Paksworld

Having shipped off Book II late last night,  I’m now shifting to Book III until Editor comments on II.   The transition from the end of II to the start of III is fairly seamless, leaving aside what two certain people did for a few hours.  Imagination is your friend in the wilderness.   (It wasn’t wilderness, but oh well.)

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As you may have noticed, I also cook…bake bread, make stock and soups.  So the kitchens of Paksworld have always interested me.  What do the people eat, and how do they fix it, and why?

With Midwinter Feast coming up (theirs, not ours) this seemed like a good topic to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

A productive, 2000-word day, in which I finished the POV section I’ve been working on.

A Halveric sergeant and a couple of tensquads meet the unsurvivable and survive.  Well, sixteen of them survive.  For awhile, anyway.   My view of Halverics has always been from the Phelan side…and I thought they were more alike than they are.  (More spoiler warning!)

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Fewer words (1000) today, as I paused to deal with other writing-related chores, including fine-tuning the timeline for the series of battles.   And then there was the trip to the city, so M-  could ice-skate and I could not-fence and instead sprawl on the couch and discuss various writer-things with DRW (whose comments on crossbows you have, I hope, read) and J- and C-.   Spoilers will appear below the cut, so choose your level of preferred knowledge.

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3061 words today.

That battle I was talking about?  It’s unfolding rather differently than I planned originally, but better.   To argue with the A-Team “I love it when a plan comes together”—I love it when my plot-daemon knows better than I do what should happen. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m basing a lot of my longbow archery on information derived from the Mary Rose bows, as reported in (among other places) Strickland & Hardy’s The Great Warbow, which includes a history of the longbow in use from the Battle of Hastings up to the Tudor period.   (It’s also a great temptation to spend way too much time on details that aren’t plotworthy…how to conserve and then revive bows that have been buried in silt and salt water for centuries, for instance, something no one is trying to do in this book.  On the other hand, the horrible but effective treatment one noble received for an arrow wound in the face may show up sometime.  Not right now, though.)  Read the rest of this entry »

I’m working on a fairly complicated little battle early in Book Three–complicated in part because it includes some weapons types I haven’t previously used in my fiction in something this size.   The forces involved aren’t matched in size, experience, or weaponry…which is sending me back to the history books repeatedly to check that I’m not doing something stupid.  Read the rest of this entry »

Even though we didn’t actually end up fencing yesterday–taking a guest from far away around the land took up the time that might’ve been spent with swords–the swords were around and unsheathed from time to time for purposes other than putting bruises on one another.  There was an award to hand out, and the very special sword to show to the guest from afar, and another to demonstrate on a pell to someone who hadn’t seen that one yet.   As for the feast–this being Thanksgiving in the US–we ate like a mercenary company in Aarenis, finally in a good Valdaire inn.  Platters and serving dishes emptied with amazing speed.   Although I’m normally a casual cook and diner, I love setting out a beautiful table a few times a year, using “the good stuff”  to its fullest extent and piling on the food of all kinds.

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Writers are often asked (OK, I am often asked) why I put bad things in stories about good people.   What is the purpose, someone asks, of having war, terrible wounds, grisly deaths, and torture afflict characters?    Is it to teach the character a lesson?   Did the character deserve it?  Or was enduring such things the only way to create a paladin?

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I’ve been talking about the new new book, book two of the current group, but as I was prowling through book one, Oath of Fealty, checking for continuity on something,  I was reminded of the thinking I did about how people felt when Kieri disappeared from their lives.

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