Paksworld

31 days (or 30 by the time most of you see this) and thus time for a snippet.   In fact, a snippet from the very beginning of Kings of the North.   I don’ t think, this close to release, that it’s going to be spoilerific for anyone.

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One of the difficulties of restarting a story last seen twenty years ago is that for readers who read the original books when they came out–even five or six years later–it feels as if there should be more time between Oath of Gold and Oath of Fealty than there is.   Intellectually, these readers may grasp that the second Oath picks up where the first one left off, but they’ve experienced years in between and they aren’t the same readers they were when they finished the first three books.

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Shifting gears to working on revisions/corrections makes Book IV grumpy and me…a bit confused.    Did I really write that?   What was I thinking?   Was I thinking, or perhaps indulging in stream of consciousness?

In addition, while waiting for the pages Editor is sending with her markings on them (75 pages, she told me today…ouch!)  I have her notes and the notes and comments of two alpha readers and my agent.   One alpha reader deserves the honorable title of Nitpicker Extraordinary (and it is honorable, in this instance) and the other is a Characterization Maven who instantly notices a character acting out of character (or not showing the development that other events show must have occurred.)     Editor is multitalented, of course, so her comments range from deep structure to pacing to surface detail.

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Book IV is now just over 34,000 words.    At the moment, it seems to be settled into a more relaxed pace as I figure out some details I hadn’t needed to know before.    I have Tsaian dukes figured out, pretty much, but not all the counts and barons.  Um….that would be none of the counts and barons, except the names of the ones on the Royal Council.  Who’s hot-tempered?  Who’s phlegmatic?  Who leaps to conclusions?  Etc.  Moreover, who has a marriageable daughter?

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The last “block” of Book III fell into place with the completion of the swordfight at, um, 2:15 am this morning.    So between now and January 1,  there are decisions to be made, and multiple rewrites/cleanups to be done.  More text may need to be added (transition cues, scenes that now,  though not formerly, need enhancement.)     About 4-6 weeks of work is going to have to be accomplished in 10 days, two of which are Christmas Eve (when I have two church services to attend and one to sing in) and Christmas (when I won’t be working on the book–I’ll be sleeping and recovering from Christmas Eve.)  Plus a necessary social thing on 12/26 (annual party at close friend’s house given by her kids…not missing that.)   Hence, “writer as whirlwind.”

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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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Something has been brooding in the depths of the plot for this entire world (not just this book, or the previous, but I’m finding its shadows on sonar of the oldest–in story time–books, Gird & Luap as I re-read them for continuity)  for years.   Now it’s rising slowly  into view.   These are foundation-level conflicts that I’ve never really examined, having just discovered outcrops of apparent bedrock on which to put the foundations of the world 27-28  years ago.

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In Kings of the North, which only the alpha readers among you have yet read,  the POV characters leave Aarenis at the end of the campaign season, so whatever happens there between, say, a few tendays before the Autumn Evener  and Midwinter is offstage for that book.   And in that book, what happens in Aarenis isn’t relevant to that book, but it is relevant to the next…the one I’m on now.

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Sometimes I’m amazed at what the Plot Daemon has been up to behind my back.  I was not feeling well for several days after the trip, and couldn’t get more than a hundred words or so out at a time.    Far below my daily goals.    (I was waking up unsure where I was–mostly thinking I was on the train, but once still in a hotel–and the writing itself was peculiar.  I knew certain scenes would be difficult, but usually those difficult scenes come embedded in their full context.  This time…not so much.)     But underneath/behind all that, the Plot Daemon was busy.

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So I left Atlanta this morning and wrote 2700+ words on the train, mostly about poor (ummph, you don’t know him yet.  Let’s just say that he’s young and was brash, but reality has laid some clue-bats on him lately.   I didn’t expect he’d ever become a POV character, as he wasn’t my favorite of the available young-and-brash stock, but sometimes they simply o’er leap all obstacles to find themselves on center stage with very important lines to say–and say them with panache.  Or some word of that type.

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