I know this will disappoint  many of you (and me, as well) but it will produce a better book than if she had rushed into reading it without having a solid background in the whole Paksworld mythos, or tried to rush it through the production stages.    It will have a reasonable time for copy-editing, for  review of the copy-editing,  conversion to its multiple formats, etc.  This is all to the good.     (And where did my cursor go???  It suddenly disappeared for no reason…the words do appear where I click on the page, but it’s hard to place the click accurately when there’s no marker.)

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to work on Book V, and as soon as I know an absolutely firm date for publication, I’ll get back to you.   You’ll be glad to know (I hope) that I’m sparing you a long, boring stretch of days at sea with nothing for my POV character to do but wonder when it will ever end.  And another long boring stretch of someone recovering from an injury–you get some of that, but not a day by day, because that would require another book.  Or four.  (And those other books may be written, but not now.  This one has to be on the bit and moving with impulsion to the end.  Which I hope agrees to die itself up into a very decorative knot.

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!)

But thanks to the time zone thing, BBC needed to talk to me in my morning, their afternoon–and my morning brain is presently dedicated to Paksworld.   So the request to come up with nifty high-tech SFnal entertaining ideas fell on a brain buried deep in late medieval ship construction, navigation,  sea currents off the coast of Prealith and eastern Aarenis,  the economics of the sea trade between the East, the North, and the South, the possible reasons for the decline in elven populations,  sibling psychology in prominent families, etc.    All my bright ideas were bubbling up from the wrong substrate.

I had thought that by not actually starting to write in the book before the call came, I would be able to switch on the SF brain, but that didn’t entirely work.  I could retrieve stuff I’d already done, but I couldn’t  innovate at a speed suitable for an expensive long-distance phone conversation.    I felt slow and stupid, in fact.  So now I know that to prep myself for next week’s taping, I will have to wake up the SF side and suppress the fantasy side for a few hours.

It’s clearer now what they’re hoping for from me as a participant, and I expect I’ll do OK on the day, but it’s not my natural posture, so to speak.

Meanwhile–entering stuff in the yarn stash file while waiting for the phone to ring–I discovered that I have (as many people probably discover) more yarn than I realized.   Just in the yarn bought for socks, I have enough for 10 pairs beyond the  two pairs of socks now on the needles.  But I also have yarn of types not suitable for socks (it was beautiful, it was on sale, “I’ll find something to do with it…”),  yarn that I don’t have enough of for socks  (a ball of this, a ball of that),  two balls of super-chunky novelty yarn that need to be made into gift scarves before next winter (a long time coming in Texas), and that’s not counting the yarn inherited from my mother.   the “I’ll think of something…” yarn doesn’t attract me as much now as it did…it was shortly after I started knitting again and was trying out different yarns to see what I liked…and now I’m committed to worsted wool and lots of socks.  (Besides the socks for myself, I have three pairs on request already.)   If  all I had in the stash was the yarn for socks and the yarn for the gift scarves, I wouldn’t have too much.

Today is music day (voice lesson and choir); the knitting goes along for the period between the two, and the traveling notebook (not electronic–pen & paper) also goes along so that any bright ideas can be set down.   Tomorrow should be an all-clear writing day.

As icing on that cake,  most of that was written in a chapter that is technically difficult.    Here’s the problem (and it’s one that happens repeatedly in long works.)   Characters sleep.    Characters fall off horses, walls, roofs…they are beset by enemies who give them a whack with a branch or a rock or a barrel stave.   They get drunk and pass out, or someone puts a little something in their drink.    Inevitably, in the kind of stories I write, people lose consciousness (one way or another) and then regain consciousness (one way or another.)   And inevitably, sometimes the circumstances of losing (or regaining) consciousness are plot-relevant.

And yet…because it happens often enough in enough books–there’s a conception that if a character wakes up not knowing where she/he is, especially if the character is surrounded by impenetrable fog, or in a plain white room, or in the dark, or bobbing on a raft in the middle of an ocean, the writer wrote that because the writer is stuck, facing a blank page or computer screen with no idea what to do next.  Er.  No.

But the trick then is to help the reader understand the plot-relevance and not yawn and think “Well, here it is, the old woke-up-not-knowing-where-she-was cliche again…stupid writer, why not solve your own problem and write something better?”

Even I, who have had a generally placid and unadventurous life, have had several instances of waking up confused about where I was, when I was, and what had happened.  Two involved concussions (one without apparent loss of consciousness, according to witnesses, though there’s almost an hour gone from my memory) and one I still don’t understand except as an effect of post-travel exhaustion.

So anyway–today’s task was to write a scene in which someone with a traumatic brain injury wakes up, is confused, passes out again, wakes up again–and so on–and over time re-acquires the concept of language but not the person’s memory of the past.    From an interior POV (and I could use my own experience of waking up in confusion) and without boring you-the-reader (I hope!) while keeping the reader oriented to person and time while the character isn’t, and then bring the character to the point where the character’s able to interact with someone else–who can inform the character of a few facts and transition the character into being self-aware enough to do what the character has to do next.

I’ve been thinking about this scene for a week or more, in the background of other writing.  It’s the kind  of  scene that needs to be written all in one day (one afternoon/evening, it’s been)….it’s over 2000 words, because there’s a lot in it the reader needs to know about this person–the reader needs to understand what has “come back” and what is “never coming back” in terms of function, in order to understand (if not anticipate) the choices the character will make later on.

And it’s done, and it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t totally suck large granite boulders, either.    Everything the reader needs to know at this point is in there.    Not much if anything the reader doesn’t need to know at this point is in there.     The character’s confusion (which could be lots longer) is as short as I can get it and not leave important things out.    I left it for a couple of hours to watch stupid TV shows and clear my head, and coming back to it a little while ago…yeah.  It’s OK.   Getting it done is my excuse for eating a whole bag of chocolate covered caramels, one by one, through the writing.

It will of course need revision.    I need to think more about the punctuation choices I made.  To me, the ellipsis (the dot-dot-dot thing, for those who don’t know, which most of you do) is a good choice for uncertainty and confusion, but too much of anything leaches the meaning out of it.  But that’s for another day.

As he lay wondering about this, a sound moved in the darkness, a sound for which–like everything else–he had no name.

And no, I’m not saying who “he” is or what’s going on.  There’s a book and a large chunk between now and then.

Nor is this a good topic for open speculation.    You might accidentally hit on details that would spoiler it for many.

1. East of the Eight Kingdoms is the Eastern Ocean.  Across the Eastern Ocean is another continent.

2.  The Seafolk came from that other continent; they farmed along the coast and in the nearer-to-coast valleys.  Inland are high mountains they did not cross, home to rockfolk.  These mountains are not exactly parallel to the coast, leaving more room between sea and the rockfolk’s lands toward the south.

3.  Magelords came across the Eastern Ocean in several waves,  first as traders (who mostly got along with the Seafolk) , then as individual invaders seeking their own domains (having had reason to leave Aare), conquering small areas and driving the Seafolk out) and finally as a group of invaders when Aare fell, whereupon they took the most fertile parts of the eastern shore and in a series of brutal battles killed or excluded the Seafolk, prompting their migration to the western continent.  Some Seafolk still live on the eastern continent, to the north where the coastal strip on which they live is very narrow.

4. Sekkady was part of the invasion, and Kieri was transported across the sea twice, though he remembers nothing of that earlier trip, both departing from, and returning to, the port of Bannerlíth.

5.  Seafolk continued to traverse the eastern ocean, both to visit kin in the north, and to trade with the magelord domains.   Such trade has been dangerous but profitable–the magelords are eager to hear news from both Aarenis and the  Eight Kingdoms.  They are fascinated by elves (if there are any in the eastern continent, they do not interact with the magelords there)  and pay well for elven artifacts.    They pay extremely well for part-elf captives, apparently hoping to learn new magic from them…some of these magelords have ambitions to return to the western continent as conquerers; others hope to reverse the situation in Aare and return there.   They are appalled by the news they’ve had of Gird, and consider that a society founded on “stupid farmers and greedy merchants” must be doomed by incompetence.  (They’re just a tiny, wee, infinitesimal bit conceited…)  They’re amazed it’s lasted this long.

Though their magery has not faded as much as that of magelords in the Eight Kingdoms, their fertility has declined, and they have not outworn their resources yet.

5.  It cannot yet be told whether the eastern continent covers as much of the world as Eurasia does, or whether there are several continents “over there.” before you get to the “western ocean” that lies (by legend) west of Kolobia.

6. How much of Aare is livable is also something that cannot be told at this time.   All the writer is allowed to say, at this point, is that it used to be more habitable than it is now, providing a population big enough to spread both north into Aarenis and eastward across the Eastern Ocean.

7. Remember that this world has no moon, so the only tide would be a solar tide, not nearly as dramatic.   Tides  affect coasts much less than they do here.  However, general climate effects, due to solar radiation and the resulting movement of air masses, do create large, stable (in terms of the time in these stories) current patterns that have allowed sailor-explorers to follow reasonably predictable routes.    Like the current patterns on our world, these form “highways” with branches that help sailors do more than one thing.

8. Sea trade is largely coast-wise in the Immerhoft Sea and up the coast to Bannerlíth and then the Honnorgat.    It’s also coast-wise up and down the west coast of the eastern continent(s.)   The trade across the eastern ocean is more seasonal and a much longer route.

Hope this helps readers keep things straight.

When I know the time it will be broadcast, I’ll definitely let everyone know.   I was able to listen to an earlier program online, so it may be available even later for those who can’t listen to the broadcast.

Book V, stymied for several days while this excitement was going on (a matter of email-tag and finally a phone call from London)  took off again today, showing that I hadn’t neglected it too long.    Where have we not been in Paksworld?  On an ocean (other than in Kieri’s memory of his flight from Baron Sekkady.)   Well…there’s an ocean voyage coming up in Book V, though I can’t tell you the outcome.    The POV character is already aboard, though, and action isn’t far in the future.  My naval history adviser  is already feeding me terms and specifics.

Right now Book V has several “growing nodes” and I’m working on them all.   Major characters whose strands have entered the story so far include Kieri, Dorrin, Mikeli, Camwyn, Arcolin, the Marshal-General, Arvid.  Those were expected, amd I know Alured the Black is coming, but I have the feeling more will show up for the finale.

Mac-the-horse hasn’t gotten loose again, but a friend of mine had cardiac surgery last week (she’s doing fine.)   My county political party convention was Saturday, and I went to that (and knitted, to the fascination of several people.)    Sang two anthems each at two services Sunday.   And someday must get more than five hours’ sleep.

Here he’s trucking me through my first-ever horse show (we also did a flat class) , and this was my first time to jump a triple combination.  It’s not high, but it was challenging enough for me.

My weird position here is due to having put him in a near-impossible position to jump this…coming into the fence at a sharp angle, without room for another stride (I was avoiding a mud patch).   Having been told he could jump anything in the ring from any angle, I closed my legs and spoke to him.  The rocket assist came on,  he shot up in the air, twisted to square himself to the fence, and landed like a marshmallow.  I hung on.  Obviously.      He was a dead honest horse to ride;  he loved to jump, was amazingly fast for his breeding,  and aside for the stifle injury that ended his career as an open jumper,  the soundest horse I’ve ever owned except for the Arab mare.

Once we moved him up here, I could ride him around town bareback, or under saddle in the local festival parade (in which he pranced like a youngster and showed off–he loved an audience.)   But he died at 23,  when a maximum dose of Bute wasn’t enough to keep him comfortable (re-injury of his stifle, thanks to a kick from the same TB mare)  and the vet and I agreed that putting him down was the only humane thing to do.    So, though I had initially thought Paks would have a golden-colored horse (not palomino–one of those golden chestnuts),  when the horse ran out of the hills and to her…it was this one.

I have no pictures (at least not that I can find right now)  of the horse I bought for Michael (the one that came with a history of past founder, and foundered again, fatally, later.   This is also the horse that bucked me off spectacularly–sunfishing–and then kicked me in the rear while I was still up in the air. )

Pictures of the Arab mare looking her best, at the trainer’s.

Pictures of Cricket (another rehab case, bought for Michael)  right after she arrived, hundreds of pounds underweight and full of worms (that’s not a hay-belly), and then later when he was riding her.

Pictures of Illusion (inherited from Kathleen, who trained him to upper levels of dressage–I can’t ride at those levels.)  He’s half warmblood, one quarter Pryor Mountain mustang, and one quarter mystery.

And now I really do have to go Deal With Mac.

The most universally useful reality bits are those that remind the writer of real things that happen to everyone (and thus can find places wherever you need that particular character-reaction.   Loss–of a job, a home, a friend (by quarrel, illness, moving, death.)   Unfulfilled wishes–the college you didn’t get into, the person who didn’t love you back, the job you didn’t get, the “perfect” house/car/coat/dog/pair of shoes sold to someone else just when you’d made up your mind to get it.   Hopes fulfilled (see above list and add your own.)   Any of the things that evoke common reactions, and allow the writer to make the character’s reaction real to readers.

“Interruptions” are a category in themselves.  We all get interrupted; most of us don’t like it (though a friend of mine says the discovery of a non-fatal as she was being prepped for a different and unpleasant medical procedure was a desirable interruption, as it put off  the evil day for months and maybe forever if she turns that color again…)   Yesterday, for instance, the red horse escaped at morning feeds when the person doing the feeding failed to latch the gate from the horses’ side of the barn to the human side (where the feed room, equipment and fool storage, and aisle between those is.)   Tiptoed past the person feeding, who in the feed room, and into the back yard.  Which has two gates to the front yard, one at either end of the house.  The front yard communicates with the rest of town, which has a highway running through it.

I became aware of this while working away in the study, when the thunder of hooves and a red streak passed the study window.   The subsequent twenty minutes were busy,  giving me at least a small cardio workout.  Horse is now back in.  But how rich in detail for a story…not just a horse escaping, but my thoughts and feelings, the other person’s thoughts and feelings (both of us expressing our thoughts and feelings),  the discovery that a horse who will tiptoe through a barn aisle will not (at first anyway) go through an equally wide gate if the old rambler rose’s strands are hanging down to tickle its back and nose (which meant I got to the east gate before he got out), the discovery that the same horse will not go through a wide, unobstructed gate into a familiar paddock, even though someone’s there with a bucket and some feed in the bucket…when it’s more fun to play chase in the backyard.   (I suspected this might be the case: this is the Drama Queen horse.  Anything for drama.)

Stories can be plotted or written by instinct, but characters need to be interrupted in their progress through the plot…their horse gets out.  Their phone rings even as they’re on the way out the door to do something they consider important.    Phone calls (or, given the setting, someone running in the gate to say that the spotted bull has gotten out AGAIN, or someone’s least favorite in-laws arriving, or a child falling and getting a scalp cut that bleeds copiously all over the formal clothes the person put on for the important event they’re due at, or someone spilling a hot drink into the space-ship’s control panel…) are inevitable.    And very, very useful in making fiction believable.   And in keeping the plot moving when characters have settled into a comfortable position and are talking far, far too long about things that aren’t that important (in terms of finishing the book on time and having it be a story, not just a 400 page conversation.

The horse escaping is only one of the interruptions that have given me ideas and reminded me of the value of interrupting characters.  There’s the night the hot water heater gave up and flooded the hall (it entered my dream as a hurricane–wind and water–through which I was fighting my way.  Then I woke up.   Then I stepped into the flood.)    There’s the night I woke up to the sound of small child throwing up.   The time I went in the bedroom with an armload of laundry (a regular, but necessary, interruption to writing) and found a small snake coming in the window, through the hole in the screen we’d made for the phone line to the “fire phone” (no longer then in use.)  Longer interruption, as the terrified snake made it all the way in, and zipped under the bed.   (We had to move the bed, and what else was under it.)  The time I went out to the kitchen for a drink of water and found a much larger snake coming in the kitchen door.   Neither snake was venomous; the smaller snake didn’t survive (sorry, snake) but the larger one did, though both of us were excited and not thrilled with each other.

When I was on the ambulance crew, call-outs were always interruptions but always elements in the Story Cauldron…beyond the obvious (learning up close what gunshot and knife wounds look like, how quickly a means of transportation can turn into a means of mangling one or several human bodies),  emergencies reveal details of human behavior very useful to writers.    How different people react to violent interruptions in their own lives,  for instance.    To death, injury, property damage,  scary things.  Though coming home to a large batch of bread that has over-risen and oozed over the top of the bowl, across the counter, and onto the kitchen floor–where it forms a gooey mess–leads to thoughts of writing horror.

Another horse-related interruption occurred years ago, when I was rehabbing a Thoroughbred mare for someone and he was coming to pick her up.   She was a spooky, difficult mare–it had taken me a long time to convince her that I was not going to hurt her–and being a Thoroughbred, and former polo pony, she was a hard keeper and took a lot of careful feeding to get her weight back up.   On the day appointed for her homeward journey, I put her owner’s halter and lead back on her,  tied her to a post,  and–since it had been raining overnight and she was wet–started rubbing her down with a burlap pad to dry her before the trip.   I’d rubbed her down before; she hadn’t objected to my touch since the early days.  All the sores were healed up; she’d grown a new coat.    The owner’s choice of lead was a nylon webbing one–which means it could stretch.   But that day–she went bonkers, set back on the lead, stretched it out, and the !**!  pot-metal snap they put on that kind of lead broke, and the broken end flew straight at my face.   I got my hand up–saved my eye–but it broke the index finger of my right hand as well as cutting it to the bone of the first joint, cut my thumb and the second finger as well.   I explained to the mare, when I could speak,  that she was lucky she’d broken my trigger finger.     Went in, bandaged the broken finger tight to the other one, and let her owner deal with her when he arrived.    (I had been using a heavy cotton lead rope with a big stout bull snap on it–the only safe lead rope in my admittedly biased opinion.  The broken end of the pot-metal snap showed clearly that the “brass” color on the outside was just that–color.)

It is possible to keep working on a book with a broken index finger, since there was no mousing to be done in those days.  Just typing.   Put a proper splint on it and typed flat-fingered.     Horses and families are an excellent source of interruption.

Yesterday’s escapee, you ask?   Back in confinement, but very, VERY interested in that gate every time someone comes near it.    He thinks it would be fun to get into the yard again.

Over 2000 words today.    I ate too  much supper too late after that. 

This is one I really must not tell you anything about, because it comes near the end of the last book–almost two books away from where you are now.    But I’m hoping to finish it tomorrow…another 2-3000 words should at least get it down in first-draft form.

(The first plot-bomb from last week comes earlier in the book.  It may even be nudged up to the beginning, because it could make a good opening chapter.)

Still, it can’t be snippeted either, at least until I run out of side-stories and Limits of Power snippets.  Just too far ahead of  the current situation.   I will say that both of these plotbombs, which appear to have remote forward connections, maybe,  are going to be waving-at-the-future loose ends.  There’s not going to be room in this book to tie them up.    In fact, the whole Paksworld universe is throwing things at me, now that I’m in the home stretch of the five-book arc,  and reminding me that I’ve never dealt with…or this…or that other thing…and maybe…NO, I say loudly.   Not NOW.  Now is for Book V, getting this particular arc completed and tied off.  NOT for starting new ones.   To the characters who are crowding onstage, all in costume, I’m saying No, no, casting is complete, clear the stage, I’ll talk to you after this production IF YOU CLEAR THE STAGE.  NOW!