Paksworld

As you may have noticed, I also cook…bake bread, make stock and soups.  So the kitchens of Paksworld have always interested me.  What do the people eat, and how do they fix it, and why?

With Midwinter Feast coming up (theirs, not ours) this seemed like a good topic to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

A productive, 2000-word day, in which I finished the POV section I’ve been working on.

A Halveric sergeant and a couple of tensquads meet the unsurvivable and survive.  Well, sixteen of them survive.  For awhile, anyway.   My view of Halverics has always been from the Phelan side…and I thought they were more alike than they are.  (More spoiler warning!)

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I’m basing a lot of my longbow archery on information derived from the Mary Rose bows, as reported in (among other places) Strickland & Hardy’s The Great Warbow, which includes a history of the longbow in use from the Battle of Hastings up to the Tudor period.   (It’s also a great temptation to spend way too much time on details that aren’t plotworthy…how to conserve and then revive bows that have been buried in silt and salt water for centuries, for instance, something no one is trying to do in this book.  On the other hand, the horrible but effective treatment one noble received for an arrow wound in the face may show up sometime.  Not right now, though.)  Read the rest of this entry »

I’m working on a fairly complicated little battle early in Book Three–complicated in part because it includes some weapons types I haven’t previously used in my fiction in something this size.   The forces involved aren’t matched in size, experience, or weaponry…which is sending me back to the history books repeatedly to check that I’m not doing something stupid.  Read the rest of this entry »

Under the heading of research:  yesterday disappeared in 13-14 hours of preparing for and beginning the process of converting a 1500 pound bull into meat in the freezer.    This isn’t myfirst experience of home butchery, but it’s certainly the most strenuous and exhausting, and finding one’s limits (no, I could not lift the bull’s head by the ears…nor work the whole time without lengthier rest periods than some of the others involved) is not fun.

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Writers are often asked (OK, I am often asked) why I put bad things in stories about good people.   What is the purpose, someone asks, of having war, terrible wounds, grisly deaths, and torture afflict characters?    Is it to teach the character a lesson?   Did the character deserve it?  Or was enduring such things the only way to create a paladin?

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It’s Veteran’s Day in the U.S.,  which is a day of remembrance for more than those who died–remembrance also of those veterans who came home and quietly set about rejoining the fabric of civilian life–who became, or returned to being, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, police officers, parents, and so on.

Fictionally, veterans have had interesting “remembrance”…sometimes as foolish, self-centered old men boring everyone with their stories of wars past and demanding privileges that (on examination of their war record) they didn’t deserve…sometimes as heroes looked up to by the community for leadership.  In real life they’ve been reviled (as some were during and after ‘Nam), nearly canonized into faux sainthood, neglected (all too often), used for photo ops by ambitious politicians (all too often), and treated in all the various ways non-veterans have been treated.

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Some of you will remember the “Rules of Aare” quoted and discussed extensively in Surrender None.   Some will also remember the various mentions of Old Aare, legends and stories and songs about that mysterious land and the “fall” of Aare that brought the magelords across the sea.   You know it’s across the Immerhoft Sea from Aarenis, and that Aarenis was named for it:  “Daughter of Aare.”

But the deep mysteries of Old Aare are central to the long story arc of this group of books…what happened in Aare has had consquences affecting the entire north as well.    There are a few hints of this in Oath of Fealty, though it’s mostly concerned with the immediate consequences of Kieri’s  move to Lyonya.    More show up in book two.   Paks unwittingly involved herself in the affairs of Aare, elves, dwarves, dragons,  and magelords even before she became a paladin…everyone she touched is changed by that, as well as just her personality and more obvious paladin qualities.

So a lot of questions will be answered, though I can’t promise they all will be (in fact, probably not.  Just the big ones.)

I’ve been talking about the new new book, book two of the current group, but as I was prowling through book one, Oath of Fealty, checking for continuity on something,  I was reminded of the thinking I did about how people felt when Kieri disappeared from their lives.

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Yesterday was complicated by my first voice lesson with our choir director, and then came supper and then came choir practice, so by the time I got home (sometime after 10 pm) I was not in any state to write.  However, on the way home I thought about the music in the Paks books and the new ones.

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