Paksworld

In real life, many things impinge on our lives but are only slightly connected (by us) with one another.    I have horses, so I have a “line” to the horse vet, the farrier, and the feed store…I write, so I have lines to my agent, my editors (present and past), the various publishing houses, and readers.    It’s true that because I have readers, I still have publishers, and also the money to put in the bank to pay the vet, the farrier, and the feed store…but nobody at the feed store has ever met any of my editors, or knows their names.   The farrier is aware of the equine vet (most farriers know every equine vet in the area they service) but neither the farrier nor the equine vet knows any of my readers outside their home town.

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Because some of you have expressed an interest and offered good thoughts & prayers…the current status is that my husband is home from his cardiac catheterization with two stents in arteries and some limitations on activity for the next several days.   When the cardiologist finally clears him for the next surgery (and we don’t know exactly when that will be) and the GI surgeon is happy with his status (ditto), then comes the “big” surgery.  Sometime.

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I think–I hope–this won’t be a spoiler at all.  It’s from Book IV, not Echoes,  but it doesn’t reveal anything too…spoilerish.  I hope.  And after all, it might disappear in editing.

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Plot bombs I’ve explained before–inspiration that explodes in the plot and drives it forward into new and fascinating territory.    What I’ve had this week isn’t a plot bomb.  It’s more like that rib-spreader thing that surgeons use when they want to mess around inside someone’s chest cavity.    This week’s inspiration–if you can call it that–shoved itself into too small a space in the plot and then pushed it open.

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A-Kon was interesting, fun, challenging, and huger than I’d expected, silly me.   I did not manage to get online even once, nor do any writing, so now I’m officially behind my own (sculpted for such occasions) schedule and must dive into work.    One five-day chunk of wiggle-room is gone.  (Four of those and a month of wiggle-room is gone.)

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This Thursday I take off again, this time on a shorter train trip to A-Kon in Dallas.  A-Kon is technically within driving distance, but driving up I-35 from here and then trying to negotiate Dallas traffic is no way to arrive at a convention with the energy left to engage.  Hence, the train.   I’m going up on Thursday, back on Monday.    My friend Lee Martindale (writer, editor, and several other hats, including–as of now–publisher)  is launching Ladies of Trade Town at A-Kon, an anthology of stories about, well, the trade.)   I wrote the introduction.   Many of the stories’ authors are coming to the launch, and so am I.  And some other people I’ve been wanting to see.   I’ve never been to A-Kon, so it’ll be a new experience for me.

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From the point of view of Paksworld, the trip produced some interesting pages, and once I’ve pulled them off the thumb drive and entered them into the main file, I’ll have an idea how much I accomplished.  Word 2010, which is on the netbook, is even more annoying than the version of Word on my main work computer, so I will have to undo a lot of unwanted formatting and use the magic four-letter Words of Word-Doom a lot to get it straightened out.

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