Paksworld

Suddenly I need to find something in last part of the Deed that I just can’t spot in my copy–but I’m sure it’s there.    We’ve both looked and we’re not seeing it.    Somewhere–I think but am not sure that it’s between the time Paks gets to Chaya and meets the dying king, and the time she leaves Vérella following Kieri–someone reveals that Kieri’s elven mother chose to make him look more human than half-elven.

If anyone can find that passage and tell me who said that, to whom they said it, where it was said, and in what circumstance–that would be very, very helpful.   I’m revising a scene where I don’t trust my “new” version of that story told from a very different POV and need to check to be sure they are either in accord or there’s a reason for them not to be.    It’s important to know by what chain of informants Kieri learned this.  This just caught my eye last night.

Thanks.

First a thank-you to y’all for your patience.    It has been a…um…very busy time here at the old homestead.  Tonight is the night of the Messiah performance, and that will make four days in a row of driving to the city for 3+ hours of singing (and on Sunday I drove in early to sing the first service at church, then drove home to do the other stuff.)

Your reward for the patience is a snippet, after a short review of revision progress.   I have finally (FINALLY) got important two important events tied in neatly with all their threads connected.    As I near the end of a book, everything has more and more threads hanging off it (it’s connected to this, that, and the other in various ways–foreshadowings that may go back several books,  links to contemporaneous happenings, hooks set that will turn out later to be significant, etc.    The next to last book in a group is even more rife with threads for every major event, internal and external.   And every one of those little stinkers needs to be woven in, as invisibly as possible, so the pattern is unbroken.    But enough about the work in progress:  Herewith a snippet from the work to come.

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We had two long tables almost full, and a day of food, music, knitting, swordplay,  talk (LOTS of talk),  and beautiful weather.    In honor of Anne McCaffrey,  I had changed the table decorations to include horses, more green, and a large bowl (standing in for the cauldron of plenty in Irish mythology) instead of a wicker cornucopia.   We toasted her life, achievements, and influence in mead brought for the purpose by one of the guests (he made it, which was even more special) and those of us who’d been fortunate enough to meet her or work with her told Anne stories.

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Some distractions I can work right through.  Others…I can’t.   Thanksgiving is one of those others.   It’s the holiday on which I indulge my love for cooking and entertaining occasionally.    Occasionally, because I do a huge lump of work for Thanksgiving, and I’m not going to put out that much effort every week or so, or I couldn’t write books.    Holiday music is another.   Again this year our choir is singing Messiah with the Austin Symphony.   And this year, the first rehearsal was today, Saturday, and the next is Monday…yes, this Monday, the Monday before Thanksgiving.  EEEEEPPP!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.   If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times  (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.   If you know you’re going to write a novel set in an invented world (SFnal or fantasy), then your research must be broad and had better be deep in some areas.

But no matter whether your topic is narrow or wide, some of the research you do won’t make it into the book…at least, not into a book anyone will want to read.  Most of us have read a book that “taught us more about penguins than we really wanted to know,”  written by someone who did a lot of research and wanted someone else to share the pain.

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OK, it’s a tiny little spoiler to let you know this far ahead that there might be a gnomish appearance in this book, but you had a gnomish appearance in Kings, too, so…it’s something even the spoiler-aversives up with it must put.  (And a gold star to the person who recognizes where that bit of inverted language came from and how it changed the way I write.)

Beyond the break is a snippet.

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So this afternoon I was hacking away at stuff, helped by Ms. Rancherfriend who has an excellent eye for the “enough of that, already” passages (she’s the reason the first Paks books did not chronicle every single hour of slogging through the mud. )  And while talking to her, a nagging little worry about a scene you will now never see  (because it Did Not Happen that way!)  suddenly rose up even though she hadn’t mentioned it, and I asked her what she thought about it.

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This snippet from Echoes of Betrayal comes fairly near the beginning…those familiar with Kings of the North remember that Pargun has invaded and though the scathefire may be over, the Pargunese are still around.  Some snippage may occur within the snippet.

Who:  King Kieri is POV

Where:  Between Chaya and the Honnorgat River

When:  Night.  The Lyonyan force is camped alongside a scathefire track

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Since I myself don’t enjoy pronunciation guides in books and would rather “hear as I read” whatever my phonics training hands me, I have resisted having a pronunciation guide for a long time.  But this is the era of audio books as well as printed books, and the books are being read in places were vowel sounds (to name one complication) aren’t like the ones I hear around me.    So it’s dawned on me that what I hear in my head should perhaps be laid out in a way that’s helpful to those who want/like pronunciation guides, without being stifling to those who–like me–wing it, right or wrong.  (In other words, if you hate pronunciation guides, don’t look at it when it arrives.)

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Writer emerges from the undergrowth, stained and ragged and wild-eyed from having taken “the short cut” to getting this thing in order.   Taking it down to be printed somewhere else never happened, due to Lifestuff.    So Writer elected to do it all in the machine (the printer is not happy about churning out lots of pages in a hurry.  Some pages in a hurry, fine.  800+ pages in a hurry…not fine.)   Writer then looked at the mass of thick, impenetrable brush in front of her and spotted what looked like a short-cut game trail.   And plunged in.

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