Paksworld

Under the heading of research:  yesterday disappeared in 13-14 hours of preparing for and beginning the process of converting a 1500 pound bull into meat in the freezer.    This isn’t myfirst experience of home butchery, but it’s certainly the most strenuous and exhausting, and finding one’s limits (no, I could not lift the bull’s head by the ears…nor work the whole time without lengthier rest periods than some of the others involved) is not fun.

On the other hand, every particle of experience is story-material, somewhere and sometime.   A friend from the city had wanted to see what it was like (and boy, did she get a large dose of it!)  and the glee on her face as she got to drive a tractor for the first time (well before things got messy) was worth the whole thing.

In reference to the Paksworld books, it was on the same ranch, before I had even started the first one, that I realized how different the details of  life would be–and were, in reality, in our world, in some places.   I’d gone over to help work cattle–and another family had come as well, with their kids, including a 4 yo little girl.  (They raised hogs.  After working the cattle, we all went over to their place and helped immunize the young ones and castrate a boar.)    Anyway, the little girl, who’d been on a farm her whole life, looked at the pool of blood where one of the calves being dehorned had bled, and said “Pretty red!”

At the time I thought of a story I’d recently read, set in a typical fantasy setting, in which the heroine reacted to the common conditions of her village (muddy, smelled of pigs and cattle, etc.)  as an urban person in the 20th c (it was the 20th, at the time of this incident) would:  eeeuw, dirt!  eeeuw, smells!  eeruw, blood/manure/urine.    As, in fact, I was inclined to do, but was controlling.

People living near train tracks come to ignore the sound of the trains.  People living in a house with smokers don’t smell the smoke residue in the house.   The familiar is unremarkable or barely noticed…the important thing about a pool of blood is that it’s red.

The important thing about a dead 1500 pound bull is that you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.