Paksworld

Having shipped off Book II late last night,  I’m now shifting to Book III until Editor comments on II.   The transition from the end of II to the start of III is fairly seamless, leaving aside what two certain people did for a few hours.  Imagination is your friend in the wilderness.   (It wasn’t wilderness, but oh well.)

Wanting peace doesn’t always get you peace, if the other side (person, faction, nation) would rather have war, or at least your stuff.    Several elements in these books are of that inclination.  Some showed their nature back in the original Paks books…we all knew at the end of Sheepfarmer’s Daughter that Alured the Black was not a nice guy.   He’s still not a nice guy, and changing his name to be more “noble” (in line with his purported noble ancestry) hasn’t helped.

Others are a surprise.   More will be.   In any family (a family you’ll see a bit of in Book II, but more of in Book III) with a lot of children and enough stuff to wrangle over, at least one sibling will feel slighted and resentful.    That sibling may simply sulk for decades, but may also decide to get back at the others.

Some characters are really hard to figure out.   Back when I wrote “Judgment” for The Dragon Quintet, I set it in the past of Paks’s world–pre-Gird, even–because I knew there had been dragons in that world, but thought they were all gone or at least far away.  I didn’t expect one to erupt into Book II.   I was then bound, to some degree, by the character of dragons as set up in the earlier story…and I needed to figure out why a dragon would show up in modern times, so to speak, when they hadn’t been known in the Eight Kingdoms for centuries.   At least with volcanoes, they stand there smoking now and then…they don’t fly in from Somewhere Else.

Dragons have different, but very strict, notions of right, wrong, justice, and fairness, and wiggle room is not in their vocabulary.

I’d best get to it.