Paksworld

So…now that I’m well again, and have gotten the two government reports off my desk, and finished another commitment that held on until last night (committees…not my favorite work environment, but someone has to do it sometimes.  Just not me for awhile now)…now the book is trotting briskly ahead and today threw some plot bombs at me.  Lovely ones.

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From one of my mother’s favorite joke verses…and relating to the power outage that had all my stuff offline for awhile this afternoon.    I learned to recite this as a little kid, and I still think it’s funny.

Am he gone?  Are he went? Have he left I all alone?  Us can never go to he; he can never come to we.  O cruel world, to I unkind!  Go he way and leave I hind! It cannot was.

It wasn’t in the “humor and whimsy” section of the big poetry anthology we had, so I have no idea where it came from, nor did my mother.   Online search didn’t find it (haven’t looked lately, though.)   If you do, let me know the author.  At any rate, the power up in north Texas was off, shutting down my hosting service, the wonderful SFF.net/Greyware,  and they were kind enough to post what happened on Twitter and let us know when they got back up again.

The warehouse scene continues to amuse (me, anyway)  although the transitions are still extremely rough.  They feel rough to Arvid, too.

Anyway…a little bitty snippet from today that may or may not be like this in the final version:

…………………………………………………

How many were there?  The report they’d gotten only said “a gang of men” had attacked the grange.  Arvid felt in his cloak pockets–he had only three bolts left.  He glanced behind.  Could he make it over the next roof before they got to him?  Maybe.

………………………………………………..

It has to be brief because it’s a Book V snippet and would otherwise be trailing a cloud of spoilers for Limits of Power.

The scene I’ve been munching in my head for several days (and tried writing today, with mixed results) is one that has antecedents a long way back and needs to connect to an earlier book…without being a copycat scene of a particular scene in that book.   And it has to fit seamlessly into this book, hitting exactly the right note of climax-resolution for its character arc and the overall plot.

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Had a relapse in the health side of things this week and haven’t been out of the house yet.   Nothing to worry about, but another “something going around” which on top of the partly-recovered state last weekend meant…flop.   If I were a laser cannon, my energy charge would have been listed as “expended” in the Weapons Officer’s display.  I’d hoped the Tuesday blah was just the change in weather, but…no.   Husband is also down with whatever it is (at least he doesn’t have whatever I had the week before.)

I have been able to make some progress on the socks and one scene of Book V, though it’s a lot less than I’d planned for.     In that scene, Arvid…oh, wait, that’s a spoiler.  Well…sobeit.  In that scene Arvid uses talents developed in another line of work to save lives.    Arvid sneaking across roofs and into buildings is always fun to write.    I haven’t yet figured out quite how he’s going to manage what he’s going to manage, because that requires more oxygen than is currently available to my lungs on a regular basis.  But he’s in there.

I had to give him something fun to do because I decided that a long stretch of Arvid being snarkily superior to someone teaching him Girdish law was not actually that plot-relevant.  Fun, but not going anywhere.

Thanks to this blog entry by Irene Gallo of Tor.com,  you can see the many steps it takes to get a book printed and bound.    You can probably also see how mistakes could happen–how, for instance, one or a few signatures of one book could end up in the middle of another.   Rare, but annoying if it’s in the book you bought.    My thanks to Gallo and Tor for putting this up–I found it fascinating and hope you do, too.

…is I should be getting an ARC later this week, so the contest is just about ready.

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When I wrote the original books in this universe, I had reasons for everything, but…in hindsight…not all those reasons were good ones.   You remember I told you about the naming conventions…using root-names for characters and then suffixes which suggested (were supposed to suggest) different origins for them, like Seli, Selis, Selits, and Tam, Tamis…??  And you probably remember that, in hindsight, this was sheer h-e-double-hockey-sticks for the copy-editor and probably did not enrich the reading experience nearly as much as I’d hoped.

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I am now spending my days peering carefully, line by line, at the copy of the copy-edited manuscript (on the left) and the page proofs (on the right.)  These two stacks of paper, and the “completed” pages of each (to the right of the right stack and the left of the left stack) take up a significant portion of the kitchen table.  So far I’ve found only two  errors.  One where my correction of the CE’s change wasn’t picked up (same change was picked up elsewhere) and one where both the CE and I missed an original error.   This is good, and I may skim a little faster later on, even though I know there’s a late change to watch out for.

Kitchen table set up for page proofs: from top to bottom, checked copy edit, copy edit, page proofs, checked page proofs.  Pages sticking out toward camera have errors.   Instruction letters from publisher to the right, with pencil sharpener, also 3×5 yellow card w/notes.

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I don’t know if this will continue, but there’s a stuffed cow in Book V.    There’s a stuffed cow in Book V partly because of an email I got some months back, but also because, as soon as I got the email, the stuffed cow appeared in the book.  At first for no reason.  I stared (mentally) at the stuffed cow and it didn’t even look back.  It wasn’t a very good stuffed cow.  It was big, and badly done, and ugly, and smelled some.  WHY was there a stuffed cow in my book?    I understood it had something to do with the impetus of the email, but not what it had to do with the story.

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At my friend’s daughter’s wedding,  I met my friend’s uncle, whose first name happens to be that of a character in Paksworld.    It’s a fairly unusual name in the U.S.    Naturally, she was curious why I had given that character that name, and wondered if she’d said something about her uncle, way back when.

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