Paksworld

…”Out of period!” sniffs the judge of exclamations.  “Does not fit the book.”

Well, no, but my copies of the Orbit edition of Oath of Fealty arrived today.    They’re both in the study with me where I gloat over them every few minutes.    Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s workday turned into a mere shadow of itself thanks to something I ate that didn’t love me for some hours of the night before.  But still–progress.  Sort of.  I was going back over the work on Book II and realized that I had totally ignored a “conversation file.”

What, you might well ask, is a “conversation file?” Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was goofing off by starting book three,  which meant I needed to check a few things from one and two.

It’s a fairly minor plot point (so far) so I don’t think it’s hugely spoilerish to reveal a little.    Some of Our Folks are in Aarenis, on a contract with Cortes Vonja to deal with brigands.  Standard, ordinary, until they find some swords.  One of the swords is a  Halveric sword, which is odd because the Halverics were careful to recover the arms of their wounded and dead.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I looked at the one editorial request that I just could not make work, and then finally figured it out, I realized it was a perfect example for study.   My editor correctly noted that the emotional high point of a relationship’s end was not at the end…there was an anticlimax scene.

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The cultures in Paksenarrion’s world are all advanced enough to use metallic coinage, though barter still exists (and still exists today, of course) and “paper” in the form of letters of credit and other non-coin exchange exists in some places.

Where you have coins, you have counterfeiters.    Paks, being a trusting soul, paid little attention to the coins she carried, though moneychangers were attentive to the possibilities.   In the new books,  with viewpoint characters who are older, more worldly, and having to deal with financial matters, I found myself facing the certainty of counterfeiters.

Only problem…I knew very little about how it was done.

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One of the constants across cultures is music:  people make music.   They play with rhythm and pitch and loudness–they sing individually and in chorus–they move to the music they make, and make it dance.

I’ve been hooked on music since early childhood.  I write to music–characters have theme music, entire books have music attached them  as I write them.   (Gird: Brahms’ GERMAN REQUIEM.  Luap: Zamfir’s best-known work for panpipes and orchestra.   Listen to both.  Tells you everything about the difference in their character.  Or it does to me.)

This past week, I’ve sung a good chunk of Handel’s MESSIAH with my church choir & friends, and the Austin Symphony.  My husband sang Vivaldi’s GLORIA tonight with his church choir & friends, and a small chamber orchestra.    The GLORIA is definitely a work that belongs in Paksenarrion’s world…but no one there speaks (or ever spoke) Latin, nor is the theology  correct there.  But the music…oh, yes.   Some of MESSIAH could also cross over, but not all of it.

So far, only classical music (in the broad sense) works for me when writing fantasy.   Everything else is too connected to this everyday world…the music I write to (at least when writing fantasy, and often otherwise) has to lift me out of the mundane.   For me this means harmony (dissonance only to resolve it), intricacy, and really gorgeous shadings.  Vivaldi’s GLORIA has all that.