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Late last night/early this morning, finished THAT round of editing, which included a lot of formatting changes (where paragraph indentations had indented line breaks, timeline notes, chapter titles, and anything else but an actual paragraph first lines), spelling corrections, infodump chunks removed, less-than-stellar word choices, missing words (!), and additions where necessary for clarity. A lot of “the” is gone. A lot of “there” that does not correctly indicate a location. A lot of wussy-inactive verbal forms (someone “began to” do something, or “was doing” something) and a handful of unnecessary conditionals/subjunctives (someone might/could/would/should “be doing something.”), and several handfuls of unnecessary “that.” Anything weak, flabby, blurry, etc. revised to be crisply in focus, more concrete, more connected to senses other than vague psychic stuff. Necessary “telling” still connected to a character’s individual understanding and expression in behavior, including speech. Lots of fascinating (to the writer) details suppressed for lack of real connection to the immediate or next-up or recent-past storyline. Some of this WILL appear in short fiction pieces. (The hidden politics of the banking industry in Aarenis, for instance. Corruption in the grain merchants’ guild. The careful insertion of false history into the legal system.)
This morning when I started at C-1 again, the remaining stuff really stood out as “stuff” and not “story, so I’m working that today, with breaks for my very sore typing-and-mousing hand. The farther you go, in editing, the more what else needs doing shows up, at least in the editing method I’m capable of now. Overall wordage is moving up and down in much smaller increments.
Snippet from C-1, which I hope will be followed (if I can get the sketch finished and photographed for inclusion here) by what the character sees at a street corner in Valdaire:
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Corner of Guillder and Southgate; Charater: “Camwyn” (all he knows of his name; astute Paksworld readers will quickly know who this is, five-six years later.)
While he fished a coin from under his surcoat, they gave clear directions. He nodded his thanks, tossed down a coin, and rode on. A major street as wide as this road? There, and directly across it, the bankers’ symbol, three-coins-and-sack, painted large in yellow on a tall windowless stone building. Below that sign was a brown arch on a white background, with the words South Gate and an arrow pointing south.
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There we are. The pack animals was supposed to be a mule at least the size of a riding horse (around 15 hands, in modern terms, but I didn’t leave enough room on the page for longer legs, or (since I have more trouble drawing things facing right than facing left) I lengthened the body too much. Ah, well, it’s just a sketchy thing with the use of some colored pencils. The building would extend of the page to the right. The brick areas are bricked up windows…it’s a bank now, originally a store with living quarters upstairs, but now…a bank. The two signs are on areas painted white (not paper signs hung) and the unevenness of the stone underneath still shows.
Comment by elizabeth — September 27, 2023 @ 12:20 pm
Valdaire is near the meeting of two mountain chains, so…lots of tectonic stuff went on, and lots of different colored rock is available for masons to work with, along with basis red-brown bricks The fashion at times has been striping a building with alternating colors. This important corner (defining the T-intersection of two main streets) makes it clear that if you want money-stuff or the south gate of the city, TURN HERE, and the bold alternation of a gray stone and a much lighter yellowish/tannish stone, plus the sharp brown/white row above makes it memorable, even to strangers. Adjoining buildings using the alternating courses design do not ever use the same colors the same way. And yes, I should have continued the street color around the corner and given that woman a shadow, at least.
Comment by Caryn — September 27, 2023 @ 7:56 pm
Like the church buildings in Milan! Love that we get tectonics and real geography, unlike in JRR’s maps. (I wonder if there’s somewhere around the Urals that could resemble his geography. )
Comment by Jonathan Schor — September 28, 2023 @ 10:07 am
Wow, a lot of work. Of course the computer helps. What did authors do in the old days? I does make me appreciate your writings a lot more.
From up in New Hampshire where fall is coming in.
Comment by elizabeth — September 28, 2023 @ 4:08 pm
Caryn, JRRT could have seen mountains in South Africa, in Britain, on any travels he took after WWI (I don’t know if he did, or where he might have gone.) And he could have been photographs from anywhere, or topographic maps, and used those as a basis. The world’s full of strange (to someone who, like me, has mostly known the Appalachians and the Rockies) mountain ranges. C.J. Cherryh said, one time, “Don’t do the map first” because the writer doesn’t know yet what the story needs. The mountains I’m using for the Horngard setting (or rather, the two *peaks* I’m using) are in a range that runs, in part, along the Russian/Mongolian border for a ways and then off that line mostly in Russia, if I’m reading the map right. Most of my generation of kids in the US learned *something* about the Pyranees-Alps across the “base” of southern Europe, much less about the extension of those mountains south of the Black Sea across Turkey,and on into Iran/Persia, Afghanistan and then the great block of the Himalayas in the north of India. I was taught nothing about other important European mountains…the wars we studied never seemed to involve them. Geology classes in college opened more mental windows, and some novels mentioned the Caucasus and its mountains, but instead I knew about the Andes in S. America.
But if you Google on the Sayan mountains, you’ll find some fascinating shapes of highly folded stuff with a wealth of mineralogy. Would help if I could read Russian!!
Comment by Jonathan Schor — September 29, 2023 @ 4:28 pm
How accurate then are the various planets in both the Vatta systems and the Serano systems? I the description of the island in Hunting Party a remembered place?
Comment by elizabeth — September 30, 2023 @ 2:46 pm
This will be a long discussion, I fear, and I’m kinda busy right now (house guest, friends with complications, and work on Horngard.)
Accurate in what way? Is the island in Hunting Party a remembered place? No. Have I been on any islands? Yes, various sizes near various continents. The island on Hunting Party is, however, a reasonable island of a type that could be on an Earth-type planet. It’s big enough for the action that was taking place on it, with the kind of topography that exists in other islands in the same general area.
Accuracy applies to exact copies. I do that only for stories set on this planet; I don’t write many like that. Largely because I enjoy writing more in imagined than real landscapes, where I would have to cope with those landscapes’ real histories all the way back beyond ancient history. Pre-human. I wrote a sort-of mystery (“Fencing in”) in the area where I live (using area loosely) and my story for the Apocalyse anthology in another part of the area where I live. People who live here would recognize that they’re central Texas stories, and probably get (from vegetation and fence building) the different end of the area each story’s in, but they’re not going to pin them down closer than that.
Comment by Nadine Bowlus — October 8, 2023 @ 3:01 pm
I saw walls like that in Peru.
Comment by elizabeth — October 9, 2023 @ 8:56 am
Thank you. I’ve seen only photos of walls in Peru, but they were one of several inspirations for walls in Valdaire which is intended to have a “mixed” origin: stonework by humans of different cultures and by dwarves.