Paksworld

I tried to link to these in a comment,  but the links didn’t work.  Sigh.   The only pictures I can find of Ky, the horse who was my model for Paks’s paladin horse, are the ones my webguru had on one of her computers.

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As I sit here, I smell the turkey necks and giblets simmering in the kitchen, with a faint whiff of a brownie pie beginning to share the air.   Turkeys are defrosted (finally) and will go in the roasters in the morning.  (We now get smaller turkeys plural instead of the giant bird I used to get, because it’s easier.  And we’re older.)    The ham is ready to go in the oven with a homemade spiced pear glaze.   Guests will start arriving tomorrow morning, some bringing food to share, some bringing themselves only, which is fine.    This is a middling year (big years, we end up with ~20 at the tables; this year it’s 15.  Small is 10 or fewer, small enough that we don’t need to put up another table.)

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I had ridden for years and read about cavalry engagements when I first climbed on a horse with a sword belted on.    I thought I knew what it would be like to knock various objects off the tops of fence posts.    I didn’t.   I’m sure that back in the day youngsters learned from experienced elders (by watching or by direct instruction)  some of the things that a few sessions with horse, sword, and fence-posts taught me.    And ritual disclaimer here:  I’m not an expert in this stuff.

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Having opened this stable door, it’s time to go in and see what we’ve got–I expect it’s going to take more than one post to cover both horses and horsemanship, so I’m starting with the easy one.

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I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut/alteration that’s going on now.

This one is about horses.   I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s  horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown at Prix St. George about a year before she died.    I myself had never ridden at that level.   But K- was giving me some lessons on him, in the hope that he would connect better with me (not really–or not for the first five years at least.)   In the process, I learned to ride some advanced movements that were a lot of fun, and obviously would be of use to someone riding a horse in battle.

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…otherwise known as “stupid virus.”     This has slowed work at a time when I didn’t need to slow down, but though I can’t write long at a time, I can think about things.  So progress is being made.  Just slower than I want to make it.

I have been housebound since coming home from fencing last week…started feeling lousy on Friday, and things rapidly went downhill, so I’m getting maybe a half hour to an hour at the computer before doing a face-plant in the bed again.   With a weird schedule as a result.  Not to worry–it’s nothing serious, just a stupid virus.   Takes longer to get over than it used to but still just a virus.

Something has been brooding in the depths of the plot for this entire world (not just this book, or the previous, but I’m finding its shadows on sonar of the oldest–in story time–books, Gird & Luap as I re-read them for continuity)  for years.   Now it’s rising slowly  into view.   These are foundation-level conflicts that I’ve never really examined, having just discovered outcrops of apparent bedrock on which to put the foundations of the world 27-28  years ago.

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Larry Lennhoff,  ( #42 on the contest comment list)

Contact me (via email on website) with mailing address w/in  a week (there’s a backup winner number already.)

Thanks to Webmistress Ruta, who used a random number generator and got me an answer this morning.

The “take a character home for dinner” contest for an ARC closes at midnight my time tomorrow night….that’s…um…Central Daylight (dammit) Time for those in the US and I think (if I did the conversion right) it’s 0500 UTC.

I’ve really enjoyed the entries so far–many characters have been chosen (some are very popular) and the various dinners sound scrumptious.