Paksworld

This morning I planned to start work on Book Two as soon as I w0ke, and in fact had planned an ambitious attack on it while dealing with a click beetle in the bedroom last night.   (Click beetles, which show up in the house in late summer, are small, harmless, but noisy little beetles that are more active at night and markedly interfere with my sleep.  Last night, for instance, one crawled under my pillow and started jumping and clicking right under my ear.)

Anyway, when I turned on the computer this morning, I had email from the Orbit UK, where they’re working on the omnibus Deed of Paksenarrion and proofreaders had found anomalies.  Could I please check them out?

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Fortuitous combination: a couple of days ago,  I got my contributor’s copy of the October Writer’s Digest in which I have a (commissioned) article on SFWA.  Naturally it became the instant “in the throne-room” reading (it’s new, it’s different) and though I’m no longer a novice writer, there’s still stuff to learn.

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I’ve been told I’ll be getting the page proofs early in September.   This is the step that produces ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies, or review copies.)   As of September, we’re only six months from publication…scary thought.

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Progress continues on both the revisions of book two and the first-drafting of book three.   In the original Paks books, I wrote parts of the second and third book in parallel almost.   Here I’m finding revising two while writing three to be just as useful–since the things are So Darned Long, working on the previous one helps with continuity.   A lot.

So…what’s happening now?

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The growing tip of the story is alive and moving in the third book.   At the moment, it’s growing with a chapter in each of several  viewpoints.   There’s Arcolin having breakfast in camp, about to confront some annoyed gnomes, and Dorrin watching the children learning to make pastry, and Andressat about to make a very important announcement to his family.   I’m not sure what Kieri’s doing, because I’m not sure the end of the second book won’t change by the time I finish the revisions of it.

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Yesterday I finally (!) got the copy edits boxed up, taped up, and ready to go when (out of the blue, literally) a storm landed on top of us and for over an hour we had lightning, wind, and (wonderfully) rain.  The power flickered on and off and I declined to go out in it, risking the manuscript, until things settled down, which they finally did.   Then I drove the 20-something miles to the Kinko’s/FedEx place and handed over the box to the nice fellow keeping the doors open until closing time, and drove back home, lighter in heart and pocket both.  (You really don’t want to know what it costs to send over 850 pages of paper ‘overnight’ to New York City from central Texas…)

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There was a glitch with the copy edits…which I haven’t talked about much if at all.   They didn’t come, and didn’t come, and finally I was told that they weren’t able to contact the copy editor.   I tried to be a Good Little Writer and just keep truckin’ on the revisions, but as time passed, I worried more and more.  (So, of course, did my editor.)

The worry began to interfere with my ability to concentrate on the book (no, I do not possess superhuman concentration) and I began to spend more online time far away in another corner of the internet.   Nature listservs, email, the new SFWA website’s beta test…anything…

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It’s been small steps this week, for various reasons.

There was the first test of the new meat saw over at the ranch, which resulted in the need to make lamb curry (need is a relative term.  We like lamb curry a lot.)    But that took up a morning–not the single cut, but cleaning the meat saw afterwards.   In Paks’s world, there are no big meat band saws…there are big butchers with sharp knives and cleavers in the cities, and experienced persons elsewhere.    It’s easier to clean a knife than a band saw, but harder to cut up the carcass.

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Apologies, to start with…I could not bear to see the cover image slide down out of sight…hence the lack of posts for a week.

But I haven’t been idle in that time.   No, the copy edits aren’t here yet, but some structural problems in book two…aren’t here still.   They’re fixed.   Here’s what happened.

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First: Happy Canada Day to you Canadians.

Second:   This may make you laugh.  It did me.   Critical scene–critical in terms of reader spatial orientation as well as reader “what’s happening” orientation.

And I got both direction (east v. west) and possibility wrong.   It was a plot bomb, and I was writing as fast as I could, but still!  East is east and west is west and if you go the wrong way you end up in the wrong place.   And one little three-letter word (“not”)  makes a huge difference.

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