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When you’re writing a book that covers various seasons, you’re often writing out of season. It’s Texas in late July, and today I was writing about a Midwinter celebration somewhere in Lyonya. The Midwinter Feast I wrote about in Fin Panir, when Paks was there, about to become a paladin candidate, or the one that Gird’s followers had all alone in that winter camp, had covered, I thought, the ground of what Midwinter celebrations were like, and I had not expected any big surprises.
I was wrong. If this is right–and I’m pretty sure it is right, at least in substance if not in detail–it kicks in the top of another Pandora’s box of possibilities. It was also harrowing to write, not least because a change in air pressure between yesterday and today produced a whopping sinus-generated headache. I knew I had to write it, and had to finish the main part of it tonight, but the headache didn’t help.
This being Book III, I can’t tell you anything about it (and I want to–I had to go roust husband out of his computer and make him listen to it.) You’ll know it when you come to it. I won’t be able to process it intellectually for at least a few days, though I’m just beginning to sense some of what went into it (the obvious pops up at once, but the roots go down past that.)
Anyway…2348 difficult words today, and I hope I get some sleep tonight, because someone’s coming to work on the computer tomorrow and give it a voice (this one doesn’t have sound. Mostly that’s good, but I couldn’t complete on online-learning thing I wanted to do because it doesn’t.
Comment by Heather — July 29, 2010 @ 9:51 pm
I’m curious – how long do you tend to write for, in a given day?
Comment by elizabeth — July 29, 2010 @ 9:56 pm
That’s highly variable, Heather, because some days are harder than others and sometimes LifeStuff interrupts. That’s why I have a wordage goal instead of an hourly goal. On a really, really good day, I may have 2000 words by 11 am. Other days I’m struggling to fill the bucket at midnight. I would guesstimate that the time spent first-drafting 2000 words averages out to six hours a day…when I go over that (and I often do) then it’s longer, but how much is again variable.
The non-first-drafting writing chores take up another 1-2 hours/day if I’m being careful, and more if I’m not.
Comment by Heather — July 29, 2010 @ 9:59 pm
That gives me hope for my own writing. Thanks! 🙂
Comment by Amanda Moon — August 7, 2010 @ 6:02 pm
I bet it is super difficult to write about winter when it’s burning up here in Texas. The moment you walk outside, you are practically sweating!
Comment by elizabeth — August 7, 2010 @ 6:15 pm
Actually it’s kind of fun. I get to imagine being cool, even cold. The trickiest thing, really, is remembering to put in precipitation of the season when we’re in a drought. With the first Paks books, I used local weather adjusted for book-season and book-climate…if it was a rainy day in real life, it was a raining or snowing there. This lent realistic randomness. However, long dry spells are not natural to all of Paksworld, so I have to pick a substitute, or risk having not enough rainfall for the vegetation.
Comment by Amanda Moon — August 7, 2010 @ 8:13 pm
That’s true. I would probably forget to write that it rains or snows since it hardly happens here (with the exception of this past year haha) It’s nice to imagine crisp winter air or heavy rainfall once in a while.
Comment by AmyG — August 18, 2010 @ 5:06 am
I wonder if they’d let you go to the supermarket and hole up in the freezer section if you promised them a preview copy 🙂