What you send to Agent or Editor varies with the kind of book, but I’m now working on the not-book parts of the submission package.\u00a0\u00a0 NewEditors who are assigned in the middle and latter parts of a group of books–especially something as complicated as the Paksworld books–usually appreciate something that will get them up to speed quicker than just reading the whole (in this case eight previous) books.\u00a0\u00a0 Copyeditors always like to have a list of unique character names, words, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 And that’s what I’m doing now, taking a break from the wildlife management report for a few hours to work on this.<\/p>\n
Some of what I’m doing will end up on the Paksworld website, because it should be there anyway:\u00a0 more on the history, more on the religions, more on money, food, economics & politics.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve been thinking what NewEditors need to know first–what will ease their way into Paksworld the most–and it may be my history degree, but I’m thinking “history.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I’m partway through the history lesson.<\/p>\n
What I know of the history of Paksworld goes back thousands of years, and what I surmise (from what I know of it) goes back much, much farther.\u00a0 It’s pretty cloudy back there, but that’s OK because although we have archaeology, we don’t have a connected narrative of a known individual’s life from even 10,000 years ago in our world.\u00a0 We know there was someone.\u00a0 We know something about his\/her tools, and we may have physical remains.\u00a0\u00a0 We can tell, from archaeology and rock paintings and the like, some of what the people were doing.\u00a0 But we can’t say “A man named Joe and a woman named Sharon lived in this village; Joe had children with another woman named Alice and Sharon never had children at all.\u00a0 Sharon discovered a new dye, a better red dye than the one they’d been using, and Joe was a great storyteller.”<\/p>\n
So I know in general, vague, “here are some tools and this is what might be done with them” ways what was going on 10,000 and 20,000 and 30,000 years ago in Paksworld, but it’s deep background and nothing that should concern readers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It lets me move populations around, account for migrations, look at the ecology of the place and decide whether redroots (for instance) are native to the north, the south, or the far south.)<\/p>\n
The trickier thing–and the reason I’m taking a break to think longer about it–is dealing with the vast differences in memory between an elf who experienced an event 20,000 years ago, and someone whose entire memory is a tiny fraction of that length of time…me, for instance.\u00a0\u00a0 I studied history;\u00a0 we learned, among other things, that historians, as well as ordinary people, make mistakes.\u00a0 (For instance: horse collars.\u00a0 The French historian who started the “known fact” that pre-horse-collar harness methods choked horses and that’s what limited what loads horses could pull…was wrong.\u00a0 Totally, completely wrong, and it’s been proved wrong by experimentation.\u00a0 The experimental refutation wasn’t known at the time I was in college: I learned about it later.\u00a0 What really increased the efficiency of draft horses?\u00a0 a) taller horses and b) iron axles and trace chains.)<\/p>\n
With my “thinking-like-historian” hat on, I’m entirely too likely to jump in and correct people on their historical mistakes (see above paragraph)\u00a0 but within Paksworld, I have to think about how those people would think.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How important is it to them<\/em> that the details be right?\u00a0\u00a0 (How much did it affect me to know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? Or Johnny Appleseed?)\u00a0\u00a0 Are all the reasons that people conceal, embroider, enlarge, and otherwise misrepresent what really happened the same?<\/p>\n Probably not.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The motivations of elves, for example–and of particular groups of elves and particular elves–may be very different from the motivations of rockfolk–and we already know the gnomes and dwarves see things differently.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As for humans…our memories are in constant reconstruction, according to neurologists.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The high school class that was hell for me may have been a favorite of someone else.\u00a0 Whose memory is wrong about that?\u00a0\u00a0 Neither.<\/p>\n So:\u00a0 in looking at the “real” history of Paksworld, why are the elves telling humans what they tell them—and not telling them the other things?\u00a0\u00a0 There were humans around tens of thousands of years ago, but the elves are not saying (that I’ve heard yet)\u00a0 “Your foremothers grubbed in the dirt with their fingernails and ate worms and centipedes; you were dirty ugly animals, and if not for us, you’d still be…we are the ones who taught you everything you know, we are the ones who showed you beauty,\u00a0 music, weaving, how to care for the land…how dare you question us?!”<\/p>\n There’s a certain pleasure, for some people, in knowing what others don’t know–withholding the knowledge,\u00a0 keeping it to a favored few (C. S. Lewis mentions the almost-universal interest in the Inner Circle–from those in it, those who want to be in it, and those who despise it.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There’s sometimes concern that the ignorant can’t handle the knowledge safely.\u00a0 \u00a0 Or that they just won’t understand it no matter how much you tell them–not until they’ve learned other things.<\/p>\n I have inklings of the reasons for the different groups, but I’m finding it hard to analyze it in a way that will help NewEditor.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Back to work now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What you send to Agent or Editor varies with the kind of book, but I’m now working on the not-book parts of the submission package.\u00a0\u00a0 NewEditors who are assigned in the middle and latter parts of a group of books–especially something as complicated as the Paksworld books–usually appreciate something that will get them up to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,61,5],"tags":[108,62,31,107],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446"}],"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=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1448,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}