Structural concerns; nature of protagonist

Mulling over several things:

Inga's comments on the timeframe have made me realize that I have to consider whether I need to start again almost from scratch figuring out the plot structure of the novel.

I had thought: main action of book opens Memorial Day weekend with firm announcing they've won contest to design ice palace. Solveig and Jack meet, stuff with Aquatennial in July (summer magic climax), maybe the Little Guy is consulted, State Fair occurs (maybe Ingrid disappears here), ice palace is built in December, Winter Carnival/book climax in January, book ends at May Day Festival in May (Jack becomes Jack o' the Green). One year in review, boom.

But if work on the design doesn't even start until late summer, and they don't learn that they've won the contest until fall . . . well, that changes everything. Now the Aquatennial stuff and the State Fair stuff is entirely thrown into doubt.

I can approach this problem three different ways: 1) accept the info Inga has given me and work up a new plot event structure, lopping off all the summer magic stuff 2) reason that few people will come back to tap me on the shoulder to say, hey, it doesn't take so long to design an ice palace, so I stick to my original plan and ignore that it happened otherwise in real history, or 3) state that the ice palace was designed more quickly last time, but come up with a plausible excuse for stretching the process out this time. (Actually, there is a fourth option: crawl into a corner and dither a lot. I often resort to that one, which is why I've been blocked at novel writing for quite a while.)

I know I still want to tell the story of Solveig, an architect, designing an ice palace. She has a daughter named Ingrid, a mother named Agnes, her father died when she was a child, and it all has something to do with the fish. And there's this guy named Jack, and there's something about the ice palace that's magical, and there's something about choosing a heart of flesh. What the question boils down to here is, where does this book begin? That is not always so easy to tell. I don't have an answer on it, either. And perhaps I won't until I come up with those other elements that I think that I'm still missing . . . perhaps a fairy tale to give the book a spine, or an answer to the question, "What are the fish up to?"

Have also been thinking today about Solveig today, after reading this bit from the Terri Sutton article I mentioned earlier:

. . . What's most significant to me is that she [LeGuin] went back to her tale to worry one of the most cherished tropes of YA fantasy: the idea of a "chosen," fated hero. In a sense, all protagonists are chosen people, because the author has chosen to focus on them. But the concept of fated heroes, so often male in the past, has been troubling to me as an adult reader of fantasy. I'm not more special than anyone else. My actions do not resonate across the world(s). At the same time we always need heroes to jolt us into movement . . . What I find myself craving in YA fantasy is average protagonists, compelled by events to discover themselves capable of heroic acts--the Frodo Baggins type.

Now, this struck me quite strongly, and I think I might need to think about this a bit. I had been thinking that Solveig is the center of the action, because she got "saturated" with winter magic when she fell through the ice as a child, and she fell through because the fish were calling her. Why, though? Does she have to be chosen? What if she's just a normal woman, facing extraordinary magical challenges, and she has to solve them, not with a latent magical power that she suddenly discovers within herself, but by suddenly locating inner real resources, of nerve and steel and courage . . . by using her heart of flesh?

I used the latent magical talent tack in my first book. Perhaps . . . I should try the Frodo Baggins approach in this?

Eddi McCandry was chosen in War for the Oaks partly because she was a musician, which gave her a kind of magic, too. Is that the same thing? After all, she did spend a fair amount of the book grumbling "Why choose me?" (She was also chosen because she happened to be the ex-girlfriend of the guy who was chosen by the Unseelie Court.)

I remember how delighted I was with the central idea of the movie "Oh God." Not because I thought John Denver was such a good actor . . . but because I thought, when the movie was over and the lights went up, you know, why wouldn't God come to speak to someone as ordinary as the assistant manager of the produce department of a grocery store? And what would that very ordinary man discover about himself as he faces an extraordinary thing?

The Frodo Baggins story is tremendously moving to me. And yes, perhaps that is closer to the story I want to tell . . . the story of an ordinary person facing something strange and dangerous and perhaps wonderful, something never faced before and she pulls out something extraordinary in response.

On the other hand . . . maybe I'm just confused about what I want to do.

If you haven't noticed yet, I tend to dither a lot.

Peg