{"id":1367,"date":"2011-11-04T22:30:30","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T04:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1367"},"modified":"2011-11-04T22:30:30","modified_gmt":"2011-11-05T04:30:30","slug":"snippet-with-gnomes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1367","title":{"rendered":"Snippet with Gnomes"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, it’s a tiny little spoiler to let you know this far ahead that there might be a gnomish appearance in this book, but you had a gnomish appearance in Kings<\/em>, too, so…it’s something even the spoiler-aversives up with it must put.\u00a0 (And a gold star to the person who recognizes where that bit of inverted language came from and how it changed the way I write.)<\/p>\n

Beyond the break is a snippet.<\/p>\n

POV: Arcolin<\/p>\n

Arcolin has just explained to some gnomes that there used to be orc lairs in some hills and they should be careful.<\/p>\n

…………..<\/p>\n

The estvin nodded and said something in their language that brought the rest to his side.\u00a0 They all laid hands on the same boulder the estvin had sniffed.\u00a0 They muttered in gnomish, faster and faster.\u00a0 Arcolin’s horse threw up its head, ears pinned.\u00a0 Then he could feel, through the horse’s body, the ground trembling; the horse squealed, whirled, and tried to bolt as the shaking grew.\u00a0 Arcolin wrenched it back around.\u00a0 Then a loud noise, deeper and louder than any drum, rolled out of the hills.\u00a0 Clouds of snow and dirt flew up from several hills, including the two nearest, and hung there a long moment before slowly settling again.\u00a0 The gnomes stepped back from the boulder, dusting their hands.\u00a0 The estvin looked up at Arcolin.\u00a0 “No more,”\u00a0 the estvin said.<\/p>\n

“No more?”<\/p>\n

“Orcs. Lairs. Gone.”<\/p>\n

…………………………….<\/p>\n

Telling you where, when, etc. would be very<\/em> spoilerish, so I won’t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, for those determined to see if they can outguess the writer (you who hate spoilers, Go Away Now<\/em>)\u00a0 I’m sprinkling gingerbread crumbs here for you.\u00a0 (And again–if you really, really hate spoilers, do not read the next paragraph.\u00a0\u00a0 Fair warning, OK?)<\/p>\n

You already know–from Kings of the North<\/em>–some of what gnomes are capable of, and from both Kings<\/em> and the old group (both Divided Allegiance<\/em>,where Paks runs across gnomes, and Surrender None,<\/em> where Gird learns a lot about, and from gnomes) some of their attitudes about Law (their law always has the upper-case L), about gifts and charity (bad: must be fair exchange)\u00a0 and other salient facts about the square of…sorry.\u00a0 Brain is skipping around tonight.\u00a0\u00a0 In “Judgment,”\u00a0 you may recall that dwarves (not gnomes) were at one time the guardians of dragons’ eggs, but…something happened.\u00a0\u00a0 An egg or two got into the wrong hands.<\/p>\n

I’m sure those who want to connect the dots can now connect the dots.\u00a0 The rest of you can pretend you never even saw the dots.\u00a0\u00a0 There is more to be discovered about gnomes, as there is about us all.<\/p>\n

I leave you with an unrelated quote accessed today via Twitter to a PlOS site, where the first sentence beyond the abstract was this astonishingly brilliant insight (sarcasm mode stuck on FULL.)<\/p>\n

“A striking finding of recent research on human cooperation is that its expression is highly variable…”\u00a0 Ya think?\u00a0\u00a0 Nobody ever noticed before that humans are not all equally cooperative?\u00a0\u00a0 And that this varies by surroundings?\u00a0\u00a0 You might as well say that a striking finding of recent research is that dropped things fall…or that some dogs bite the hand that feeds them and some don’t…or some people have messy houses and some have neat ones.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t mind someone doing research on a common phenomenon–it’s easy to accept that X is just there, and finding out why it’s there, and not somewhere else, or what it really is, and so on, is fine.\u00a0 But the artlessness of that first sentence sounds as if the authors think no one ever noticed that until recent research pointed it out…while anyone who’s lived through an ordinary childhood knows it by heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, it’s a tiny little spoiler to let you know this far ahead that there might be a gnomish appearance in this book, but you had a gnomish appearance in Kings, too, so…it’s something even the spoiler-aversives up with it must put.\u00a0 (And a gold star to the person who recognizes where that bit of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snippet","tag-snippet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}