Into the Breach

I’ve been a bad journal-keeper lately. I’m trying to finish the manuscript for the sequel to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, which currently is titled The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. The book’s reached that point where everything is avalanching into completion. But yesterday a curious thing happened.

The Glass Maker’s Daughter takes place entirely within an imaginary city very much like pseudo-Renaissance Venice. Its main character is part of that culture’s aristocracy; the story takes place very much the city’s largest estates and in its palace. Then there are a few detours to a couple of seedy spots, giving the heroine an awareness for the first time that there are indeed a number of indigents within her city’s walls who are as vital to its future as she. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice focuses on those people. Its protagonist is a poor kid who, thanks to Cassaforte’s draconian system of work-debt, has spent all his life as an indentured servant of one sort or another. He’s only just managed to escape the worst of them and to obtain a spot as servant to a really poor (in every sense of the word) troupe of traveling actors, when the ship on which they’re sailing is attacked by pirates—who are part of a political intrigue that threatens Cassaforte itself. By the end of chapter two, the actors are taken for slaves, the ship is sunk, and poor Nic is left to fend for himself on a deserted island.

The book’s story is how, after so many years of being owned and directed, Nic manages to come into his own independence. It’s about how he manages to bluff and scrape his way home, collecting allies as he does, and how he defends a country that admittedly hasn’t given him any of the advantages boasted by the heroine of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s also about how living on society’s margins have given him an insight and flexibility that the more aristocratic classes might not have.

Anyway. Yesterday I had a fairly straight-forward scene to finish in which Nic and his allies, having made their way to a seedy shipping port before sailing for Cassaforte, had to find a used-boat salesman. They’d been given the address of a tavern where the guy was hanging out, and they’d made their way through the city’s dirty streets while avoiding drunkards, beggars, and buckets of muck being slopped from upper story windows, when suddenly they all balked, en masse. “He’s not in there,” they told me, nodding at the tavern I’d picked out for the scene. It was a nice, smelly tavern, too. “He’s in that place.” They pointed to the doorway across the street.

“But that’s a whorehouse,” I told them. “See? I just wrote a little sentence about the buxom woman sticking her head out of the window and flirting with them. Did you see how she jiggled her breasts? That's because she’s kind of a hooker.”

“He’s in there,” said Nic and company. They crossed their arms.

“You heard me say it’s a whorehouse, didn’t you?” They all nodded at my question. “Are you sure? Tavern? Drinks? I could put in a bawdy tavern wench.”

“You already had a tavern scene,” Nic said. “Chapter four. Remember? When I get traded in a card game? Do you really want to repeat yourself?”

“Yeah,” said the blue-face pirate who had accompanied him throughout most of the book. “I’d like the whorehouse, too. I'm adult. It's been a while.”

“Is a whorehouse even appropriate for a young adult book?” I asked.

They were already stomping ahead of me. “Your editor will love it,” they called back.

So before I really knew what was happening, my characters barged through the whorehouse, looking around with wide-eyed wonderment, giving each other advice on how to behave (and not to kiss the women with sores on their lips), sniffing with disapproval, and generally having the time of their lives as they hunted down the used-boat salesman for ten pages.

They do that sometimes, one’s characters. Sometimes their rationales for running amok aren’t very well justified. At other times, though, they have the right instincts. I think they did, here. Any town can have a seedy tavern. In a port town catering to adventurers and freebooters, however, a nice, grimy whorehouse really can set the mood, plus it gives one’s cast a chance to sound off and show themselves for what they really are—prudes, libertines, or something in between.