Seasons

No one will actually read this. :P It is long and rambly and probably of little interest to anyone else. Ah well, for me, then, for records.

I have figured it out. It is perfect. I will write a dreamy peace, five or six paragraphs long, only slightly more realistic than the prologue, for each of four seasons, Canis Arianna's first awkward year in Valencia. Yay for run on sentances. But anyway,

This is what I was looking for! Hurrah! I just felt like writing a piece about being in a field, and looking at flowers, and I started the piece with "It is Spring", and then things made perfect sense.

The summer is Canis' first impression of the city. Everything is loud, and smelly, and crowded, and hot: It's the perfect season to show the extent of her culture shock in moving to a hotter climate.

The fall is Canis learning, still rather astounded at the differences in her two worlds. This spares me from writing dialogue for a girl with almost no control of the language. She will still be making mistakes a year later, when the regular prose begins, but she'll be able to get her point across.

The winter is Arianna (Her name changes about this time) having some weather she is more familiar with, and also having bonded more with Dania. However, she is far from comfortable this season as... well, either her father will return or he will show up for the first time. She may also get to meet her two 'lovely' half sisters and rather distant half brother, depending on whether or not I want that to happen in normal prose or not.

The spring is a brief scene, showing an Arianna who is coming to terms with her new culture, but also slightly disagrees with it and rebels in little ways. The Southlands are very much with her even as she has become fairly adapted to her new world.

Honestly, as much as I'd like to have all that family stuff happen during the winter, I don't think I will. She may see these people briefly but not be introduced to them, or some such. I think the best place for me to put her meeting her father is between the prologue and the seasons, but Summer actually happens in the minutes before she meets her father. There's a chance I can still get away with it, but I'll have to ask around. At any rate, I want meetings to be in prose.

Gah! Now I feel like my solution has raised more questions! But, they are smaller; it's breaking a big problem into little ones, I guess, and even those have a smaller total size. So yay. I'm getting somewhere... Besides, what happens to her when she is little is probably remembered, years later, as rather dreamlike. So it works. I just have to figure out what to do with the meeting with her father, which I rather like, and a few other scenes that will be hard to hammer into my new framework. We shall see...

Also, today was the third day of TriMo, and I got 601 words, a little above the daily average, and a good bit of breakthrough planning. :D