Paksworld

Progress today was less than hoped, but more than feared, but unexpected in its content.   I’m fairly sure this scene won’t survive until the end.   Road-building?  Really?   Nobody’s attacked the road crew or the visitor to the road crew (yet, I say with a trickle of hope that something more interesting will happen.)   No wild animals.  No earthquakes, landslides, broken axles on the wagons, broken bones from accidents.  Nothing but sweat and dirt.    It’s not too hot, not too cold, and no storms are looming.  Yet.

The fact is that if you’re a discovery writer, as I am, you end up writing tens of thousands of words that don’t make it past (if even into) first draft.   This road being built may end up being important later in the book.  I  don’t know.   The only way I can find out (says experience of book-writing with my particular imagination)  is to write the “Good grief, this is dull and surely it has no plot-relevance!” parts with the same care that I write the “Wow! Plot bomb!  Off at a gallop!” parts.

So far in this whole day at this location in Tsaia, nothing suggesting the plot actually moving has happened.     Someone got up–I pushed this person past breakfast, short=changed this person’s usual post-prandial pause to consider the day, rushed this person through the house, out the door, and onto a horse.  Surely that would start something…but it didn’t.  Off this person rode, crossed a rivulet (not even a splash or the horse stepping into a mudhole) first this way, then that way, and (as I ruthlessly picked up horse and rider in my mind and muttered Get somewhere!!)  dropped them down where rider had expected to be, at the business end of road construction that started somewhere else.

Where the road crew was sitting around eating lunch.  So someone got off the horse and ate lunch.   Who, I muttered, cares whether it’s a cheese roll or a ham roll? But I wrote it anyway (cheese roll) because that’s what had to be done, and then turned someone’s head to look at where the road had come from.  What  a mess!   Felled trees, a sort of scraped line down the middle,  maybe wide enough for one wagon…must have been, here are the wagons, ox teams (ox teams?  I didn’t know they’d be ox teams on the primitive leveler thingies) and horse teams and various tools, and the man in charge, hired from somewhere else, started in about dross and nedross rock, and why, on the way up this ridge (the one they’re on) they’d had to zig-zag and it was taking longer.

Someone finished the cheese roll and ate a berry pastry.  Whoop-te-do.  But wait–time-check–yes, OK, those berries do ripen first.  But still.  No earthquakes, landslides, violent storms.    And I have to get someone back where someone started by nightfall (why?  Is anything going to happen tonight?  OH…yes.  There’s a messenger.   Not where someone started yet, but on the way there.  There’s a reason to get someone back…good, I was beginning to worry about the Plot Daemon.)

Well, but…the thing is, my mind wants to pull a Telzey.  Some of you will remember the Telzey Amberdon stories, which I loved initially (yay, girl with psi powers and spunk!)  but came to loathe because after awhile every single time Telzey got in a bind, her existing powers and her smarts weren’t enough to get her out, but she popped out a new psi power she didn’t know she had.  Presto Zappo, just like that.   When I’m having to write something very backgroundish, that’s not particularly (or even at all) exciting, my mind (not the Plot Daemon, but the plain ordinary mind) starts making suggestions that are, to put it plainly, lousy.   Why not have someone develop sudden mage ability? NO.   Why not have someone develop sudden mage ability that causes an earthquake? NO.    Landslide? No.   Magically creates ten miles or leagues or whatever of road with a lovely smooth surface plus new axles and bearings for the wagons and…wait for it…motorized oxen! NONONO!!

An ordinary day in the life of a writer who is working on slog, not the world’s best inspiration.