Paksworld

K-II being its “stable name,” that is.

Editor says that no amount of backfilling will allow readers who start with K-II to understand everything that went before.

There’s a lot of before.   Although K-I, now known formally as Oath of Fealty, covers only about a quarter year of that world’s time, it’s a quarter year in which a great deal happens.    Some of the problems mentioned about K-II arose from not knowing what was in K-I, but others were real problems.

But: most of the problems mentioned are now either fixed or roughed in (to be finished when my head recovers from the trip.)   Foreshadowing on a number of fronts has been moved forward to the first or second chapter.   Conflicts are pointed up earlier.

I was able to talk over K-II with Editor while I was in NYC,  in moderate detail, and the good news is that she understands I can’t fit the rest of the story into K-III…there will have to be a K-IV at least.    The things that need to be connected and pieced together to form the final design (such as those sleeping magelords out in Kolobia, from Luap’s book and Paks II, and finding out what the necklace Arvid gave Paks really was, and why Old Aare really fell, and why the elfane taig Paks found became banast, and why dragons worry about fire, and many other things about the square of the hypotenuse)  are just too many and too tricky to compress.  Not to mention the people and their personalities and so forth.

While in upstate New York, I had a chance to talk to a couple of classes at the parochial school where my friend is the librarian.    Naturally someone asked how many times I had to rewrite things.   (It varies.)   But K-II’s first chapter has had at least a dozen (two dozen??) re-writes.     It’s better.  Is it good enough?  Don’t know yet.