Paksworld

The book has now moved from my editor to Production.   This means all substantive changes have been made, but not that everything is in it, even yet.  There’s the map, and there’s the list of characters the editor wants to include up front (I argued for at the back, but lost.   Those of you who don’t like character lists up front–it’s not my fault.   The acknowledgments are at the back.)

I worked on the map today, roughing in “the north” in pencil, then showing it to Richard, who’s one of the few people to have seen the (now lost) original.   His memory of the original is similar to mine…the new one is the right shape but wrong size.    I changed the size deliberately–the north was never detailed,  just a coastline and river.  Extrapolating from travel times between Kieri’s stronghold and Vérella, and Vérella and Valdaire, and pretending that A to B equals other similar looking distances…is not perfectly accurate.

If I put in all the detail that *could* be there, the text on the map will cover it…if I put too little, someone will have conniptions about that, too.

But whatever, I have to get the character list and map to my editor by the end of the month.  Which isn’t that far away.

The next step is that I get the copy-edited manuscript.  Writers have horror stories about what copy editors have done (tried to do, succeeded in doing) to their stories.    And did I get the style-sheet written?   Er…when would I have had time?

So it’s going to be an interesting copy-edit, all 800+ pages of it.

But after the to-ing and fro-ing that go with the copy-edit, the next stage is page proofs…and as the page proofs come to me, someone’s putting up the uncorrected proofs as ARCs, reviewer copies.   Things get exciting.

Right now, though, my attention’s on that map.    The missing-in-action background notebooks had detailed information on the geology, which I sortakinda remember, but not as clearly as I’d like.    Tomorrow, I hope to get to the good mapping-supply place in Austin and pick up larger sheets of vellum to work with.   And some new pens.    It’s going to take multiple drafts before I’m happy with it.   I’d love to do a wall-size one, but there’s not time.