Paksworld

This will be the last post for awhile because a) deadlines and b) medical stuff–appointments, tests, all that, all taking time out of the writing day.    So I decided to hint at some things coming up in Crown of Renewal, along with the background research that went into them.   I hope this will tide you over for a couple of weeks, while I finish the revisions and the shorter work due for an anthology. Read the rest of this entry »

The hierarchy of writing-research starts with personal experience.    If you have ever cooked a meal,  mucked out a stall,  driven a car, or fallen out of a tree, you have a wealth of sensory inputs as well as intellectual understanding of those experiences available to use in a story.   You know, in the most direct way, what it’s like.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ritual disclaimer: nobody gets through a long writing career without some mistakes.  You will sometimes trust the wrong research source (even if it’s someone who should have the knowledge you’re looking for–say a fire department veteran you’ve asked about a procedural point in managing a multi-alarm fire…and no, this isn’t a problem I’ve had.)    No writer knows everything, and every writer must, at some point, trust a map, or a reference book, or a person who seems to have first-hand knowledge.

But there’s a huge difference between occasionally  trusting the wrong source and not looking something up at all.   Writers should look things up in the best source they can find or beg/borrow/get via Interlibrary Loan before they plan a book or a chapter–and should let the facts dictate how the story goes, rather than ignoring the facts because they already have a fantasy-version in mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.   If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times  (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.   If you know you’re going to write a novel set in an invented world (SFnal or fantasy), then your research must be broad and had better be deep in some areas.

But no matter whether your topic is narrow or wide, some of the research you do won’t make it into the book…at least, not into a book anyone will want to read.  Most of us have read a book that “taught us more about penguins than we really wanted to know,”  written by someone who did a lot of research and wanted someone else to share the pain.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or therapy.    Excuse #1 for spending time with knitting after many years away is that my hands get very sore from typing, and knitting is completely different in the way you use your hands.    Excuse #2 is I wanted something that could be done indoors or out, and taken along when waiting somewhere (traveling, for instance.)  Excuse #3 is that I’d been feeling the need to do something with my hands for others.  Other than family, I mean.

Read the rest of this entry »

Having opened this stable door, it’s time to go in and see what we’ve got–I expect it’s going to take more than one post to cover both horses and horsemanship, so I’m starting with the easy one.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut/alteration that’s going on now.

This one is about horses.   I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s  horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown at Prix St. George about a year before she died.    I myself had never ridden at that level.   But K- was giving me some lessons on him, in the hope that he would connect better with me (not really–or not for the first five years at least.)   In the process, I learned to ride some advanced movements that were a lot of fun, and obviously would be of use to someone riding a horse in battle.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was a 2000+ word day.   Clitter-clatter-clitter-clatter on the keys, sometimes very fast, and sometimes a half hour spent staring futilely at the computer screen hoping words would show up there before I froze in that position.

Read the rest of this entry »

Distractions of the usual type are things that must be done–distractions not sought out, but imposed.   For instance, official paperwork that must be filed by a given date,  business mail that must be dealt with, scheduled maintenance of human, animal, machine, repairs of human, animal, machine, house.   Then there are the everyday distractions of friends, family, online places to socialize.

But then…then come the biggies.    For me, it’s something I don’t know much about, that comes to my attention in a time and way that creates an automatic pursuit response:  facts known to exist, that I don’t know yet, are like the squeaking of a mouse to a fox, or the scent of a fox to the hounds..and these are the hardest distractions for me to resist.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s fortuitous that in Book III, I’m  presently dealing with winter weather (shows how little progress I’ve made lately!) because today it snowed.  It hasn’t snowed like this here for years, and I decided that a long walk in the snow would give me more recent sensory inputs than my memory of the most recent previous snow.    Read the rest of this entry »