Insert chapter

Finished the insert chapter of the party scene today. It's now Chapter Twelve.

I went streaming onward through the draft, adding a word here and there to reconcile old draft with the new and simplified plot structure. We're cool up to Chapter Sixteen (new.) Stopped there for today.

Jess shows up at Meeks Street. Some fact mods. I'll have to shift and shade some of the emotion too, I think.

Ran into a member of my crit circle at Paneras. Small towns ...

Oh. And I'm recycling Anneka's boyfriend for Jessamyn. This lets me salvage some writing. Yeah!

Now with Anneka I originally wrote it that she had this idealistic young Dutch soldier boyfriend and the two of them snuggled madly in a horse barn under the moon when they were sixteen. All very tragic, him getting killed.

Which left my Anneka NOT a virgin when she meets Grey, but with no troublesome boyfriend hanging about, which is what I wanted, virginity being so bloody cliched.

But when I tried to make this play with the spy setup
ARRGGHH
Sauvignon and Soulier would have had her EARS if she'd done anything that stupid --
army camps being impossible for even the chancy contraceptives of the era
and pregancy being about a surefire result of unprotected sex over a period of months.
Which would leave Anneka out in the field with no way of getting an abortion except among the whores.

I have to be at least a little realistic about this.
So -- no Dutch boyfriend in the horse barn.

But with slight changes he will do very well for Jessamyn, who needs to dispose of HER virginity, virginity being such a cliche and all.

But that left me with poor Anneka, of course, being all virgin.

I piddled around with changing the boyfriend to Rene and then killing HIM off -- which was some more nice writing that I can't use AT ALL now. But that never really worked with the spy setup either.
Nobody would pair a a lively, warm-hearted 16-year-old up with a boyfriend-handler and then send them to work hundreds of miles apart.

And I couldn't see Lucille sanctioning this. Lucille's always thinking she might send Anneka home if the war ever dies down.
She's also keeping Anneka ineligible for courtesan duty, not wanting her to take that professional route. So she'd watch the girl like a hawk when she wasn't in the field.

Just too many reasons Anneka wouldn't have casually misplaced her virginity.
She's not that kind of woman.

And I absolutely refuse to have Anneka raped.

Oh well. I made her a very uninnocent virgin. No coyness underlies the plot anywhere.

And I picked up the barn scene whole and recycled it, which is tidy of me.