Paksworld

Ritual disclaimer: nobody gets through a long writing career without some mistakes.  You will sometimes trust the wrong research source (even if it’s someone who should have the knowledge you’re looking for–say a fire department veteran you’ve asked about a procedural point in managing a multi-alarm fire…and no, this isn’t a problem I’ve had.)    No writer knows everything, and every writer must, at some point, trust a map, or a reference book, or a person who seems to have first-hand knowledge.

But there’s a huge difference between occasionally  trusting the wrong source and not looking something up at all.   Writers should look things up in the best source they can find or beg/borrow/get via Interlibrary Loan before they plan a book or a chapter–and should let the facts dictate how the story goes, rather than ignoring the facts because they already have a fantasy-version in mind.

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I spend the “awake but not up” portion of the very early morning thinking about an idea I had yesterday for Book V.    All along I’ve had a particular vision of what happens when Mmmph and Ummph meet.  It’s been stable through the other books, but I had a bright idea.   What if Rrrmph and Mmmph were connected?  What if Rrrmph wanted to do A and Mmmph wanted to do B, and then Ummph never met Mmmph in the same circumstances…???

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My UK editor wants an essay for their blogsite.  I’m working on it.  I’ve been working on it since it was assigned.   It should’ve been easy; I thought it would be easy.  It’s not.  And it’s even a topic I suggested.   In the weird way that Lifestuff and Writerstuff sometimes intertwine, it got tangled in a discussion here, a discussion elsewhere, and my original thoughts on the matter.

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Vonda N. McIntyre (a writer whose work I hope you’ve read)  has been posting some snarky comments about  the verb “seem.”     It seems that some writers seem to find a reason to seem uncertain about things going on in their books…they seem unable to say what someone felt, only what someone seemed to feel, seemed to think, seemed about to do, etc.   “Seem” has its uses (every word has its uses) but some words seem to fit a writer’s need not to say exactly what he/she means.   Thus, “seem” upholds the banner of “weasel-words.”

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My mother was a terrific knitter (and seamstress, and designer, and needlepointer, and…well just about everything.  Engineer, nurse, built some furniture, designed everything from houses to ranch pens to clothes, carved wood, painted pictures…and made biscuits I will never equal.)    Watching her pull together a knit-in-the-round sweater with no seams (especially one of the patterned ones) was a visual metaphor for what I do writing books (I realized this years later, after she’d died.)    You could talk to her while she was knitting a sleeve.  Often you could talk to her while she was knitting the body.  But when it came to The Joining, when the two sleeve tubes were mated to the body tube at the correct angle , with her signature little cable running up the join,  when there would be enough double-pointed needles in the project for several hours  to make it look like a torture device, there was no talking.    There was silent removal of empty coffee cup and setting down of a filled one.

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I can’t remember if this question has been asked here, but it comes up in other venues, at least, and I’m in the mood to write a little about it so…”Do writers really need a big vocabulary?”

That’s kind of like asking a world-renowned chef if she really needs all those spices, herbs,  ingredients, all those pots and pans and tools.

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What you send to Agent or Editor varies with the kind of book, but I’m now working on the not-book parts of the submission package.   NewEditors who are assigned in the middle and latter parts of a group of books–especially something as complicated as the Paksworld books–usually appreciate something that will get them up to speed quicker than just reading the whole (in this case eight previous) books.   Copyeditors always like to have a list of unique character names, words, etc.   And that’s what I’m doing now, taking a break from the wildlife management report for a few hours to work on this.

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Chapter numbers.   Chapter numbers don’t go on until I’m sure all the chapters are there, in the right order (OK, MOSTLY sure.)    Before that, chapters have a title, such as “Chapter: Kieri & Elves Talk History” (not actual title.)  That way I can use a search on “Chapter” to find the beginnings of chapters, and the title tells me if I have the one I want.  Chapter numbers change during the writing, as I may be off-chronology.    Chapters are numbered now, all forty-one of them.

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If you have over a million words of fiction set in the same world, you’re very likely going to have a lot of characters and those characters need names.   The names have to fit the world, and each other.  In real life, many people may have the same name (which is how the innocent get blamed for crimes they didn’t commit): there are dozens of Elizabeth Moons across the country, with at least one in most states and at least nine in Texas.   But in a book (as I discovered in my first one, when I didn’t know better) readers expect one name per character and one character per name.   They need those names to be easily pronounced (and “easily” varies with the reader) and distinctive.

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I am deep in chronology now, maybe halfway through, and discovering that I have duplicated some events (though the way the scenes are written varies a lot) and completely left out some very important ones.  Last night’s work session was on one such scene (a plot-mover for sure.)    Getting the others into even rough order helps a lot in seeing overlaps, duplicates, and gaps.

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