Paksworld

Shifting gears to working on revisions/corrections makes Book IV grumpy and me…a bit confused.    Did I really write that?   What was I thinking?   Was I thinking, or perhaps indulging in stream of consciousness?

In addition, while waiting for the pages Editor is sending with her markings on them (75 pages, she told me today…ouch!)  I have her notes and the notes and comments of two alpha readers and my agent.   One alpha reader deserves the honorable title of Nitpicker Extraordinary (and it is honorable, in this instance) and the other is a Characterization Maven who instantly notices a character acting out of character (or not showing the development that other events show must have occurred.)     Editor is multitalented, of course, so her comments range from deep structure to pacing to surface detail.

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Yesterday’s post was written before the call and email  from Editor, and now Crisis of Vision is back at the top of the priority list.    As expected (given the raw speed of revision in December) I missed some things.   Editor also wants a chapter moved from Crisis to the next book (did that this morning) to get Crisis under 170K.

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The major speed bump of the week, the big report I had to write, kept me away from Book IV a couple of days, though I wrote some after choir practice (staying up too late, after midnight, to finish a scene.)   I  didn’t want to leave Book alone that long, and Book definitely did not want to be left that long.   By the time I finished the report, Book’s frustrations had taken over my brain and I was a very grumpy camper indeed.  Read the rest of this entry »

As I warned y’all, the arrival of comments from Agent or Editor (or both) would result in a diversion of time from Book IV back to Crisis of Vision.    Yesterday I got my agent’s comments on Crisis (there’s a chapter he thinks is weaker than the rest, but Editor isn’t there yet) and a heads-up that Editor was about halfway through and had found things she wanted to excise.   So although I’m not starting on any fixes until I have all the comments in, some attention has shifted to that book and not this book.  Thus downgrading (as the investment industry puts it) the projected output this week.

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Book IV is now just over 34,000 words.    At the moment, it seems to be settled into a more relaxed pace as I figure out some details I hadn’t needed to know before.    I have Tsaian dukes figured out, pretty much, but not all the counts and barons.  Um….that would be none of the counts and barons, except the names of the ones on the Royal Council.  Who’s hot-tempered?  Who’s phlegmatic?  Who leaps to conclusions?  Etc.  Moreover, who has a marriageable daughter?

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End of week,  Book IV is just over 31,700.    I made it to 10,000 (the week’s goal) by midnight Thursday and sort of loafed along on Friday and today.

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I love it when the zeros line up (or at least I wave at them as I go by…)    I just crossed the 3o,000 words marker (that includes the chunk moved from Crisis of Vision), with page length at 153.   New production (written in the last two weeks)  is  20,905 words ,  and 103 new pages of manuscript.   Usually I wouldn’t stop in the middle of a workday to post here, but could not withhold the good news.

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Book IV continues to behave like a healthy young book that wants to be written.  I didn’t work on it Saturday and it niggled at me.  Came home from church Sunday and it was doing worse than niggling.   So Sunday ended with 1893 words before I could make it let go so I could sleep, and Monday produced 2011, despite my spending a couple of hours in the garden helping Richard put up the support for the peas (T-posts, the pipe from the top of the chainlink fence we’d taken down, and chicken wire.)    Today was a slow start, but ended 2332 words to the good.  So the week’s off to a good start, 6236 words already.

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Here’s a snippet from Kings of the North to either whet or satisfy your impatience for the release date (65 days from now, not that I’m hinting or anything like that…)    This one is from early in the book.

Spoiler warning now (mild spoilers but some of you don’t want any spoiler–so if you don’t,  don’t click on the “Read the rest of this…” button.)

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Book IV continued to go forward at a good pace.  The book is now over 20,000 words (and I’ll probably tinker with it later tonight and nudge it over 21,000, just to watch the turnover, but we’ll see.)

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