Paksworld

This evening I’m struggling to dry (somehow) a shirt I meant to wash in the hotel room washbasin Saturday but forgot in a drawer…and now it’s a damp pink lump.  So far the hair dryer has made scant inroads on its dampness (yes, yes, it was rolled in towels before ever being hung up.)   I shouldn’t have washed it.  I should have carried it home dirty.  Sigh.   Nobody bugged Paks about putting a dirty shirt in her pack on the way back from a foray.

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It was an interesting trip, what with floods, weather and all the LifeStuff going on.   Mac-horse pooped abundantly overnight Monday to Tuesday morning,  but vet’s orders had him on a restricted diet for 48 hours after poopage, so my husband had to deal with that, as well as his own medical appointments.   I fell into my train compartment and knew we would have no contact until after his Wednesday appointment, when I’d be in Chicago between trains.   That call was a good news/bad news mix, from his doctors.

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Tuesday morning I board the train and Thursday evening I arrive in Baltimore.  I won’t be posting or emailing then–and will have scant time to do so while at Balticon, probably–and again no time on the way home.  So we’re looking at a ten day hiatus that might be relieved by a post or two somewhere in there–or not, as time often compresses during conventions.

If you’re planning to attend Balticon, I hope to see you there.

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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820 pages have now been gone over in detail one direction, front to back.   Next comes the (usually faster) reverse sequence, back to front.  I’ve already seen all the CE’s marks, and have made most (sometimes all) of my marks.  More “stets” may be applied, or some “stets” may be withdrawn.    Usually, in the last half of a book, both CE and I are getting sick of it, and begin to do things mechanically in a way that’s not best for you readers.  So if I have the time I always go backwards on the second run.

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A visual look at how I work with copy edits.

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Copy Edits are, in the best of times, a nerve-wracking proposition, because CEs, unlike one’s own marvelous, wonderful, thoughtful, brilliant Editor, are professional nitpickers.   If you don’t have a nitpicker mentality yourself (and most storytellers don’t) and if you have a feel for the needs of fiction as opposed to, say, a sociology textbook (and most storytellers do) the more rigid CEs will drive you batty.    Good CEs, as I’ve said before, are pearls beyond price and save your bacon.   Not-so-good CEs become embroiled in trying to rewrite your work to suit their notions, and in the process miss actual mistakes they should catch.

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Some of you will remember a TV show called “That Was the Week That Was.”  Well, this was that week, only without the laughs.    My husband has a chronic condition, myasthenia gravis.    He has always been a very strong, very active person and not thrilled with the limitations the myasthenia has caused.   So he pushes himself.   Last week, while out on the land moving some boards around, he felt bad–had not felt well for several days–and he suddenly passed out.   He figured hot day, dehydration, maybe salt depletion, and came in and ate some salty stuff and drank a lot of water.

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Copy edits are on the way…and a family member is in the hospital.   So I will be busy elsewhere, probably for the rest of the week and maybe a bit beyond.   Please be patient, and understand that I’m not goofing off (I WISH!  The answer to “Do writers take vacations?” is a hollow laugh.)

The struggle with tangled plotlines and histories is now showing clear progress.   I don’t think even the most spoiler-phobic will think being told the categories of revelations are spoilerish…but just in case, I’m putting a break between this first paragraph and the rest.

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