Squeetus summer book club: The Goose Girl, chapter 17

This is hard! It's hard knowing what to say that will be interesting while not saying what I shouldn't. I don't think it's right for the author to break down what everything means, and I don't want to be self-indulgent and be all, "see what I did there?" I want to give you an idea of what goes on during the writing process without analyzing the book or declaring any definitive meaning and interpretation. I hope nothing I'm saying diminishes your own reading experience for you.

The yellow lady

And part 3 begins. I do parts in books when I feel definite separations in the chunks of story. In this case, the parts delineate different areas of personal growth in Ani, since this is her story. I wanted to keep the title The Goose Girl because it's about her, starting as one thing, evolving into another. That was the real story in the original tale. I enjoyed telling it against the backdrop of high fantasy, across two kingdoms with journeys and battles and a large cast of characters. But it's about Ani, and in this last part, she moves from being the goose girl to the yellow lady.

Gilsa

It's good to be home with Gilsa again. I'm extremely fond of her. We also needed to return in order to find Talone, plus the story needed a respite chapter here, I thought.

"it'd be nice to just hold something real in your hands that felt like a measure of your worth"

I echoed this sentiment in Dangerous. It's subtle, but I like the little detail it brought out in that book.

Talone!

Yeah, so the fairy tale said Falada died, but I was under no such strictures for Talone.

If I hadn't already mentioned, Finn's original name was Cris, and Razo's was Rin.

ilikefish asks, "do you ever put little bits of dialogues you've heard in real life into your stories?" I did in The Actor & the Housewife. "how do you write good dialogues?" Lots of practice, listening, rewriting. Never use dialog for exposition, try to hear the sound of each character's voice, know the relationship between the characters speaking.

Angela asks, "Do you remember the first time you learned "The Goose Girl"?" I don't remember the first time. It was the second tale in an illustrated fairy tale book we had that we read a lot growing up.