Paksworld

But I’m telling you anyway.   One of the ways you get multi-sensory accuracy into a work is to get it into your life.   Back when I was first writing for publication, I was immersed in a busy life that included regular doses of excitement and gore: I was a volunteer with the county EMS, and our station lay between a military base in a dry county and the nearest bars.   Car wrecks (lots), fires, explosions, fights,  death by violence and death that came as quietly as a sigh.   If it’s part of a human and it breaks, bleeds, or leaks–I’ve seen it.  I also had a rideable horse then, and rode almost daily.

However, it’s been years since I worked with EMS (impossible to do if you’ve got a small child clinging to your knees) and the juvenile traumas are far behind us,  so to keep my experience of what some call “gritty reality”  fresh, I take what opportunities I can–opportunities that come more often in the country than the city (for writing in this universe, anyway.)   I walk the land, I deal with horses and tractors and shovels and only slightly modernized versions of tools Paks would’ve known.    Tomorrow morning early  it will be one of the less glamorous  and more gruesome chores.

A not-so-little lamb will end the day in the freezer.   We could’ve wished for cooler weather, but the writer-mind will store every sensory detail, compare it to the experience we had last time (on a near-freezing day of cold drizzle)  and someday, somewhere, a few elements of that will show up in a book.    Tonight I’ll recheck the instrument of death and ensure that it’s perfectly clean and functional…the goal is for the animal to suffer no anxiety or pain.

Luckily, my editor called today with her last comments on the revised ms. and I’ve completed all she told me about (but forgot to ask her how she decided on the Track Changes section she sent me Friday that I’d emailed in early in the morning.)