Somebody’s going to ask “So why that story and not that other one you mentioned you were writing\/had written?”\u00a0\u00a0 Some decisions were easy.\u00a0 One of the Paksworld stories I was working on came to a halt, hooves stuck in the ground, back up in a hump, neck stretched out, ears flat and would. not. budge.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not a failure to thrive: it’s a story telling me I made a mistake, that’s not how it goes, and it’s not going to cooperate until I take it where it wants to go.\u00a0 But it won’t tell me.\u00a0 Eventually, left alone out there in the pasture, it will come wandering up to my mental cabin, climb up the step to the porch, and stomp on the porch.\u00a0 But it didn’t choose to do that before the time I had to have stories turned in, so…maybe next time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then there’s the story that walked right off the list for this book and into an anthology.\u00a0\u00a0 “See ya!” it said, over its shoulder, and was gone.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can read “Mercenary’s Honor” in Operation Arcana, <\/em>edited by John Joseph Adams, Baen Books.\u00a0\u00a0 Then there are the previously published:\u00a0 some chosen because they were only seen briefly online on publishers’ sites when a new hardcover was coming out.\u00a0\u00a0 It was clear that I had a lot more Paksworld fiction than room in an ebook collection, where experience has shown that shorter collections do better than huge fat ones.\u00a0\u00a0 So “Bargains,” “Dream’s Quarry,”\u00a0 “My Princess,” “Gifts,”\u00a0 and “Judgment”–along with “First Blood” and “Mercenary’s Honor”–will be in later collections.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The first four don’t connect with any of the Paladin’s Legacy characters, and though one of the last two does, sort of, it’s at a considerable remove of time.<\/p>\n Every story in Deeds of Honor…<\/em>yes, even the two legends…has to do with the past, present, or future of a character in the Paladin’s Legacy group.\u00a0\u00a0 The other stories are more scattered across the times and places of Paksworld.\u00a0\u00a0 So the unifying relationships, for this book, was that group of books, the untold stories that were hovering around–before, behind, between the pages of those five books. \u00a0 They’re certainly not the only stories to be told about those characters (there will be more) but they’re the ones I had ready in time to have the collection out this year. \u00a0 I don’t yet have any idea what might be the connection for the second and other volumes. \u00a0\u00a0 I hired my own editor to help me with decisions; she read all the stories, and then helped me with a few last decisions on which to include in the first volume, and with more on how to place them within the group.\u00a0\u00a0 They ended up mostly chronological in story time, except for one, which is placed where it is for a particular reason.\u00a0 You’ll know it when you get there.<\/p>\n So there’s a story about Arvid, and one about Torfinn of Pargun.\u00a0\u00a0 Farin Cook has her own say, as well as her parrion.\u00a0 Two legends, Falk’s Oath and Torre’s Ride.\u00a0 Vardan’s story, the old story about the boy Selis, and an old man’s story, Beclan’s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somebody’s going to ask “So why that story and not that other one you mentioned you were writing\/had written?”\u00a0\u00a0 Some decisions were easy.\u00a0 One of the Paksworld stories I was working on came to a halt, hooves stuck in the ground, back up in a hump, neck stretched out, ears flat and would. not. budge.\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,84,53,38,5],"tags":[112,31,107],"class_list":["post-2386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-e-books","category-life-beyond-writing","category-marketing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386"}],"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=2386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2387,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions\/2387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}