Squeetus summer book club: The Goose Girl, chapter 1

Welcome to the annual Squeetus Summer Book Club! Join me weekdays in July for discussions of The Goose Girl. The book is currently available for under $5 wherever ebooks are sold.

Chapter 1

I believe I rewrote this chapter 50 times. Mostly just word changes, but some drafts it was scenes cut/added, characters changed. One of the things I cut was the backstory about how Ani's parents came to the throne. The first chapter was different enough from the other chapters that some drafts I set it apart as a "Prologue." I wanted it to feel like a fairy tale. I was conscious that I was taking one art form (fairy tale) and meshing it with another (novel) and so I wanted the beginning to have that fairy tale quality before pulling the reader in closer for the novel. I modeled the first chapter of Forest Born after this one, wanting both books to have a similar feel to their beginnings, as the bookends of the series.

POV

Whereas all the other chapters of the book are told from a close 3rd person POV, through the eyes of Ani, this chapter starts from her birth and dances about, first an omniscient narrator, then to her aunt, her mother, and finally to Ani herself.

Ani

In the first draft, her name was Talianna, and she went by Talia. But then I liked the name Selia, and Talia sounded too close. I liked Anidori that I'd made up for her third name and switched that to her first. I've been known to pronounce it both "Annie" and "Ah-ni." I don't care how you say it.

Stories

I loved making up the stories that the aunt told Ani. Once early in my career, someone asked me to read from The Goose Girl. I chose the paragraph about stories on page 3, and having recently had my first child, the part about the mother and baby made me cry. I was so embarrassed to cry at reading my own writing I've avoided reading aloud from my books ever since.

page 4, "listened to both the story and the sound of the story"

This reminds me of being little and leaning my head against my dad's banjo to listen to the inside as he played

page 5, "her eyes gleamed with memory"

"...and regret." My mind finishes that sentence with what I must have cut out. 12 years later, I still see what I deleted between the lines that I didn't.

page 10, "the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold".

I always loved that line.

"A noise like snapping fingers."

I want to love that line, because that's just how aspen leaves sound in the wind, but it can be misread as finger bones breaking, which isn't what I meant.

The aunt's departure

Oh, Ani's sorrow and solitude is heartbreaking! I'm so sorry I subjected her and the readers to that. I feel so bad, the poor little girl. I just want to hug her.

page 14, "a city of many towers"

I'm not going to make a habit in these posts to try and tell you what I meant by things or insist on particular interpretations, because I don't think my voice should be the final word or deny anyone their own interpretation. But occasionally I will admit things like the city of many towers that Ani built from blocks looks remarkably like the city of Bayern.

pg 14, "a very thin giantess"

I wrote a line in DANGEROUS that's a lot like this one, but just a touch different. I do that a lot in my books, make references to parts of previous books that I'm sure most people will never notice. It's like this secret conversation.

"It was early spring and still cold at night."

This is one of my favorite sentences in the book. I'm not sure why. I just like how it sounds at the end of that paragraph.

pg 15, "she understood, suddenly and keenly, that she was too small to run away"

Did that happen to any of you? It did to me. It was both a harsh slap in the face and a huge relief.

pg 15 "goat milk soap"

When I was young and first exploring the downtown mall, I used to go to Crabtree & Evelynn, and I was fascinated with certain products made from food products, like the egg shampoo and the goatmilk soap. I love how it smelled, milky but just a little spicy and with a touch of lavender.

TALONE

Hooray, Talone! Yeah, I love Talone! I'd almost forgotten about dear Talone.

Ani's Sickness

This section was longer originally too, and I came to realize that I was basically retelling Aerin's fever from Hero and the Crown. Delete.

pg 17, "almost motherly"

Somehow almost motherly seems worse than not motherly at all. I don't think the queen was a bad mother, especially not to her other children. Ani just needed a different kind of love and attention than she got from her. It's so interesting to read this now, after knowing all that will happen in the three books that follow. Ani, your adventures have hardly begun.

Have questions about this book? Ask in the comments and I'll try to answer them next post. And please feel free to discuss this chapter.