Paksworld

Horngard I has a new first chapter, new first section of the first chapter, and everything is now “clean” through C-3.   One segment that was second in C-1 is now at the end of C-2, and other segments (aside from the very first, which is new) have been shifted around (often more than once, like quilt pieces) to find their best spot.  General tightening to make the new arrangement work better.   And so on.  Chapters will need to be re-numbered, at least (right now there are two C-3s, one helpfully saved as C-3+) and more splits and/0r joins may need to be done as this revision progresses.   Since re-numberiung this many chapters (34 now, will likely be 35 if I don’t find more largeish cuts to make) is tedious and it’s easy to make mistakes, relabeling the second “overlapping” chapter and leaving re-numbering to the end seems to work more smoothly.  For me, anyway.

This, and maybe some subsequent posts, is a “technical writing” post.   How do you fix the front end of a book–what decisions are involved, what actions need to be taken, and what natters most?  Though it’s a “how-to” and “how-not-to” post, it is not (except for Rule One–maybe)  a black-and-white prescription.  As always, my way is NOT the highway, but a crooked path through the wilderness.  If you find yourself in the wilderness with your book (first or thirtieth) it’s a reminder to look at that first chapter you were so happy with six months ago.  Maybe it could be where the problem with the book started.

Rule One  Don’t bore the reader.  Bored readers don’t finish the book unless they need it to pass a test.  If they’re bored on page one, they’re done with it.  This is why even bestsellers don’t sell to everyone…someone’s bored, they don’t buy the book.   If you leave the finished book alone for a few months to…um…ripen or rot…and then you start to read it, and you find yourself skipping the first chapter after the first page…be sure to have no fewer than five people read that first chapter alone (no reward visible) and listen to their comments.  “Starts kinda slow…” means “I was bored.  “I guess we’ll find out what it’s about later on, huh?” means “I was bored.”   And so on.   Reader boredom anywhere in a book damages it, but reader boredom at the start kills it.

The most common cause of boring starts is starting before the action.   The writer often needs to start writing before the book starts; the writer certainly can spend words and time on setting up when/where/who/how the start is going to happen, and ease into the story itself…but the reader, especially the modern reader, wants to feel, from the first page at least, that they’ve stepped into a strong narrative current and are being pulled along.  Doesn’t have to be a roaring flood, but does have to be a current.

A contribution to boring starts that will overwhelm even starting where the story itself starts is too much information too soon.   (And if that sentence was a boring, there’s your clue.)  If you have even a touch of “instructor” in you, you’ll be tempted to demonstrate your knowledge, as well as your storytelling.   I have a large bump of instructor, since I’ve tutored individuals and taught classes…and like many instructors, I’ve been sure my lessons were interesting and useful to my captive audiences of students.  But…the students didn’t have much choice.  As a writer, your readers have many choices of what to read, and as a fiction writer, they didn’t come to you to learn about the English civil war, the pastimes of medieval peasants, how a ‘tall ship” is rigged, or exactly how to grow food for your family on a quarter acre.  If you write fiction, your readers are fiction readers, and they want a good story.  Story needs to be there in that critical first few pages.  So don’t front-load your book with description, a history lesson, or the things that fascinate you about the story you’re telling…tell the story itself.

How does this relate to what was wrong with my earlier beginnings to Horngard I?   Here comes Rule Two:  Get important characters into the first scenes.  Characters make stories.  Introduce the characters readers will be following at the beginning.  Not–as the old Bobbsey Twins books used to do it, with a page of “Let’s get to know the Bobbsey twins” infodump–but instead with a name, an action, and a glimpse of their thoughts, feelings, selfhood from inside.  It can be in an immediate crisis (Paks and her father having a row, Brun climbing a cliff being shot at, Ky called out of class and forced to resign), or in a calmer but still active situation (Gird setting off with a basket of fruit for the required tax, Heris taking command of a civilian’s personal yacht, or–in the present case after fixing the problem–a young man riding out of the foothills toward a city, thinking what he’s been told to do.)  In the previous version of Horngard I’s beginning, I had Dragon flying around looking at the old citadel and remembering and thinking and planning and then going away again.  Followed by a long scene with some bad guys dealing with their own problems –neither bad guy likely to attract a reader’s interest on his own– and the co-protagonist, who is now up first, not showing up for pages and pages and pages.  Oops.  Stories are *about* someone as well as something.   Dragon is not a character.  Dragon is a Force, or Power…not a deity, but the personification of transformation, or change.    Yes, a dragon can fry you with its breath, but it’s more like plate tectonics than a character.

Rule Three:  Get someone doing something in the first scenes.  Stories are about someone doing something that matters to them (and hence to the still-imaginary and future reader.)  Character sitting on the bank fishing and nothing’s biting?  Quickly boring.  Character sitting anywhere and just musing…quickly boring.  Character riding toward a city still confused about what he’s supposed to do…most readers can think of branching lines of possibilities in that.    Another character on a fractious horse on a dangerous mountain path near a cliff…again, readers can imagine multiple possibilities there, too.  Both of those are a) doing something and b) doing something that has potential problems all over, leading reader to mild suspense.  Will this confused character be unable to function in the noise and confusion of a city?  Will he get robbed? Will he find someone who can clear things up for him?  Will the character on the fractious horse end up in pieces at the bottom of the cliff?   If one character (not of these two alone, any two) thinks of the other, wants to find the other, wants to avoid the other,  wants to kill, or save, or make love to the other, that adds another layer of possibility to the plot, and raises the reader’s interest.  If they’re both going to the same city, especially.  The reader will have several questions in mind that the reader wants answered.   Questions the reader wants answered count as “suspense.”   Suspense is good reader-glue.  The sooner in a book the reader wants to read the next page, the better.

Notice…I broke all three rules in that first chapter.  Boring instructional glop in the first section (OK, it had Dragon, who’s not intrinsically boring, but also not a character the reader will identify with at all.)  Minor characters loosely connected with a minor character in earlier books, unpleasant, doing not much besides talking & planning, in the second section.  They did at least mention they were planning to kill the person in the next section but they didn’t actually DO that, or even approach it more closely, until several chapters later.   Third section finally introduced a character, but not one of the major characters, and what was she *doing*?  Sitting (SIGH) and signing a contract and thinking about the general state of things.  Then she heads off for lunch.  That’s really riveting storytelling, right?  Er…um….no.  It’s not.

New start: Start of plot, major character shows up in Significant Clothes (knight in shining armor on fancy horse) with definite immediate goal (get to city, get to banker…oh, so there’s MONEY involved?!) and confusion about how to accomplish future goal.  Dragon in his past (hmm), memory loss, and according to Dragon, important future.   Then another major character shows up, headed to the same city, from farther away, on a steep and dangerous mountain trail on a fractious young horse next to a cliff where the rocks below are decorated with bits of wrecked wagons and skeletons.  Both characters are named.  So  previous readers in that story-universe have an advantage and almost certainly put 2 and 2 together and get the right answer, but new readers are being handed information they need when they need it…and their minds will correctly decide that both these guys are important, and since they’re headed for the same city, might meet.    Another important minor character from previous books, tightly connected to Major Character 2 is also in that scene.  Next scene down, another important minor character is connected to Major Character 1.  Then Major Character 2 drops a final clue.  Even new readers are now oriented to two major characters’ relationships to  the most significant secondary characters and their potential relationship to each other, their ultimate goals as they see them, and some of the difficulties foreseen by characters and writer.

More coming another day.

Those of you hanging out here and commenting often ask questions or impart information that tweaks my brain and gives me new ideas.  I can’t begin to give a whole list of examples, but several in the comments to the previous post are doing that this morning.  And I had already started a list of things to look up when my OED comes.  (The nuances of difference between identification by seal, design, sigil, mark…just as a start.)   Viking stuff was never my area of study in college…I first read a translation of some sagas years later, without any real discussion.   I think I need some books as well as the OED to clarify my understanding of just how different (or not) Viking culture is/was from Germanic, eastern Baltic, Anglo-Saxon, and which words come from, or were filtered by, which.  This is getting exciting-er and exciting-er, says the child who never quit wanting to understand *everything*.   I have Lear’s work on the difference between the concept of treason in Roman and German cultures (one of the foundations on which I built Paks’s world…still visible in the US, by the way.  The influence of Roman thought in our foundation is very clear, and the influence of Germanic ideals of *personal* loyalty to a leader rather than loyalty to the abstract law/Constitution is very clear in politicians of the Trumpian stripe…antithetical to the concept of a constitutional Republic.

So that’s another set of words to dig into.  How it will emerge in fiction…I don’t know yet.  But I know my fiction has always needed deep cultural roots, well entangled with one another.   If getting back in the room with the most academic of the books, and reviewing the books I used that first two years of writing Paks , and playing with the Big Kids’ dictionary cleans up some of the head injury damage to brain function from the injuries…excellent.  And fun, in any case.

Now back over to the fiction side of life; I’ve been alternating this with stretches of editing in Horngard, with the notes I made when my agent called right beside me.

Feeling like the luckiest writer EVER…my used, older, OED has been wrapped in bubble wrap and will be shipped on its way to me on Monday.   I can sense already the storm of words, the OCEAN of words that is about to flow into my mind.   I remember the feeling from the day–after I’d learned to use her old college dictionary–the she introduced me to the largest book in the house: the unabridged dictionary that came with the 1950 Britannica.  And I was allowed to use it on the floor (I couldn’t lift it yet)  and start discovering its abundance.  My mother believed in children learning lots of words, and their meanings, and expected me to be able to give the dictionary meaning of any “big” words I used.   Our dictionary was as big as the biggest on our high school, for ordinary words (there was a Dictionary of Science and Technology added in about 1961, I think.   There was an Encylopedia of Science and Technology, also new, but one volume disappeared into the Librarian’s “Not without me watching you” special hidey-hole.  By rumor (I never saw it) there was a drawing of (gasp!!!) a penis.    I thought the restriction was stupid; I’d been raised with art books showing unredacted gods, goddessed, athletes, etc.  and had (being a girl) learned how to change diapers.  Saying to the HS Librarian “It’s just a penis” would’ve gotten me banned from the library altogether so I didn’t.

Meanwhile, the office cleanup has restored unto me access to the Gilbert Murray translations of Greek dramas, and the rest of the treasures (to me) in that corner.   A lot of my ancient history sources are there, many of them picked up in used bookstores (esp. Kendrick’s, that used to be in the Village west of Rice;  as in HS I preferred books to food at times.  Multiple translations of some famous works, only one of others…I had my preferences, having read different ones in class and in the library.  One shelf (a raw board when I bought it) has curved up at the end, making the Roman sources unhappy on that end and crowding the books in the curved part.  It’s mostly paperback (not mass-market–the variably sized “trade paperbacks” sold in the college bookstores.)   I read through the Greek poetry book a few days ago, picking out favorites.  Have to watch it, though, because Paksworld was not given the same kind of cultural background that Europe got…it was intentionally stirred together from a different mix, just to see if I could, while avoiding (as much as possible) really *obvious* steals from specific cultures that might object.   I will be diving back into some of the older stuff–I used to have a rotation of foundation books that I re-read in a steady round, with the new things riding on top, but that fell apart as home-schooling Michael and writing a book a year took over every available minute.   I meant to get back to it, but like many well-laid plans, Stuff Happened.

Churning of the books is about to start getting serious,  as I found a home for my 11th edition Britannica (pre-WWI…!  Amazing old photographs, drawings, maps.  And words…names of places that now have new names.)  I used it a lot at one time, but haven’t lately.   It’s going to someone (two someones) who want it, will use it, appreciate it.  I want to find *future* (not immediate) homes for books I’m still reading fairly regularly but that should not just be dumped in a trashpile.   There are some discardable books that *could* go in a trashpile in every room, that can be set out in a library sale or (if damaged enough, like the one old pb I picked up that immediately shed its pages like a tree in late autumn), so the aggregate space available for (of course) new books may reach 20 linear feet.  Wouldn’t THAT be fun?  Yes, it would.   Will I discard all the lightweights, all the “trashy” ones?  No.  There are awful 3 am times when only a solid gulp of strong medicine will hold the mind together and allow sleep.

I am not a professional in etymology or linguistics or languages overall…BUT we did manage to afford the  Compact OED* way, way, WAY back when it was new(ish) and used to use it for (among many other things including research) playing Scrabble with friends.  OED Scrabble was a lot of fun, if slow enough to allow two people to play chess on the side.   And back in those days I could read the OED without a magnifying glass or glasses by putting my nose maybe half a centimeter above the paper, at which point the tiny print was in focus.  ANYway.   I now need reading glasses and the magnifying glass that came with the set.

*OED Oxford English Dictionary.  I always yearned to own the full version but it was and undoubtedly is still, incredibly expensive in its full expanse.**

** I had to look it up.  20 volumes, 4 feet of shelf space, $1,215 from Amazon.  That’s new.  What have I got I could discard to gain four feet of shelf space?   There’s not another place in the house to put another bookshelf.  Certainly not the 2013 Britannica.  Or the 1950 Britannica.  Not any of the nonfiction; that’s my personal research library.   (Looking with narrowed eyes at the fiction shelves.  How much of that am I going to re-read?  Yes, it’s also reference, but…I have just be attacked by a massive lump of book hunger.  And older, not up to date ones aren’t as expensive…there’s a lovely earlier 13 volume version, about what I remember from college.  Used, yes, but very nice, with proper volume covers…YUM.)  Writers need words.  They need to *understand* words, in the depth of time those words have been used.  They need words sitting around them, emitting all the nuances…filling their heads with words…beautiful, sensual, luscious, practically chewable, words.

Yesterday, in conversation with my agent, who had had someone else look at the Horngard ms., it turns out the first question to be answered, from the third person was “What is a paladin?” because all that cane immediately to his mind was Dungeons and Dragons paladins and even a cursory reading on Horngard revealed that nobody in *that* book thought of paladins the way whatisname did (sorry, but the head injuries are playing serious games with name memory today.  I can clearly remember the stuff in the rule books that so infuriated me about the abuse of the paladin concept, but not the name of the man who wrote them…wait…Gary.  Gary something…starts with G also.  Not Geronimo, shorter than that.  Gorgon, Griffin, Grimaldi….Gary-Gary-Gary…yes, this is a problem.)  By chewing on the old problem of “Why on earth did you write rules that made “lawful good” essentially include “stupid” and why did you let people start at level zero as paladins (and stupid-good) when the actual paladins (there were some) were all experienced and expert fighters??   I was then motivated to go haul out the second (heavy!!) volume of the compact OED and look up the history of the word and see if I’d remembered any of that.

I’d remembered it wrong, OK? But here’s the straight scoop from the Compact OED.  It goes back to Charlemagne’s court.  Now remember–this is post-Western Roman Empire time and Europe was mostly a seething (thinly seething) mass of little realms–Charlemagne (just means Charles the Great) of the Carolingean dynasty (became king of the Franks in 768,, King of the Lombards from 774, and was crowned as the Emperor of the Romans by the Pope Leo III  in 800, and died in 814.)  I regard those dates as…iffy, because of later calendar changes and I don’t know how much slippage was accounted for, but I could be wrong.  8th to 9th century Common Era, anyway.  Who were the Franks and the Lombards?  Funny you should ask.  They *had* been among the invaders who toppled the Western Empire, handily tucked into one or more of the Goths & Vandals tribes.  I happen to have a translation of the Lombard Laws from a pre-Charlemagne period, (like the Burgundian Code I also have a translation of, both of these researched and done by my medieval history prof,  Katharine Fischer Drew, then chair of the History Department of Rice University, may her name be remembered for good scholarship AND being a really good history teacher and administrator.   Both of those legal codes were intentionally modeled on their view of Roman Law (the first codified law either bunch of barbarians had ever seen)  but the difference between the stately and determinedly “universal” approach of the Romans and the decidedly particular and individual approach of these Germanic tribes is both notable and  useful to fiction writers wanting to add a little verisimilitude to their sometimes unconvincing narratives.

Back to Charlemagne.  Because Pope Leo III, wanted to recreate a more stable and uniform Europe (e.g. the Roman Empire),  with Roman Catholics in charge and no more Byzantine invasions and persecutions, he gave Charlemagne the title of Emperor of the Romans, although the actual crowning ceremony occurred in what is now France, not in Rome (Leo III had fled Rome.  It’s a really *lively* period of history which makes clear that interesting times may be interesting but get a lot of people killed, displaced, and wishing for nice boring peace for long enough to raise a family.  Some people are never satisfied–or rather, in any situation some want it to last and some want to change it.  Charlemagne’s father was Pippin (not Tolkein’s Pippin); that’s how Charlemagne inherited the crown of the Franks; his brother had the Lombards but when his brother died, Charlemagne just snagged that crown, ignoring his brother’s heirs.  Nice fellow.  As you can imagine, becoming and staying king, and gaining more meant wars and so Charlemagne as a feudal sovereign had fighting men–good ones, or else–under him.  Specifically twelve peers,  who were “of the palace” (hence, through a couple of spelling wiggles, paladins,  “palace warriors” the paladin title meant, who were directly sworn to him.

From Charlemagne’s court, the term spread with bards, writers, etc. and was helped along by Chretien de Troyes and his tale of Arthur and his Round Table and others.   Suddenly the Matter of Britain got involved.  Then the courtly romances of somewhat later medieval times.  Various other attributes got tacked on to the requirements for paladins (being polite to women, being clean, being pious.  The “parfit gentil knight” thing.  Galahad, not Lancelot.  Oh, and of course the Chanson de Roland was part of it, and even the Welsh poet Taliessin.   In German mythology, as expressed in Wagner’s operas and their preceding legends, the perfect knight might be tangled in pre-Christian mythologies as well.  The term was sometimes used for the exceptionally brave alone but more often for a cluster that included “presentable at a palace” (so the bravest soldier in the army, a terrific fighter, if too rough and cruel…couldn’t be a paladin.  Looking at Charlemagne’s time, this must have been a later addition.)  Courage, fighting ability, courtesy.  Often righting wrongs on his own, a knight errant off doing great things.  Since the Holy Roman Empire included most of Europe at one point, it also included staying within the bounds of Holy Roman Catholicism, and included Spain-to-Germania.  Not, however, Scandinavia. Vikings were immune to the romantic nature of paladins, until later.

My first experience with the word was in stories *about* the middle ages, the knights in shining armor approach.  But a degree in history, most of it ancient & medieval, gave it a lot more dimension…[[Gygax.  That was the guy’s name.  FINALLY.  Gary Gygax.  OK, sorry I couldn’t remember it faster.  The memory isn’t totally gone, it just has an extremely slow name-finding function.]]   Besides Dungeons & Dragons (before that arrived, in fact) but after writers like Scott & Tennyson & the spate of Arthurean fiction that popped up at intervals, there was a TV series called “Have Gun, Will Travel” with a main character names Paladin.  He wore black, carried a gun, shot people, and usually in the course of an episode, righted some wrong or other.  Modern paladin that sort of, but didn’t entirely, sit right with me when I watched it.  Like an unromantic Zorro (yes, I watched that one too.)

Paksworld paladins are based on the older form, as most of you know. However, the intrusion of functional magic in various forms in Paksworld allows paladins to do things that Charlemagne’s palace warriors could not.  Keeping their powers limited and sufficiently different from the magicks of others felt necessary to me, though the ability to light a fire or even a candle from a finger almost tempted me to give paladins “ordinary” magelight.   Nope.  Paks & others get the bright white “reveals the truth” kind of light.  What else?  They can’t be fooled when it comes to good/evil or truth/lies.  They have an innate ability to heal–it’s from their patron saint or a god, and it goes beyond what a Marshal can do.   They can protect others from magical fear (an evil projection from some evil source).  They are charismatic–natural leaders, and leaders for good.   But also they have the skills of expert warriors, including tactical skills developed from years of training & experience.  They are courteous, “presentable at court.”  They are typically active as paladins alone, going out on quests to accomplish an assignment (right a wrong, find a missing king, stop something bad) though they may associate with a crowd trying to do the same thing.  They’re no all alike, and they don’t feel allegiance to exactly the same good powers.  Paks and Dorrin, for instance, came from very different backgrounds (as did Gird and Falk).   Aris and Seri, the two young paladin figures in Liar’s Oath, one of them born Old Human and one of them born magelord, leading the most vulnerable people of Luap’s kingdom down-canyon and away, hoping to get them back to Fintha…were fully paladins and connected to the old high gods of Old Aare, Sunlord and Sealord and Windlord.  They had known Gird personally…they were “his children” nonbiologically but not “his” paladins.

It’s all perfectly clear now, right?  My rough-and-ready telling here didn’t buck you off into the mud, did it?

I once bought my husband a book entitled “Mistakes and Errors in Surgery” written a long time ago but fascinating in its dissection of typical surgical errors.  And I love the title.  The sound of it, the rhythm and mouth-feel of the words.  Da-DUM, da-DUM-da, da-DUM-da-da.   (Yes, some writers hear/feel word sequences like this.)

So last night was an example of mistakes and errors in writing on a computer.  I had finished (probably) the last  edits on a story called “Final Honors” which is not a sequel to the previous story with a major character but a distant echo…seven years later, nothing in between written (yet.)   Still frustrated that MS Word does not include an e-acute-accent in its “special characters” you can insert, and also does not include a u-circumflex–both of which my previous Word had in its list–I wondered if those were available from the keyboard itself in some way.  A combination of Control with a vowel, or maybe one of the function keys with something, so I skipped several pages  and tried out a few things.  That was a huge mistake.    CTRL with lower case a deleted the story and the backup with the same name and a different time-stamp, and the other backup with the same name and a different time-stamp.  Gone.  I still had the drafts with a *different* filename  but the longest of those was about half the length of the final.  OOPS.  I retrieved the longest, and quickly wrote a precis of the missing part–I couldn’t hope to replace 3000 words word for word, and trying to do so will blue memory of the plot itself…even that took hours (and the help of Beethoven, because that second half of the story had been written to three Beethoven symphonies, each offering a mood-tone that worked for that part of the story.

Along about 2 in the morning, with my brain seizing up no matter how many times I played the 3rd (Eroica) from the funeral march on, I gave up and went to bed, telling myself firmly that I needed to treat this as an opportunity to write a *better* story, rather than grieve over the Truly Stupendous Powerful Story now gone forever, and went to bed.  Woke up tired, stiff as a board, and dabbled with it today, still not ready to tackle it again.  It’s not on deadline or anything, so letting it sit and marinate isn’t all that bad.

This afternoon, still tired and in need of sleep, I started to go down for a nap when the phone rang.  And lo! it was my agent.  And lo! he wanted to talk about Horngard!    And all the story-writing I’ve done since the latest head-bang has really cleared my brain’s plot-thingie (used to be my plot daemon and I really wish he’d come back because he was fun, but I now have a modernized version, smooth and metallic, not the Scots-accented engineer of the Inchcliffe Castle…this one, so far, just extrudes plot into prose without chatting me up or scolding me.)   In writing and editing these short stories, keeping them short-story length, I’ve become able to recognize the glop that sometimes extrudes along with the plot.  Sometimes it’s infodump.  Sometimes it’s story-stuff that’s not part of *that* story but another…like the side stories I wrote while writing Paks in the first place–things that happened, that I had to write, but that weren’t main-line-express-train plot for the book.

Today, I heard from my agent.  He’d had one of his people look at Horngard I since he’d led me through revisions several times and gotten–um–over-familiar with it, would be one way of saying it.  So today I got the other guy’s opinion.  Not familiar at all with the Paksworld books, and thus a really fresh viewpoint.  My problems with both the failed Vatta book and Horngard I once Joshua read it, was that I wasn’t yet able to completely understand what he was driving at…I could not see, when re-reading the book to try to work on it…what was wrong and what might fix it.  Horngard I understood more, but still not completely.   Now, looking at James’s comments, it’s clear and I can also see that the part Joshua really wanted me to cut, which I considered necessary, IS necessary but not in its present form, and in its present form, it practically is a nice side story…it sits *beside* the book, on a siding, not the main track.

So I will start–not tonight because I’m still fighting a week’s sleep deficits–tomorrow, on Horngard I again, for what we all hope will be the final (until it sells or doesn’t and meets a real editor) cleanup.  Chapter whatsit will be gone, replaced with a stout coupling between the cars that were before and after it.   What was carried IN chapter whatsit will be compressed to the plot-relevant-only and put where it will do the most good.   I have (out of my agent’s hearing, more or less) pledged to myself to remember I’m not writing the epic fantasy equivalent of The Eustace Diamonds, in which vast amounts of wordage are expended on details of manner, dress, architecture, internal workings of this or that bar, this or that court, etc., all fascinating  to some readers (I’m one of them) , but in terms of my genre of fiction, could easily be handled in a novella.  The widow is a dishonest cheat who is illegally hanging on to her late husband’s family jewels, which jewels are part of the estate and thus entailed, she’s lied about everything.  In fact, the widow in The Eustace Diamonds has done what Trump has done with the classified documents…in her case using some unwitnessed comments of her late husband the way Trump has used the “Clinton Socks Case” (IOW, the reader is led to believe that the late husband did NOT tell her they were hers to do with as she pleased but lied about her justification, just as Trump has lied about the Presidential Records Act and the “Clinton Socks Case.”  At any rate, the train of Horngard needs to stay on the main track and plow ahead through snow and flood and dubious bridges and all that.   No detours.  No stops to admire the view, or the wildflowers, or wander off to discover the weirdities in Guild League regulations compared to the Code of Gird.  That’s what side stories and data on the site are for.  CHARGE!

Monday is not the 18th.  It is the 17th.

THAT means DEEDS OF YOUTH does NOT go live on Monday, but on Tuesday.   My husband’s birthday is not Monday, but Tuesday.   I finally figured that out TODAY.  Despite looking at a calendar repeatedly and being SURE that Monday was the 18th.

So sorry for misleading previous posts!!!

I can say that when it goes live as an ebook (TUESDAY)  it should be up for ordering the Print-on-Demand edition.

The brain, though still not ready to get back into classical Greek or pick up the calculus text, seems to have made another connection.  Or else, it’s the lack of dire mess in my office (though I thrive in having *some* mess, esp multi-colored mess, around me when I work.  Plus complicated music.)

Last night I considered doing some more work on the bedroom’s “organization” (lack thereof)  and the brain said “I’m WriterBrain now, not OrganizerBrain.  Let me remind you that you have several unfinished stories.”   So I said “Did you have one in mind?” because, again from experience, starting the *wrong* unfinished story sends WriterBrain into a frenzy of infodump.  Best to let the lake settle and take whatever the hand offers (some of you will recognize that reference in an instance.  Not mine.)  What WriterBrain offered up was the unfinished story of Aesil M’dierra.  I started that some years back, pulled it out again when working on Horngard I,  and got kind of stuck.   Last night, looked at again, and messed with, I saw what was wrong.  In a very dark mood I had written a very dark section of it very VERY vividly and it was dominating the rest in a bad way.   But by the time of the Horngard book, it was decades in her past.  In fact, she’s five years past it by the conclusion of this story, which means, to write it at that depth and intensity, this would have to be at least a novella and possibly part of a novel.  Sorry, Aesil, I don’t want you stuck in my head for a whole year.  I like you; I liked you when I first made you up, but not enough to live with you in the intimacy that giving you protagonist space and time would require.

Yes, I talk to my characters and they talk back.  She’s not actually that interested in re-examining her life that much.  Unlike the ones who march in demanding their book (or trilogy) her focus has always been somewhere behind my left year and behind me, when she’s standing in front of me.  She’s *there*, and vivid, sharp as crystal shards, but she’s never invited me all the way in, and…here we are.  However, in this instance, once I discarded the first half of what I had (leaving home, being thrown in jail, the vivid description of Valdaire’s jail and how (as in many European jails in the middle ages and even up to the 18th c.) if you didn’t have a way to buy your own food, you got very little if any from the jailers…the rescue from that, her arrival in Margay.)  Sudenly the story came alive again and Aesil was ready to show me how she got OUT of Margay.

Readers who have read “Mercenary’s Honor” either in Operation Arcana or in my collection Deeds of Honor will understand some of the backstory of enmity between Ilanz Balentos and the rulers of Vonja.  Other connections barely mentioned in other Paksworld fiction show up again, in the story I’m writing this week (and for however long it takes.  Who can know? Not me.)  You’ll know, sort of, where Margay is (between Vonja and Sorellin on the branch of the Guild League Road that connects the main one to Sorellin and goes east to the coast just south of the Eastbight…the Guild League standard design of it, though, doesn’t go much beyond Sorellin.   Aesil is so full of agency today (both today in my week and today in her world) that she interrupted senior commanders.  Her mind’s racing full speed trying to figure out how to rescue everyone she knows.  She can’t, of course, but it’s better than giving up.

Writerly egos really do work this way.  Inspired by the review copy of DEEDS OF YOUTH,  I was able to finish the sequel to “Consequences” (last story in that volume) yesterday.  MUCH faster than I finished the first one of the pair.  Together they cover the entirety of Kieri Phelan’s first independent mercenary command.  The original version I wrote in the neighborhood of 35 years ago hasn’t been found, so I was reconstructing from my memory of it.   I’m sure it’s not an accurate reconstruction, but nobody else knows the original at all.  Ha.  What you’ll finally get, when the collection after the new collection comes out, is  all there is.

An ego-correction was finding out, while doing what I thought was the final revision, that I had *reversed two characters’ names.”  Between stories.  Within weeks of having re-read “Consequences”.    Yes, OK, I’m good enough to write an exciting story in less than two weeks, a story that involves blocking out a clash of militaries (size, location, terrain, opposing forces’ different weapons, mobility, background of military theory for each, etc.)  and collapsing all the details the writer then knows into just the ones the *reader* needs to know to grasp what’s happening, the sequence of events, the personalities and back stories of the POV characters, and fitting all that into less than 7500 words at most.   But I’m not apparently good enough to noticed that between “Consequences” and (its current name, this may change) “Unintended,”  Crown Prince G-‘s name turns into younger Prince H-‘s name.

All fixed now.  G- is back to being G- across the narrow temporal gulf between reading story C and writing story U.   Be sure that from now on in I will be looking harder when writing subsequent related stories to existing stories, and doing the name check *earlier* in the process.   First-readers of story U liked it a lot.  I still like it a lot today, having spent last night and today cleaning it up.  Is it spotless and shiny, all ready for its debut later?  I’ll know better after letting the resident Nitpicker at it.  Meanwhile, a snippet.

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“Get a horse,” the king said.  “A good one.”

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Meanwhile, in the daily life stuff, it’s been very, VERY hot so I’m feeding horses later and later in the evening and today moved the morning feed up to “nearly all hard feed in the morning because it’s cooler and better for them.”

A US Senator (former football coach, whoop-te-do) is taking out his spite on the Department of Defense by blocking all promotions that require Senate approval and thus leaving many commands without a commander when the previous one reached legal retirement age.  Including my branch, the Marines, who are without a Commandant for the first time in over 100 years.  (And, dear friends, you really truly do not want to leave the Marines to their own devices without a solid command structure.  You don’t want to leave ANY military that way, but we have particularly…strong…well…our nickname with at least one other branch is Uncle Sam’s Misquided Children, and our reputation is “If you want something absolutely totally destroyed, call in the Marines.”  I, of course, am now a sweet old lady, perfectly harmless except for the razor edge on tongue and pen.

I called said Senator’s Senate office today and gave a brief and non-profane description of his misdeeds (this is only one of them; the guy’s a raging racist and a contributor to the J6 insurrection) before calling on him to resign.  He won’t, of course, but this is what I can do legally, for now.  Let him know he’s not the strong noble hero he thinks he is but a pissant southern neo-Confederate who broke his oath of office, tried to overturn the government, and has pissed off a Marine veteran.  At least one.  Sure there’s more.   I’m feeling that the Senator, who never served in any branch, should perhaps contemplate the effect of Marines minus a complete command structure on something closer to his heart than the rest of the country, since he doesn’t care about the rest of the country, just his billionaire donors and the white folks in his home state.  Needs to be reminded that the Senate doesn’t command the military.  That’s an executive function, and it needs a whole, unbroken, chain of command from POTUS on down to the lowest level just-out-of-boot-camp E-1.

So I think I need to call his office *daily* with things he clearly doesn’t know, and needs to know, about the real, serious, deal it is to stand in the way of the Marines having a  Commandant.  His name, in case you don’t know it, is Tommy Tuberville, and he pronounced it TUBBER-vill.  Wouldn’t want to say a Senator’s name wrong, would we?  (Rubber-Tubber?  Flubber-Tubber?)  I leave the cussing out to the senior NCOs, who are superb at it (an art form, once they’re up in grade)  and recommend that former officers and lower grade enlisted just list any four or eight of his “errors” as politely as possible within the need to make it clear what a [redacted] he is.