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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Fewer words (1000) today, as I paused to deal with other writing-related chores, including fine-tuning the timeline for the series of battles.   And then there was the trip to the city, so M-  could ice-skate and I could not-fence and instead sprawl on the couch and discuss various writer-things with DRW (whose comments on crossbows you have, I hope, read) and J- and C-.   Spoilers will appear below the cut, so choose your level of preferred knowledge.

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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 »

Even though I just found yet another unfixed rough spot  in the new book,  Book Two is almost certain to take off for NYC and its Editor tomorrow.    What rough spot, you ask (thinking, surely this writer has filed off all the rough spots and polished them smooth by now…)

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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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About three days ago,  one of those ideas hit me that could be really good, sort of interesting, or not at all the right move.    It’s very spoiler-full, so here’s your first spoiler warning…if you don’t like spoilers, skip this post.

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I think I mentioned that thanks to reader comments I’ve now found a way to change one of the A- names (Alured the Black) to something else for a logical reason in K-II.   Alured considers his current name too plebian and associated too closely with his criminal past, so he wants a fancier name.  He has some genealogical records that he thinks relate to his real parentage, so he picks a non-A (not his reason but mine) name from among them.

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Just to return to where we are, sort of…

Location: Chaya, in Lyonya, the day after Kieri arrives.  He has gone to see his cohort in the inn where they’re housed.

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