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rachelmanija invited me to talk a bit about writing my Yuletide fic, and it hadn't occurred to me to do so, but once I started, I found out I had a lot to say! I have literally never written in this much detail about a piece of my own writing, but it was fun! Thank you to
rachelmanija for mentioning that you'd be willing to read notes!
Let's start out talking about the canon itself:
I remember reading
Chalice when it was first published--Robin McKinley is one of very, very, very few writers whose books I will buy without reading them. (This has only come back to bite me once, in the form of
Pegasus, which I was not crazy about.) When I first read this one, I remember thinking that it was kind of a minor McKinley, along the lines of something like
Shadows, which I very much enjoy, but which does send me swooning the way the best of McKinley can.
But on reread a few years ago, I realized how wrong I was. This book is so wonderful and rich!
[I
do wish the book was a bit longer, but only because I want to spend more time in the story, in that world, with those characters! It's a good problem to have!]
The worldbuilding is the plot, which I absolutely adore: the world is divided up into demesnes, and people are bound to the land in the exact opposite of feudalism--the bond is literal, in that people whose families have lived in a certain place for a long time can actually sense the land, which has its own desires and emotions. This relationship, when properly nurtured, is beautiful and sustaining.
The land is kept (in the looking-after sense) by a Circle of people who are called to that responsibility, each with specific duties. Our main character is a Chalice, whose task it is to soothe the land and bind together the members of the Circle.
This is always a big responsibility, but it's soooo much higher stakes for Mirasol, because instead of being apprenticed to the previous Chalice, she is suddenly called to the position when the previous Chalice dies in a terrible incident that also kills the Master, the highest male authority figure in the Circle.
This is a Big Problem because the Mastership(? Masterdom? lol, all of these are terrible!) runs in bloodlines (unlike most of the other Circle positions) and the only other member of the family was sent by the previous master to join a religious order that basically renders him inhuman.
So Mirasol has to deal with the fact that she doesn't know anything about being a Chalice, the returned Master that the people of the demesne are scared of, and the trauma that the land itself has undergone after years under a bad Master. It's a lot!
The aesthetic is cottagecore, but without the treacley overtones--McKinley is, as always, way too interested in the everyday stuff of living to fall into that trap. And while the world is warm enough that I want to live in it in the same way I do the Shire, the central conflict of the book is serious enough that the story never becomes twee.
There's a darkness lurking around the edges of Mirasol's world--hints of all the ways in which people in power can abuse both the land and the people under their authority. We don't dive deeply into this--that's all backstory. But it keeps the setting from seeming saccharine, and the plot of the book is high-stakes enough within the boundaries of Mirasol's little world (literally a demesne) that we know it's going to take a
lot of work to for everyone to heal. The book is the beginning of that work, and it's beautiful and I love it.
Also honey and bees.
And the worldbuilding is so wonderful! It very easily could have been slapdash or shallow--a vague "the land is living" kind of thing--but McKinley has always been so committed to exploring what the details of magic are like. What do you actually have to
do to make magic work? How does it make you feel? What physical objects does it require? Etc.
So it's perfect for a worldbuilding fic, which is what my Yuletide recipient requested. I was so excited and also intimidated to see my assignment. Because there's
so much potential, but also: I don't want it to be twee or vague!
I immediately knew that I wanted to write something that explored different kinds of Chalices--their magic is based in a liquid of some kind, most often water or wine, but sometimes milk, brine, or even blood--and their different demesnes. I chose the three least-common liquids (besides Mirasol's honey) and, unlike with 90% of the fics I write, the title and the summary were both
right there. A triptych. Portraits of three Chalices in brine, milk, and blood.
I knew I wanted to keep the focus on the things that the book is most focused on: the Chalice's relationships with her land and with the Master. And it only made sense to take a page from the book and focus on different moments of crisis for each Chalice I wrote about. I wanted to write about women at different points in their lives (an old, wise woman; a girl just starting out and intimidated by her position; and a middle-aged woman).
The book is very uninterested in the world outside of Mirasol's demesne of Willowlands (except in what she can learn from other Chalices' experiences, though that is limited) which makes perfect sense because it's a wonderful first-person narrative and Mirasol a) has always been just a simple woodskeeper and would have no way of knowing about the outside world and b) is really, really busy with just trying to stay afloat!
But that means that there's no way to know how pervasive this demesne system is in that world. Is it just the way a certain area is set up? Do they do things differently elsewhere?
I immediately rejected the idea that the living-land thing is particular to Mirasol's corner of the world. Obviously, the whole world is living!
So that gave me room to move outside of the English countryside feel of the book and explore some other corners.
I knew I wanted to go furthest afield for the brine section, which ended up being the first part. I thought about something Jeju Island inspired with the old lady pearl divers, etc. but I ended up going with a world that's more Polynesian and tropical. This was the opportunity to go to a completely different direction than the book. So! Tropical island! Okay! How would that demesne communicate crisis? Volcano! Yes!
With part two, I wanted to pull it back to something much closer to the setting of the book. I chose a Scottish inspiration for this section--a place that can be cottagecore-y, too, but that also is distinct enough from the Shire-esque setting of the book. As soon as I thought about writing a milk Chalice, I was like, "This is a woman who takes goats with her everywhere she goes." The book has a tossed-off line about milk Chalices coming from a woman who receives her Chalicehood when she's either pregnant or nursing, so I was like, "Of course this woman is a mother." But also, I wanted an old lady in one of these sections, and that wasn't appropriate for blood, so milk needed to be the one that explored age a bit.
Blood was the hardest to write. We get a few lines in the book about a blood Chalice who had a terrible time of it but brought her demesne through a series of wars that destroyed neighboring demesnes, so I had to stick with that. I pictured a woman in her 30s or 40s, between the poles of the other two, but who is incredibly tired and worn down by all she's been through. I thought that something more Norse/Germanic-inspired would work well for this--it's closer geographically and culturally to the setting of the book, but a little colder and harsher in my mind.
And from there...I wrote. I write mostly by instinct. I like to have a vague scaffolding to hang the story on (see above), but the details, the themes, etc. are all things that emerge
as I write. I don't know where they come from! It's like magic, the way they emerge from my fingers without conscious planning! But that's the way I work!
I used to try to plan a lot more and I'd just get frustrated. For the past few years, I have given myself permission to start with a skeleton of a story and flesh everything else in as I write. It just flows better for me.
Of course, this results in lots of surprises! I knew that I was going to have Orra, the Scottish Chalice, be dealing with the death of a Master, but the idea of the new Master being a small boy came in the writing. And I was like, "Oh, that's perfect!" I don't know where that inspiration come from! But it was a gift!
Also when you write off the cuff like that, you end up having to go back and edit quite a bit when things arise out of nowhere and you need to lay the foundation for them. For example: I was halfway through Orra's section when I realized that of course she would have an apprentice and that that apprentice absolutely needed to be present in what's happening. So I had to go back and rewrite that apprentice as present and make some references to her before she shows up.
I wanted the three Chalices to have three very different kinds of relationships with their Masters. I knew even before I realized how young Orra's master would be that she would be the mentor in that relationship--and in a very maternal (she's a milk Chalice!) way. To balance that, it made sense that Harawai would be roughly the same age as her own Master and that he would be pretty new too--they're starting out on more even footing. But Chalices and Masters can't have romantic relationships so I wanted to make it very clear that they wouldn't--easy! Give him a husband! (I didn't figure out a way to work into the text that Harawai is gay too, but she is!)
As I mentioned before, I had the least idea what I was doing with the blood section (her name is Syn--I literally just scrolled through lists of characters from Norse mythology and when I saw that one, I went, "That's her!!!"), but then it just came to me: she's on her fourth Master. Each of the other three was eaten by the war and each failed to bring peace for different reasons. I didn't have a ton of room to go into details, but a line or two about each works. And then I realized that Syn's section is all about the unexpected Circle members and something clicked.
A blood Chalice is considered unlucky, but we know from the book that she is the one who succeeds where other Chalices failed. So I realized that the Master needed to be disabled in some way--physically unable to fight, because surely that would
also be considered unlucky for a people at war. And then the whole joy their situation is that
no: they're
not unlucky. This demesne needed a blood Chalice and a disabled Master, and only they could lead it through war into peace. The unexpected is the point!
I wrote each of the three sections in basically one sitting each, which I think was the right way to do it. The first two sections I felt pretty confident in going in, but I was really intimidated by the blood section and was surprised that the writing of it was not as much of a labor as I thought it would be.
I was pretty satisfied with what I wrote!
sophia_sol gave me confidence that it was good and
chestnut_pod was hugely helpful in cleaning up my prose (too many sentences beginning with conjunctions! Too many commas in some places and not enough in others! Clunky phrasing!). But there wasn't a ton of rewriting to do of the plot/characters/substance after that second draft wherein I did things like give Harawai's Master a husband and make Orra's apprentice show up.
I was so excited to post it! And the recipient seemed to really enjoy it, which is such a joy! It got a good reception from the people who commented! I am generally very happy with it!
But of course you can always do better. One thing that I wish I could have done better on is coming up with different names for things. As I mentioned in my author's note, obviously the people of a Pacific Island would not use the same labels that the people in the English countryside would. I didn't do the work of coming up with the labels both because I didn't feel like there was room to do that in such short sections and also because it would have required some research that I just wasn't prepared to do. But a better writer would have done that work, I think.
Another thing I think I could have done better with is the culture of the blood section. It's pretty vague? I think the character herself and her immediate context works. I like what I did with exploring how terrible it would be to be a blood Chalice. But I could have done more with that to make her culture more distinct. I can kind of excuse myself by saying, "The focus is on war. War is totalizing and has a way of obliterating everything else," which is a decent argument, but I still wish I'd done more! Especially in comparison with the brine section, in which I researched flora and shells of the Pacific and Indian Islands in order to be really specific.
