Jaycee Woods

I worked on formatting the drafts for Ch 9 “The Mentor” and Ch 10 “The Waiting” from my Boudica and The Butcher. Together they are 12k words of raw dialogue driven draft.

These chapters are distinct so far in the story as The Butcher does not appear, but instead Olga is featured with Boudica. Yet his absence dominates the scenes. This was the section of the draft when I understood how much this is Boudica’s story.

Where did The Butcher go? To war, he has stuff to do as his life does not center on Boudica. Instead of dramatizing the battles, news gets filtered back second-hand as it is Boudica and Olga’s reaction to the news that is important to the story. Both are former rebel soldiers spared from death by enslavement who by that point have switched allegiances to the Union.

For my amusement, this section of the story is an intentional Bechdel test fail. The scenes contain two women and no men (some injured male soldiers will be added to the scenery during editing), but their conversation focuses on men, The Butcher and Cyrus.

Part of their conversation includes war policy, WMDs, and innocents in war, but each is put into the context of the men they are discussing. Meanwhile this section deals with contemporary increasing female unhappiness around such issues as focus, purpose, materialism, & communication.

On the latter, I didn’t try to dramatize universal conclusions applicable to all women as I am dealing with specific characters, yet the points likely apply to most women. If I had to extrapolate the story’s concretes on this to a universal principle, it would be the requirement for prioritization of one’s effort through one’s hierarchy of values, but that is generally true independent of one’s fun parts.

Olga became a character in the story to do and say things that were inconsistent with The Butcher’s character. In the story, he literally rents Olga from Cyrus to do something too unimportant for his time, train Boudica. In contrast to the stern, laconic, and commanding Butcher, Olga can make similar points with feminine verbosity and an emotional flare. Unlike my archetypical Valerie character, Olga is emotional and her pregnancy leads her mood to be volatile. She is a nice contrast to The Butcher, who is well regulated emotionally except when he erupts in terrifying rage over memories of his wife’s death or thoughtless proposals that would subject his soldiers to sacrificial harm.