Paksworld

2216 words today so far

79,338 in book II

If I’m fizzing with music energy when I get home from choir, I may try to rip off that last 662 words to make an even 80,000 at midweek.

Then, if I can pop the next two days up to 2500 each, I’d be at 85,000 and caught up from the slump last week.    A dangerous game to play, though, esp. with my hands and the need to nurture these blogs.

It feels good to have the routine building in again, though.   I have spurts of greater natural productivity, but 2000/day is a comfortable range for me–enough to keep the story alive mentally, but not the strain that it was last fall.

Editors on both sides of the Atlantic and their respective powers that be (upstairs, the suits, the bean-counters) have agreed, so Oath of Fealty is now the official (until something breaks) title.

The comment from someone upstairs at Del Rey (“upstairs” is a hierachal terms, in this instance, not  architectural)  was that this title would work if we weren’t trying to go outside the core audience.  Which I’m not, though the Paks books have pulled in some very interesting readers.

Last week did not go as planned, and produced only a little over 3000 words of progress, but today I’ve done my 2000 (2084, to be precise) and the total on the second book  is now at 76,184.

I’m working on some fairly gnarly bits.  Dorrin is still dealing with her family’s legacy of evil and their connection with Liart, the Lord of Torments (also called the Bloodlord.)    Some people don’t trust her.

Not saying whose, right now, but there’s a set of royal regalia with its own personality and its own ambitions.   “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” is true, especially if it talks to you even when you aren’t wearing it.

I need to get the last tangles in the broadband connection worked out, so I’m not being distracted by that (or by A, B, C….X,  the other elements in my life that drag me away from the writing.)

Word count is now 70,790

Saturday’s production 1092, Sunday’s 1117.    Home sick, but not too sick to write a little (despite careful separation and lots of hand-washing, caught what R- had.  At least he’s now well or almost.)

Need to bump up production to 2000 words/day.   Doable when I’m well again.

With the slow production in the past week, there’s not a lot to tell..decided to go back and write what happened immediately after the end of the first book (in the POV that now ends that book) and discovered another bit of excitement.  Funny how they can hide in the folds, as it were, until I concentrate on them and pull the story fabric taut.

1672 words so far today, for a book total of 67,430.

This is the second book in the new group, and right now we have Arian out in the forest west of Chaya with some old ranger friends. She’s bringing them up to date on Stuff, and they’re suggesting that she’s the right person to do an unpleasant errand for them. She’s not so sure.

Meanwhile, Dorrin has returned from the second coronation in book one, and still processing what happened there. I need to open up the strands copied over from the first book, when I chopped it off at Midsummer, and figure out what Dorrin did between then and the Autumn Evener, and from then to now (“now” being a day or so beyond the end of the first volume as originally written. Is that sufficiently unclear now?)

Going for a short walk and to feed horses, then I’ll finish up the goal for today, 2000. What’s odd is that I wrote most of the 1600 while waiting for the telephone repair people to call me back.

Total wordage on second book has now topped 65,000.  That’s not much in a week, but it was a holiday week.

That Character who was refusing to do what I said….was right.  We had several long, heartfelt conversations, which I discussed with one of my alpha readers, and Character is right.

I still have to finish an article on deadline before I can get back to the book full-time.

Progress on the NEW new book–the one after the one that will be published next (which is, other than editor-requested revisions and production-related work–done.

Total wordage at the moment: 61,000 words.

New wordage (yesterday and today) 1700+ words continuous, plus some fill-in bits here and there.

As some of you know from my LJ and SFF.net newsgroup postings, most of this was written when I thought it was part of the “old” new book, Blood and Bone. Yes, if you’re going full-blast it’s possible to write almost 60,000 words past the end of a book…sort of like skidding past a stop sign. Now I need to get back up to speed…this gives me a nice start on the next book, which means I could finish it faster than the contract demands. That would be good for all of us. If it’s about the same length as the one I just did, this is just over a third of it. I’ll start pushing for 2000 words/day after Christmas. Or maybe today.

Surprise has already landed on me–I thought things were going smoothly in a certain quarter but discovered last night that Someone doesn’t like Someone else’s father, and this is going to put a very large monkey-wrench in the works.

Monkey-wrenches in the works make for good plots later on, but still…I wanted this one thing to work smoothly and monkey wrenches to cause a problem somewhere else.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled Sunday programming. (I’m home today for two good reasons, neither of them relevant to the topic.)