Paksworld

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 »

Yesterday was a partial success (interference from gut bug, but still some production of decent story) and today, despite Book III’s attempt to lure me off to another project (at least, I’m blaming III for that, rather than the other project–a nonfiction book), I made progress on both of them.   1500 on the nonfiction,  not quite 1500 on III.

Book III would like to run smoothly, but too smoothly…I stopped it in its tracks today when it was about to have a perfectly normal conversation in a place that demanded something else.   “Wait,” I said.  “If A really started from X in the morning,  A should have reached Y by now.  And A is only halfway between.  B started from Y at noon and is halfway now, so do we see a problem?”

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…But it’s fixed now and none of you will ever know why I had to dive back into Kings of the North, fix something, email my editor about it, have her point out what was wrong with the fix, fix it again….

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…and I am Not Ready.  Anxious, of course.   Eager, of course.  But if “ready” is supposed to include organized, all supplies in place, wardrobe chosen and prepared, etc, etc, etc….no.  Not Ready.   And thanks to the misery that’s Daylight Savings Time (every year I scream silently at the heavens “It does not save any !**! daylight!!!”  And here in Texas we pray all summer for night to come and give us small relief from the day’s heat and glare)  it is already 9:30 in the morning when it should be 8:30.

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Some of you may remember the posts I did last year during the Spring Revision Season, but some of you weren’t here yet, so I’ll chatter away as if you couldn’t look up the posts by category and find them (but go ahead if you want.)   Editor-revisions are basically the same as any other revision except that Editor has more experience and more clout even than DRW and Karen S- and Ellen M-.

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Sometimes a vivid imagination leads you wrong.  Sometimes trying to fix the wrong leads to a different wrong, but not a fix.  Book III again, this time with Kieri and someone you haven’t met, Sgt. Vardan of Halveric Company.

The present instance of this is a battle.  It’s not a big battle (it’s big to those in it, of course) but it needs to serve several long-plot purposes as well as a short plot purpose or three, and like many military engagements “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”  In this case, the “civilian” plan of  serving the plot isn’t working.

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I’ve talked about plotbombs before, and how they sometimes dump 1-2 chapters on me without warning, exploding all through the plot and making some things clear while making other things change. Read the rest of this entry »

…”Out of period!” sniffs the judge of exclamations.  “Does not fit the book.”

Well, no, but my copies of the Orbit edition of Oath of Fealty arrived today.    They’re both in the study with me where I gloat over them every few minutes.    Read the rest of this entry »

I was very overdue for a visit to the eye doctor–Stuff keeps coming up–but since my husband needed to see one with some urgency, we made matching appointments and I had the full “do” today.  As I suspected, I’m getting cataracts, but they’re in the early stages.  Everything else is healthy.   I need new glasses (which I was pretty sure of, too.

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