No, this isn’t about a particular belief of a particular group of Christians.\u00a0 It’s about stories.\u00a0 Stories that start with someone left behind–oversleeping and missing the boat, the train, the shopping trip, perhaps.\u00a0\u00a0 Shipwrecked on an island.\u00a0\u00a0 Falling\u00a0 out of an airplane into a dense forest. \u00a0 Or missed by the rescue vessel when others are rescued.\u00a0\u00a0 Or not invited to the party, or sick and unable to go.\u00a0 The one who, in some way, is ignored or isolated or…you get the idea.\u00a0 There are many, many ways of being cut out from the herd and left alone to cope with…anything the writer thinks up.<\/p>\n
Sometimes writers read an old story that isn’t that kind of story, and notice that significant persons to the story’s protagonist were just…dropped.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance: I wrote a story for an anthology, Warrior Princesses<\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0 My story’s title was “My Princess” which sounds kind of sappy and could lead the reader to think it’s going to be a love story about a prince in love with a warrior princess…but it wasn’t.\u00a0\u00a0 I wrote it in, probably, 1997, since the anthology was published in 1998.\u00a0 Told in first person from the POV of the groom who cares for the princess’s charger.\u00a0 She’s a warrior all right; she’s a cavalry captain.\u00a0 Her sisters are pretty and about to be married off to princes.\u00a0 Etc.\u00a0 And in the end she disappears into the fog of time with the sixty cavalrymen in her troop.<\/p>\n Her sisters?\u00a0 Well, they were the pretty ones.\u00a0 Princes were found for them, or they were found for princes, whichever way you like to look at it.\u00a0 I imagined them married, growing older, with children.\u00a0 Happy maybe.\u00a0 Unhappy maybe.\u00a0 Didn’t know, didn’t (at that time) care much about them, the Rose of the Kingdom and the Lily of the Morning.\u00a0 Everything a princess should be, they were.\u00a0 MY princess, the captain of cavalry, wasn’t.\u00a0 But it was her story, at least according to her horse’s groom, it was her story.<\/p>\n And yet.\u00a0 In that story were phrases that–when I read the story years later–cast worrisome shadows on the Rose and the Lily.\u00a0 “Peace.\u00a0 A treaty with our old enemies, sealed by the marriage of my princess’s sisters to the sons of their royal houses–entirely traditional…”\u00a0 Political marriages between less than allies…sometimes it works.\u00a0 It *could* work; goodness knows it’s been tried often enough.\u00a0 Connect the royal houses by marriage, make love, not war.\u00a0 English and French and Spanish and Holy Roman Emperor, Balkan states and Russia?\u00a0 Surely the children and grandchildren of\u00a0 Victoria and Frederick, married into every other royal house, can hold Europe in a safe web of familial love.\u00a0\u00a0 Surely it will not plunge into the worst war yet.\u00a0 And yet…August 1914.<\/p>\n And yet more years later, deciding that “My Princess” does belong in the Paksworld short fiction stuff, I’m caught up short again.\u00a0 That first princess–the eldest by some years, and no sons in the family?\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 What happened.\u00a0 Where’s her mother?\u00a0 She \/doesn’t look anything like her sisters, and it’s not *all* because of her age and soldiering.\u00a0 The Rose and the Lily: did they bring their children back to visit their parents?\u00a0 Did the treaty hold?\u00a0\u00a0 What happened in that city square when the cavalry troop rescued their captain from a forced marriage, when she jumped from the carriage to her horse, and her troop got her out of the city?\u00a0 What did that rescue cost…the others?\u00a0\u00a0 Her father’s reputation as a king?\u00a0 Her sisters\u00a0\u00a0 Left behind.\u00a0\u00a0 Left behind on their wedding day to deal with the aftermath, her angry would-have-been groom and his family, their husbands and their families…the peace their marriages were supposed to purchase.<\/p>\n The story has demanded to be written.\u00a0 It’s being written.\u00a0 It’s not pleasant.\u00a0\u00a0 So far it’s all about the older of the two pretty ones.\u00a0 I don’t want to leave her as she is (in the story as far as I got it today.)\u00a0 I want her to reach some…other place, mentally, emotionally, physically.\u00a0\u00a0 But wow did things not go as planned.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No, this isn’t about a particular belief of a particular group of Christians.\u00a0 It’s about stories.\u00a0 Stories that start with someone left behind–oversleeping and missing the boat, the train, the shopping trip, perhaps.\u00a0\u00a0 Shipwrecked on an island.\u00a0\u00a0 Falling\u00a0 out of an airplane into a dense forest. \u00a0 Or missed by the rescue vessel when others Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,43,32,10],"tags":[20,55,7],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beynd-writing","category-paksworld-stuff","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-paksworld-universe","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1462,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/1462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}