Paksworld

(Aside–it’s really hard to talk about some of this without spoilers for those who hate spoilers…so if you avsolutely hate spoilers, you might want to skip what’s below…)

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It’s now clear to me that there’s no way I can finish the revisions before Tuesday, when I leave for St. Louis and then, some days later, points north and east.

Several important responses, from which I expect much impetus to rearrange & rewrite, haven’t come in.   I need to do laundry, shop for remaining things I need for the trip (like more cardstock for more business cards) and I have to sing both services tomorrow.   Time has run out.

Nonetheless, from responses received and my own re-reading, progress is being made, just slower than I wanted.   I really wanted to be able to present Book Two, all combed and brushed, with its boots spit-shined and its perfectly arranged insignia bright, to my editor when I get to NYC, but…it’s not going to happen.  Not like that.  If she wants to see it, she’ll see it in a state where I don’t normally let editors discover what a mess even the late drafts are.     Editors, like agents and alpha readers, always want to meddle…and editors come cloaked in Authority.   If they decide something’s a problem early, then they’re likely to demand that it vanish from the book, even if the real problem is that I haven’t yet made it obvious enough why it belongs and is absolutely essential to the final resolution of six lines of  plot.  (I may not know yet…and writer-not-knowing is but putty in the hands of Editors, who know not only many books but also how the sausage of publishing is made.)

I will snag one of the dilatory experienced alphas by the short hairs when I visit her after the Ninc conference–she will not escape me then.   Heh-heh-heh.    The one I thought I had trapped earlier this week made an agile feint and retreat.   And time’s run out, and I’ve just spent 41 minutes online answering email, removing spam from all the spam buckets, answering a few comments here and there.

I must get ready for the trip.  I’d rather work on the book.  WHY did I agree to the trip???  (NB–I’ll enjoy it once the train starts to move.  I always do.  But the book, which wants to be done, isn’t done, and can’t be done by time to leave, and that’s like an itch you can’t scratch. )

I’m back from Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, where I spent yesterday (drove down Sunday and back today, through rainstorms.)    It was a lovely trip, and I enjoyed the five classes, luncheon, and evening program (though I was hoarse by the end of it–I like to talk but I’m not used to talking that much in one day!)    Professors and students were delightful, as were the people who showed up for the Monday Night Fiction meeting.

I took the printouts of the alpha reader comments with me and worked on them Sunday evening and very early Monday morning–I woked up with a headache at 4 am and had a brainstorm, so got in several hours of work before heading for the university.  Now that I’m home, and the suitcase is unpacked and a load of wash churning away…I can transfer those notes to the main file.  (Because I took the laptop along, but did I take the thumb drive with the book on it?  Nooo….)

I mentioned at some point that I was going on with revisions while the alpha readers were doing their thing…and this meant that (DUH on my part) none of the page numbers were right by the time the comments arrived.  However, I could still tell where they went; it just took longer.

So…back to work.

This morning I planned to start work on Book Two as soon as I w0ke, and in fact had planned an ambitious attack on it while dealing with a click beetle in the bedroom last night.   (Click beetles, which show up in the house in late summer, are small, harmless, but noisy little beetles that are more active at night and markedly interfere with my sleep.  Last night, for instance, one crawled under my pillow and started jumping and clicking right under my ear.)

Anyway, when I turned on the computer this morning, I had email from the Orbit UK, where they’re working on the omnibus Deed of Paksenarrion and proofreaders had found anomalies.  Could I please check them out?

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Fortuitous combination: a couple of days ago,  I got my contributor’s copy of the October Writer’s Digest in which I have a (commissioned) article on SFWA.  Naturally it became the instant “in the throne-room” reading (it’s new, it’s different) and though I’m no longer a novice writer, there’s still stuff to learn.

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Thank you Google (NOT) for costing me some days of work to fill out your stupid forms to remove my work from your clutches.

It is impossible for a writer to just say “Do not include any of my work in your digitization.”  It’s not even possible to say “Do not include any editions of this work, foreign or domestic.”  No, you have to go through the whole damnfool search & destroy procedure for every single version of every single title and sometimes you hit the wrong button and have to start over.

Also I’m printing out the current draft of Book Two because I need to see it off the screen.   So there will be a hiatus until I’ve dealt with Google (not, alas, with a flaming sword) and gotten my stuff “claimed.”

Those of you waiting for word on being alpha readers, or having already cleared the hurdle and waiting for the whole ms, my apologies.  The wait will last a bit longer.  I’m not spending my Saturday dozing in the sun, I can tell you that!

Progress continues on both the revisions of book two and the first-drafting of book three.   In the original Paks books, I wrote parts of the second and third book in parallel almost.   Here I’m finding revising two while writing three to be just as useful–since the things are So Darned Long, working on the previous one helps with continuity.   A lot.

So…what’s happening now?

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There’s a chapter in Book Two that is Not Right.   Now usually at this point in a project, I know if something isn’t right, and why it’s not right, and thus how to fix it and make it right.

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There was a glitch with the copy edits…which I haven’t talked about much if at all.   They didn’t come, and didn’t come, and finally I was told that they weren’t able to contact the copy editor.   I tried to be a Good Little Writer and just keep truckin’ on the revisions, but as time passed, I worried more and more.  (So, of course, did my editor.)

The worry began to interfere with my ability to concentrate on the book (no, I do not possess superhuman concentration) and I began to spend more online time far away in another corner of the internet.   Nature listservs, email, the new SFWA website’s beta test…anything…

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Apologies, to start with…I could not bear to see the cover image slide down out of sight…hence the lack of posts for a week.

But I haven’t been idle in that time.   No, the copy edits aren’t here yet, but some structural problems in book two…aren’t here still.   They’re fixed.   Here’s what happened.

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