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after Queen's Gambit
Jun. 27th, 2016 08:56 pmIt has been well over a year and I finally finished writing this. I’m really sorry, guys, I have no idea why it took so long. Here is how Dark Bishop and Knightfall, the second two books in the theoretical Gambitverse trilogy, would have gone.
*
Queen’s Gambit is structured somewhat oddly because it was written and plotted to fill two distinct and contradictory positions: the second book in one trilogy (the Ouroboros series) and the first book in another trilogy (the theoretical Gambitverse series). The universe in the Gambitverse existed before the Wake characters arrived; it will continue to exist now that they’ve gone. The story hasn’t concluded, and for that reason there are a number of plot threads that weren’t tied up or that were introduced near the end of Gambit, because they were intended to lead into the second and third books.
I promised that when Gambit had finished I would write up the events that I knew of in the second and third books -- Dark Bishop and Knightfall, respectively. There’s a good chance that this says more about the way that I plot and write than it does about what was actually intended to occur in the remainder of the trilogy; I usually write to and around what I call “keystone scenes” -- flashes of visuals or, occasionally, dialogue that stand out for me. They don’t always end up in the story in its final form, but using them is often what I’m structuring the plot around. I didn’t do extensive plot work on Dark Bishop and Knightfall since I knew I wasn’t going to be writing either one, but I do know a handful of the keystone scenes and plot threads in each one.
Queen’s Gambit opens with Queen Amidala essentially occupying Count Dooku’s canonical position as head of the Confederacy; it ends with her in Leia’s position at the end of A New Hope: as a queen in exile (though still head of the Confederacy, at least in name). In some ways Gambit was supposed to be kind of a fakeout; the basic set-up implies that it’s going to be a take-off of the PT/TCW, but the bait and switch at the end -- the introduction of Palpatine’s New Galactic Empire -- is to actually set it up as a mirror to the OT, a thread meant to be carried through the second and third books. Exact parallel? By no means. But it was something I was thinking about.
( Read more... )
*
Queen’s Gambit is structured somewhat oddly because it was written and plotted to fill two distinct and contradictory positions: the second book in one trilogy (the Ouroboros series) and the first book in another trilogy (the theoretical Gambitverse series). The universe in the Gambitverse existed before the Wake characters arrived; it will continue to exist now that they’ve gone. The story hasn’t concluded, and for that reason there are a number of plot threads that weren’t tied up or that were introduced near the end of Gambit, because they were intended to lead into the second and third books.
I promised that when Gambit had finished I would write up the events that I knew of in the second and third books -- Dark Bishop and Knightfall, respectively. There’s a good chance that this says more about the way that I plot and write than it does about what was actually intended to occur in the remainder of the trilogy; I usually write to and around what I call “keystone scenes” -- flashes of visuals or, occasionally, dialogue that stand out for me. They don’t always end up in the story in its final form, but using them is often what I’m structuring the plot around. I didn’t do extensive plot work on Dark Bishop and Knightfall since I knew I wasn’t going to be writing either one, but I do know a handful of the keystone scenes and plot threads in each one.
Queen’s Gambit opens with Queen Amidala essentially occupying Count Dooku’s canonical position as head of the Confederacy; it ends with her in Leia’s position at the end of A New Hope: as a queen in exile (though still head of the Confederacy, at least in name). In some ways Gambit was supposed to be kind of a fakeout; the basic set-up implies that it’s going to be a take-off of the PT/TCW, but the bait and switch at the end -- the introduction of Palpatine’s New Galactic Empire -- is to actually set it up as a mirror to the OT, a thread meant to be carried through the second and third books. Exact parallel? By no means. But it was something I was thinking about.
( Read more... )