Paksworld

In real life as in fiction,  interest picks up when things go wrong.   We enjoy (and enjoy reading a little about) when things go right…the travelers are gliding along a smooth lake, surrounded by beautiful scenery, eating delicious food, enjoying the company of delightful companions, but after awhile it feels/reads like an ad from a tour company.   Though a few pages of this can build suspense (because surely something will go wrong) too much is soon too much.   We think we want that life, but many of us–when things are going too well–start rocking our own boats.  If it’s going well, why not try this…or that…?

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Another batch of chocolate chip cookies and Saint Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”)   pulled me out of the slump and past the next milestone:  130,000 words.    The problems aren’t all solved, but I squeezed out a nearly shut door and went off somewhere with Kieri to look at progress along the river.

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Book faced me today with two of the most daunting scenes in the series…not the kind that twist your emotional core into a wad and then set it on fire, but technically daunting as in “How the dickens do I even approach writing this?”

One answer is “First make chocolate chip cookies and pick your music.”

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Page proofs are done and should be shipped off today if I make it to the city.  Otherwise, another day (not due yet, so no screaming rush.)

As to Book IV, I had an interesting chat with a writer-friend last night, complaining that something I wrote way back at the beginning of this, and had been trying to find the right place for, really needs to go in Book IV–but I’m not sure where or how.   He had an idea, which I’m thinking about.   I like what I’ve written as I’ve written it, and it would have to be changed (in tone, in detail) to do what he’s suggested (essentially, moving from a mysterious but suggestive scene to a dream sequence.)

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I’m presently one-third of the way through the page proofs for Echoes of Betrayal and have found few (but as usual, in page proofs, puzzling) errors.  Page proofs are the last chance to fix things.  This time (probably because of the error in the Kings map) I got a proof of the corrected map, which has Lyonya on it this time.  Yay!

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I was determined to keep on schedule as much as possible before husband’s surgery, so my goal for this week was to make it to 120,000 words.  Which I did.   Today I went back to an unfinished chapter (it had stopped in a sort of lurch awhile back) and it took off a bit.    A certain teary widow has pulled up her socks and had an idea I certainly had not anticipated when I quit on that chapter.    I’m impressed.  Kieri’s impressed.

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Some people like to write villains, just as some gamers really like to play evil characters.     For writers who like to write villains, writing non-villains can be a challenge.  And the same is true for writers who don’t like to write villains.

Before we can talk about this, a few caveats.   Characters are not the writer.  All competent writers can create characters very unlike themselves (and not just taller, stronger, more physically attractive, either!)  Much of a writer’s research is “people-watching”–observing people of all walks of life, in different settings.    So someone who’s never been a doctor or a helicopter pilot can–with research–write believable doctors or helicopter pilots.   Similarly,  writers who are not nasty themselves can write nasty characters, and writers who aren’t saints can write good characters.

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In real life, many things impinge on our lives but are only slightly connected (by us) with one another.    I have horses, so I have a “line” to the horse vet, the farrier, and the feed store…I write, so I have lines to my agent, my editors (present and past), the various publishing houses, and readers.    It’s true that because I have readers, I still have publishers, and also the money to put in the bank to pay the vet, the farrier, and the feed store…but nobody at the feed store has ever met any of my editors, or knows their names.   The farrier is aware of the equine vet (most farriers know every equine vet in the area they service) but neither the farrier nor the equine vet knows any of my readers outside their home town.

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Words–existing words–come with their own cloud of witnesses–all the meanings they’ve had, the meanings of their origins, the associations they now have.    Some words strongly evoke the specific places on this planet–and specific cultures on this planet.   For that reason it can be hard to find an existing word that works for a specific person, place, or object  in a fantasy set other-where.   When I was writing the first Paks books, for instance, I was faced with a decision about what to call the places the Girdish met.    All the usual words connected to a specific religion alive here and now: church, mosque, synagogue, chapel, temple, etc.  They did not belong in Paks’s universe.   I spent a long time with various dictionaries–a lot of thought–before grange and barton proved themselves the right words.  Yes, they already existed…but they worked.

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I’ve been knitting again, and the ball of yarn from which I’m knitting (ball, not skein) developed some tangles in its innards (it’s a commercially wound ball; they do this sometimes.)  It was necessary to partially eviscerate the ball (reading into the hole and feeling around and then pulling a hunk out) to untangle it.   This is remarkably like what’s gone on  with the story the past few days, and is a clear sign that my sudden urge to start knitting again was connected to more than hand pain–my brain needed the tactile and musculo-skeletal input.

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