Paksworld

I knew re-entry to the book itself might be tricky, as despite brief spurts  it’s been on hold while the map got done.    The spurts, never very long, had gone well, though, and I was hoping that Book would keep in mind that it had not been locked in a closet forgotten.     However, Book has its own ideas of how long is too long, and when today I sat down to get back to work on it for a several hour stretch, it ignored me.    Hmmm, I thought, and opened this file and that (at this point, in a multi-viewpoint work, the viewpoints are separate files), trying to find a character who was awake,  coherent,  and doing more than staring into space with a mind full of vague somethings.

Even Arvid was staring at a wall trying to think what next, with his mind running in little tiny circles of the same three thoughts over and over.   Snap out of it, I said.   He ignored me.    I had left something unfinished  down in Andressat (on purpose–an “in the middle” situation that I thought might be useful later when I needed an easy insertion to writing) and did manage to finish the conversation (but abruptly) and then get one of the participants out of the building, onto a horse, and going somewhere with another person who needed to make a surprising revelation.   The revelation made (and I was thinking “Oh, goody, we’re cookin’ now!”) the  two looked at each other and fell silent, and it was a long way to anything likely to happen.

At these moments, the temptation to spend all one’s facing-the-computer time on other projects grows and grows…it’s like needing to blink.    I stared at the last few sentences.  They stared back.   I scrolled up to the last whole paragraph–to the previous page.  Somewhere in there was the little thread that would become more story if only I could find it.  Unless this was a dead end.  Was it a dead end?

I backed up to the beginning of that chapter.   It’s odd when I read stuff I’ve written but not finished–sometimes, but not always–it’s as if the important characters and events  sort of glow, or raise up off the page or show up in colored print.  As I re-read the chapter, four secondary characters who had been of almost equal importance (I thought) suddenly changed.  Two shrank and flattened,  one acquired a mild glow, and one flared.

The mild glow was the non-POV character in the conversation with the revelation in it.  The POV character in that conversation certainly glowed–you met him in Oath, and will see him again in Kings and he has more story to come…definitely has a story thread in him and is worth following.

But the flaring-bright character wasn’t there (could not be there) and I remembered that he had marked himself as a story-pusher even earlier.  His backstory had come easily.   I could see him doing thus-and-so, which would be of use to other parts of the plot, and had semi-planned to go that route.   But it wasn’t yet time or didn’t feel right, and when I had tried to think how he would go about thus-and-so, it never quite developed.

So I contemplated, staring at the screen, the flaring-bright character.   He wasn’t with the POV character.  Could he be another POV character?   But I’m trying to be economical and not have too many this time.   I slid into his head.  He was angry, hurt, knew he shouldn’t be that angry, was angry anyway, and in a tangle of temper with which I’m only too familiar, was heading off to Do His Duty in the kind of clench-jawed, resentful, I’ll-show-you determination that leads to falling flat on your face when you  trip over your shoelace.   Not, however, worth a POV segment.

Who knew where he’d gone?    Did he just storm off without letting anyone know where he was going?   He’s married–would he tell his wife?   He’s on horseback–did he tell the groom who brought the horse out, saddled?    He left a note, I think.    But there are two possibilities, which I haven’t yet chosen between…though I’m leaning toward one of them.

All this isn’t typed up yet, but when I realized I’d been sitting staring at the screen without touching the keyboard or moving for so long I was almost frozen in place and had a fierce headache…I was hit with a sleep spell, clambered up and into the bedroom, and took a nap.  But I remember the plot thread and am about to write it (yes, it’s after midnight.  But I had that nap.)   Book needs me.  I need Book.