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My hosting site just announced a major refurbishment (changing out servers, etc.) to begin this Friday night, March 1, at 10 pm, and expected to last at least 4-6 hours, maybe longer. So if you find the Paksworld site and this blog down on Friday night, do not worry. Try it again Saturday morning and if it’s still down…be patient. I don’t expect it will be unless gremlins attack, but we should all be sufficiently tech savvy to know that hooking new things up quite often is a gremlin magnet.
Meanwhile, back to work. Someone has survived a fire in a warehouse; someone has had a disagreement with an adviser; someone’s expecting a baby; someone’s up to their chest in rapidly rising water and it’s raining cats, dogs, horses, and dragons.
Comment by Annabel — February 25, 2013 @ 9:46 am
All sounds like good stuff! Glad the writing is going well.
Comment by Jenn — February 25, 2013 @ 10:00 am
4-6 Hours!!!!!!!
How will we survive.
work guesses
A-, M-, A-, A-
Didn’t want possible speculation spoilers so just the first letter. 🙂
Comment by mikelabb — February 25, 2013 @ 10:35 am
I used to upgrade servers for a living. We had nearly a hundred to do over a weekend twice a year. We always reckoned that if the first upgrade was successful, the others would be, since the upgrades were supposedly identical.
We could have done with Dragon on our side!
Comment by Ed Bunyan — February 25, 2013 @ 12:18 pm
My thoughts and prayers go to the techs as they get ready to throw the switch and start things back up. Been there and experienced that.
Comment by Daniel Glover — February 25, 2013 @ 2:41 pm
Just getting the appropriate people to agree on specs for upgrade/migration has taken way too long. It’s worse when you can only do it in pieces.
Comment by pjm — February 25, 2013 @ 5:29 pm
.. raining cats, dogs, horses and dragons ..
Sounds like home.
We had a short but rather severe storm last week – nearly 40mm over a few hours and a supermarket roof collapsed. Then today my daughter has a roof leak. We hope it is only as bad as it looks.
Computer system upgrades – hope it all goes well. In theory it should.
Peter
Comment by Linda — February 25, 2013 @ 7:45 pm
All those things happening to your characters make it sound like a book which will not be put down by its readers until it’s finished.
There’s an almost full moon tonight and a great horned owl is hoot-hoot-hooting not far from my window. Having just returned from a long driving trip which took in many different ecosystems, and lots of birds (some really “good ones”), I’ve been thinking about the birds in various “created” worlds I’ve been exploring over the years. Some stories seem to require them, and others, obviously, don’t.
When one re-reads as much as I do, odd things end up catching one’s attention. Like the authors who describe meals in some detail, the process of caring for horses, doing housework, or using magic, etc. I for one prefer worlds where there are socks to be darned and where crossing streams ends up getting one wet and miserable. The details need to further the story, of course, but those details also make worlds believable, and characters better rounded.
Thanks again for all your skill and care!
Comment by Richard — February 26, 2013 @ 2:31 am
In my time zone that’ll mean Paksworld will be offline over Saturday breakfast for certain.
Linda, I’ve just opened the Deed almost at random and (second time) found the line, “I’ll hoot like that owl last night when I think I’m near again”.
Comment by GinnyW — February 26, 2013 @ 12:24 pm
Linda, I wish an owl would hoot within hearing of my window. We have squirrels scurrying up and down the drainpipes and across the roof. They knock the green tomatoes and apricots onto the ground, and don’t even eat them. An owl family, or hawk family, would make a real contribution to our ecological (and mental) balance.
Jenn,
Your first letters made me realize how many A- names there are. Not to mention the number of people named Arne.
And I wonder where the warehouse was, and what wares it housed.
I guess we’ll go to the movies on Friday night. Thanks for the warning.
Comment by Jenn — February 26, 2013 @ 1:46 pm
GinnyW,
When I first read the Deed, I decided that Arne was the Paksworld equivalent of Jennifer.
Comment by Nadine Barter Bowlus — February 26, 2013 @ 9:26 pm
Re birds in books. One of the things in Oath of Gold that especially hooked this ornithologist’s interest was Pak’s discovery of birds beyond carrion crows when she stayed with Master Oakhallow.
Comment by elizabeth — February 27, 2013 @ 12:24 am
Nadine: Even though she grew up on a farm–and could have learned more–she just wasn’t that interested, except for birds perceived as a threat to lambs or crops. And in her military life, of course, nobody spent much time on birds. So I had the chance, with Oakhallow, to give her that experience.
We are fortunate to have both spring and fall migrants and winter resident migrants on the place, and it’s been a lot of fun to learn where they like to hang out (some in the brush, some in the creek woods, some in the grassland, etc.) Though I grew up in one of the great birding areas, I wasn’t, as a kid, that interested–I didn’t know about field guides, and the huge book on birds we had wasn’t useful for identifying the birds we saw.
Comment by Kevin Steverson — February 28, 2013 @ 6:57 pm
Off Topic (sorta): If you eat a live tadpole, first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you all day…just sayin…Though I may not try it to get through the fact that this site will be down…it is an option.
Comment by GinnyW — March 1, 2013 @ 7:11 am
Nadine and Elizabeth,
I liked the engagement with the birds in Oath of Gold too. The willingness of the birds to be seen, rather than flying away and being heard anonymously from the tree tops conveys a sense of stillness that is in drastic contrast to the tension of the Paks that entered the wood. The behavioral equivalent of sound sleep after the delirium of fever, if that makes sense? It made her healing very plausibly visible.
Comment by Richard — March 2, 2013 @ 6:27 am
So what other birds do we know Paksworld to have (from all the books, not just the Deed)?