So…now that I’m well again, and have gotten the two government reports off my desk, and finished another commitment that held on until last night (committees…not my favorite work environment, but someone has to do it sometimes.\u00a0 Just not me for awhile now)…now the book is trotting briskly ahead and today threw some plot bombs at me.\u00a0 Lovely ones.<\/p>\n
Naturally, any plot bomb creates a few problems.\u00a0\u00a0 The latest (just now)\u00a0 was linguistic.\u00a0 Someone is speaking a very archaic dialect, and the person being spoken to, in the books’ present day, is having trouble understanding it.\u00a0 But you readers shouldn’t have to struggle with that.\u00a0 Conveying the difficulty without showing so much of the difficulty that you do struggle with it, and making it believeable that something you can understand fairly easily is difficult for this other person…that’s the problem.\u00a0 Not a huge one, and I know I can solve it.<\/p>\n
But it delights me, because something I’ve vaguely wondered about for several books (the Verrakai’s shifting of identity into another body using blood magery) …the why and the how of it…is now clear to me, and also where they got the idea.\u00a0\u00a0 It just happened (in the writing, that is, like less than five minutes ago)\u00a0 so I’m still at the bouncing up and down stage and murmuring quietly “That’s so NEAT!” because my husband, who has dental work early tomorrow, is already asleep.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Heh.\u00a0 I hope all this survives the editing stage.<\/p>\n
Even before I got the government reports done, I called in editorial help–not from my editor in NYC, who’s had to cope with the Hurricane Sandy stuff and many other things this winter, but from a friend who’s a professional copy editor but also good on structure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She just lost some clients and needs work; she’s an excellent sounding board; this will help both of us.\u00a0 And writing emails to her about what’s been done and where I think things are going is helping me restart the engines that shut down while I was sick.<\/p>\n
So the plot-bombs.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a good writing day, just over 2000 words.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 More tomorrow.\u00a0\u00a0 If I get a break, I’ll hunt up a snippet from Limits of Power<\/em> for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So…now that I’m well again, and have gotten the two government reports off my desk, and finished another commitment that held on until last night (committees…not my favorite work environment, but someone has to do it sometimes.\u00a0 Just not me for awhile now)…now the book is trotting briskly ahead and today threw some plot bombs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[44,107],"class_list":["post-1778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-plot-bombs","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778"}],"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=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1779,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}