Paksworld

NewBook I has had a partial read by Agent now, and I called to find out what his reaction was so far (about 1/3 through it.)   Still some concerns, things to work on, so I’m back in revision mode sort of,  hoping to also get back to work on NewBook II while it still has life in it, so I don’t have to revive it from coldsleep when NewBook I is deemed ready for its debut in the market.   NewBook I needs to read like the new beginning of something that it is, and now like the added-on “tail” of Paladin’s Legacy, which finished with Crown of Renewal.   Yes, there are carryover characters from earlier books…Aris Marrakai from Divided Allegiance for instance, as a young schoolboy in Fin Panir, right the way through Paladin’s Legacy where he’s a page in the palace in Tsaia growing older through those five volumes and developing a close friendship with Prince Camwyn Mahieran.  That friendship, and the future of both boys (Camwyn’s older by three years but they’re both too young to be squires, for instance)  is left in doubt at the end of Legacy, after Camwyn’s critical injuries from an iynisin attack and his removal by Dragon for a chance at life.

So far, Agent says, the first chapter or two of the book doesn’t feel like a new start.   And, of course, if it IS a new start, that means it’s a new entry point (potentially) to the entire story-universe for potential new readers, and new readers need  some background (can’t insult them with “You should’ve read the previous 10 books”)  without boring those who’ve read the previous ten books repeatedly and know exactly who all the repeat characters are.   The question of “simple straightforward “Here’s the background you may need” vs. trying to slot in 10 books’ worth of background without reducing the story proper to endless lumps of infodump” has been raised, and when raised in this blunt fashion makes it clear that “Background in the forward” would be kindest to all.  If it’s short enough.  (It’s also becoming clear to me that with this many books–and words!–in print,  there needs to be some kind of place where ALL the stuff new readers need is in one place.  I thought I’d done that–before even starting the Paladin’s Legacy group–in the Paksworld website, but it’s not working as well as I hoped, even considering that Legacy doubled the number of volumes and the wordage.)

So…once again into the breach to build the story-wall up so the whole thing is sound and will work for most (never all) readers.    No writer really enjoys the moment at which “Needs more work” (whether in those words or couched more gently)  is uttered instead of “Amazing, wonderful PERFECT in every way!!” but every writer with some insight knows that books (and stories) DO need more work more often than not, and that reflection will show how true it is that this one (whichever one you just finished) does in fact need more work.   (The same is true in every craft and art.  A choir full of really good singers still doesn’t sing a big piece perfectly at the first…or second…or fourth…rehearsal.  “Begin at measure 83, all the way to the solo…” and everyone suppresses a groan but then sings it better.  The best riders in the world on the best horses are told by their coaches “Need more work on your core, horse needs more work bending through the body to the [left/right], less rein and more leg.” etc.)

I will be more absent than present unless I have more news, which isn’t likely anytime soon.  Agent’s buried in work, and I’m about to be.   This is also posted in the Universes blog, for the benefit of anyone dropping by either location.

Though Kieri Phelan, captain of Fox Company, was confident he had behaved well in the matter of raw youths spying on his bath–and just as glad it had not been a murderous attack by Pargunese soldiers–he was not at all sure the youths had really understood the magnitude of their error or his reaction to it. Of equal interest, a youth he would have expected to be with them…had not been.  Duke Verrakai’s kirgan, usually one of that group in the commanders’ tent…usually, in fact, standing next to Kirgan Marrakai and Kirgan Serrostin, sometimes between them…had not been with them.  Duke Verrakai and Duke Marrakai appeared to occupy a secondary level below that of Duke Mahieran, and slightly above Dukes Serrostin and Elloran.

A mercenary commander, Aliam had told him, must know as much or more about the power structure of employers as the employer knows about the commander.  You’ve met a prince of Tsaia, a future king, and he’s mentioned offering you a contract?  Pay attention whenever you see him among his nobles.  So Kieri had, and knew that Verrakai and Marrakai were rivals, and not friendly ones.  That Serrostin and Marrakai were friends, and Elloran was afraid of Verrakai.  That Kirgan Verrakai, whose father was not friends with Kirgan Marrakai’s father, had been cultivating Kirgan Marrakai for some purpose not yet clear, and yet…had not taken part in yesterday’s hunt.  Had the others told him?  Deliberately not invited him?  Or had he chosen not to go for reasons of his own?

He puzzled over this and the currents of ambition that swirled among the older men, not just the dukes but the counts and barons.  The nobles were not skilled at war of the type he himself knew best, but quite skilled at the methods of courtly intrigue, wielding small units of influence as skillfully as a man might use a small weapon–a dagger–to penetrate the weak points in armor. As in fighting physically, some were more direct and others more apt at ruse and guile.

Verrakai was certainly that kind.  For himself, he knew Verrakai deeply resented his having a direct contract.  His attempts to discredit the upstart mercenary were not so obvious as to catch the prince’s attention–always courteous, always mild, little corrections that weren’t, seeming deference to Kieri’s practical experience, but with little suggestions and questions that hinted at his concern Kieri–so young for such expertise but of course mentored by the famous Halverics–might not quite measure up to the task they laid on him. Under them, Kieri sensed both hostility and more military knowledge than most.  He had found the man annoying, but he found many non-soldiers annoying–a risk of his experience, Aliam had said–but now he wondered if Verrakai and his Kirgan were part of a coordinated attack…but on what?  The Marrakai family as a whole?  Or more?

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He was wet, naked but for boots, and armed, already out of the water, partway to them, sword in one hand, dagger in the other.  His clothes lay on the grass at the water’s edge; he had stamped back into his boots without their hearing or seeing him do it. He stopped when they rose from the grass, some of them already turning to flee.  Kirgan Marrakai frankly stared; the man’s pale skin was finely striped with scars, perfectly aligned, overlain by later scars clearly from war-wounds: larger, more irregular, one or two still colored darker.  And yet the body itself–he had never seen such perfect balance of muscle and bone and sinew.  Or such a perfect mask of indifference to his situation: naked and alone before wealthy men clothed.

Then he grinned.  “Oh, come, gentlemen, as I suppose you to be.  Sons of nobility.  Surely all of you are not afraid of one man, even if he holds a sword!  Draw yours, if you would feel more comfortable, while I go and dress.  If you want to enjoy the water, I am through bathing, and the pool has been refreshed by the river’s flow; it will not taint your…purity.  And it is a perfect coolness today, refreshing without biting.”

Every syllable etched as finely as any courtier’s, with a precise fraction of indulgence, courtesy, scorn, and humor; Kirgan Marrakai felt striped by it, as the captain’s body by whatever had scarred it so.  He felt his face heat with a telltale flush, and his friends, he saw, felt the same.  Damn the fellow!  And then the fellow turned his back on them, heedless of their reaction, and walked back to his clothes.  There on his back, the same pattern of fine scars as on his front, and on one firm buttock, what could only be a brand.

Horror forced the indrawn breath he heard from all of them.  The man shrugged, pulling on a shirt, toeing off his boots, carefully holding his sword in one armpit and dagger in the other, while pulling up his trousers, his socks, fastening the belt on which hung the scabbard, and sliding his weapons home, stamping back into his boots, then turning around.

“So, then: have you seen enough? Is your understanding now complete? Because if you want to see anything else–”

What else could there be?  What other horrors?  Kirgan Marrakai felt sick, and saw that Kirgan Serrostin, his closest friend, was faintly green around the lips.  Had he actually thought of what else there could be?

“–Then we must come to blades,” the captain said.  “I think we would all benefit by not doing so, do you not?”

None of them had drawn a blade.  None of them wanted to draw a blade now.  They all, knowing each other well, had the certainty of nervous cattle that what they all wanted was to get back to the army, their safe herd, and never speak of it again, at least to anyone else.  Maybe someday, when two or three were alone together, it might be mentioned but…not now.

He gave them a long, level stare out of grey eyes feral as a wolf’s.  Then a sharp nod.  “Good.  We understand one another.  I am returning to my unit.  Please do not follow me closely.  You may go ahead, or aside, as you please, of course, but I really can commend the quality of the bathwater here.”

As he came up the rise, they parted, as for a prince, and when he had gone by they did not turn to watch, but stared at the ground awhile.  No one wanted to bathe there.  Kirgan Marrakai wondered if he would ever be able to strip off in front of his father’s body servant–or anyone else–again.  Inside his clothes, his body felt alien to him, wrong in some way.  He knew it wasn’t flabby or misshapen, but he felt ashamed even so.  It was days before he realized that what it lacked was scars.

They came back to the camp slowly, reluctantly.  Would the captain have reported their spying on him? There was nothing wrong with seeing another man bathing naked in a stream…they had played in streams and ponds naked before.  But they knew–and knew they had known when they did it–that sneaking after someone, some particular person, to peer at his nakedness, hoping to see something laughable or disgusting, was different.  Not honorable.  The Crown Prince would not, they knew, approve.  Their own fathers would not approve.  They could not approve themselves, or each other, and each one sought for another to blame. Kirgan Marrakai saw them glance at him and look away–he was the one who had told them about the captain.

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The other parts will come later this week, God willin’ and the power stays on, the roof stays on, and I get some other critical things done.

Back when I was writing the original DEED, I often wrote extra bits from various POVs.  Side stories, I called them.  Didn’t have internet, didn’t have any place to put them, hadn’t been published yet.  Some of those stories stuck to my mind and when, in time, I had misplaced printouts of them, and was back in Paksworld, I wrote newer versions in Word.  Various times, some older, some newer.  This is part of a group of incidents involving Kieri Phelan on his first independent contract for the Crown of Tsaia (he’d been a subordinate commander to other merc commanders or nobles who needed a small unit for some reason.)   Pargun had invaded Tsaia north of the Honnorgat; this army was combined of the feudal levy and one little bitty merc group: Kieri’s.   A single cohort, one hundred.   Siger (yes, the same Siger) was his sergeant.  None of the captains you’ve seen before; not even Arcolin was there yet.  For most of the people in that army, he was a complete unknown,  with no family, no friends, no history.

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Kieri Phelan’s First Command

As the Tsaian army marched out of Vérella, unit after unit swung into line.  They were on the road to Pargun, to take back the land the Pargunese had invaded, and they were full of confidence and pride in their numbers.  The Tsaian Royal Guard, in its rose and white uniforms led the way.  Every feudal troop, under the small banner of its local lord, and the larger banner of its lord’s lord, and those highest lords–the dukes–following (and not exactly under) the banner of the royal house, the rose circlet of Tsaia.  All the nobles accompanying their troops rode, though except for cavalry units the troops marched.

All but one.  One small group, one hundred and one strong, infantry with short swords and shields, marched under the pennant of no land-holder at all, but a mercenary captain.  Maroon bars bordered the white center, and a small maroon fox mask smirked out at the world from the white.

Its commander marched with his men, on foot, through the dust that hung over the the whole army.  His clothes, maroon with white trim, like his troops, were coated with dust, gray or tan from whatever soil they marched over.  His face was masked in dust, his fox-red hair dulled with dust.  His armor coated with it.  And this dusty, increasingly unkempt-looking unit marched directly behind the Crown Prince’s entourage, because this unit–holding a contract directly from the Crown–ranked equal in standing–according to the Crown Prince–with any other that had contracted directly with the Crown, and the Crown Prince himself had dictated the order of march.

It was ridiculous, and many of the nobles or their sons had mentioned–with delicate courtesy–to the Crown Prince that it was perhaps injudicious to so honor a foreigner, a mere mercenary.  “If I’d known you wanted a mercenary unit, I could have hired you one,” Duke Verrakai had said.  “No need to deal with him yourself.”

Young Marrakai, his father’s Kirgan, had said as much to the younger prince, two steps farther from the throne.  “Any of us could have hired him.”

“Yes, but Gerry wanted to.”

“But why?”

“I have no idea.  I asked and he told me to figure it out for myself.  He’s a bastard, no doubt of that–no family anyone heard of anywhere…”

“Any history at all?”

“Was in Halveric Company–”

“Ahhh.  Lyonya, then.  A bastard from that family?”

“I heard it was not, but you know–bastards.  Some people don’t claim them.”  That with a sniff.  The Mahierans, at least, acknowledged theirs, which made it fashionable to do so and less fashionable–honorable, they would say–not to do so.  Kirgan Marrakai had often wondered if his father had sired any, but was afraid to ask, given the lectures he’d received as he grew into the ability.

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(Part One)

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Time for some snippets, yeah?

This one will not be in the final book….it is the original start of the book:

Camwyn had no memories of his childhood, only those begun in a dark cave, when he woke from grievous injuries.  He knew of his past only what he’d been told by Dragon.

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This was followed by pages of past-history stuff and landscape descriptions that (aside from describing  a gorgeous view of the Vale of Valdaire and a good opening shot for the movie, maybe)  have nothing to do with the story because he’s never there again.   Also, there’s no tension.  People who’ve read the Paladin’s Legacy group know who Cam is, what his injuries were, and that he’s lost his memory.  People who haven’t will be thinking ‘How many pages of infodump before I have a reason to care about this character?”

Worse, the next person being shown is thinking about how disappointed he is that on his last trip over the mountains, there’s fog and he can’t see his favorite view.   Interior monologue with nothing happening but the fog lifting and a horse whinnying.  Ho-hum, ho-hum, the starting point is dumb…and then it goes into pages more of trivia that’s interesting to ME, because I was working back into this invented world, checking that Fenis Kavarthin & Sons were still in the building they’d been in that previous book, that this and that were in the right place and the right kinds of interactions were going on. Fine, for a book on the economics of merchant-run late-medieval cities, but this is supposed to be a story.

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So now we have the result of a complete mental reset:  When the problem is a static passage, nothing really going on, AND it’s in the POV of a known character who’s a protagonist…don’t whittle away at it hoping for something better.  Take a big leap.

The blade lay lightly, but dangerously, on his neck, just under the side of his jaw.  “You haven’t paid your bill,” said the voice in the dark.

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The next sentence tells you who “he” is…Ilantides Balentos.   Those who’ve read the short story “Mercenary’s Honor”  may have a vague memory of an Ilanz Balentos who was Aesil M’dierra’s uncle and the reason she became a merc commander.   Ilanz in that story is a middle-aged merc commander who helps a village win independence from its greedy neighbor city, and when that city hires a much younger Aliam Halveric to attack, and Aliam sends out his squires to a recon mission, Ilanz meets Kieri Phelan for the first time.   Between then and now is a story of the young Aesil M’dierra and how she met Aliam and Kieri in dire circumstances–unfinished, still.  Maybe now I can write it.  Ilanz left his company (and some money) to M’dierra when he died.

This isn’t Ilanz; this is Ilanz’s much younger relative (and thus, more distantly, M’dierra’s relative.)  You don’t yet know who the other person, the voice in the dark,  is (and won’t, thanks to, ummm, errr, mmph, and mumble-mumble-writers-keep-secrets.)   But you know, every one of you, that you do not want that voice in the dark in YOUR bedroom, and you already suspect Ilantides may have a shady side.   You also want to know if the guy gets his throat cut and what happens next.

Does this 13 page segment connect to anything else in the book?  Yes, it does.  It foreshadows events already written some chapters later (and thus was easy to think of and write) that make other connections…and so on.   So when mmmrff happens, readers (the more astute ones) will be thinking “It’s those Balentoses!” while at the same time wondering if fffnnf can possibly make it out and can vlkksr get there in time.

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But remember the entire first chapter had problems of insufficient forward motion and insufficient tension.  Yet certain precursor things had to happen before other things could.  A had to meet B.  B had to not meet C.   D had to misjudge a situation.  And so on.  So what should come after that 13 pages that makes it clear the initial engine is putting tension on the same overall plot, getting the whole thing rolling?   Who gets the next POV slot, and why, and what do they do with it?

To keep the tension on, the next logical POV will be either the other conspirator or…another potential victim. The other conspirator has no further appearance in this book, as who he is, at least.  Readers are free to think he took part in a certain nefarious deed, or to think he was in another part of the same organization.  Doesn’t matter.  Another potential victim is already in the book, several chapters ahead, and was going to be in chapter 1 anyway, but from a different angle.  Well, then…make the next POV that of that potential victim’s POV and take a first look at Protagonist through that potential victim’s eyes…and at Balentos through that victim’s eyes as well.    Another big leap.

So the next POV is Aesil M’dierra’s but not in an exciting moment, though exciting moments are referenced, and a Significant Moment occurs in that POV segment when she walks into The Golden Fish and sees an obvious newcomer.

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She noticed a striking young man at the front window table, richly dressed in yellow and black over mail and–her experienced eye recognized the way the cloth laid over it–breast and back plate.

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Other necessary nubbins have been dispensed in this POV section before this moment, relating to the matters her cousins have kept bubbling on the legal stove, adding to the tension of *that* plotline, but this is where another and major plotline’s rubber hits the road.  The naive reader (the one who hasn’t read the previous volumes) doesn’t know who he is, and even the experienced reader–though perhaps guessing correctly–isn’t sure either.  The last black and yellow colors shown so prominently down here were–as far as readers know–on Siniava, the Honeycat.  Who IS this fellow?  Why hasn’t he doffed his heavy-weight armor, or taken the coif off his head?  M’dierra (experienced readers will know) knows every merc commander in Valdaire…this isn’t one of them.  So who and what is he, and what is he up to?   That’s revealed in their conversation, or the part of their conversation that’s shown, so the main direction of that plotline seems to be clear and straightforward.  The book is going to visit a place none of the previous books have shown, but that’s been mentioned a few times.

Another POV section is coming, which introduces two well-known characters from previous books but in different roles, and foreshadows (obscurely) a major road-block in the major plotline that’s just been shown, though the actual roadblock isn’t at all clear.  One of those two is the second, co-equal protagonist.  And Dragon, who, though a plot-mover, isn’t a protagonist, and gives readers the chance to question Dragon’s good will, sanity and, um, “wisdom.”   If humans have holes in their logic, and gaps in their knowledge, how is it possible for a creature of such length of age and vast experience and desire for all to be wiser…to be so blind to certain things?  Why isn’t Dragon the perfect deus ex machina, instead of…well…fallible?  Or are the humans just misunderstanding the nature of the beast, so to speak?

But that would be telling, not showing, says the mischievous writer, running off to work on other chapters.

The New Book is now at 82,000+ words and still going strong.   It’s feeling like a “long” book, more like other Paks-world books and less like the SF books, which usually finished up around 120,000 to 130,000.   The Paksworld books, as y’all know, run 150,000-plus.   I can’t tell yet if it’s actually going to be multi-volume or not, but it keeps gaining “weight” (and so am I as I write it…which isn’t good, but I’m not going to strangle this book for the sake of dropping a size of jeans! )   Minor characters are acquiring the kind of backstory that could mean they’ll be more important in a subsequent book.   Locations are waving signs at me saying “Important things happen here!  Right here!  Look at this terrain–you’re going to need it!”  There’s another pregnant woman in this story and it’s summer and she’s uncomfortable because she may (or may not) deliver by the end of her husband’s part in this book.   She’s not major (yet; she has potential)  but her husband is a plot-mover by position;  he’s also just a wee bit OCD about some things (they don’t have OCD in their vocabulary but you know what I mean.  He wants to get everything exactly, precisely, to the nth degree right.)  There’s a horse with a problem, a family with several problems, a Marshal Judicar who remarkably learned some humility between the last book he was in and this one (he, like everyone else, is older, but I didn’t expect him to do that; I thought he’d be crustier.)  I will admit that my own once-broken ribs ached in sympathy with those of  a character hanging over a pit,  and that childhood experience in crawling along a ditch under thick vegetation plus seeing real hedges in England resulted in someone having to crawl along close under a hedge while enemies were searching for them on the other side.

So far there’s not enough food in the story (may be why I keep eating while writing??)    There are horses and a few dogs, a fire in a hay barn, weaponry including hay forks, lances, poles, sticks and stones, swords, daggers, crossbows (no longbows yet), and chamber pots.  Blame a little book in Fondren Library at Rice U., which I checked out over and over; Welsh Ballads ed. Ernst Rhys had a poem about a medieval wife who defended the home fort when her husband was out raiding, driving off the intruding force with the amount of stuff she and the other women threw down on the attackers.  It ends with a little praise of the husband’s fighting skills, and then says:  “but better still than Ievan, Ievan’s wife!”  Cities, yes.  Towns, yes.   Places where villages were, but haven’t been for years.  Ruins. Locations known by what used to be there (still common in rural areas–we were once given directions to someone’s house that included “turn onto the road just past that pasture where [name if person who used to live there] had that big paint bull.”  Roads in several Texas counties weren’t given numbers for decades, even now some are known by the name of the ranch at the end of the road (Greenwood Valley Ranch, for instance, in Real County.  That’s ree-AL County, and it means “royal.”)   That road wanders through two other ranches before it gets to Greenwood Valley where there’s a little airstrip in the narrow valley and hills all around.  Anyway, Old Forge had a forge once, and was a village, but now it’s a wide spot in a grass-and-dirt road where the Woods Way ends.  More-or-less south of Old Forge, the road meanders on, and eventually through, Serrostin lands, and more-or-less north it crosses the River Road between Verella and Fin Panir.

So far, the story’s working toward the second meeting of two characters, and this volume may end with that.   But there are floating loose ends that may bump into one another and lock on.   Where’s Dorrin, these days?   Is Torfinn still king of Pargun or did he die, and if so did his youngest son inherit or….?  Ganlin of Kostandan married the king of Tsaia’s cousin Rothlin Mahieran,  but what about Elis of Pargun?  Arcolin’s adopted son Jamis has turned out to have a gift for languages, and speaks gnomish better than Arcolin…and has also learned the horse nomads’ language…ability like that doesn’t exist for nothing; he’s going to have an interesting life one way or another, besides inheriting his father’s lands.  Will he also become a gnome prince?  Or…um…find a horse nomad girlfriend?    In the back corners of my brain, where the shadows are and shy little mouse-like ideas come out at night to see if they can find some cheese and grow bigger, there’ve been some high-pitched squeaky discussions of Old Aare, which isn’t just barren sands and heat anymore.   People are starting to sail over to take a look; some ships (not the largest) even dare to venture into the great bowl that was a shelter for multiple harbors at one time, and look at the plants now growing in the shores and the wild animals and think about moving in.

Meanwhile…it’s late and I need to write more tomorrow.

When a horse’s cerebrum–the thinking part of its brain, small compared to the rest–is treated as an external storage device for about 30 minutes of a particular human memory by a dragon who is looking for a place to stash that memory so the human in question can’t reveal something the dragon wants kept secret, the horse is immediately faced with an terrifying situation.  The horse cannot understand human memory, but it can feel the emotional surge of that memory (it was a very, VERY emotional memory)  and it knows these new surges are connected to its owner/trainer.

When the owner is with the horse (best case) the horse has much less cognitive dissonance to trouble it.  This is a horse bonded to its human from the hour after its birth; it’s been trained by its human, and its human is a steady reassuring presence in its life.   Extra emotion is familiar (the human is a person of strong emotions.)   The horse can check in with its senses–smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight–and its excellent memory of *horse* experience–and identify the extra emotional surge as just like its owner.

The difficulty comes when the human (or the human’s father, another familiar human) is not with the horse for an extended length of time.  When the human…is sick, or injured, or forcibly separated, and the horse encounters only those it hasn’t worked with closely.  Then the emotional surge of unassimilated human memories conflicts with its own horse-memories and the horse–for want of a better word–goes crazy.  Nothing makes sense anymore.  The smell of its owner, the touch of its own, the sound of its owner’s voice, are all gone, and what’s left is the intense emotion of its owner but without the owner’s presence.  The horse wants to find its owner but it’s not allowed to go find the owner.

The dragon expected horse and owner to be together and thus made no provision for protecting the horse.  After all,  a horse’s cerebrum is small: somewhere between a walnut and a lemon in size, if you should take that layer (it’s flattish) and roll it into a ball.  Yet–to a dragon–a horse’s use of its cerebrum is limited to the simplest of “thoughts” and there would be ample room to stuff in those memories where they’d be safe, and yet unused and unavailable to the human until the dragon came along to reverse the procedure.

Why would a dragon, who prizes wisdom, do something so obviously (to us) foolish?   It’s impossible to understand dragonish motivation completely (at least for me) but dragons do like to carry out their own plans, and by their overall powers, they’re usually able to bend reality to their will.  The dragon had a plan for certain people to meet in a certain way at a certain time, and neglected to calculate the likelihood that any two humans in an urban area may, however unlikely, encounter each other.  Perfectly normal random events, strings of them for both individuals, put them in the same place at the same time.

We could say the dragon over-reacted, or was having a control-issues moment, but whatever the cause, the horse is now carrying its owner’s memory of that encounter and the owner is…in a life-changing situation.  The dragon isn’t there anymore (it’s off doing something else, and is confident the horse and owner will continue as it expects…)  The dragon has many dozens of irons in its fire and hasn’t thought it needed to revisit these two new ones (the man with a memory gap of the same length that the horse has the memory dump) for another year and a bit.

Writers are even trickier than dragons…that dragon’s in for a surprise.

Most of you will know that four years and 5 months ago I was bucked off, landed head down, and got a concussion that messed with my brain quite a bit.  It was only about six months after the previous concussion (that one involved a mountain bike and a pothole with an overbite) and…yeah, damage is cumulative.  At first I couldn’t read more than a few sentences at a time (short simple ones) and couldn’t write anything.  Also couldn’t knit worth beans, and couldn’t read music either.

Long story shortened…it became obvious over time that although I recovered the ability to write coherent prose, I could not write fiction anywhere near my previous standard.  And after four years and–was it two, or three, failed book attempts???–I pretty much quit trying and worked harder on what I could do to recover physically and the rest of mentally.

Then, out of Paksworld,  in May this otherwise frenetic year, came an idea begging to be written.  And very tentatively, I started.  And it…moved.  Breathed.  And is now behaving like my other books, in that it pulls me forward (rather than me trying desperately to push it forward) and hands me what I need to do a scene or a sequence, and has built interior and exterior connections the way a book-length work must.  It’s at 35K words now, and shows no sign of quitting.

This book is set after the end of Crown of Renewal, and though a lot of familiar characters are in it, they’re older and in a different time of life than they were.  They’ve grown up, or grown out into new dimensions, or aren’t where they used to be.  Well, except Dragon, who lives on a scale of time and space the humans (even the half-elven humans) don’t have.  There’s Prince Camwyn, who was perhaps 15 or 16 when iynisin invaded the palace in Verella, and his friend Aris Marrakai, two or three years younger, who woke and discovered the danger but all else were enchanted.  Camwyn’s been gone for years now, in Dragon’s care, it’s thought, without any memory of his past, Dragon has told the king.   Aris, grown to be of age to squire Arcolin in Aarenis, still misses his friend and worries about him, feels guilty that he wasn’t faster that night.   Dragon wants Camwyn on the throne of Horngard, the mountain kingdom in the Westmounts  from which Arcolin fled long ago, as an abused bastard.  Horngard has declined even more since Arcolin left, a series of bad kings and worse councils has left it poor, depopulated, half-forgotten by the rest of the world…and prey to banditry and petty tyrants warring over scraps and rags.

I’m a very happy writer, grateful that if the same plot daemon isn’t back on the engine room, someone is keeping the revs up and the process going.  If you’re going through a bad patch in your work, whatever it is and whatever caused it…I hope you have a similar experience of unexpected success.

What’s the best/fastest/easiest/most efficient way to get published? What was it when you started?  (Not the way I did it, is the honest answer!)

Many writers have a stack of manuscripts gathering dust on a desk top or filling a box or two tucked into a closet or under the bed.  Some of them will end up with published books, and some of them won’t.  And the reasons aren’t always the relative quality of the books.  Sometimes it’s the decisions they make–the same ones I made that kept me unpublished for decades.

I started writing fiction at six (lousy fiction) and by high school had discovered and started writing science fiction (probably also lousy) and daydreamed about being a writer.  For money.  My very practical mother inquired how many cents a word writers got paid; ANALOG listed its pay scale.  And how many words would I have to write every month, even assuming every word sold, to make a living, she asked.  As a high school student, a minute of calculation immediately led to “I can’t write that much every month!”

Without further research, I gave up the notion of supporting myself by writing. “Everyone knew” that you had to write and sell short fiction before you could write a salable novel.  “Everyone knew” writing a novel took many years.  I accepted all that, and dropped “want to be a writer” in the same slot as “want to be a fighter pilot” and “want to own a horse ranch with 25 golden palominos, 25 collie dogs, and have a dozen children, including three sets of twins.”  Impossible.

Through college and after I continued to write (because I couldn’t stop) in a sort of wistful-hopeful way, vaguely expecting that if I was cut out to be a writer, someday a spotlight would beam down on me, and a James Earl Jones kind of voice would say “YOU are a writer!  Grasp the torch.”  It doesn’t work that way.

Meanwhile, I was doing other things and learning a lot.  Military service followed the history degree, and while in the military I programmed computers, learned to backpack and camp out on mountain trails, sew, do needlepoint, make jams and jellies from wild fruit, read topographic maps, identify local wildlife and plants (new to me: Virginia is not Texas), take better photographs with a good camera, and more.

I married, moved back to Texas with my husband after we left active duty, got a second degree in a different field, and started graduate school (my thesis committee consisted of a microbiologist, a geologist, and an ecologist.) Hiked, learned to ride over fences, learned to set a line of traps for research, started making my own bread, pickles, preserves, did very successful organic gardening on our tiny lot, raised a few chickens for eggs and meat.

Moved again, back to my home town, leased (and later bought) my first horse, moved again, joined the local volunteer EMS and learned a lot more about rural medical care and pre-hospital care than I’d imagined existed.  So none of that time was wasted, really.

We landed here, in a small town, where I had no prospects for employment other than volunteering (which I did–Library Board, elected to City Council twice, plus the EMS work.)  And–to keep my hand in, I thought–I audited a writing course at Southwestern University, telling myself it was a last chance and if nothing came of it I should quit writing.  That class, taught by the wonderful Dr. Lois Parker, changed me from a “hopeful but not practical” daydreamer to a determined writer.  Finally, finally, I began to treat writing in a businesslike way, the same way I had history, biology, chemistry, horse training.  I started sending in stories (all rejected, by the way.  Lots of them.)  When a tiny opportunity opened up to write a weekly news column for this town in the county paper, I applied–and got it.

Every week I turned in 800 words on whatever might interest people here–mostly not real news but personal interest events and chat.  School honor roll lists, a bake sale for the library, a loose calf in someone’s garden, family reunions, gold and diamond anniversaries.  “Real reporters” covered school board and city council business; I covered the other stuff.

There’s nothing like a weekly deadline, a defined word limit, and a paycheck (however tiny) to get a writer headed in the right direction.  Though it wasn’t “writing every day” it was writing with intent.  Besides the money, I got feedback from the folks in town every week when the paper came out.  When I started writing the Paks books I already had a couple of years of experience, and had learned more about the business of writing and publishing.

I joined what was then the Austin Writers League (now the Writer’s League of Texas.)  My income from the newspaper column paid for the gas to drive down to Austin and back once a month for meetings.  Soon after I finished the Paks books, AWL offered a one-day science fiction workshop.  So I found someone to care for our son that day and went to it. (My husband worked Saturdays.) Howard Waldrop, the instructor, said the most important thing I’d heard yet: Send your manuscripts to editors whose choices you like to read.  That one sentence got me my first two sales because I had been doing the exact opposite.  He also suggested that we all should attend that year’s NASFiC, in Austin.  I did that, too…with those two sales in hand.

“Bargains,” to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress III, and “ABCs in Zero-G” to Analog, were very different stories, both connected to personal experience.  “Bargains” is a Paksworld story, based on my own experience with a bargain horse; “ABCs…” is a hard-SF story straight out of my EMS experience.  I started it one cold winter night riding in the back of the ambulance on the way back from the regional trauma center after getting the last blood off the floor.

I never sold another story to Bradley, but I soon had two more sales to Stan Schmidt at Analog.  When they came out the following year, a young man named Joshua Bilmes saw them, liked them, and wrote me, saying if I ever wrote a book he’d like to see it.  I replied that I did have three completed books, but  they weren’t SF, they were fantasy.  He was willing to look at the first one. Then he asked for the others. Then he offered to represent me.  Meanwhile, I’d gone to my first WorldCon and asked Stan Schmidt what he thought of the agency Joshua then worked for and found out it was his, too.

That’s how I got an agent.  The same agent I have now, thirty-two years later.  He started trying to sell the Paks books, initially with no success.  There was considerable resistance then to a woman writing military fiction with a female soldier at the center of it.  I had somewhat huffy (my perception) rejections from a number of well-known male editors on that basis, firmly sure it was impossible/stupid/ridiculous to have a woman soldier in fantasy and even worse to have a woman *writing* it.  What could she know?  I did some muttering and grumbling in my lair.

The last rejection came from Baen Books, whose senior editor then (Betsy Mitchell) had liked the books, but Jim Baen had rejected them without reading, for the same reasons as the other editors.  But his comments got to me, via my agent.  That was the final straw.  I replied (not to the publisher, of course–I had that much sense–but to my agent in a fairly…firm…tone.)  Joshua claimed the paint peeled off the mailroom wall when my letter arrived.  I doubt that, since most of the letter was perfectly rational documentation of factual error, and anyway, I did know what I was talking about, harrumph, being a veteran myself.  (Hmmm…maybe there were a few scorch marks, after all.)

Joshua went back to Baen, pointing out that his writer was a Marine veteran, and the dismissive rejection without reading was an insult.  Jim Baen changed his mind, read the books, and then published them.  Moreover he told that story on himself, repeatedly. I respected his willingness to change his mind, and even more his willingness to admit error in public.   And now we’re here, all these years later, and the Paks books, in either the separate or omnibus edition, have been available ever since.

Thank you, Joshua, for persisting.  Thank you, Jim, for that change of heart.  Thank you, Betsy, for not just editing these books, but teaching me how and why editing decisions are made.   Thank you, Baen Books, for giving me that break and the start of my writing career.

What’s your writing process?  How do you come up with all that stuff and how do you keep track of it?  These questions come up naturally considering the middle book of a trilogy, where there are more complications than resolutions.

The writing process is deceptively simple (even simpler now, with a computer and printer, because I don’t have to put a sheet of paper in the typewriter every few hundred words, use white-out, or literally cut and paste to make changes.)  Seat of pants on seat of chair, fingers on keys, GO.  And keep going.  For hours.  For more hours.  For days, weeks, months.  Stagger up now and then to use the facilities or input water and food.  Until it’s done.  Then edit, and edit again, and then start the next one.  Scream loudly when the power goes off in the middle of a backup, when a hard drive decides to self-destruct, when the backup hard drive is corrupted, when the roof leaks onto the computer (yes, it did) and then start again.  And again.  Until it’s done.

Everything else is a refinement.  Music: I write to music a lot, mostly classical music, which generates writing rhythm for me.  I need it less now (my mind can play music though not as well.)  Food: dark chocolate is particularly useful when the writing is harder than usual, otherwise something that doesn’t need time spent to prepare it.  Time: I started out writing in long solitary stretches, but learned, when we adopted an infant, to write long books in short (even five minute) bursts, holding a paragraph in my head while changing a diaper or feeding or cuddling the baby, then–the moment he was down for a nap–running in to write as fast as I could.  That had not been my plan–my plan was that the baby would love being in a sling snuggled against my front while I typed.  That was not the baby’s plan, and writing epic fantasy (or anything much) while a struggling screaming infant is whacking you with that tiny little fist destroys concentration on anything but the baby.

Remember: you don’t FIND time to write; you MAKE time to write, whatever it takes in terms of lost sleep, undone chores (other than feeding and cleaning that relate to the baby), no recreation (other than writing), no social life (other than baby/toddler/child.)  If you want the book written, it’s up to you to figure out how, because nothing but doing it will get it done.  You can (I did) write a book a year while caring for and home-schooling an autistic kid.  And you can enjoy both.  (No, I’m not saying it’s easy.  Just doable.)

I do my best first-drafting if I start fairly early in the morning, because I wake up at or just before dawn, completely awake and hungry.  I want food, some exercise (mucking out a stall will do; a short ride will do more–or, lacking a horse, a bike ride or swim or brisk walk) and then the story is live and nudging me to get in there and write.  Some days I could write straight through until late evening, but now I need a long break and a nap as well, before the evening surge of energy.  For the entire first volume, I had long mostly empty days to write in and a horse to care for and ride.  Even with the old typewriter and those uncooperative sheets of paper, it went fast.

Keeping track of the details was another issue.  I had charts (Paks’s recruit cohort: names, and who died when.)  Although I had technical-looking small maps of each combat encounter, I didn’t have area maps until the second campaign year, when one of my first readers commented that no matter which way an army approached a certain city, it had to cross a river.  Was the city on an island, she asked, and if so, shouldn’t I mention that?  It wasn’t.  I had created a city that jumped from side to side of its river.  A map fixed that.  That first map grew to cover all of Aarenis, and then spread north to cover the Eight Kingdoms.)

I kept lists of character names, place names, names of plants and animals, words specific to this story-world, short bits about legends, myths, religions, customs.  All these went into a 3 ring binder.  Many of these names required searching through various dictionaries (we have quite a few) to find what I needed, and some required the help of a friend who spoke Latvian.  (Why Latvian?  Old language believed to have very close ties to the original Indo-European.  Some wonderful root words in there.)

In November 1983, when our son arrived,  I was partway through the second book, had my reference notes tucked into the notebook, and a brand new computer (IBM PC with two floppy drives and 256K RAM) to replace the old Corona half-electric typewriter I’d inherited from my step-grandmother.  I had chosen WordStar for its versatility, and loved it.  Would still be using it, if it would run on newer machines.  Baby and all, having a computer to write on saved me a lot of time in both writing and editing, almost enough to keep on at the same pace.  Sleep was overrated, I thought.

Since my brain thought the story was all one thing (though too long to fit easily in a normal size volume) I had no “second book slump” with Divided Allegiance.  And that brings up the issue of a series versus a multi-volume story.  A series has separate standalone stories, each in one volume.  Detective series with the same detective/team in each are an example.  The story arc is complete in each volume, though elements (detective, sidekick, office politics) may carry through. Each book, standing alone, is rather like one in a row of storage units.  In contrast, a true multi-volume work has one main story arc that needs several volumes to complete, while each volume has sub-arcs in support of the main one (think Gothic architecture.)

This means that the middle part of a multi-volume work holds the keystone of the work–it’s the volume that holds the entire  story together.  It’s where the infinite possibilities of the rising curve are controlled, limited, and forced back down in a definite shape toward a definite end.  Which means the middle volume is where you find out if the initial concept has what it takes to center and control that long an arc.

Is there enough “stuff” in the story–not just wordage, but complexity, both in characters and plot–to sustain the tension of such a long arc?  A middle book may seem weaker (a less defined beginning and end for that volume) but have the strength, when the reader finishes the whole, to show that it’s the right middle, a true keystone.  Or it can fail, by not tying the others together–and the failure is usually a matter of attempting a perfect internal arc with too little connection to the larger one.

So, deep in the story as it developed through Divided Allegiance, I was excited to realize that it was behaving like a very strong keystone indeed.  Writing the actual keystone and the downward arc, however, was anything but the same fun I had had with Sheepfarmer’s Daughter.  Unlike readers (who had to survive the end of it to get to the final volume) I knew as I wrote that what seemed to be desolation would not last forever  but it was still hard when the characters’ flaws–clearly there in the first book–had their inevitable outcome in the second.  It’s still hard for me to read, years later.  But it would have been dishonest to make it easy.

Once into Oath of Gold I could see more of where the story was going.  I hurried on, in my increasingly short periods of writing, as we entered the home stretch of the race between my first book and our son’s becoming able to walk.  He beat me by five days, in early January 1985–but close enough.  The story was complete, all the parts in the right place.  Now it was time to turn 2500 sheets of paper covered with words into separate manuscripts ready for submission.  I would have had a nice long nap–but I had a very active toddler in the house.