Paksworld

Whatever the weather where you are, and your attitude about the holiday season…for me it means only three more months until Launch Month (not Launch Day, but Launch Month)  for Kings of the North.

It also means only one month left before turning in Book III, which is ambling along towards the version the editor sees, still untitled.  So unless there are major changes, I’ll be scarce on the blog while keeping the already abraded nose firmly on the relentlessly turning grindstone.

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I had ridden for years and read about cavalry engagements when I first climbed on a horse with a sword belted on.    I thought I knew what it would be like to knock various objects off the tops of fence posts.    I didn’t.   I’m sure that back in the day youngsters learned from experienced elders (by watching or by direct instruction)  some of the things that a few sessions with horse, sword, and fence-posts taught me.    And ritual disclaimer here:  I’m not an expert in this stuff.

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I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut/alteration that’s going on now.

This one is about horses.   I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s  horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown at Prix St. George about a year before she died.    I myself had never ridden at that level.   But K- was giving me some lessons on him, in the hope that he would connect better with me (not really–or not for the first five years at least.)   In the process, I learned to ride some advanced movements that were a lot of fun, and obviously would be of use to someone riding a horse in battle.

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Something has been brooding in the depths of the plot for this entire world (not just this book, or the previous, but I’m finding its shadows on sonar of the oldest–in story time–books, Gird & Luap as I re-read them for continuity)  for years.   Now it’s rising slowly  into view.   These are foundation-level conflicts that I’ve never really examined, having just discovered outcrops of apparent bedrock on which to put the foundations of the world 27-28  years ago.

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I now have ARCs for Kings of the North in my hot little hands (the weather turned warm and muggy–hands are definitely hot.)    There will be a contest in which someone will win an ARC.   However, due to multiple instances of LifeStuff, I don’t have the contest idea worked out yet, so the contest isn’t today or maybe even this week.   It will happen, however, because I now have a prize some of you will probably want.

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Sleep, Shakespeare said, knits up the raveled sleeve of care.   I wish something would knit up the raveled sleeve of prose when loose ends of yarn are hanging out and there’s not a knitting needle in sight.    However, the authorial crochet hook is working hard.  (My mother, who was incredibly good at needlework, pointed out one day that knitting and crochet are the same thing, really, except geometrically in some relationship I forget.  Upside down and backwards, maybe.)

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Though I can almost hear the cries of Woe! No! from here, the braiding process always results in dropping some overwritten sections (or parts of them) and tightening this and adding to that.  Unlike cooking, where once you put the salt or the spices in, they’re in for the duration, writing allows do-overs…trying whether something works and then removing it if it doesn’t.  (Would love to have had that option the time I put way too much tarragon in the tarragon chicken!!)

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(GRUMP: just erased the whole post I was about to send.  My right little finger hit *something* (I wasn’t looking at it, so don’t know) and it all disappeared.  So this is not the post you would’ve had but the post’s general gist as I remember it after that moment of shock, useless attempts at recovery, and then writing a GRUMP.)

This week has been about reorganizing the POV sections into chronological order and writing connections when the lack of them became apparent.  I’ve also been noting places were cuts could be made later, to accommodate the additional material that will bring the book to the conclusion I’m trying to achieve…for which I need a LOT more room.    Right now the book’s just under 163,000 words,  but it changes daily up and down as this is trimmed slightly and that is added for connectivity and this other bit now turns out to be wrong, and here I’ve added a chunk…etc.    There’s a lot of front-loading in this book, so anything trimmed there has to be carefully done so the plot-threads can run smoothly on, without fraying to nothing later.

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In Kings of the North, which only the alpha readers among you have yet read,  the POV characters leave Aarenis at the end of the campaign season, so whatever happens there between, say, a few tendays before the Autumn Evener  and Midwinter is offstage for that book.   And in that book, what happens in Aarenis isn’t relevant to that book, but it is relevant to the next…the one I’m on now.

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Because I moved from POV chapters to one central file a bit early (in order to make keeping word count easier, and thus checking against daily goals easier), the book began to grow in ways that ran counter to temporal sequence.

Or, more simply, it was/is a mess.

What I needed was a printout.   By this week, I desperately needed a printout.  Usually I start doing a printout earlier, but for reasons A – R, that didn’t work for me this time.     And printing out 780+ pages takes a) time,  b) lots of paper,  c) lots of printer cartridge, and d) even more time to punch holes in the sheets so they’ll go in the two big fat 3-ring binders that I use to move chapters around.

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