Those of you reading my LJ last year (before this blog existed) may remember the series of plot bombs that landed on me in the last third of the book.<\/p>\n
Plot bombs are events\/characters\/situations that I didn’t anticipate and that propagate new plot and lots of words all of a sudden.\u00a0 They disrupt my train of thought and break things open.\u00a0\u00a0 But, being creative and not truly destructive, plot bombs are always–well, almost nearly always completely–right.<\/p>\n
The first true plot bomb of the second volume exploded in my head this morning.<\/p>\n
It might be more accurate to say that a buried plot bomb erupted from below…I knew back in the first book that [censored: stuff I can’t mention without spoilers] was going to connect to Paks II and be important.\u00a0\u00a0 The true nature and importance of the Censored Stuff has been revealed, layer by layer, through the rest of book one and the earlier parts of book two.\u00a0\u00a0 I thought it would be nicely laid out from here.<\/p>\n
Well…no.\u00a0 Not exactly.\u00a0\u00a0 This morning, in the midst of writing a scene with the Duke of Immer,\u00a0 the plot bomb burst and I had to drop that and start a new file.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It started quietly enough,\u00a0 more quietly than usual for a plot bomb,\u00a0 though a bit startling as I’d never seen a gnome wearing anything but gray, or talking to a dwarf, and they were chatting along in their own language (which appears in my head as ordinary speech, since my plot daemon knows I have no gift for languages.)\u00a0\u00a0 Chatting and arguing–and I’m wondering why is that gnome wearing colors<\/em>?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Because not all dwarves are dwarves.\u00a0\u00a0 (Lightbulb moment, but not the plotbomb)\u00a0\u00a0 “Everyone” knows that dwarves and gnomes, though both rockfolk, are not friendly to each other.\u00a0\u00a0 Everyone knows gnomes wear gray and have no beards.\u00a0 Everyone knows dwarves like bright colors and have beards.\u00a0\u00a0 Yup.\u00a0 Those beardless dwarf\u00a0 “youths” occasionally seen with their “fathers” and “uncles?”\u00a0\u00a0 Not dwarves.<\/p>\n But that was only the lightbulb within the plotbomb.\u00a0 Things really went wild when the next person showed up at the table.\u00a0\u00a0 Urbane, suave, dressed in black, knows Paks, once gave her a costly present.\u00a0 Yup.\u00a0 Arvid Semminson.<\/p>\n The plot bomb is galloping away, bit in its teeth.\u00a0 I’d better hop back in the saddle and find out where we’re going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those of you reading my LJ last year (before this blog existed) may remember the series of plot bombs that landed on me in the last third of the book. Plot bombs are events\/characters\/situations that I didn’t anticipate and that propagate new plot and lots of words all of a sudden.\u00a0 They disrupt my train […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[22,34,35,44,107],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-dwarves","tag-gnomes","tag-plot-bombs","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"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=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}