Paksworld

This prologue was written way, way back, in the days when I was writing Oath of Fealty and had no idea what the mysterious thing was, where it would turn up, or how it would function.    But it actually started farther back than that,  decades before I  started the first Paks book.    It started with some verses and some music, back in the day when I wrote some of both (not outstanding, nothing worth pursuing with the level of musical incompetence I had.)    “Three white towers in an empty land, red sand like an endless sea…”   That image stuck with me, and became Old Aare when I started writing about Paks.

Some of you may figure out more than has yet been told, and I would ask you not to speculate out in the open too much  about it, just in case you spoiler it for others.    (If I need to open another spoiler topic, I’ll do that.)    Below the break, the non-prologue…as this is not really a snippet (though tagged as one) but a non-snippet, a bit that won’t be in the book.

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From one of my mother’s favorite joke verses…and relating to the power outage that had all my stuff offline for awhile this afternoon.    I learned to recite this as a little kid, and I still think it’s funny.

Am he gone?  Are he went? Have he left I all alone?  Us can never go to he; he can never come to we.  O cruel world, to I unkind!  Go he way and leave I hind! It cannot was.

It wasn’t in the “humor and whimsy” section of the big poetry anthology we had, so I have no idea where it came from, nor did my mother.   Online search didn’t find it (haven’t looked lately, though.)   If you do, let me know the author.  At any rate, the power up in north Texas was off, shutting down my hosting service, the wonderful SFF.net/Greyware,  and they were kind enough to post what happened on Twitter and let us know when they got back up again.

The warehouse scene continues to amuse (me, anyway)  although the transitions are still extremely rough.  They feel rough to Arvid, too.

Anyway…a little bitty snippet from today that may or may not be like this in the final version:

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How many were there?  The report they’d gotten only said “a gang of men” had attacked the grange.  Arvid felt in his cloak pockets–he had only three bolts left.  He glanced behind.  Could he make it over the next roof before they got to him?  Maybe.

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It has to be brief because it’s a Book V snippet and would otherwise be trailing a cloud of spoilers for Limits of Power.

OK, gang, I’m a lot better today…not well yet, but definitely on the way.  So: last day of contest entries (in case you’ve been holding back) is Friday, January 4, 2013 with a time-stamp deadline of midnight.    I should have an answer for you by Sunday night (giving myself extra time to be sure I get an accurate count of entrants and am not confused by multiples.  The old brain isn’t necessarily 100% yet.)

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This is a small bouquet of gratitude to someone on the list who–reading the snippet–found an inconsistency with Oath of Gold and emailed me privately about it overnight.  So this morning I hauled out my copy of that book, and the manuscript, and knew he was right–it was an inconsistency and it needed to be fixed, if possible.   The book’s already past copy editing, so I didn’t know if it could, but I set to work looking for the smallest possible fix that wouldn’t mess up any other previous books.

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Via my agent’s tweet,  here’s a site with info on Limits of Power and a look at the cover.     Hurray!

Meanwhile, I’m struggling with a couple of scenes from Book V that don’t want to be written, which undoubtedly means I’ve messed up somewhere else…but still, things have to keep happening.

And so you get a snippet.

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When we get to talking about something, I tend to think of comment-answers and my own comments as post-equivalents, and then you’re left without a new topic.  Sorry…you’re all so courteous and patient that I forget.  And when I forget, for that matter.

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This snippet is actually two snippets from a longer conversation that’s riddled with spoilers.  I picked out the bits that spoiler only one thing…and I don’t think it’s a “bad” spoiler.  However, if you don’t want to know anything at all, best not go beyond the cut.

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This snippet reveals the way that Mikeli of Tsaia thinks about the responsibilities of a royal marriage.  There are no plot spoilers.

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Sometimes, especially with stories told from several viewpoints across multiple volumes, the writer needs to have a scene that establishes the relationship between this POV in this book, and a different POV in a previous book.  Particularly, in the entire Paksworld work, the temporal situation.   We are so used to knowing today what happened an hour ago 2000 miles (or more) away, so used to having simultaneous different points of view, with television cameras and interviewers able to get the reaction of four widely scattered “foreigners”  (to whatever station the news is on) and four “native” (ditto) that it’s hard to keep in mind how long it could take for information to get from one place to another.   My entire life, privileged information arrived within 24 hours (telegraphs were expensive but used for super-important stuff)  and the technology wasn’t new then.

So this snippet, early in Limits of Power,  re-connects in a way the POV of someone else somewhere else with the POV here.  Very important things have happened to someone else, and this person didn’t even know–had not a clue what was going on.   It is a slight overlap, reflecting the temporal effect of distance.    The chapter it’s in has possible snippets holding spoilers, but I’m handing you this one instead.

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You’ve already met Poldin M’dierra, the nephew of Aesil M’dierra, commander of Golden Company.   Aesil is presently the only woman running a mercenary company in Paksworld, and she’s very good at it.   Poldin, her nephew, came to her with the usual starry-eyed romantic-idealistic notions about being a mercenary, despite having known Aesil all his life.    He’s learned a lot, since he came–he’s spent time with Fox Company, he’s now familiar with most parts of Valdaire, he rides better, he’s learning some fighting skills.  But he’s still a boy at the age where boys shoot up fast and sometimes do foolish things.

This snippet may or may not be a spoiler, depending on whether the 2000+ words I wrote today actually do fit in the final book, or just some of them, or (worst case) none of them.

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