current project is to figure out the geography of Mâvarin's capital city, Thâlemar. I had about five named streets, but only a vague idea where they were in relation to major landmarks and to each other. I'm no mapmaker, but I will have to make a map. And just tonight I finally decided the name of Rutana's street, and Fayubi's street, and the Ramets' street.

What's the point of all this? It goes back to worldbuilding, and Damon Knight's comment to me, many years ago now, that he had the impression that my world "ends ten feet from the road." I've come a long way since then, but I have just a little farther to go, I think. Once you know that Rutana's housekeeper Etha leaves Harmony Street just before noon each Market Day to buy Rutana's groceries, including fresh apples in season and Derion chocolate whenever possible, the world becomes that much more real. I hope so, anyway!