Paksworld

The growing tip of the story is alive and moving in the third book.   At the moment, it’s growing with a chapter in each of several  viewpoints.   There’s Arcolin having breakfast in camp, about to confront some annoyed gnomes, and Dorrin watching the children learning to make pastry, and Andressat about to make a very important announcement to his family.   I’m not sure what Kieri’s doing, because I’m not sure the end of the second book won’t change by the time I finish the revisions of it.

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Yesterday I finally (!) got the copy edits boxed up, taped up, and ready to go when (out of the blue, literally) a storm landed on top of us and for over an hour we had lightning, wind, and (wonderfully) rain.  The power flickered on and off and I declined to go out in it, risking the manuscript, until things settled down, which they finally did.   Then I drove the 20-something miles to the Kinko’s/FedEx place and handed over the box to the nice fellow keeping the doors open until closing time, and drove back home, lighter in heart and pocket both.  (You really don’t want to know what it costs to send over 850 pages of paper ‘overnight’ to New York City from central Texas…)

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When you get the manuscript back from the copy editor (via the publisher) it’s conveniently referred to as “the copy edit” or “the copy edits.”   (Plural for its many pages, I guess.)

You find out at this point that your carefully prepared manuscript has mistakes in it.  You changed something but left one word of the old version of that sentence and did not see it.   Oh, the shame!   You misspelled something–and you a writer of many years, how could you!?  Oh, more shame.

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There was a glitch with the copy edits…which I haven’t talked about much if at all.   They didn’t come, and didn’t come, and finally I was told that they weren’t able to contact the copy editor.   I tried to be a Good Little Writer and just keep truckin’ on the revisions, but as time passed, I worried more and more.  (So, of course, did my editor.)

The worry began to interfere with my ability to concentrate on the book (no, I do not possess superhuman concentration) and I began to spend more online time far away in another corner of the internet.   Nature listservs, email, the new SFWA website’s beta test…anything…

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It’s been small steps this week, for various reasons.

There was the first test of the new meat saw over at the ranch, which resulted in the need to make lamb curry (need is a relative term.  We like lamb curry a lot.)    But that took up a morning–not the single cut, but cleaning the meat saw afterwards.   In Paks’s world, there are no big meat band saws…there are big butchers with sharp knives and cleavers in the cities, and experienced persons elsewhere.    It’s easier to clean a knife than a band saw, but harder to cut up the carcass.

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Apologies, to start with…I could not bear to see the cover image slide down out of sight…hence the lack of posts for a week.

But I haven’t been idle in that time.   No, the copy edits aren’t here yet, but some structural problems in book two…aren’t here still.   They’re fixed.   Here’s what happened.

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First: Happy Canada Day to you Canadians.

Second:   This may make you laugh.  It did me.   Critical scene–critical in terms of reader spatial orientation as well as reader “what’s happening” orientation.

And I got both direction (east v. west) and possibility wrong.   It was a plot bomb, and I was writing as fast as I could, but still!  East is east and west is west and if you go the wrong way you end up in the wrong place.   And one little three-letter word (“not”)  makes a huge difference.

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This morning I was goofing off by starting book three,  which meant I needed to check a few things from one and two.

It’s a fairly minor plot point (so far) so I don’t think it’s hugely spoilerish to reveal a little.    Some of Our Folks are in Aarenis, on a contract with Cortes Vonja to deal with brigands.  Standard, ordinary, until they find some swords.  One of the swords is a  Halveric sword, which is odd because the Halverics were careful to recover the arms of their wounded and dead.

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4800 words so far today.

164,800-something for the book.

And two pages into the next chapter, I realized I had written the end, at the end of the previous chapter.  It may grow or shrink some, but the skeleton and most of the flesh are there.

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Book continues its happy gallop down the to the finish line, paying no attention to its writer.

I will say it’s interesting.   Though the newly introduced “character” has a regrettable tendency to spout infodump, I think it’s telling me, and it will be easy to prune that away so readers don’t have to deal with it.   (You think? comes the little voice in my head.  One of the little voices.)

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