Paksworld

The local climate produces a dilemma…as summer approaches, it’s cool enough to go out on the land only in the early morning.

And morning is when I write best–first-drafting, anyway.   This morning, having wakened–really wakened–with a bright idea well before dawn, I fought it for awhile and then made my way to the computer.  Started writing.   2000+ words later, it wasn’t 8 am yet.   Hands were sore and swollen.  I flapped them around and ate a bowl of cereal.

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The maps in the Paks books and the Gird book (reproduced a little larger in the trade paperback omnibuses) are only part of the original map of this story-world.   Somewhere there’s the first sketchy map (hole-punched and put in a 3-ring binder along with many other useful bits that would’ve made starting this set of books much easier)  and the BIG map to which I transferred things from the first sketchy map and other more limited site maps.

It’s not where it was.  It’s not near where it was.  It’s what my friend Esther called SITH…Somewhere in This House, only in this case somewhere in either this house or the other.

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I like to think I write reasonably well even on the first draft.  Oh, sure, there are occasional glitches, but the logic should be sound and the prose should flow, even if more wordily than it will later.

Fat chance.  I was just looking at a chapter, written some time ago and now about to be folded in to the first third of the new new book.    And after a page of fairly ordinary stuff (stuff happens, yes, but it’s not earth-shaking, though it might be someday),  here’s this:

The next day, they reached the house in the evening.

Oh, no!   Surely I didn’t write that!   But yes, no one else gets on this computer but me, and yes, I wrote it, and yes, it’s as bad as it reads.   It’s not quite as bad as if I’d written “The next morning, they reached the house in the evening,” but it’s close.

Headdesk.

If ever you thought perfect sentences sprang from the writer’s mind/eye/hand/fingers-on-keyboard, now you know better.

“The next evening they reached the house.”   Simple, uncomplicated, obvious in the right way, and why the !**! didn’t I write it like that the first time?  This one gets changed before I ever reach the formal revision stage.  I cannot stand to see it again.