Rollercoaster

I’m roughly a third of the way through the third book in the Cassaforte series, currently called A Traveler to Nascenza. Today I found myself stalling over a particular scene toward the end of the first section. Originally the scene had occupied all of an entire paragraph—it was just a little incident told in passing, as my travelers vainly tried to move from one town in the countryside to the next. A blip. Yesterday I decided to expand it, although the scene isn’t mentioned in the detailed outline I originally wrote for the project. It seemed as if it would offer some unique opportunities for tension that I couldn’t pass up. And now, here I am up past midnight, dragged out of bed because when I was nearly entirely unconscious, I had the inkling of an idea of how to expand the scene even further—in fact, to make the scene the lynchpin of the entire first section. My brain insisted on poking around online researching the tenuous trail it wanted to follow, rather than sleep.

I worry about all my books, of course, but it seems as if I’m being especially fretful about this one. Particularly when I compare it to the previous entry in the series. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is all about kidnappings! And murder! And sword fights! And explosions! And more abductions! And political plotting! And shipwrecks! And bad actors! And that’s just in the novel’s first twenty pages! (Really.)

A Traveler to Nascenza, on the other hand, is a gentler tale. It’s not about shipwrecks and pirates. It’s a story focusing on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the protagonist of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, and it starts off gently enough at the school where he’s living. No one is taken hostage in the first five pages. No one lies in a pool of blood, early on. There’s talk of a ruined wedding—I won’t say whose—and there’s a practical joke that has serious repercussions down the line, and there’s an entire page in which two teenaged boys make terrible dirty jokes with straight faces to a nut farmer. There’s some weirdness, and some suspense, but action? Nothing like The Buccaneer’s Apprentice.

Until the second and third sections of the book, that is. Then there’s death and intrigue and explosions and blood to spare.

Every story has its own shape, I need to remember. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is like one of those theme park rides that’s fast and wild and relentless the moment the lever’s released—a higher-speed Tilt-a-Whirl or a Loop-O-Puke that’s determined not to let you off until you’re dizzy and breathless. This story is more like a classic roller coaster. There’s the inexorable winching up, the terrible moment of sheer suspense in which you realize there’s no returning, and then the inevitable plunge down. The Glass Maker’s Daughter had much the same shape—it was all woe and teenaged moping, and then suddenly the entire city started to fall down.

I have to keep in mind that nobody likes 24 syndrome, either. That is, it’s tough for a continuing story like television’s 24 to avoid becoming wearying, because every year the pattern and the rhythm of the story is the same. Jack Bauer’s forced to save the world from some awful threat, which turns out to be not as awful as the even more awful threat no one saw coming, which is just an appetizer to the really awful threat that concludes each year. The forces he battles are like a never-ending series of nesting Russian dolls, each one bigger than the last. Now that the show’s locked into an unvarying structure, I think most viewers are pretty numb to any of the threats at all. Oh, pooh. It’s just another few hundred nuclear bombs, Jack. Yawn! No, having the freedom to vary the rhythm of a continuing story line is a good thing.

So. Tomorrow (or later today, technically) I’ll rewrite that scene yet again. Third time should be the charm. Now, if only my brain would let me sleep.