Paksworld

Book IV continues to behave like a healthy young book that wants to be written.  I didn’t work on it Saturday and it niggled at me.  Came home from church Sunday and it was doing worse than niggling.   So Sunday ended with 1893 words before I could make it let go so I could sleep, and Monday produced 2011, despite my spending a couple of hours in the garden helping Richard put up the support for the peas (T-posts, the pipe from the top of the chainlink fence we’d taken down, and chicken wire.)    Today was a slow start, but ended 2332 words to the good.  So the week’s off to a good start, 6236 words already.

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Book IV continued to go forward at a good pace.  The book is now over 20,000 words (and I’ll probably tinker with it later tonight and nudge it over 21,000, just to watch the turnover, but we’ll see.)

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Book III is no longer Book III, or the tentative title I sent it in with.   Editor (who is a genius, if anyone asks)  agreed that the tentative title wasn’t an obvious marketing winner, and suggested (ta-DAH)  Crisis of Vision.     And I immediately said (after the ritual headdesk maneuver for not thinking of it myself) Hurray, hurray, o frabjous day, a book is born, hurray, hurray.

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Saturday didn’t really count.   Today is the official Day One of Book IV, and Book bounded out of the starting gate and gave me its daily wordage in a little less than 3 hours.    The pace isn’t flat out gallop (boy, the first two paragraphs were!) because it’s a long race and it’s better not to push too hard too soon.  Read the rest of this entry »

Very, very, VERY big plot bomb.   Jaw-dropping for the writer looking at the mass of Story that just exploded into her head and is wondering how the heck to write it as well as it deserves.  This one covers a lot of ground, temporal and geographic.

All praise to the Plot Daemon, who has outdone himself.  (“All right, all right, lassie.  Now will you just go back up there and steer?”)

(Back to work.)

This book…I’ll swear this book wants to drive its writer crazy.   Where did this new character come from?   And why, once she arrived, didn’t she behave like a normal character (if Kuakkgani are ever normal, that is?)    Not only do I now know a lot more about how someone becomes a Kuakgan (some of it I knew years ago, but I’ve learned more in the past couple of years) but I just found out what can happen to a young (in experience) Kuakgan during his/her first spring out in the world.

“The green blood is strong in this one…”

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Pruning, re-ordering, and now gap-filling…chapters have numbers now, and are in what I believe (!) is the correct order, all 33 of them.    Some are much longer than others, and some of the very VERY long ones may be split.    Very short ones may be combined (if same POV and adjacent.)

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As I sit here, I smell the turkey necks and giblets simmering in the kitchen, with a faint whiff of a brownie pie beginning to share the air.   Turkeys are defrosted (finally) and will go in the roasters in the morning.  (We now get smaller turkeys plural instead of the giant bird I used to get, because it’s easier.  And we’re older.)    The ham is ready to go in the oven with a homemade spiced pear glaze.   Guests will start arriving tomorrow morning, some bringing food to share, some bringing themselves only, which is fine.    This is a middling year (big years, we end up with ~20 at the tables; this year it’s 15.  Small is 10 or fewer, small enough that we don’t need to put up another table.)

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Sleep, Shakespeare said, knits up the raveled sleeve of care.   I wish something would knit up the raveled sleeve of prose when loose ends of yarn are hanging out and there’s not a knitting needle in sight.    However, the authorial crochet hook is working hard.  (My mother, who was incredibly good at needlework, pointed out one day that knitting and crochet are the same thing, really, except geometrically in some relationship I forget.  Upside down and backwards, maybe.)

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Though I can almost hear the cries of Woe! No! from here, the braiding process always results in dropping some overwritten sections (or parts of them) and tightening this and adding to that.  Unlike cooking, where once you put the salt or the spices in, they’re in for the duration, writing allows do-overs…trying whether something works and then removing it if it doesn’t.  (Would love to have had that option the time I put way too much tarragon in the tarragon chicken!!)

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