The Death Scene.

Today, I reworked the scene in which Clovis gains his first heir, and loses his first love.  This is one I worked on recently, but somehow it brought me back once more.  So my word count isn't greatly down today, but the finer-tuning, fingers crossed, was a good choice.

This scene takes place pretty early in the going.  Theuderic, first prince of Clovis I, is older than those I refer to as "the Clotine princes" (sons of Queen Saint Clotilde), born extremely early in Clovis' reign, and many years before his marriage to the Queen.

Theuderic I, 19th C depiction

Without basis in history - perhaps only because of a White Liberal Guilt brand of need to confer on my characters some level of imperfection, I give to Theuderic a youthful palsy.  As he fights to overcome what would have been seen as a weakness or even a defect, Clovis himself fights the fear, for those early years, that he has not sired a healthy heir.

The death scene echoes with this - but, more than anything, it is the moment when a very young man indeed comes to understand his own love, in losing it.  I don't spend much time in philosophizing all this - part of what I need to do, after all, is to *shorten* this novel - but I hope the writing conveys a sense of the place mourning truly originates.  Because the other thing I am doing, at the same time, is plumbing the emotional depths of the character.

Right now, this scene has sort of exhausted me.  I've never lost a concubine to childbirth, but certainly on Father's Day, of all days, a sense of loss is never far away.  And I have lost love - at that age (Clovis would hardly have been seventeen), it is practically the order of the day to lose love, even if not in quite this context.

Clovis' own death scene (SPOILER!  He's dead now!) has made me cry.  This scene did not have this effect, but, as long as it's been since I dealt with Clovis' scene, this one probably means more to me.

Still, the thing is hard to deal with.  Writing, as much as I try to divorce myself from some of the more "passionate" cliche's about authors and poets, is an immensely personal emotional exercise.

And here it is 11:30 at night, and I am still not moving through the MSS like lightning, and wasting time on Blogger.  Of *course*.