Orchards and Lessons - Thoughts
And now, to discussing the chapters!
As discussed in the last post, this is where it all started. The opening scene with Hannah and Leyla leaving and saying goodbye to Ciaran as they went to name the trees just popped into my head, and everything else from there just came out. And while this definitely saw the most rewrites out of everything in the book (I think more editing was done on this than the rest of the book combined), it was always more “getting what was in my head out onto the page the right way” than any real change in how I saw it all.
First chapters are always interesting, because you’re setting up all these expectations and world building and everything else while also trying to tell an interesting story, right? And some books do this a lot better than others, heh. I feel pretty happy with this one, but it took some finagling and running it by different people to get the right level of detail, while still leaving plenty to explore in later chapters, particularly on how the actual magical experimentation works. I originally had a lot less detail, but was persuaded that too much of everything was still in my head.
But leaving all that aside, there were some key things I wanted to hit here:
The basics of what Hannah does, why it matters, and how it’s scientific in the sense of knowing the numbers and margins/etc. This is magic, of course, but it’s also engineering.
The basic relationship of Hannah, Leyla, and Ciaran.
Showing that this is more-or-less very late medieval but with some important differences. And as we see through the book, that isn’t actually a great description as things have developed quite a bit differently here, but I wanted to give everyone a starting point.
Showing that despite everything being nice and happy, there is real, serious danger.
Getting the formula of “All Creatures Great and Small but wizards” (or, in other words, “they go out, talk about things related to the day, learn the problem, do their work, and then come home and everything is nice”) settled.
The first bit was tricky, as I wanted to show how the numbers mattered and were a standard part of what Hannah did and what everyone expected with magic, but I didn’t want to get bogged down trying to engineer everything and calculate relative efficiencies. So, I used the standard trick of “here’s one set of numbers, and you’re never getting another one so you can’t calculate anything from there!” to make the point and show what would be a part of it, but not make my life too hard later. You know how many lightsworth this waterwheel provides, but never how much anything else provides or uses, and probably you never will.
The second part I think comes through well, we see Hannah as the one who goes out and does things, Ciaran as the one that stays home and handles things, and Leyla had been home but is just now starting her apprenticeship and joining her mother. Everything else could come in time.
The third one was interesting. Showing that Lachlan was married to another man but had been vying for Hannah’s hand, and that this wasn’t particularly worthy of comment, I hope went to show that things operate differently in this society. The addition of Hannah having some anxiety about working on this rather than a Guild wizard helps show some of the social stratification, as does Lachlan trying to qualify his daughter as a bonnet laird. The bonnet laird bit is particularly interesting to me, because I had no idea what it was going to mean for the longest time, but every time I went to edit it out, I just...Couldn’t. Chewing on that eventually led me to a big realization about how this society functions, which we’ll get to much, much later (grins).
Fourth, showing the danger was critical. This is real, serious stuff, and people can easily die if they misuse it. Showing Hannah being worried, and then tying it back to an incident when she was Leyla’s age to make it clear this isn’t just a fussy mother, was important to set the right tone and seriousness, and we’ll see that in much more harrowing detail in a few chapters.
And finally, I’m pretty darn happy with the formula here. I break with it at various points, notably in the Interlude chapters, but it works for me, and it works for those who have read it so far, and it lets me write out chapters well and quickly so we’ll see it continue for quite some time, I think.
That's it for this one, but if you have any questions or things you’d like explored in more detail, just let me know!