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We have achieved Title for the second book: Kings of the North was a clear winner with Editor and Marketing, I heard Friday. Now to put the correct title on the header line of all the chapters now titled “Kieri II”. I’m not at all sure that KOTN has the same appeal as LOTR.
Comment by David — February 6, 2010 @ 10:39 pm
I like it. It ties in nicely with “Oath of Fealty”. Keep them coming.
Comment by beth — February 6, 2010 @ 10:49 pm
I reckon people can cotten onto that title. Heh heh.
Seriously, I like it. And I have my suspicion about which kings it refers to.
Comment by elizabeth — February 7, 2010 @ 6:37 am
Glad you like it! Editor will be glad, too.
Comment by Kathleen — February 7, 2010 @ 10:25 am
Kings not King — hmmmm So we’ve got another one floating around in the book. This should be interesting.
Comment by elizabeth — February 7, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
I like the title–it was the first one I came up with that I DID like.
More than one king? Sure…this is the Eight Kingdoms we’re talking about. Let’s just hope they don’t turn from human kings to Nazgul. (You’re safe: there’s no One Ring. There is a…no, wait, that’s a really BIG spoiler. And it’s nothing like that ring. Promise.)
Two of the Eight Kingdoms don’t have kings–in Fintha, kings were abolished when Gird won the war. Prealith’s king is weak, for a king–it’s another human/elven blend, sort of (very sort of) and also, thanks to its coast, much more commercial–its human inhabitants look to the sea and trade. Dzordanya…well, we *think* they don’t have a king. They’re very insular, Dzordanyans. But Kostandan, Pargun, Lyonya, and Tsaia have kings. The Ladysforest has the Lady, who, if she were male, would be a king. Sort of.
So there are kings available. It would be impossible to write about Lyonya’s king without acknowledging the existence of the strongest neighboring sovereigns, and they do sometimes…interact.
_Oath of Fealty_, in fact, produces a Tsaian king in addition to Kieri. Kings of the North produces another. I restrained myself from adding yet another (and aren’t you glad?)
Comment by arthur piantadosi — February 7, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
This is Arthur. The title sounds like Bernard Cornwell’s title “Lords of the North”, though not for the same reason. Is it a reference to the Nordic based Seafolk, or Kings in the other Eight Kingdoms?
Comment by elizabeth — February 7, 2010 @ 6:34 pm
I’m not saying yet, Arthur. You will meet one other king in the first book, besides Kieri. You’ll meet another in the second. The third book is too close to the beginning to know for sure if another will get involved.
The contrast is kings of the north to the would-be king in the south, Alured…who got a burst of grandiosity back in the original Paks books.
Comment by Malcolm — February 7, 2010 @ 6:50 pm
To paraphrase Gandalf, “Elizabeth’s Kings are never misplaced, they always arrive precisely where they mean to.”
I’m looking forward to this (having, with difficulty, come to terms with the fact Paks is not a POV character), I’m only sorry that it will be 3ish years from first book to the last in this series.
Comment by elizabeth — February 7, 2010 @ 7:03 pm
The first three Paks books were written before any of them were published…before I’d sold any fiction at all…so they could come out closer together. I’m writing almost as fast now as I was then, but I can’t go faster without risking worse books. Sorry…but I suspect you’d rather wait for the next than have a slapdash job done. (And if you’d rather have a bad book…sorry, but I wouldn’t be happy with it. I have to be happy with it first, and then Editor and then…we all hope…you.)
Comment by Malcolm — February 7, 2010 @ 7:28 pm
Sorry,
I was assuming 18months between publication of each book rather than writing speed. I apologise for not being clear. My assumption was that even if all three books were complete it would still be something like that length of time before they were all released.
I will happily stand in the corner and wait patiently while the writing bit happens…release dates make me gnaw fingernails.
Comment by elizabeth — February 7, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
Publishing houses differ in their ability to push things through, but in this case they’re hoping for a yearly publication date. Considering that they’re giving me gorgeous original artwork on the covers, and the books are big and thus take longer to read (for Editor) and longer to work over (for copy-editor), they need as much time to produce them as I do to write them. We’ve already had the cover art conference for book two, for instance. I need to write like a bandit and turn these monsters in early.
This does mean (certainly meant for Oath of Fealty) that Editor may need to ask for revisions that–if I’d had time to finish the whole group and rework it as a whole myself–wouldn’t have been needed. But then again–Editor is a fresh but experienced eye and can do it now, rather than (if I had it all to myself, my preciousssss) another year or so before you saw the first one.
The approaching release date would have me gnawing my fingernails to the elbows if I weren’t paddling hard to keep afloat and moving forward.
Comment by Eir de Scania — February 8, 2010 @ 3:52 pm
Well…as long as you don’t do a GRR Martin on us, we shall not complain!
Comment by elizabeth — February 8, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
Things that have delayed books in the past (I think only one was actually delayed past original deadline, but I let them know early; the others were tight but not late): illness, hard drive crash just as moving into final polish (yes, I had backup. But I needed a new machine…nearest source was fifty miles away and of course it was a weekend…), and a death in the family (that one did require a change in deadline.) Travel had become a serious delay on my end, forcing longer work days to make up, so I’ve cut back a lot on travel–fewer conventions and appearances. I was losing two weeks’ work to every trip, plus the time on trip–partly because I was getting sick every trip.
Comment by Layla — February 14, 2010 @ 9:11 pm
I love the title! Better than some I’ve been passing around in my family.