Paksworld

My US publisher offers 50 pages of a new book free every Friday, and today that’s Echoes of Betrayal.   Read fifty pages, plus some paragraphs I wrote about the process at http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2012/02/50-page-fridays-elizabeth-moon.html .

There’s a new page up at the Paksworld site,  history stuff mostly, to place the current books in the deep-history context.     Yes, I know there are still typos.  My webguru caught several, but missed a few, as did I.  We’ll fix as our mutual schedules allow.   If you go there from the front page instead of the new page link, you may need to refresh your browser.  The history page is under Info/Background, and Background was previously empty.

Having had a final round of “Just fix this bit right here…” from my agent today, Book IV is now with NewEditor.     All but that chapter’s work got his approval earlier in the day; the past 8 days have been busy but apparently fruitful.   Book IV grew back up to 170,800+ words, as my agent felt I had compressed some parts too much.     (Since the book has been, since it’s supposed first-final-length, everything from 180,000+ down to 156,000 [when stuff was clearly missing!] and many, many points in between, a tad under 171,000 is probably a healthy weight for it.)

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In the book I’m working on,  the Company is once more camped near Ifoss, as in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter.   In that book, the Company camped on the west side of town.    Now they’re camping on the east side.  Moreover, the town’s changed some (as most towns did, during and after Siniava’s War.   Paks at that point didn’t care whether the town had a grange;  it does…on the west side.    Ifoss is still the smallest of the Foss Council cities, but its wall is no longer complete; expansion after Siniava’s War (the war to end wars, in the locals’ minds) led them to breach the wall to the northwest, while retaining most of the rest.    Several inns are mentioned in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, and without my notebooks it didn’t occur to me to reuse any of the same names.  Until now, when–looking for something else–I ran across them.  So  there’s another bit of revision to be done.

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Vonda N. McIntyre (a writer whose work I hope you’ve read)  has been posting some snarky comments about  the verb “seem.”     It seems that some writers seem to find a reason to seem uncertain about things going on in their books…they seem unable to say what someone felt, only what someone seemed to feel, seemed to think, seemed about to do, etc.   “Seem” has its uses (every word has its uses) but some words seem to fit a writer’s need not to say exactly what he/she means.   Thus, “seem” upholds the banner of “weasel-words.”

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Agent had some worthwhile comments on Book IV which sent it back to me for more work.   This will result in an added chapter early in the book and the “perking up” (my term, not Agent’s)  of some fairly large chunks considered “flat” as well as showing one character more active and tough than before (hadn’t realized that character had softened that much between books.)     Some of that will involve shortening, and some will involve lengthening, as usual.   Agent has contacted Editor, who gave permission for an extension to do the work he suggested, pointing out that we could send her the version I sent him today, or a better version in ten days.  (Agent has had the book since January 20 and I appreciate the fast, analytical reading Agent gave it. )

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My mother was a terrific knitter (and seamstress, and designer, and needlepointer, and…well just about everything.  Engineer, nurse, built some furniture, designed everything from houses to ranch pens to clothes, carved wood, painted pictures…and made biscuits I will never equal.)    Watching her pull together a knit-in-the-round sweater with no seams (especially one of the patterned ones) was a visual metaphor for what I do writing books (I realized this years later, after she’d died.)    You could talk to her while she was knitting a sleeve.  Often you could talk to her while she was knitting the body.  But when it came to The Joining, when the two sleeve tubes were mated to the body tube at the correct angle , with her signature little cable running up the join,  when there would be enough double-pointed needles in the project for several hours  to make it look like a torture device, there was no talking.    There was silent removal of empty coffee cup and setting down of a filled one.

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I can’t remember if this question has been asked here, but it comes up in other venues, at least, and I’m in the mood to write a little about it so…”Do writers really need a big vocabulary?”

That’s kind of like asking a world-renowned chef if she really needs all those spices, herbs,  ingredients, all those pots and pans and tools.

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What you send to Agent or Editor varies with the kind of book, but I’m now working on the not-book parts of the submission package.   NewEditors who are assigned in the middle and latter parts of a group of books–especially something as complicated as the Paksworld books–usually appreciate something that will get them up to speed quicker than just reading the whole (in this case eight previous) books.   Copyeditors always like to have a list of unique character names, words, etc.   And that’s what I’m doing now, taking a break from the wildlife management report for a few hours to work on this.

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Book IV left via the electronic express this morning, after a brief conversation with Agent on the topic of titles.   It’s gone off with an obviously not-suitable (but descriptive) title that will ensure Editor realizes it needs a different one.    It’s going first to Agent,  who will read through it just in case I’ve missed something really awful, and then to Editor.    And it’s out of my hands for right now, which is WHEE! time.

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