Paksworld

Lots of stuff has already happened, but new stuff has now started happening at a decent rate.    I’m afraid one of the minor design elements in this volume so far is that which someone becomes comfortable with is what they realize is impermanent.   That wasn’t planned, by the way.   It’s just intruding itself into my awareness.    But not all that’s lost stays lost and sometimes what’s discarded or vanishes is replaced by something something else.

Limits of Power has many funny moments (I think you’ll agree when you get there) but so far Book V is being fairly unrelentingly serious.   I think it’s the outside world…the illnesses,  the suicides,  etc.   But a book without some leavening in it is a dull loaf of a door-stop, so it’s time I put my mind to it.   I’ve been re-reading Surtees’  Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour right before bedtime to raise my humor level and I think it’s working, though it’s not showing in the wordage yet.  Maybe I just need a recalcitrant horse. Either Multum in Parvo or ‘Ercules will do.

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Sometimes, in the past year, having some knitting to work on has helped me past story tangles.   (So far, writing has not helped me past knitting tangles at all.  Unfair!)   There are similarities.   To make progress on either knitting or writing requires putting one little thing after another: a knit stitch or a purl stitch, a word or a punctuation mark.   Untangling yarn from a badly wound ball (I wish yarn manufacturers would either make good balls or sell it in skeins) is like diving into a story that’s gone immobile and refuses to “come out.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Progress today was less than hoped, but more than feared, but unexpected in its content.   I’m fairly sure this scene won’t survive until the end.   Road-building?  Really?   Nobody’s attacked the road crew or the visitor to the road crew (yet, I say with a trickle of hope that something more interesting will happen.)   No wild animals.  No earthquakes, landslides, broken axles on the wagons, broken bones from accidents.  Nothing but sweat and dirt.    It’s not too hot, not too cold, and no storms are looming.  Yet.

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Echoes of Betrayal has a new cover for the paperback edition coming early next year.    I liked the hardcover art, but this is a very strong cover that will show up better on the smaller format.

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Limits of Power passed Editor’s approval (my reworking of her comments)  and heads for the copy editor on Monday.   I don’t know what the CE’s schedule is.   Since Editor did a line edit,  and has approved the variations, one would hope CE keeps sticky fingers off the dialogue, but you never know.   At any rate, I should have the copy edited pages to review sometime between the convention I’m going to on the last weekend in July (ArmadilloCon, for those of you in the Austin area), and WorldCon at the end of August.

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Dropping out of the choir concert was definitely the right decision:  the hours I  did not spend driving to and from the city, and in rehearsal, have been put to use, and the lessened strain helped too.   Usually I spend a lot of time in prep for a concert working on the piano at home, listening to rehearsal tapes or CDs of the music, and I like to come into a concert able to “hear” my part in my head the whole way through, no doubts.  This time I couldn’t–and I could not take the time to do the prep work I wanted to do.    That made it harder to concentrate on the edits.

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I really admire Sharon Lee & Steve Miller’s Liaden books, because they handle issues of register and custom so well.  For those not dragged backwards through a linguistics course at some point, “register” refers to the way people speak in reference to social roles.    Most of us learn as children that one mode of speaking is fine with another child–a friend, say–but another is needed to satisfy expectations when talking to a friend of our parents.  That’s register: everything from the choice of words to the tone of voice to the topics considered appropriate…communication changes with social situations.

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Just in case you’re wondering where I am, I’m digging through the computer file line by line, while changing things in accordance with (or similarly to, or in a related way to) Editor’s comments.    I don’t always do *exactly* what Editor advised, because in some cases the exact phrase Editor wanted to change isn’t there now (having been expunged in my own editing earlier) and in other cases I see what I (no doubt arrogantly) think is a better fix to the problem Editor pointed out.   (I’m nearly always agreeing that what Editor points out is indeed something to be pondered and then fixed.)

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Editor has asked, quite reasonably, for more information about elvenhomes.   I vaguely remember writing a post about it,  one of the background posts.  But did I actually hit the PUBLISH button?    Do any of you remember?    Here are some questions (if you feel like answering them) that will give me a handle on how much readers grasp of the elvenhome thing…(in case you haven’t seen the post about it.)

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Remember how I said I was impressed and grateful that NewEditor (hereinafter known as Editor) had read through the whole monster pile of the preceding books?    The proof is in the editorial letter I just received this afternoon.  WOW.  As in,  I have landed in the lap (OK, laptop or desktop or whatever) of another great editor.  An editor who is going to help me make LIMITS and Book V better than I could possibly make them on my own.

It’s not that I doubted her editorial skills before,  especially since (like anyone who’s been in the business this long) I inquired delicately of people who’d worked with her and got rave responses.   But with so much backstory to get through, and all her other work, I wondered how much she could grasp of the whole Paksworld mythos, having to read at top speed.    And there’s also the chemistry thing.   Sometimes it’s not the book, the writer, or the editor…but just a lack of spark between editor and book, or editor and writer.

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