Paksworld

The east half of the new map may be ready to photograph…when it’s printed, you’ll notice some tributaries you didn’t see before (hadn’t needed them before) and some towns, strongholds, etc.  The west half is still being worked on.  The southwest corner has acquired another range of mountains.

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Here’s the current state of the map.   I’m about ready to pull the undersheets of details to be transferred and continue with the empty spots.

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Someday, maybe even tomorrow, there’ll be another picture of the map progress.   It won’t look like much, but that’s because today I erased about a quarter of it.  Luckily for me (and you, in the long run) what needed erasing wasn’t inked yet.  Now it is.

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As if you didn’t know that already.    But last year’s goof (not recognized as a goof at the time)  has made the last week….difficult.   I’m swiping a post I made over at SFF.net  so I don’t have to write the embarrassing thing twice, but being a writer, I had to edit and revise it. Read the rest of this entry »

Thought you might like a picture of the master map on the board, ready for more lines…

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We moved the old drafting table over from the other house (had been my mother’s after she moved up here,  then guest-house, then son’s house for a couple of years) to what is now the spare bedroom in this house.  Only it’s not going to be a spare bedroom–it’s going to be a drawing/painting/graphics room.  The old drafting table, now well over 60 years old, is pretty beat-up, so I’m using a piece of plexiglass on top of the (rapidly delaminating) original maple veneer top.  The tilt mechanism doesn’t work anymore–my mother stabilized it with a pair of extra “legs” that fixed it at one tilt.   (Yes, I could maybe get a newer used one, or a new one, but this is the drafting table I remember from early childhood.   A “don’t touch” zone that I violated only a few times…most notably the time I used my mother’s big T-square as a hobby-horse.  Once.  The repercussions were convincing.)

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Thanks to the packing and preparation for moving M- into an apartment in the city, writing time has remained minimal this week…but some progress is happening, at least in my head.   I hope and expect to have a sort of microburst of writing when he’s installed, writing it all down in sequence rather than rough notes.

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Another snippet from Kings of the North today.   This may be one I posted in an earlier draft last year, but as someone said, there are people new to the place who probably don’t want to hunt through the archives for everything I said back then.    As before, there may be mild spoilers incorporated, so if you’re spoiler-averse,  don’t read beyond the break.

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I spend a couple of hours with Book III yesterday (all I had, due to Other Things) and had fun with the inimitable Arvid.   I don’t know how much of this will fit in the final Book III–but it’s such fun to write.  As with the story of the King of Pargun and his difficult daughter Elis, that we put up  on the publisher’s blog site, I’ll find it a home somewhere even if it can’t stay in the book proper.

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….Almost.   Still a few more things to be done before shipping them back to NYC.   I need to rewrite the Dedication, write the Acknowledgments, and run back through the text to catch a couple of things I think I may have done wrong.   Read the rest of this entry »