Know the Novel Part 3: Words Written in The Kidnapping of Prince Ferdinand

Happy December my dears! A blessed Advent season to you and a very merry Christmas when it comes! God bless us, every one!

One of these fine December days I shall take some time and reread A Christmas Carol, but it is not this day. This day I am taking some time and answering the last set of questions in the lovely Christine Smith's annual link-up, Know the Novel. 

Of course, I didn't actually finish my current WIP last month, but...what matters that? Not a whit, says I. The link-up must be participated in. My muse demands it.

1. How did writing this novel go all around?

I was gonna say "it's been fun! slow, but fun" or something like that but actually?

It'd be way more accurate to say, "Writing this novel has helped keep me sane." 

Like.

Yeah.

Life has been crazy for the last six months (a good kind of crazy, but crazy nonetheless) and I think my mental health would be way worse if I didn't have this cast of characters to keep me company. I don't get a chance to work on it all that often? but when I do it's usually because inspiration has struck and offered me a respite from the daily grind. 

And right now I'm kind of walking on clouds because Thanksgiving break was glorious from a writerly standpoint. I had time to just WRITE and the pages flowed and when I stopped to look back I had gotten over a lot of rough ground without undue toil. 

I think it's because I left my computer behind me when I came home and couldn't get distracted by ze internet. *grins*

2. Did it turn out as you expected or completely different? How do you feel about the outcome?

......."as you expected" at what point, is the question.

Because this story looks NOTHING like it was supposed to look when I decided to write a Very Serious Futuristic Epic at the tender age of 14 or whatever. And I am heartily glad of that. 

Really the last several years of redrafting have helped refine my understanding of what the story is supposed to be. I didn't really know what I wanted from the plot until after I wrote "the end" on Book 3 in the summer of '21. 

And then even after I had the overarching plot figured out I was still struggling to get mood and voice right in the summer of '22. Back in June I started a draft wherein I tried to dive right into intimate 3rd person POV. Which...may work by the time we get to the end of the first story arc, but is not the best choice for the very beginning. It ruins the tongue-in-cheek tone and makes the whole story way too serious right off the bat. Writing it was like a throwback to being a 14-year-old novelist. :P But now I've gone back to being silly with it and that's solved a lot of problems. 

....Did that answer the question? I feel like we've strayed far off-topic but oh well MOVING ON.

3. What aspect of the story did you love writing about the most? (Characters, plot, setting, prose, etc.)

The CHARACTERS.

*flails shamelessly for a few minutes*

I just...I've known these people so long they have CEASED to feel fictional to me. Also they have ceased to feel like they are under my control. I just...they tell me what they wanna do and I write it. And it's a grand old time. 

To give a recent example:

MARIUS STRIKE (to his sons): Boys, arrest this man.

ME: Wait--you don't wanna do that--

THE SONS: Wait why would we NOT wanna do it?

ME: BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHO THIS CHARACTER IS. I didn't plan for there to be beef between him and you, that would COMPLICATE THINGS.

THE SONS: And your point is?

ME: *hesitates for a moment* You're right you're right. Carry on.

MARIUS STRIKE: As though you have any control.

4. What was your least favorite part?

Working with previous drafts. Consolidating sources. Untangling timelines. Knowing what to keep and what to scrap. It's been ROUGH, man. 

Thankfully I thiiiiiink the hardest part is through. 

(Did I just quote the Lumineers? Was it intentional? You never know but it's a safe bet.)

5. What do you feel needs the most work?

*has been looking cautiously behind at the still bumpy but mostly patched together first act*

*looks cautiously ahead at the three hulking documents that still need condensed together somehow*

Um....deciding what to do about certain subplots.

There are several very IMPORTANT subplots that I enjoyed quite a lot in the last draft and which I think have a lasting place in the story-world...but I don't think they quite fit in the first book. One of the major ones is a romance thread and the other major one is a traumatic-family-backstory thread. So, like, fun things, yes? Yes. I want to keep them. I'm afraid of damaging them if I transplant them from the events of this book.

I also need to figure out whether there's a balance of the characters who are important at first + the characters who are important later. When you have three books, you can get away with completely switching out entire crews of characters, y'know? When your three books are now one, that might be a trifle problematic. 

*sigh* We'll figure it out, guys. We'll figure it out.

6. How do you feel about your characters now? Who's your favorite? Least favorite? Anyone surprise you? Give us all the details!

MY CHARACTEEEEERRRRS.

Ahem.

I can be calm about this.

How do I feel about them--I love them, that's all. Basically all of them. I cannot pick a favorite.

But if I had to it would be one of these people:

DAR BEAUREGARD, my cocky thief. Although to be honest he has gotten on my NERVES lately. He's just so FULL of himself. So FOPPISH. So SMUG. So WRAPPED UP IN HIS OWN ILLUSIONS and UNCOMPASSIONATE and CONDESCENDING. And he NEVER. STOPS. TALKING. Like Dar would you just shut up already????

I think I was amused by his character flaws when I was a) more immature and b) writing the only version of Dar I had ever known, but now that I've seen him grow up a little bit in previous drafts (and seen where some of his issues come from), I'm just....really ready for him to get over himself.

*cracks knuckles* Cutting characters down to size is our department.

Okay who else.

PRINCE FERDINAND, my hapless prince. He is precious. That is all. 

And I mean I have to give a shoutout to JUDE SUMMERS, my frustrated bureaucrat. "Frustrated" in both senses. He's both exasperated with his little siblings' scrapes and not allowed to just BE A BUREAUCRAT because he's too busy getting dragged into ADVENTURES all the time. Uncomfortable things, adventures. Let's stay home and be productive and invisible instead. Shall we? Yes, dear Jude, let's shall. I relate to you on a deep spiritual level, my son. 

As for my least favorite...well that's fairly easy, actually. Dar's uncle remains a cold-hearted, fishy sort of soul and I honestly couldn't care less if he fell off a cliff and never came back. Except I have a feeling no matter how many times I push him off a cliff he will always come back because he's good at driving up conflict that way. I couldn't do without him, apparently.

But, like. I'm not keeping around cuz I have a soft spot for him, like I do for all my other major villains. He just...refuses to die. He's like a cockroach.

Gross. 

As for surprises....

CAROLINE has been polling pretty high with my sisters, for Caroline. She's mellowed out a little bit and I think I'm proud of her? She's still got her coffee obsession and her penchant for 1960s pop culture, which is as it should be. But she's....less brassy and more sensitive than she used to be, I think, and it feels right. 

BOB has been even quieter than usual. Like, I forget he exists. He gets plenty of screen time but I forget he exists. This may be a problem.

TORTXOF arrested Jude the other day. (See above.) I should've seen it coming from six miles off but I'm still not over it, actually.

7. What's your next plan of action with this novel?

Keep on writing and editing and cutting bits out and stitching things together until I get a cohesive story arc, I do suppose. I'd like to have that section of the job done by New Year's but I'm not getting my hopes up. It just has to be whatever it will be. Then I want a paper copy of my very own to take a red pen to (or...let's be merciful, a mechanical pencil) and the iDEA is I can take a good six months to smooth it out/whittle it down/make it polished and pretty and then--

8. If you could have your greatest dream realized for this novel, what would it be?

I do want to publish this one. Maybe not traditionally, cuz I feel like relinquishing creative control of it to the publishing industry would be like donating my permanent teeth to the tooth fairy. *Frodo voice* I doubt that I have the strength for it, Sam.

*cough* But I do want to publish it. 

So, um, yeah. We'll see. 

9. Share some of your favorite snippets!

THIS QUESTION ALWAYS BLINDSIDES ME. Even though I know by rights it is coming.

I'm gonna be lazy and just grab some recent stuff rather than combing through for favorites. Which I hope is sufficient. If I'm willing to slap it up on my blog it's definitely nearer favorite than least-favorite. 

***

Being both a prince and a millionaire’s son, Ferdinand had everything a body could possibly want, EXCEPT for the one thing he wanted more than anything else in the world. And that thing was: holes in the elbows of his sweaters.

You see, Prince Ferdinand had plenty of sweaters. He had so many sweaters that you could have walked through his closet for three days and still not see them all. There were red sweaters and blue sweaters, argyle and plaid, striped and spotted, collared and turtlenecked, patterned and plain; light sweaters and heavy sweaters, cotton and corduroy, woolen and velveteen, angora and cashmere. Mostly cashmere. Mostly turtleneck. They had to be very warm, you see, because Prince Ferdinand had a weak chest, and he caught colds easily. Anyway having nice sweaters wouldn’t have been a problem, but what was a problem was any time Ferdinand wore a sweater more than once or twice, it disappeared. He could never tell quite who it was that spirited them away—the laundress or the seamstress, or the tailor or the chambermaid. The servants in his father’s house were highly efficient people, and they worked without anyone noticing. But the fact of the matter was, Ferdinand’s clothes were always new. And he hated it. Just once in his life he wanted a sweater with holes in it. Something that had stuck with him so long it got worn out a little bit. Something he could make friends with.

***

            “Wait!” And Bob looked up, finally putting down the legal pad, his eyes bright. “Mr. Summers, I owe you an apology. You too, Ms. Summers. I’ve been ignoring the Prince Ferdinand case simply because it’s closed. I admit, I thought you were conspiracy theorists. But there may be something to your suspicions after all.”

            Raff blinked again. “Huh?”

            “Come here, come here.” And Bob, more animated than they had ever yet seen him, produced a huge anchor chart with so many dots and lines and notes on it that it looked like someone had printed out an executive’s secretary’s excel sheet and given them to a four-year-old for a coloring page.

            Raff blinked a third time. “…What is this?”

            “Data!” Bob hit the paper with a jubilant knuckle. “This is a chart of Dar Beauregard’s criminal activity over the last thirty-seven months, starting with the Cassiopeia Caper, when he first broke into white collar crime in a big way. You might remember the sensation. Since then he’s followed a more or less predictable pattern of big heists and small robberies across a number of locations.” (Here Officer Bob waved his hand enthusiastically across the chart, which zigzagged in a way that was anything but predictable to Raphael Summers’ untrained eye; but then what does he know, he’s just a bodyguard. Who lost the body he was supposed to be guarding. Who would much rather be a pilot in the space force.) “But HERE.” Here Bob slammed his hand against the chart so hard the paper wrinkled. “Here there is the most inexplicable gap. Beauregard’s overdue for a headline-grabbing heist. Taking the algorithm into account, I would’ve expected him to hit a high-stakes target somewhere in…this window of time.” He circled a space on the graph.

            Raff squinted.

            Bob sighed. “The window of time,” he said, slowly so as not to lose the tenuous comprehension of his audience, “is June 11^th to 16^th of this year.”

            Raff had a lightbulb moment. “And Ferdy went missing on June 13^th.”

            Bob tapped the date with his pen. “Missing prince. Missing crime.” He crossed a dramatic red X on the spot. “It all lines up.” And he leaned back on his pillows with a long sigh. The fire in his eyes burned low and steady, like the embers of a hearth fire at the end of a long day’s work.

            (Is that simile too much? Don’t judge me, it brought me joy. It stays.)

***

Caroline was in the back of Dar Beauregard’s getaway craft.

            You should not be surprised. It is a fact universally acknowledged that love makes people do crazy things, and Caroline is kind of crazy to begin with, so it should come as no surprise to us (as it did not come as a surprise to Raff, when she texted him about it) that Caroline’s love for her friend makes her do crazy things. Also, I told you that Dar should not have stopped to jeer at Officer Bob when his getaway car was idling unlocked. I told you it was unfortunate.

            But that is what you get when you are a show-off.

***

            “Hey we’re giving her MY craft?!” said Dick.

            “Well we’re not giving her the Quicksilver,” said Dar.

            “It’s probably not really yours anyway,” speculated Caroline.

            “Touché,” said Dick.

***

            Upstairs Gubrettij was taking a turn keeping an eye on Ferdinand, and he was doing a crossword puzzle while he was at it. Ferdinand had been dozing, but he opened one eye and said, “Tij?”

            “Yes Ferdinand?” said Gubrettij, gnawing the eraser of his pencil and trying to think of a synonym for “pernicious.”

            “Do you hear voices downstairs?”

            “Hmm, villainous doesn’t fit…huh? Oh, voices.” He listened. “Yeah sounds like Father has company.”

            “Oh good. I thought maybe I was imagining it. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or not and Tij? It’s kind of scary.”

            “No you’re not dreaming.—Is perfidious a word?”

            “The one voice sounds like someone I know back home.”

            “DARN IT all these words have 10 letters.”

            “Tij?”

            “Scurrilous!—no THAT HAS 10 LETTERS TOO!”
            “Tij!”

            “Yes Ferdinand?”

            Ferdinand coughed delicately into the back of his hand. “Can you get me a cough drop?”

***

             Strike stared back [at Jude] with all the warmth of a dead fish. “It could be,” he said, coolly. “But it’s not. Boys.” He turned to his sons, who were standing by the piano paying scant attention to the conversation. “Please escort this man to the office of the secret police.”

            An expression of horror came over Gubrettij’s face. “What?”

            “Tij,” said Tortxof, reprovingly. He came forward and laid a hand on Jude’s arm. “Please come with me, sir.”

            If Jude had been Raff then Tortxof certainly would have gotten punched here. But Jude is not Raff. Jude is Jude. He has a lot of faith in the value of keeping calm rather than escalating situations and a tendency to trust bureaucracy, even when it is the bureaucracy of the secret police. After all, if you slug an officer for putting his hands on you when you’re outnumbered, all that’s gonna do is get you overpowered and accused of resisting arrest. If you come quietly you just might get a reasonable judge.

            So he came quietly. 

10. Did you glean any new writing and/or life lessons from writing this novel?

I've learned a ton of writing AND life lessons while writing this novel? But I don't know how much of it is from writing the novel and how much of it is from getting eight years older.

*long dusty sigh* I am ever such an old woman, Peter. (And that was meant to be said in my Wendy Darling voice.)

But anyway yeah. It would look really sappy if I put it all down here but it's stuff about, like, friendship and laughter and homecomings and stuff. *waves hands vaguely* All that mush. 

All right my dears! That's all I have for you today! What are you writing lately? Are you doing Know the Novel? THANK YOU AGAIN TO CHRISTINE FOR HOSTING! (This really is one of my favorite bloggerly events of the year and it's brought me so much joy to see what other writers are working on, so do go check out the roster if you haven't.) I would say "I'll be back soon with a Christmas post" but honestly? I might not see you until next year. If so, then, in a George Bailey voice: MERRY CHRISTMAS!