Paksworld

It’s not here yet, because my web designer is over in London having Christmas with her family (her son married an Australian living in London–they got married in Denmark and are now living in London.)   And she’s retiring in March (this is Not Fair: she’s younger than I am and I’m not retiring yet!!)   But there will be a new website and blog specifically for the SF side of my writing.   You are the first outside the business to know (my Editor thought this was a great idea, as some of my SF fans are adamant about not sticking a toe into the Fantasy area, lest they be sucked into the swamp)  but never fear–if you’d rather hang out here,  I plan to mirror some of the content there over here (possibly not some of the straight science links I’m planning to include–your opinion on that is welcome.)   And this area will not go away.   There will be more short fiction coming out if things go as planned, and perhaps more long stuff later.

That  blog will be called “Universes” and, like this one, embedded in its site.  In this case, that site will be encapsulated in my main site, thanks to the ingenuity and cooperation of the site host and my web designer.  The Vatta books will be one “universe.”

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With the book away, and many undone things to accomplish, what’s the next step?   The day after its departure, the tree removers came and took down three trees in the back yard, none of which I was happy to see go, though they were dying branch by branch and endangering the house or a neighbor’s.   Lack of them completely changed the yard as a wildlife habitat (much more sun, much less overhead cover from the winter hawks and falcons) so most birds disappeared for most of the following week.   In the meantime, the oaks went into full color change, two weeks later than last year:

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Cold Welcome flew away to NYC yesterday morning,  right when it was due, but I was too wiped to post about it then.  It went off at 129.863 words,  and I think all the words are in the right order, though I suspect there are errors.   I’m still not satisfied with the formatting  for the transition signals I sent to readers, but Word was being such a pig about things that it took me much longer than it should have to mess them about and increase the clarity quotient.

Meanwhile, three more dead or partly dead trees in dangerous locations have been removed by the tree removal crew, the HVAC people put in a good stack for the furnace, roofer returned today to reset and caulk the collar for the furnace & hot water heater stacks (he had insisted we needed to get the stacks installed properly by modern standards)  and I started the toe decreases on one of the turquoise socks (the left one.)

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At one time we had an old (by CenTex standards, where ash trees frequently do not live past 40 years) and lovely ash tree shading the entire front yard at the house my mother lived in when she died.   In the last 5-10 years, it’s been dying by inches, not helped by the long drought from 2007 to 2013-14.   I don’t have a picture of it at its best.    We felt the job was too big for us to tackle with a couple of ropes and a small chain saw.  This is what it looked like just before the tree removal people arrived this Monday.

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At this stage of revision, I always wish I had another two weeks.  Or a month.    There’s always one…more…problem bit to untangle, that I think would benefit from more time to analyze and think about.  And then another, in the next section.  However, things are progressing appropriately.  The holes are filling in,  the once-blurry places are sharpening into focus, and though I’m dealing with some decisions made earlier that I might make differently now, they’re working out with some fierce hammering and welding.   (Clever ideas.  Clever ideas are the ones that seem so shiny! and smart!  at the time, and that flow easily in first draft and then…toward the end…reveal themselves to be more clever than good.  For instance, the…mumble-mumph.  How do you mumble-mumble and mumph-mumph so as to have a crisis *here* that requires characters to appear to have a random emergency giving you-the-writer the opportunity to lay the hook for the string that will later be pulled, so when something (errummph?) is revealed, the reader will feel a connection–yes, there was a foreshadowing but things were so hectic I missed it–and thus the revelation is not a deus ex machina.   Though of course all this backstage work IS the writer being the deus ex machina.)   Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, those are roofers tearing off shingles at the house my mother owned when she died.  Our son lived there awhile and stays there on weekends, as do guests.  It’s where we have parties, too, as it has  more room than our house.   It will soon have a metal roof, which should last longer, given that we have hail storms and branches that fall on the roof and squirrels who think getting through roofs is a lot of fun.

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The local PBS station carries as their secondary station something called worldchannel.org, and it had an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google; I saw the last part of it.   Right toward the end, he started bragging on how wonderful Google Books Project was, and how they’d been “litigated to death” (not with their money they weren’t) and how that settlement had been overturned (no doubt with the application of money) and they’d get it all done in time and it was a great service to society.
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My final Dragon*Con schedule, as of yesterday.    I have an hour reading slot on Friday at 5:30 pm (a time when, frankly, I don’t expect many people to show up.   Sensible people will be eating an early supper.   Gratitude will be abundant for those who do show.  Surprise me by stuffing the room with avid fans and something amazing may happen. )

For anyone interested, since I don’t have a new book out this year,  my donations to the charity auction will be Tuckerizations (you get to be a character in something), one for an appearance in a Vatta book, and one for an appearance in a Paksworld story to be published (eventually) as part of a collection.   More details available at the convention.

For the rest of the schedule, read on…

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So tonight the ms. stands at 70,000+ words.   This is after chunks removed and chunks added over the past few weeks.   Front end writing toward the end, and backfilling gaps both.  More chunks remain to be removed, but I’m waiting on the larger ones until I’m closer to the end.   There’s quite a bit of back-filling to be done; some of the writing has been fairly skeletal…the skeleton needs muscle, tendons, skin, and clothing.   Aiming at a finished length of ~120,000, which means 50,000 to do between now and the end of August.  Doable as so much is fleshing out the scenes and the transitions between scenes  (drat–I just has an opossum on the window-screen beside me.  Young one, but well past the cute stage.)  The story itself is moving well into the final stages.

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I strongly recommend James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life.   Some of you may already know about @herdyshepherd1 on Twitter (where I first ran across him), and you may wonder if the book is as good as his tweets.  Better.   You can find lots of reviews now, and his status on the bestseller lists (way higher than I’ve ever been, and deservedly so).  He’s not just reminiscing about his life as  a shepherd…he’s presenting an alternative life view to that most of us are familiar with.  In brief, he’s from a many-generations-farming family in the Lake District, a region that, as he says, is perceived by England as  a national playground, in which the only encounters between those who live there year ’round and those who vacation there tend to be confusing to both sides.  Read the rest of this entry »