Paksworld

It was a wild and woolly weekend, mostly great fun…until today’s trip home, when this happened.    Yes,  that’s the train I was on.   A very sad situation (still not sure if it was accident or suicide.)   And I got home to discover that a friend had committed suicide last night.

So some of the bloom was off the rose, so to speak….but the A-Kon memories are all good.   I had time with old friends, made some new ones, and signed a few books.   First load of laundry is done, and I’m leaving the other for tomorrow morning.    I went into the convention with my three pairs of hand-knit socks, and by judicious washing (I took my own towel for drying them, so they wouldn’t “bleed” on hotel white towels)  got through just fine.

Back to work on various fronts tomorrow…starting with a necessary visit to a government bureaucracy and then straight into my editor’s notes on Limits of Power.

Here’s a space for those of you who enjoy speculating about Paksworld and the future possibilities of the storyline.    It’s here so that those who don’t want to read speculations that may turn out to be spoilers can avoid it.  (So–if you hate spoilers, do not read this thread.  OK?)

Keep in mind that this is for YOUR speculations.    We need to keep a kind of wall between your speculations and my planning, for various legal reasons, so I won’t be reading this thread myself.   If anyone has complaints about behavior on this thread, contact me offlist through the website, but be sure to use a subject line referencing this space, and in the body remind me who you are, and then what the problem is.    If trolls show up, or someone’s being rude or abusive–let me know.   Otherwise, this is your sandbox.

I mentioned here that I would be on the BBC World Radio’s “The Forum”…the taping of the panel discussion (with three people in London and me in Austin, TX) will be tomorrow (early morning, my time)  and will be broadcast this coming Sunday, May 20.   If your radio station doesn’t carry the program, you can access it as a podcast here:

From 01:00 Pacific Time on Saturday,  http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/forum .

The lineup has changed a bit–the other panelists will be David Rodin and Elizabeth Quintana.  Should be a very lively conversation.  I’ve read one of David Rodin’s books now, but did not know Elizabeth Quintana had replaced the other panelist until yesterday.    Luckily the BBC forwarded several of her publications for me to read.

One interesting discovery has been how differently I view some things as a fiction writer instead of an analyst or philosopher.   (The “veteran” part comes in there too, but the fiction writer effect is stronger than I had anticipated.)   The others’ concentration is on the “outside” of individuals–and mine, of course, is on the “inside”–on the way that individual biology, culture, and personal experience interact to create motivation for behavior.

Though this is technically off-topic for Paksworld,  I felt it would be interesting enough to many here to give you a heads-up about it.  (And let’s hope the edited version doesn’t have the font change that happened the first time around!)

So there I’ve been, chugging away (some days better, some not) on Book V, and also trying to read outside that box a little because of the BBC panel discussion coming up, and suddenly…I’m on the phone to the lovely folks in London (who have been uniformly encouraging and lovely)  to talk about the upcoming program.   My day-writing in fantasy has been separated from my night-reading in SF by other things, some of them LifeStuff (like knitting while waiting at the hospital for my husband to be done with a test procedure…even a slow knitter like me can accomplish a fair bit of 2×2 ribbing in 3 hours!), and thus I’ve been able to cope with the difference in cognitive function each requires.

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First, the excitement:   my UK publisher’s publicity person emailed to tell me that BBC-Radio wanted to contact me, inviting me to participate in a discussion of future war.   Now I’ve done future war panels at SF conventions (the funniest, to me, was the one where I arrived just in time, in costume from having done a SFWA Muskteers  fencing demo, and turned out to be the only woman and only veteran on the panel. )   But this is different because the other panelists are not other SF writers or SF fans…but people in entirely different disciplines.    Early in the morning (my time)  on May 16 I will go to the assigned studio in Austin and all those lovely electronic connections will be made–and the other panelists and I and the moderator will dig into the topic, each in our own way.

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I have, or had, lots of pictures of horses, including with me on them (and most of them I didn’t own.   Here are just three of Ky, in age ranging from 18 to 20 or 21 (not sure now).    He was bought off a ranch in New Mexico as a youngish (5 or 6 year old) horse that had a habit of jumping out of corrals, and became a show jumper in Texas before I’d ever been in a flat saddle.  We intersected in his older age (16/17) after a career-ending injury to his stifle, but he could still jump up to about 4’3″.    At that time, I was just becoming comfortable with 3′ jumps.   I leased him for about a year before buying him, and moved him to our present home when we moved here.

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Writers are fond of saying that everything is grist for the writer-mill (which suggests that writers’ minds are like big stones rotating in one place, but…any metaphor can be carried too far) or potential ingredients in the cauldron of Story (same caution applies: metaphor!)   Some things are more obviously useful right-this-minute in a story; others take a long time to find their spot in the tapestry.  But I thought you might enjoy hearing about some real-life interruptions that have (or had) obvious story potential.

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Every once in a while it happens…I hit the wrong button when doing comment moderation.    Basically all I’m looking for is that the post isn’t spam…so I don’t look at the name, just the content, very briefly.   And then I hit “approve”….or…in some cases…I don’t.  After midnight, like now, I’m tired and not as accurate as I should be.

So I *think* I deleted a post I shouldn’t have, but since the deleted ones are completely gone…I can’t check.    Just in case, though…apologies now and in future to anyone whose post disappears entirely when they knew it was appropriate.  It was an accident.

Every once in a while, the book I’m writing decides to come very alive, walk into my life, and reverse our roles.   It happened with the first Paks books (especially in one instance, when Paks took over and handled a situation for me.  I wish she’d done that more often!)

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For those in easy distance of 6th and Lamar, in Austin, TX, I’ll be doing a reading from Echoes of Betrayal, chat, and signing at BookPeople tonight at 7 pm.    Knitters–bring your  yarn & needles along–it’s fine with me, and I’ll be bringing my socks-in-progress (though not knitting while reading or talking…not able to handle that yet.)  I’ll feel less silly about that if someone else has their needlework project along.

But come if you can–would love to see you.