Paksworld

After a nice canter of 1400+ words this morning,  the total count is now over 120,000.

The Count of Andressat and I have had a big surprise.  It’s harder on him, as it gives him a bad case of familial cognitive dissonance; for me, it opens interesting plot vistas.   I meant to get back to Arvid today, and I may, but what’s happening in Aarenis is driving the situation that Arvid finds himself in, and I needed to figure out exactly who did what when, so the chronology would be straight.

I do hope this won’t prove to be one of those times I followed a false trail and have to undo it, because this trail has complex consequences and undoing *that* is arduous.

This has been one of those days.   Not only was I interrupted, not only did I have other things than writing that had to be done today, but it was a gorgeous spring day and I didn’t get out for a walk at all.

As a progress report it’s a dud:  not one word on the book today so far.  For anyone contemplating a career in fiction,  you need to know these days happen.  They’re frustrating to infuriating, especially when you aren’t goofing off on a gorgeous spring day photographing flowers, or fishing your favorite spot, or lounging in a hammock with someone handing you iced drinks and delicious snacks at intervals.    If you aren’t getting work done, at least you should get to enjoy it.

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2612 words today, for a total to date of 115,093.

The plotbomb may have more to say, but I’m done for the day.

In the interest of more enticing and informative post titles,  I’ve decided to date progress reports from now on.

Current word count: 110,415

YIPPEE!

I pushed farther than my hands like, but I really wanted to get this far.   Hands will be fine in the morning…it was just over 3000 words, not 4000, which is where they really yelp at me.

Sometimes it’s good to push.

Though the repairs, etc., and some Other Stuff slowed progress, it wasn’t entirely a dud week after hitting the 100K mark last Tuesday at midnight.

The current wordage is 103,260.

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100,127 words by midnight Tuesday night.

Interesting stuff, some of it, too.  Kieri is having to cope with a very difficult situation and he’s settling down and putting his strategic mind on.

Can an ancient elf-queen be wrong?   Can she, in fact, screw up in a major way?

Inquiring minds will find out, once I know all the answers.  I don’t ever know all the answers until later (which means some re-writing, where I’ve gone astray, guessed wrong.

I’d like to stay home and work on this today but it’s not possible.  Plumbers coming to rip out the toilets and put in new ones,  a guest to pick up at the airport 60 miles away, business conferences, Ash Wednesday services, choir practice…

As of Sunday evening, the current wordage for the new book is 97,129.

There are problems with that scene, but I can fix it once it’s all out in the open…

Chances are excellent that I’ll hit 100,000 on the book this week.   There are other things going on in our lives, including plumbing work that needs doing, dealing with bureaucracies (academic and governmental both), so I may not get as far as I’d like, but…it’s quite happy to be written, now that I’m able to write again.

A cloud on the plot horizon that I wasn’t sure would head this way has now headed this way…I think we may find out (if not in this book, in the next) how the elfane taig became the banast taig that Paks and Macenion stumbled into.    There are threads that begin to look as if they connect to other threads…life would be easier if I could outline, but not nearly as much fun.

The new front page at the Paksworld website is now up.  If you’ve been there before you may need to hit Refresh or Reload or however your browser does it to see the new design.

Eventually the other pages will have a top design but not as big as this–maybe a green banner with the page title in gold or something–simple, anyway, and not taking up too much room.

Jennifer Davis did the digital form of the artwork from my sketches; I played with the colors; Ruta Duhon of Willowbrook Designs put it all together and kept me from going astray.

Hope you enjoy it.   (Now to quit playing with custom colors and “how many weird things can I do with this interlacement” and get back to work on the book proper.)

My artist friend Jen handed over the digital version of the title block design for the Paksworld website and I got to play with coloring  inside the lines.  Jen worked from my very crude design, done with a rollerball pen on graph paper, and made it beautiful.

The challenge was to find a design that would scale up and down and still evoke the complexity of the world I’m writing in.   We started over a month ago (before Jen was called in) and I started showing sketches to my web designer.   This produced a series of encounters  that went roughly like this:

Me: “See this?  Isn’t it gorgeous?  I want something like *this* bit right here, but mixed with this other thing over there.”

Webguru:  “Do you have any idea how many pixels that takes?”

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2374 words today

81, 712 words in Book II

A difficult day of writing, switching from desktop at home to laptop at various destinations in Austin, then home to finish up the day’s wordage.  Lots of backing and forthing–erasing whole paragraphs, re-writing.

In late morning, I heard through the grapevine that my editor had been let go–confirmed later by a phone call my husband picked up after I had left for the city.   I thought Liz was excellent and very much enjoyed working with her.  I’m being handed to another excellent editor, but parting is not sweet sorrow when you’ve had a good working relationship with someone and hoped to have it continue.