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…or the iron is hot, or preferably both, the writer leaps into action and neglects everything but very firm bodily demands.
Of the two things started yesterday, one petered out pretty quickly…it will take a lot of thought to bring it to life. The other, which I thought had nowhere particular to go, has taken over the day, especially this afternoon/evening. I don’t know yet if it will be suitable for the next anthology story I’m supposed to write, but I do know it will be good for something. And it came out of a link on one of the oddball Twitter accounts I follow. I say oddball because Twitter keeps trying to get me to stick to more of X if I have a couple of Xes (“Don’t you want to follow A-Z in category 389.566?”), but who/what I follow on Twitter is distributed across categories. Economics, politics, biology, astronomy, space travel, history, medicine, physics, earth sciences, etc, etc, etc….and these take me interesting places (or I quit following them) and expose me to new stuff. I can’t possibly look at every site behind every link, but every day I look at some of them. Not all give me story ideas (well, they do, but a lot of the story ideas aren’t good ones), but every now and then…lightning strikes the hot iron and it’s time to hammer hard on a story.
Anyway, this story is galloping along (had to stop awhile to rest my hands) and I have hopes it will be an anthology story out sometime next year, like the other one. If not, I’ll put it out myself. It is set in Paksworld, but is not connected to any part of the history or geography I’ve written before. The names are all different. The feel is Paksworld-but-different. At a wild guess, this is somewhere on Aare, but very far away from the part I knew about. (Aare is bigger than I thought? Whee!!!)
Comment by Hawkman — August 9, 2013 @ 11:19 pm
This is the French thingie? Or the French thingie petered out?
Comment by iphinome — August 10, 2013 @ 3:23 am
@Hawkman if it were french wouldn’t it have Pierre’d out?
Comment by KarenH — August 10, 2013 @ 10:26 am
@iphinome
Your comment made me smile this morning
Comment by elizabeth — August 10, 2013 @ 12:12 pm
This is what grew out of the French thingie, but it’s not a French thingie.
It’s now in Phase Two, first draft finished, and revision ongoing.
Comment by Hawkman — August 11, 2013 @ 5:24 pm
So surrendering or retreating is not required?
Comment by elizabeth — August 11, 2013 @ 6:26 pm
Tch-tch-tch. I’m watching two French-cooking cooking shows now and then on PBS, so I have great respect for people who, even in old age (Jacque Pepin) can dice just about anything faster than the eye can see, while I’m still going “slice…slice…slice…slice…” And he has a sense of humor.
Anyway. The story grabbed me and yanked me through it yesterday and now I’m trying to find out if that’s all, or if something else is hidden in it, or if something came along for the ride that doesn’t belong (part of a different story, for instance.)
Comment by Hawkman — August 11, 2013 @ 8:48 pm
Where I reside something grabbing you could be sexual harassment.
You reject the Corps honored ritual of poking at the French?
Comment by elizabeth — August 11, 2013 @ 9:19 pm
Only sometimes. That being when I desperately want to learn how to make that thing Pepin did with chocolate custard and chopped nuts, or the way he can tie up a stuffed rolled roast in nothing flat. In those moments of being a student of French cuisine, I won’t poke fun at the French. (You would laugh yourself silly watching me try to tie up a stuffed roast. The “neat package” isn’t.)
Comment by Sharidann — August 12, 2013 @ 12:44 am
Now you are making me curious… Aare, but when… contemporary ? After all, what do we know about Aare ?
A catastrophe
Baron Sekkady
Trade with Aarenis takes place.
And that’s it.
Did you consider self-publication for short stories or anthologies ? Or direct Ebooking. It is something Lois Bujold began with in the last couple of years, seems to work for her, even though we are not speaking of full-blown novels (collection of essays and a few short stories).
@ Hawkman: last time I checked most servicement in Afghanistan were quite happy to have french troops around.
Comment by GinnyW — August 15, 2013 @ 2:51 pm
Sharidann (Elizabeth?) Didn’t we discover that Baron Sekkady was on the Eastern continent somewhere, while Aare was in the South? It was in a sailing and geography post, but I have forgotten which thread. Around January though.
The new story sounds worth waiting for. Perhaps there are guardians somewhen in it.
Comment by Richard — August 15, 2013 @ 4:15 pm
Ginny,
I think we’ve known for much longer than that, but I cannot recall all the details of how. The first clues were in the Deed: Kieri had escaped by climbing down the wall then running through woods to the coast, where he stowed away on a ship to Bannerlith (on the north’s east coast). Aare we associate with deserts, and with trade – in the past – from ports on the south coast of Aarenis.
Comment by elizabeth — August 15, 2013 @ 4:37 pm
OK, mostly back in this place–until WorldCon, anyway.
When Kieri was captured, he was taken across the Eastern Ocean to Baron Sekkady. The eastern continent is never described much; the only human-in habited lands mentioned are/were a narrow strip bordered on the east by a N/S running range of mountains. What’s beyond that, we don’t know. Yet.
Aare is the continent south of the Immerhoft Sea, as far as anyone knows.
New Story #1 (was submitted end of July) is set in Fallo, a known part of Aarenis, up the east branch of the Immer River, beyond Cortes Immer. New Story #2 is set in Aare’s distant past, but I’m not sure how far back. It just came to me, without any connection (other than knowing it was Aare) to the present. The start of desertification has started human migrations, and human migrations have started conflicts. As they so often do. I do know now that not all migrations were south-to-north.
From here on, any Paksworld stories that don’t find a publisher will go into e-form until enough has accumulated for a collection. I will need more of them for a self-published e-book. (If I could find the old unpublished stories, maybe they could be reworked. Or not.) But when I write one in response to an anthology invitation (as with #1 and #2) and the editor accepts them, then that contract governs when I could self-pub them.
Comment by Hawkman — August 15, 2013 @ 7:33 pm
Elizabeth has answered much but Ginny you may have been referencing May 2nd thread geography clues. Tap Background on the right margin.
Comment by Richard — August 16, 2013 @ 7:49 am
Hawkman, yes, http://www.paksworld.com/blog/?p=1563
Found them! That post expanded on earlier information. Here on the site, the paragraph on the Seafolk in http://paksworld.com/people.html mentioned briefly the land they came from and how magelords had moved in there. In the books, Orlith told the same story in Kings when Kieri was preparing to receive Torfinn. The first explicit reference is in Fealty when Kieri announces he will hire Halveric Company: the Pargunese “came from across the eastern ocean, and the same who tormented me [my emphasis] tormented them until they fled”.
In the books, Orlith gave the extra information that some elves too had once lived across the eastern ocean, in the same coastal strip as the ancestral Seafolk but further north. Those particular elves moved to Aare pre-Severance, then to Aarenis (still well before the Fall of Aare), finally to the Ladysforest.
SPOILER WARNING TO ANYONE WHO HASN’T READ “LIMITS OF POWER” YET.
REPEAT: SPOILER WARNING TO ANYONE STILL WAITING FOR LIMITS.
That Sekkady lived across the eastern ocean is quite clear from the passage near the end of Limits in which Kieri reads the warning letter from the Sea-Prince of Prealith.
While we’re here, both elves (Ladysforest) and humans (Lyonya) always thought Kieri’s mother had been killed by human bandits. We now know that to be true so far as it goes, but that it was not a random attack: the jealous elf had hired, lured or coerced the bandits there deliberately, and had got them into the Ladysforest itself, albeit its outer fringes, undetected. Where they came from doesn’t matter, but note they were experienced and organised enough to know where to take a half-elf little boy quickly to sell for a good price.