{"id":1889,"date":"2013-06-27T21:22:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T03:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1889"},"modified":"2013-06-27T21:22:58","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T03:22:58","slug":"background-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1889","title":{"rendered":"Background Assignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I go through Editor’s revision letter, I realize that she’s right…without the background in the Gird\/Luap books,\u00a0 even readers of the Deed<\/em> may be adrift in places.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (And the post I wrote about this, this morning before I headed to the city for the sports medicine doc, apparently went poof–I thought I’d posted it but it’s not here.)\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, I do recommend, for those who haven’t bothered with Surrender None<\/em> and Liar’s Oath<\/em>…or the omnibus version (The Legacy of Gird<\/em> in the US,\u00a0 A Legacy of Honour<\/em> in the UK)\u00a0 that you find a copy.\u00a0 They’re for sale (the US versions of the e-books via Baen Books’ website: here’s my author page<\/a>) in both hardcopy and e-book formats.<\/p>\n

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Here’s why I can’t just insert the exact background you need from those books into the new ones…there’s too much info for the space available.\u00a0\u00a0 I can put some more–and will be doing that–but I can’t possibly include all that Editor wants or people might need.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In part because of the magelords found enchanted in Kolobia, and in part because everything really is connected to everything else,\u00a0 Crown<\/em> circles back to issues that have their roots then…what happens in Crown<\/em> started a long time ago. \u00a0\u00a0 Who Gird was, who Luap was, who the\u00a0 Rosemage was,\u00a0 who the first Girdish paladins were, why an alcoholic, hot tempered, ignorant peasant was a better person to follow than a sober, calmer,\u00a0 literate royal bastard,\u00a0 how corruption works in the well-intentioned, how easy it is for good people not to see evil coming…all that and more that just won’t boil down into a few sentences I can slide in without infodumping everyone to a stupor.<\/p>\n

I hate the thought that I’m having to tell people to buy more books (no, wait, that’s not true. \u00a0 I want<\/em> people to buy more books…but I don’t want to make faithful fans go without dessert or, worse, dinner.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Conflict of interest here.)\u00a0 You have almost a year.\u00a0 If you haven’t read them, find a copy somehow.\u00a0\u00a0 If you have read them, add them to the re-read.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, I know, Liar’s Oath<\/em>, Luap’s book, is not an upbeat read.\u00a0 It wouldn’t have been anyway, given Luap himself, but writing it too soon after my mother’s death blinded me to\u00a0 flaws that make it more difficult.\u00a0 It may help to think of it in terms of a Greek tragedy; the structure’s there.<\/p>\n

I should also mention a temporal overlap.\u00a0\u00a0 Because the book insisted that something happening before the end of the previous book had to be included in this book, rather than lumped in as hearsay later,\u00a0 the last event in Limits<\/em> is a ways into Crown.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>It threw Editor.\u00a0\u00a0 I will try to figure out how to signal that without being too intrusive (maybe a dateline sort of thing will help)\u00a0 so it doesn’t throw you, but here’s the advance warning.<\/p>\n

Crown<\/em> was a particularly gnarly book to write\u00a0 in terms of temporal continuity and discontinuity,\u00a0 and apparently the book itself wanted to demonstrate as many aspects of that as it could.\u00a0 I kept trying for simple, straight-line chronology, and Crown<\/em> kept fighting back with “Yes, but meanwhile back at the castle\/palace\/battlefield\/other place…and really, you need to put C before A, and R before M, and then insert B between R and M…”<\/p>\n

I’d say it’s no wonder my neck hurts, if not for the X-rays today that suggest it was the accumulation of multiple injuries (thank you, horses whose names I don’t remember from the 1970s,\u00a0\u00a0 another horse whose name I don’t remember from the 1980s,\u00a0 Macho, Jezz, and Illusion, [whose names I do] for your contributions to my current cervical problems.)\u00a0\u00a0 Apparently hitting the ground from a fast-moving horse is not good for your neck.\u00a0\u00a0 But since only the actual broken bones sent me to a doctor (what’s a stiff neck for a few days, eh?)\u00a0 and not always then, most of\u00a0 these were never seen.\u00a0\u00a0 I knew multiple concussions weren’t a good idea (I’ve had two, both horse-related)\u00a0 but didn’t realize (though looking now, why not?) that hitting the ground from the top of a horse moving fast (or, even better, going over a jump) is also likely to cause problems later.\u00a0 Oh, well.\u00a0 It was fun.\u00a0 Not the hard landings, but the riding.<\/p>\n

And now, back to work (I keep saying that and you may wonder if I’m getting anything done.\u00a0 Yes.)<\/p>\n

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As I go through Editor’s revision letter, I realize that she’s right…without the background in the Gird\/Luap books,\u00a0 even readers of the Deed may be adrift in places.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (And the post I wrote about this, this morning before I headed to the city for the sports medicine doc, apparently went poof–I thought I’d posted it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,53,5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-1889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crown-of-renewal","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889"}],"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=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1891,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions\/1891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}