Some random questions on the stories

A kindly reader has asked a few questions.  I paraphrase the questions and answer them below, in case anyone is interested.

Lucille seems tragic, but with a touch of inhumanity. 

The long and short of it is, Lucille is not a nice person. 

Taking a toddler to France in dangerous political times is iffy at best, so we start with that. Then Lucille's loss of her husband and her imprisonment, rape, and torture made her very hard. Cold. Fanatical almost.
Annique paid the price.

Annique's eidetic memory was recognized as soon as she could talk. It's the key to why she was in France at all. If she hadn't been uniquely useful, her mother would have sent her back to England when Annique's father died.

Frankly, Lucille exploited Annique and spared her very little. Just as Lucille spared herself nothing.

Was Lucille a villain who manipulated and used her daughter and later Justine in a despicable way

or a heroine who stepped up when England's existence was at stake?

Was she a woman who sacrificed everything she cared about for England's sake?

Or a selfish ideologue?

Or, like, all of the above?
 

I don't explain and we never go into her head. I try to show her as a woman with regrets. I'm hoping the reader will find her believable as a person and wonder about her and feel sorry for her. 

She had just a touch of inhumanity

On the exculpatory side:

Lucille, as a high-level officer of the Secret Police, curbed some of the evil things going on. Justine's rescue from the child brothel and sending Justine to help the last of the Caches are two examples of Lucille's work.

Did she really keep a brothel?

 Well ... yes.

I have trouble writing about historical whoredom. It needs somebody wiser than me.

Women had few career choices in this era. Some women, for one reason or another, became whores. A rich, well-run brothel like the one Lucille ran was an island of safety in a city visited by war, revolution, riot, and the occasional bout of starvation. The woman working there were grateful to be in the place. They had different expectations than run in the world of 1867 or 2018.

So I'm trying to deal with difficult historical realities in the context in which contemporaries would have judged them. Also trying not to be too realistic.

She raised Annique to be a spy, naively committed to France, while using her for the opposite cause. She set Annique up for the heartbreak and disillusionment in TSL,

Lucille wouldn't have felt it was morally dreadful to be a French patriot. Lucille spent her whole life among French patriots and, I think, loved some of them. Arguably, France was on the right philosophical side in that war.

Lucille chose loyalty to the British. She left Annique free to choose which side she'd be on. 

Annique feels betrayed when she sees all her letters and reports have found their way to the British. A tough day to be Annique.

What happens to Grey and Annique?

I don't say what happens to Grey and Annique after the end of TSL, since I want to be free to return to the timeline and write a story there if I ever decide to which I probably won't though.

I'm sure they had a true HEA, which means they both found uses for all their talents. Maybe out in India. Or maybe they went under deep cover in the south of France and ran a safehouse. I know they did exciting things.

Why does Shandor have a Hungarian name? At least, the spelling isn't Hungarian but the sound of it is.

It's a Kaldarashi name. A Rom name.

At the end of Rogue Spy, what was Galba's final reaction to Pax's insubordination?

All along, Doyle and Grey kept Galba in the loop about what was going forward. Galba, in the manner of senior management since the dawn of time, turned a blind eye to what he couldn't prevent . . . and what was ultimately serving his purposes.

Galba would have preferred that Pax not be the one to kill his own father, (Who among us wishes to promote patricide?) but he approves of the overall outcome.

After the close of the book Galba gives Pax a legendary and wide-ranging chewing out. Then Grey, Doyle, and Galba take turns interfering with wedding preparations to brief Pax on what they expect from him when he heads back to Italy.

Who replaced Grey when he retired?

Some "guy I didn't need to name or worry about what happened to him" took over. Then another guy, likewise. Then Adrian.

When Adrian stepped into Galba's shoes as Head of Service, the position of Head of the British Section was taken by -- you guessed it --  another "guy I don't need to name or worry about."

All else being equal I'd rather not name or describe characters who aren't necessary to the action because I always have more than enough characters anyhow.

How did Justine learn about Lucille's death and how was she affected by it? I expected to see this come up in The Black Hawk when the story moved parallel of the events in Spymaster's Lady and Vauban's death was mentioned.

[SPOILER]

What we're looking at here is the section of Black Hawk that begins with Hawker coming to Justine's window carrying a letter and ends when Justine shoots Hawker.

[END SPOILER]

In this time frame Vauban had been dead about a week. Lucille, who has been in Italy for months, has been dead a few weeks. 

The action of TSL begins after the action of this section ends.

Before this Black Hawk section opens .... Lucille dies. Annique leaves immediately for Paris. Soulier's resident spy sends word of Lucille's death to Soulier in London. LeBlanc's assassin, having killed Lucille, spends a lot of time attempting to find Annique and finish the job. He then wastes more time trying to track her north. Eventually the assassin rides for Paris and reports to LeBlanc.

During the TBH section, only LeBlanc, Soulier, a couple messengers, folks in Italy, and Annique know about Lucille's death. Justine meets none of these people except LeBlanc and he's not about to reveal he knows Lucille is dead because he has no legitimate way to have this news.

After the BH section, Paris Secret Police get the info.

So Justine doesn't learn about Lucille's death "on stage," as it were, and we don't see her reaction.

Timeline confusions (SPOILERS)

WARNING:  HERE BE SPOILERS


I've had a couple people come away from the timeline of the books a little confused.  In fact, the sound of heads banging on desks is about deafening.

So let me provide a general comment on the timeline as a Guide for the Perplexed.  And then I'll probably do it again in a week or so, but with more specificity than I can scrape together right now. And I'll only do that if I'm not buried in work of some kind or another.


We have three confusing time periods. Like ... sometimes I have two books happening at once.

1794 -- And we are in Forbidden Rose. Hawker, Pax and Justine are all young. Hawker is 12 or 13. Justine, 13. Pax, about 16.

Galba is Head of the Service. Grey has not yet joined the Service. Annique is living with the gypsies at this point. Doyle is a senior Independent Agent. Hawker is merely a raw possible recruit, on probation.

In 1794, Hawker walks onto the stage in Forbidden Rose leading a pair of tough little donkeys. About a third of the way into Forbidden Rose Hawker will meet Pax when they change duty at the watching post on Maggie's house. A bit later Justine and Hawker meet for the first time on the street outside Doyle's prison.

Black Hawk also visits 1794. This is in the first fallback section from the frame story.  We open that segment with Justine and Hawk getting together in Paris in front of the now-inactive guillotine.  This is the day after Doyle is freed from prison in Forbidden Rose.  In this segment of Black Hawk, Pax, Hawker, and Justine go to the Coach House and rescue the last Caches-in-training. 

Forbidden Rose and the 1794 section of Black Hawk then come together and end with the same scene. That's the one where Justine gives Severine into Maggie's keeping.

1802 -- This is where things gets complicated, because now we got three books involved.

In 1802 Justine and Hawker are 19 or 20. Pax is 24 or so.

Galba is Head of Service. Grey is Head of the British Section. Hawker is a young Independent Agent.

We have an 1802 segment of Black Hawk full of our three young spies saving Napoleon from an assassin. At the end of that 1802 section of Black Hawk, we see Justine shoot Hawker. This is on page 228.


The action of Spymaster's Lady opens five or six days after that shooting scene. Offstage, Grey and Hawker got picked up when Hawker was getting himself out of the Louvre. There is Hawker in prison, dying from Justine's bullet.  Annique gets thrown into the cell and they're off!!  Hawker, Grey, Annique and Doyle run headlong across France.

Rogue Spy starts when we're in the middle of the Spymaster's Lady timeline.  The two stories go forward in parallel. Action of one story happens while stuff is going on in the other.

While Pax in that tavern working up the courage to go

to Meeks Street, Grey and Annique are walking across Devon to London.

When Hawker visits Daisy's house in Rogue Spy it's been maybe three weeks since he was shot. He's only now come to terms with his final breakup with Justine. Meanwhile, across town, in Spymaster's Lady, Grey is dealing with Annique as a prisoner at Meeks Street.

Rogue Spy wraps up with the death of the Merchant but Spymaster's Lady continues. So later events like  Meeks Street headquarters getting shot up and Annique escaping to Soulier's house take place after Cami and Pax have already been married and sailed for France.

1818:  1818 is the frame story of Black Hawk. It's 16 years since Justine shot Hawker. Sixteen years since Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique married.

Hawker is Head of Service. Galba has retired. We haven't visited their timelines, but we can assume Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique have had many adventures in the intervening years, done important work, and have settled into a happy life. Maybe they have kids even.
And in 1818, Hawker and Justine marry.

So that's the way all these events spread out.
And that's just as clear as mud, isn't it?

Go ahead. Ask me something. I'll try to clarify.

Technical Topics-- Those Gestures

Somebody asked elsewhere

 -- paraphrasing here --

"How do we find ways to describe the exact motion of jerking a thumb in some direction or nodding in agreement?"

It's hard to find lovely unique ways to describe some of those, "He jerked his chin in the direction of the cyclops," or "He pointed to where the treasure was buried," situations.

But we can step back and consider gestures in a wider sense.

The words that describe the movement of body parts depend on:
Whose POV are you in?
What emotion and meaning do the physical movements represent?
What reaction are you trying to call from the reader?

(My first advice is to get hold of some Dorothy Dunnet and watch her characters do gestures and indicate things. She is just so good.)

Now, I have my WIP in front of me -- the Pax Manuscript.  Let me look at some of the head/face/hand movements and try to figure out why I did them the way I did.

***
"Something stronger?" Galba nodded toward the upper shelf where a bottle of twenty-year-old brandy inserted itself into a row of books.
****

Simple straightforward nod. You get to do five or six nods in a manuscript. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Not everything has to be fancy.

(Never use nods to tag dialog. You're just wasting one of those five or six nods you're entitled to.)


***

She tossed her last handful of crumbs to the birds, dusted her hands, and motioned to the errand boy who was heading out into the square with a package under his arm.
***

Now 'motioned' is about as weak as you can get in the way of description.
Does she raise her hand up over her head and wave it back and forth? Does she make a beckoning with just her fingers?
We don't know.

But we don't have to know.
We can be vague for three reasons.

(a) The purpose and outcome of the gesture are crystal clear and straightforward and have no hidden depths.
The gesture doesn't mean more than 'come here'.

(b) We have a picture of what's going on. We 'see' her dust her hands of breadcrumbs. With that strong visual laid down, we can be vague about the beckoning part that comes next.

(c) Doesn't matter what the reader imagines that gesture to look like. We don't minutely describe it because it is inherently not important.

All that said, we don't use weak words like 'motioned', 'gestured', 'moved', 'pointed', 'indicated' and so on but two or three times each in any mansucript.


Here's another:
***
He'd left France with various English coins, handy for bribing. He fumbled one loose. Turned out to be a shilling.

He held it up. "There's two of these waiting for you at Number Seven, if I catch up with her." He

closed his hand and got ready to tuck the coin back in his pocket.

The boy's eyes shifted. "Down there." He pointed east. "She give me halfcrown to say she gone t'other way."

He flipped the shilling to the boy. Collect two more tonight."
*****

All these motions with the coin, with the boy's eyes, with his pointing, convey complex intention. But this is one of those counter-intuitive cases where the gestures are filled with information, but the intention doesn't live in the details of the motion.

We don't have to describe the exact gesture of tucking the coin away. The meaning of that gesture stands there shouting. It doesn't need the support of visuals. It doesn't need the internals to spell out what's going on.


Sometimes, a gesture needs support.
If we say merely,
She thumbed at the air behind her in the direction of Codyville.
"We go that way."
the motion sticks out like ... well ... a sore thumb, and we keep wanting to say something exciting and specific about the thumb motion itself.
But the motion of the thumb is not important.

It's the mood, intention, meaning and so on that's essential. So you put your creative energy into talking about mood, intention, internals and so on of the thumb stick rather than trying to describe the arc of the thumb with great beauty and vividness.

She clenched her teeth, making a sound midway between a dentist's drill and a pot boiling over. When she thumbed the air behind her in the direction of Codyville, it was if a particularly nasty ghost was following her and she had some hope of putting out its eye.
"We go that way," she said.

The second passage doesn't define the movement of the thumb any more clearly,
but we've added so much value to that motion in internals we don't have to add value to the simple physical act.

Thumbing toward something or jerking a chin in the direction of something you can maybe do twice in a manuscript.

After that your folks have to keep their chins and thumbs still and maybe just glance that way (2 times), indicate with a subtle lift of an eyebrow (once), roll their eyes toward (once), motion a languid hand in that direction (once), indicate with a hunch of the shoulder (once), nod toward (you have 5 or 6 nods, total), grimace at (once), twist to look at (once), notice over their left shoulder (once) ... well, you get the idea.

Another movement of hands:

***
She pressed her hands together in her lap, knuckle to knuckle, and waited.
****

Here, the motion and placement of the digits is important. We describe the exact location and placement of the hand because it is the visual that creates atmosphere for the reader. The visual itself becomes the comment.

I don't add internals. I pack information into the gesture.







****
Deliberately, she calmed her hands and set them together, loose in her lap. Her hands would whisper,

"I am not worried. I'm prepared to deal with you." It was an old saying of the Baldoni that lies are not words only. One deceives with every fingernail and toe.
***

And here we have both detailed motion and internals. Here the reader doesn't need to interpret the meaning of the hand motion and placement. I tell her what it means. Belt and suspenders, as it were.

Regency Pastels

I've just had Pax do a portrait with charcoal, ink and pastels.
Him being an artist of sorts.

So I have all this spare information about pastels floating around in my head, 
and I wrote a posting over at the Wenches for anyone who wants a very brief look at art materials of the Regency.

I found it all interesting myself.

 

He's using a brass pastel holder.

Regency visual artists were about half way along the technological journey between the Neolithic Cave painters and one of those high-tech computer painting programs.  The fine work, the beautiful work, the Regency artists created was accomplished with the most simple tools and a limited array of colors.
 
Let me talk about pastels, because Pax uses pastels.  I think of pastel as a portable and democratic art form in Georgian and Regency times.   If you are a spy pretending to be an artist, or vice versa, you would carry a sketchbook and maybe pastels because they're fast to use and cheap.
And, like, portable.

Portraits in these readymade crayons offered tangible advantages over oil for the artist and the sitter: they required fewer sittings as there was no drying time; less paraphernalia; the materials were easily portable and the costs were lower.
      The Rise of Pastel in the Eighteenth Century, Margery Shelley

Just a whole bunch of pastels.  From the Met

These pastels were made by grinding natural white chalk -- something you can pick up off the ground in places like Southeast England -- into a fine powder. You mixed this with pigment and a binder like gum arabic.  You rolled the mixture into thin cylindrical sticks or long square sticks and dried them.  These were 'soft pastels'.  They were just super concentrated colors that transferred readily to the paper.

They called pastels 'crayons' in the Regency -- so confusing -- because the waxy colored sticks we think of as 'crayons' wouldn't be invented for another century.

 The most exciting recent innovation for our Regency pastel artist would have been the Conté crayon,  invented in France in 1794.  These were made from kaolin clay and graphite and fired in a kiln.  They were much harder than the chalk-based soft pastel sticks, and came in a smaller range of colors.  They could be sharpened.  They were good for tight, crisp lines and fine detail, and often used to lay down the first sketch on paper.  
 

Detail of picture above

You had a potential for vivid color, but in a medium likely to crumble and come apart in your hand and smear.  So the pastel sticks were fitted into a sort of metal holder that protected them and provided control and precision for the artist.

A holder for Conté pastels, about 6 inches long, brass

Because pastels were intended to be inserted into a holder, they were thinner than the ones we use today.  A square shape gave them stability in the holder. That's why the Conté pastels are square.

 

 Find the rest of this posting at Word Wenches, here.

Doing the Writerly Thing

Nothing too exciting to write about, but the mood struck me anyhow. 

Worked a little in the morning at the cafe.

Creative barista is creative

Yeah! Booksigning!!

The posters for the March booksigning have been handed over to the out-of-town folks by my most excellent friend Mary Ann.




I sorted the animals. 
What, doesn't everyone have huge pet beds in the living room?

Sorted animals

They promised us snow, but it never materialized.  We do however have ferocious winds and cold.  22 degrees (minus 5 for you folks who think in Celsius.)  I have stacked up the firewood for a long evening.

I am not writing on the Pax manuscript just at the moment.  I'm trying to understand the next contract.  Eventually I will give up and just sign the thing.

I'm going to go back and move the first Pax/Camille dialog into her viewpoint and out of Pax's.  This is not just a 'When all else fails, try changing the viewpoint' kinda thing.  There's probably some reasoning behind it. 

This whole first third of the manuscript is just a plotting mess.  

Hands. Just because.

I have a scene in the back of my mind that I really want to sit down and write.  I will, as soon as I get some mental space.

I'm about to introduce the character of Pax -- Camille and Pax -- to each other.  I want Camille to notice Pax's hands.  So I'm thinking about hands in general.  You are about to reap some of that.