Squeetus summer book club: Princess Academy, chapter 24
Chapter 24
Second to last chapter. In the homestretch! Have any of you been reading along with us, only a chapter/day? I think I'd probably read ahead. Just a chapter each day would be too hard for me.
I mentioned before that the song in this chapter was inspired by "The Hosting of the Sidhe" by W.B. Yeats. Here's Yeat's poem (the lines in bold are the ones that I echo in my song):
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
Here's my song from Chapter 24:
Night is calling, Away, come away!
Empty your mind of troubles and dreams
Empty your heart of all daylight things
Night is calling, Forget! But the day
Will not wait, not long now, won’t delay
And here's a song I wrote for Palace of Stone that was inspired by the previous. Different rhyme scheme, but I feel like they're sister songs.
Bury the embers, extinguish the spark
We plunge ourselves in the well of the dark
Far from voices that trouble and chatter
Down deep down where worries don’t matter
Our minds all teem with the unseen thing
But night is a blink, and sleep but a dream
Wake, wake, see things as they seem
pg 281: With her head, Miri doesn't believe Mount Eskel is anything but a mountain, but with her heart she wonders if the mountain did hear their need and sent the snow. What do you think?
By the end of this chapter, Miri still doesn't know what she wants. What do you want for her at this point? What do you think will happen?
QueenEnna asks, "The ending of this chapter always worries me. How could Miri's father have been sure that the mallet wouldn't hit her instead of Dan?" Think of Pa as Thor. Would Thor miss? Pa doesn't know much, my friend, but he knows the business end of a mallet!
Allerednic asks, "You mentioned that you switched some of Peder's actions in this chapter to Miri's pa. How did you decide what to have Miri's pa do, and which actions to keep for Peder?" Originally when Miri was hanging from a tree root, Dan holding her ankle, Peder dropped a rock on Dan's head. I switched to Pa with his mallet (nice little symbolism there). As I reworked the chapter and the whole book, that action of Pa's resonated and other things changed too.
H.P. asks, "You're the AUTHOR, if you're not the Sole Voice of Authority, who is?" You are. The reader. My work is done with the final draft. The reader's work begins when you open the book. I don't like authors interfering with that, trying to insist on The True Meaning of Things. That's the reader's perogative.
H.P. also asks, "Why are you using the new cover of Princess Academy? Why not one of the two old ones?" I don't know, I usually use the most recent cover of any book, and that one's the most recent. I think if you go into a bookstore now, that's the most likely cover you'd find.
Kaitlin asks, "How do you start a book after you've had an idea? Do you plan out the plot and subplots or just start writing?" I've done both. I've never done what might be seen as a formal outline, but by the time I start writing I usually do have pages and pages of notes, pieces of scenes and dialog, and ideas that I use as an outline. Though I have just started writing a couple of my books without any kind of an outline. That's fun! I wish I could do that all the time, but my brain doesn't always work that way. Usually the story is revealed to me slowly, bit by bit.