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“You killed her!”
Yeah, that’s right, I have no self-control, and now Book IV has a first paragraph. It may not be the real first paragraph (the actual start of Book III isn’t what I first wrote) but you have to admit it’s attention-getting (and I wrote it early this morning before the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords…hours before that happened. Now it looks…too related. )
Some of the rest of the day was spent in the garden, planting onions (only one bunch of sets), sugar-snap peas, radishes, and carrots. If you want until after the last possible frost, around here, these early garden plants die in the heat…the last frost and 100F can co-occur within 48 hours. So you try to get them in the ground before a predicted winter rain (they said tonight–not happening yet) and ahead of a predicted serious freeze (Tuesday night) so they won’t have sprouted yet but the soil will hold moisture. Some missed seeds of last year’s onions brought themselves up in the east bed–I planted more around them.
Book IV has, in addition to the paragraph I managed this morning (planting really needed to be done and I hadn’t been out, really out, in awhile–hence only one paragraph) the 10,000 words taken out of Book III. That 10,000 words doesn’t have a good beginning in it, though. So we’ll see what develops.
My agent is reading Book III this weekend, I hope with delight, but he usually has Things To Say. Editor’s Say trumps Agent’s Say, but I listen to both of them. I finished the Dramatis Personae thing for III today as well, and printed out the now-inconveniently-long “Names” file. It has only some of the names from the original books, but is supposed to have every name in the new books. Turns out it didn’t, and I’m going to have to change a name in III to accord with Kings. If I would write simple, short books with only a handful of characters, I wouldn’t have this problem.
Comment by Jonathan Schor — January 9, 2011 @ 3:48 pm
Planting already? It is freezing outside with a thin cover of snow up here in New Hampshire.
Have fun with the new book.
Jonathan
Comment by Vikki W — January 9, 2011 @ 4:33 pm
When I lived in Houston, I would make those plants a fall crop. Never even thought about trying to plant them in the winter. Now I live in OKC and it would literally freeze. Too bad, cause now I’ve got the gardening bug. BTW, great hook on the opening line. Now I am wondering, who killed whom, and who is upset!
Comment by Genko — January 9, 2011 @ 5:41 pm
Yes, but if you wrote simple short books with only a few characters, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it? I agree that the names thing is difficult. Is Paks’ horse ever going to get a name? Sorry, didn’t really mean to add one more thing.
I sometimes think of great names and think of keeping a list for the great stories/books I may write some day. Then I think it will probably never happen. And once in a while I think of the perfect name, and then find it in a book I read, and that takes some of the wind out of my sails. Oh, I thought I thought of it first.
Comment by elizabeth — January 9, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
As far as I know, Genko, paladin horses don’t have names…or if they do, I’ve never been told.
Comment by Kip Colegrove — January 9, 2011 @ 6:32 pm
Genko, I do the same thing with names–making them up and then finding that they already exist or that others eventually come up with them. Name-sense is something that some people have in high degree (one thinks of Dickens). If you add made-up languages, it gets more interesting (one thinks of Tolkien). But I suspect that a good character name will resonate well with most readers in an appropriate narrative context, whoever might have been the first to think it up.
Of course, personal taste is a factor. For example, I like names ending in -id: Sigrid, Astrid, Brigid…and Arvid, a name not infrequently encountered in Paksworld.
Comment by elizabeth — January 9, 2011 @ 6:45 pm
Low 50s here, Jonathan, though it will frost tonight and freeze the next two nights. We did get rain last night, so the seeds and sets are watered in. We might lose some or all of this (but not the onions–they survive.) Even before the changes I’ve seen in the last ten years, we rarely had below-freezing temps long or low enough enough to freeze the soil more than an inch or so deep. We don’t have enough cooling hours for the good apples you have there–and some years not enough for any.
Where I grew up, almost 400 miles south of here, a frost was a disaster to the farmers, as the fields in winter were full of onions, cabbage, carrots–the winter cash crops–and the citrus trees were both flowering and fruiting.
What kills off our gardens is summer heat (sustained heat with peaks up to 115F and nighttime temps that stay above 90F) and lack of water (including restrictions on using city water)–though even with water few plants can handle that high nighttime heat and maintain rigor to the leaves. Summer heat and a hot, drying wind can show up as early as March, though soil temps are still down, then. Where I grew up, there was a Gulf breeze cooling things off most nights, and the summer crops were forage crops (alfalfa, haygrazer) and cotton, all using irrigation.
Comment by elizabeth — January 9, 2011 @ 6:48 pm
In Houston you usually had more water available and more rain…at least, when I lived there, it was possible to plant in September and get a good result. Here, fall is often still very hot and dry–and if there’s been a drought and the town’s still on stage-3 or stage-4 water restriction, the young plants won’t make it. If it’s not dry, it’s like the last two years, with hurricane rain in early September that just pounds things into mush and then after that it’s dry. We tried a few years. People out in the country with their own wells sometimes manage a good fall garden.
Comment by Alaska Fan — January 9, 2011 @ 7:02 pm
In Fairbanks, there’s barely enough light to keep houseplants alive indoors. Just over four hours of barely-above-the-horizon slight. Outdoors, the temperature has warmed up to 10 above. It could just as easily be -50 F. Spring planting is still 4.5 months away.
Which makes excellent new novels by superb fantasy writers all the more important.
Comment by arthur — January 10, 2011 @ 2:34 pm
Hello it’s Arthur. Yeah it seems to be weird weather all over, California has got rain recently, 6 inches over the entire state. That amounts to about 300 billion tons of water! Me and my mom figured that problem out, because I wanted to know. Regarding Kings of the North, I was jumping off the walls thinking it had come out when I first heard there was a set date (My internet is still out!), but I soon ferreted out the truth. This year! 2011! Dorrin and Arcolin and Kieri and Prince Mahieran! And we really find out about the “Pargunese.” I wonder about Achrya … Are the Gods like the Hindu avatars and have “aspects?” I know you have asked people not to speculate about the book and what will happen, but this is just about the “Gods”, “Higher Beings” of the Eight Kingdoms and Aarenis. And how is Aare spelled? i wondering that is well I allways thought it was spelled like the word “Eire”, but I heard a different spelling on the audiobooks. Or is there no approved spelling?
Comment by arthur — January 10, 2011 @ 4:09 pm
What am saying! I meant gallons, not tons.
Comment by elizabeth — January 10, 2011 @ 7:10 pm
Hi Arthur. I think you’re asking about pronunciation, not spelling–it’s spelled Aare, and it’s pronounced AAH-reh or AAH-ruh. Accent on first syllable.
If you’ve read the Gird books (Surrender None and Liar’s Oath) you may remember that the old priest of Esea (the Sunlord to the magelords) speculates that all the founder gods of the primary groups–Adyan the Namer, Sertig the Maker, the One Lord of the gnomes–may all be aspects of one god. There’s a little mention of that in the Deed, too. It’s definitely a minority view, and except for Simyits the trickster god (god of luck and chance, depicted as having two faces) they’re not thought to have different aspects.
Comment by elizabeth — January 10, 2011 @ 7:15 pm
I’m guessing you have to use those special grow-lights to keep the plants going strong. Your spring planting will be starting when our gardens are at their best–and yours will be at their best when ours are shriveled up brown crunchy bits.
We may lose the early planting this week (projected lows tonight & tomorrow night are merely chilly for you, but killers for local vegetation, but we can plant in weekly successions until something catches, and then hope it’s not killed off by an early heat wave.
I’m sorry the new book isn’t out now–but that’s marketing’s decision, not mine.
Comment by arthur — January 11, 2011 @ 8:39 pm
This is Arthur. No problem about the book, my mother always says that I should wait for things, and that doing so makes them better, not worse. Regarding the pronunsation/spelling,
I was correct then! As for the God/Gods debate… You have to wonder if it’s the old question of the which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did God/Gods do evil and men and other beings do the same in worshipping them, or did the God/Gods do as their followers do. From what I understand, the Pargunese and the Kostandans aren’t “evil”, that is, they don’t do hurtful things willingly, or torture and loot without any reason. They seem to be remembering old wrongs the Aareian magelords did, driving them from their old lands. But then the magelords in the latter days after Aare fell and before it did seem to have attacked everybody, and were punished for it. I read the short story from the Pargunese point of view, and it was… interesting. But then, everything I’ve ever read of yours was very interesting.
Comment by arthur — January 11, 2011 @ 8:43 pm
Oh, it hasn’t rained since then except for 1 day, certainly not much, and the rain helped, extremly. Yeah, farming and gardening seem to be as much a matter of luck as of skill, that and LOTS of hard work. I help with the garden at my parents house, and a community garden, and it’s hard work, but it feels good. Every lawyer and hard driving professional should spend some time at things like that. It would help them think about what really matters.