Paksworld

One of the difficulties of restarting a story last seen twenty years ago is that for readers who read the original books when they came out–even five or six years later–it feels as if there should be more time between Oath of Gold and Oath of Fealty than there is.   Intellectually, these readers may grasp that the second Oath picks up where the first one left off, but they’ve experienced years in between and they aren’t the same readers they were when they finished the first three books.

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As I’m writing this at almost 10pm, we’re coming up on the changeover from 41 days to the release of Kings of the North to 40 days (which, as anyone in our choir would tell you, at this time of year leads inextricably to “Forty days and forty nights…” (a Lenten hymn.)

And then…less than 40 days to release.   At this point, I always get twitchy, edgy, worried.   My brain invents disasters that will make this release not like any other release, but a total unmitigated failure.    The drama that normally goes into the plot goes into my daily life. Read the rest of this entry »

Fifty thousand words on the new book, that’s what.   The wordage rolled over this afternoon.

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What?! I hear you cry.  What do new chairs have to do with writing the book?

It’s one of the mysteries of the creative mind.   Suffice to say that throughout our entire marriage (over 41 years now) we have never had “real” kitchen chairs.    And now we do, replacing mismatched, aging, and uncomfortable folding chairs with real wood chairs that are up to our weights and sizes.   Library chairs, in fact.

New chairs with new tablecloth & trial chair pad

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Writers with what I call Engineer Mind have perfectly organized desks and files.   I’ve met a few of those.   I’m not one.  I have what I call Writer Mind (in lieu of calling it Chaos Mind.)    All my organizational skill goes into the writing…none is left over for anything else.

This becomes even more obvious when I’m faced with competing demands on organizational ability.

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Terie Garrison’s bright idea of a one-month “race” to keep us motivated in the otherwise uninspiring month of February…she and I did this last summer (August can also be One of Those Months).

You can watch progress at her LiveJournal–she’s got the graphics up at the head of her journal,   and because we’re each reporting in our own time zones, the graphic may be a day behind.   ( It is, as I post this. )    The up-to-the-minute wordage posts are on Terie’s newsgroup at SFF.net.   To read there, if you’re not a member (at least several of the contestants are), go to http://webnews.sff.net/ and sign in as a guest.   You’ll browse to find her newsgroup:   sff.people.terie-garrison.

The idea is that each writer chooses a word goal for the month–large or small, doesn’t matter.  Those picking the longest goal have no multiplier–the words you see are the real words reported.  Those with shorter goals have a multiplier to compensate for the “long” goal.

Shifting gears to working on revisions/corrections makes Book IV grumpy and me…a bit confused.    Did I really write that?   What was I thinking?   Was I thinking, or perhaps indulging in stream of consciousness?

In addition, while waiting for the pages Editor is sending with her markings on them (75 pages, she told me today…ouch!)  I have her notes and the notes and comments of two alpha readers and my agent.   One alpha reader deserves the honorable title of Nitpicker Extraordinary (and it is honorable, in this instance) and the other is a Characterization Maven who instantly notices a character acting out of character (or not showing the development that other events show must have occurred.)     Editor is multitalented, of course, so her comments range from deep structure to pacing to surface detail.

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Yesterday’s post was written before the call and email  from Editor, and now Crisis of Vision is back at the top of the priority list.    As expected (given the raw speed of revision in December) I missed some things.   Editor also wants a chapter moved from Crisis to the next book (did that this morning) to get Crisis under 170K.

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The major speed bump of the week, the big report I had to write, kept me away from Book IV a couple of days, though I wrote some after choir practice (staying up too late, after midnight, to finish a scene.)   I  didn’t want to leave Book alone that long, and Book definitely did not want to be left that long.   By the time I finished the report, Book’s frustrations had taken over my brain and I was a very grumpy camper indeed.  Read the rest of this entry »

As I warned y’all, the arrival of comments from Agent or Editor (or both) would result in a diversion of time from Book IV back to Crisis of Vision.    Yesterday I got my agent’s comments on Crisis (there’s a chapter he thinks is weaker than the rest, but Editor isn’t there yet) and a heads-up that Editor was about halfway through and had found things she wanted to excise.   So although I’m not starting on any fixes until I have all the comments in, some attention has shifted to that book and not this book.  Thus downgrading (as the investment industry puts it) the projected output this week.

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