To all - well, I'm back. A week in new construction in South Texas with no AC, a week to (partly) unpack, then a week in Michigan (averaged 4 hours of sleep each night... was so tired that today I fell asleep 4 times while trying to finish a single text message) followed by my valiant attempt to leave Baltimore airport on Labor Day Weekend's Friday afternoon. A one-hour drive took three... ("A three hour tour! A three hour tour!")
Incognitia - thank you - you are entirely too kind. I benefit from having a corps of terrific readers and commenters and I try not to disappoint them.
A long way back in the planning stages it seemed to me that this must be - and end in - a tragedy. All of the principal players are undone by their own flawed characters. Only Makhearne is really redeemed at the end, and Ronsend is tortured by survivor's guilt. Frost and Messoune cannot be redeemed in any believable way; instead they accept the consequences of their actions and go down fighting to the last. Makhearne achieves a bit of nobility by sacrifice and Ronsend learns what it is to atone... Nemor, of course, suffers and dies for his fatal inability to make a commitment to one side or the other.
Thank you for reading - and commenting!
loki100 - if I hadn't jiggled the story to have
someone survive we'd have been back in the last episode of
The Sopranos and I don't have the writing chops to pull that out.
Thank you for the compliments. I have always looked forward to your comments and often learned something about my own story from them.
A cardinal purpose I had in wiriting
Special Providence was to gain some deeper insight into the creation and use of effective characters. That is a principal reason for having so many 'thumbnail sketch' characters who have their brief moment on-stage and then depart. Another was to explore the idea of how difficult it would be to 'steer' an entire world-culture even when those doing the steering are enormously intelligent and technologically advanced. The necessity of operating in secrecy proves to be an effective brake, as does Makhearne and Ronsend's low-intensity opposition. Frost is frustrated again and again by her inability to get at the levers of power, and when she finally does it is her lack of legitimacy that opens the door to a coup. It is very hard, in the Victorian Era, for a 'power-behind-the-throne' to rule in any but the subtlest and most indirect of ways - at least in my opinion.
I haven't bought CK2 but I can say that in general I agree with your comment. There are still some really good stories being written there and in HoI and we will have to see what impact the release of EU4 will have. Writing well is
hard (at least for me), doing the research is
hard, developing the characters, location and so forth is
hard. Comedy I think is most difficult to do brilliantly well and the easiest to attempt since you can (lazily) use all manner of anachronisms and (lazily) mine pretty directly from the masterworks of others; for some of this the laziness and meta-references become most of the humor the piece possesses.
Dinglehoff - I definitely intended that ending to have some hope but also a recognition of the price that had been paid for it. As you note, there is precious little rest for the victor.
King of Men - I didn't intend any sour grapes there (nor do I think you took my comment that way), I just think there isn't as much interest in deep narrative as there once was. Gameplay, history-book and comedy are easier to write (though every bit as hard to write
well, in my opinion). Back when coz1 was helming the
Gazette there was a lot of talk about what the expansion of the Forum membership and the large number of new games was going to bring. I think we know the answer now - dispersion and identification with a game rather than with AARland - and so the question becomes how do we keep a sense of community in the new environment?
I do agree that the AI can give an author a real leg up when it comes to things to write about. Persian battleships fighting (and defeating) two Japanese dreadnoughts, thereby sinking an invading Army, is an example from a recent game of Victoria 2 (House Divided). But creativity is not constrained by history: instead of writing once again of the Protestant Reformation, call it the Brianist Reformation and throw in some Monty Python, or invent a second schizmatic Pope, or let it be an Illuminatist plot to resurrect the Inquisition gone horribly right. Write well and I think the audience will go with you wherever you wander.
Robert Silverberg has always maintained that there is only one plot that every story more-or-less follows. It is the treatment that matters... or as I always have said, if you must steal then
steal from the best.
Thank you for your kind thoughts... should any sort of fortune or fame come my way you may be sure I shall brag of it insufferably.
Brian Shanahan - The ending was a bit contrived but necessary if it was to go where I thought it should. I've never been good at the blockbuster-thriller sort of huge set-piece battle followed by wait-its-not-over so repeat repeat repeat until the special effects give out. (I kind of wish I was, but I'm not). I would hope the ending remains within what we know of the situation and the characters while being a bit of a surprise... It was in any case the best I could plot out that didn't violate some part of the author-reader contract.
I think we will be seeing the birth of a new organization and civilization, parallel to and independent of the Knights Temporal. ("There are a thousand histories among the naked timelines, a thousand tales of the heroic men and women who stand against evil in the line of duty. They are the Knights Temporal... and these are their stories."
