Squeetus summer book club: The Goose Girl, chapter 8
pg 126
More food! I want to eat in Ideca's kitchen. It's always a temptation to write a scene from how I would see it, but the narrator needs to stay close to the main character and observe as she would. There are countless details I could include in any scene. As other writers have observed, what's excluded is as important as what's included.
"a hat like thick paper rolled in on itself"
In the illustrated book of fairy tales I grew up with, the goose girl wore that kind of hat. But in my book she had to hide her hair, so I gave the hat to another anonymous goose girl.
biting geese
When first writing this book, I dragged my husband to a duck pond where there were several geese, thinking to leisurely enjoy the birds' company while taking notes in the bucolic setting. We barely got away with our lives. Geese are aggressive and don't appreciate visitors, thank you kindly.
Enna!
Initially Ani's introduction to Enna was casual, but I wanted to signal Enna as a character of importance so I gave her a more dramatic entrance into the story. Razo I didn't know would become such a significant character. He wormed his own way into notice.
pg 134, "Enna-girl"
Originally this conversation happened in a scene when Razo was present. I changed it but left that bit of dialog the same. But of course Razo would call her Enna-girl, not anyone else. An echo of former draft.
Jill asks, "Are any of the others in the series also based on specific fairy tales?" Nope. "Along those same lines, why did you choose that specific one?" I spoke about this on my website.
Maggie asks, "I find when I write my characters are based off of people I know in order to make the characters act and seem like real people. Does anyone else do this? And if so, who are your characters based off of?" I don't. I sometimes borrow relationships, idiosyncrasies, etc., but I don't consciously base any characters off real people. Just not the way my brain works.
Julia asks, "Have you ever considered a Book of Kildenree, a prequel to The Goose Girl, possibly about Ani's aunt and mother, or maybe her father?" I have. I've considered a lot of Bayern book ideas, to be honest, because that place is dear to me. But I have so many book projects I want to do, and Bayern books are so hard and time consuming, and there hasn't been one story strong enough yet to pull me away from other books.