Paksworld

Book IV is now just over 34,000 words.    At the moment, it seems to be settled into a more relaxed pace as I figure out some details I hadn’t needed to know before.    I have Tsaian dukes figured out, pretty much, but not all the counts and barons.  Um….that would be none of the counts and barons, except the names of the ones on the Royal Council.  Who’s hot-tempered?  Who’s phlegmatic?  Who leaps to conclusions?  Etc.  Moreover, who has a marriageable daughter?

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End of week,  Book IV is just over 31,700.    I made it to 10,000 (the week’s goal) by midnight Thursday and sort of loafed along on Friday and today.

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I love it when the zeros line up (or at least I wave at them as I go by…)    I just crossed the 3o,000 words marker (that includes the chunk moved from Crisis of Vision), with page length at 153.   New production (written in the last two weeks)  is  20,905 words ,  and 103 new pages of manuscript.   Usually I wouldn’t stop in the middle of a workday to post here, but could not withhold the good news.

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Book IV continues to behave like a healthy young book that wants to be written.  I didn’t work on it Saturday and it niggled at me.  Came home from church Sunday and it was doing worse than niggling.   So Sunday ended with 1893 words before I could make it let go so I could sleep, and Monday produced 2011, despite my spending a couple of hours in the garden helping Richard put up the support for the peas (T-posts, the pipe from the top of the chainlink fence we’d taken down, and chicken wire.)    Today was a slow start, but ended 2332 words to the good.  So the week’s off to a good start, 6236 words already.

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Book IV continued to go forward at a good pace.  The book is now over 20,000 words (and I’ll probably tinker with it later tonight and nudge it over 21,000, just to watch the turnover, but we’ll see.)

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Book III is no longer Book III, or the tentative title I sent it in with.   Editor (who is a genius, if anyone asks)  agreed that the tentative title wasn’t an obvious marketing winner, and suggested (ta-DAH)  Crisis of Vision.     And I immediately said (after the ritual headdesk maneuver for not thinking of it myself) Hurray, hurray, o frabjous day, a book is born, hurray, hurray.

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Saturday didn’t really count.   Today is the official Day One of Book IV, and Book bounded out of the starting gate and gave me its daily wordage in a little less than 3 hours.    The pace isn’t flat out gallop (boy, the first two paragraphs were!) because it’s a long race and it’s better not to push too hard too soon.  Read the rest of this entry »

“You killed her!”

Yeah, that’s right,  I have no self-control, and now Book IV has a first paragraph.   It may not be the real first paragraph (the actual start of   Book III isn’t what I first wrote) but you have to admit it’s attention-getting (and I wrote it early this morning before the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords…hours before that happened.  Now it looks…too related. )

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Now that III is with Editor and Agent,  and I have recovered some of the lost sleep,  I can start thinking about the ground that Book IV needs to cover, as well as start deciding what to do with discarded bits of III.   Some will make side stories, as they occur far too early in III to be continued into IV.    Some–occurring temporally after the end of III, definitely need to be in IV.

Although I planned to take the whole week off to rest up, other stuff got in the way.   Epiphany, for instance: for those of us who are active in one of the liturgically traditional churches, there’s a second calendar to deal with.  Epiphany isn’t just a word; it’s a feast day, with a service to sing for (if you’re in the choir) and necessarily a rehearsal before that.   But not just Epiphany–other things required writer-business attention, and one still does.  A trip to the bank to get my French tax forms certified.

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Early in the morning, at the break of day, the writer pushed a button, and sent the book away.   Away, away, away my lads, she sent the book away,  all on a tide of ‘lectrons, she sent it far away.    Still early in the morning, but not the break of day,  the Editor did see it, as on her desk it lay.   It lay, it lay, it lay, my lads,  upon her desk it lay, just where the writer sent it, so far, far away.

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