There are days I wish I were Granny Weatherwax and think of knitting stockings like that, but my present form is more that of Nanny Ogg, who in other ways I don’t much resemble.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 Anyway:\u00a0 Stuff has been going on, of several forms and various levels, and you folk have been neglected.\u00a0 My apologies.\u00a0 The neglect, or partial neglect, will probably continue at least another two weeks.\u00a0 Things that Ought to Have Been Done have Not Been Done because things that Ought Not to Have Been Done were done (partly by others, partly by me) and got in the way of the Ought to Have Been Done ones.<\/p>\n
That being said, where I am in the book is farther along, with some Interesting Revelations about characters (not quite plot-bombs, not yet)\u00a0 and a disconcerting tendency for Book I to spread out and demand more space.\u00a0\u00a0 Not in a linear way, but like the difference in growth habit between a cypress (the kind you see lining cemeteries) and a live oak, the narrow vertical v. the wide-spreading more globular overall outline.\u00a0\u00a0 I have a flash of something very near the end which I think Must Not Be, but we’ll see.\u00a0 If it is true, then Book II is going to be…well<\/em>… something else very interesting.\u00a0 (Gunpowder.\u00a0 Match.)<\/p>\n Meanwhile a Paksworld story is itching on the upper right inside of my skull and I’m slapping it away as a distraction until I get this bit right here nailed down, and also a better idea of an anthology story I’m committed to (for which I have the perfect last<\/em> line and a vague idea of the xenobiology involved.\u00a0 But I want this one milestone crossed before pausing to work on either story, esp. since the above mentioned difficulty with LifeStuff.<\/p>\n One day this past week we had a longish power outage (well, it felt longer than it was because the house chilled down pretty fast and even when the power came back on,\u00a0 it wasn’ t stable enough for the computers, and then after that not stable enough for the DSL.\u00a0\u00a0 Another day began with a roar of wind before dawn, then sleet, then snow, then freezing rain and snow, then freezing rain…and the it was clear and bright and much warmer.\u00a0 But froze again that night.<\/p>\n Meanwhile.\u00a0 I must get back to the scene at hand, in which the very first ping that someone may not be what he seemed can be detected if you’re watching closely.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a marker for me, and may or may not survive to be noticed by you.\u00a0 I’m also trying to convince myself on the topic of bears v. no bears, and if bears then which bears.\u00a0 Speaking with my amateur but educated ecologist hat on, any stable ecosystem needs top predators.\u00a0 If derived from this planet, that gives you dogs, cats, weasels, hyenas, bears, some reptiles and some birds\u00a0 to play with on land, and some marine mammals as well as birds and fishes to play with in the water.\u00a0 Total human population of this planet is around 1 billion or a little less, so there’s still plenty of room for large wild animals–hoofed prey, tooth-and-claw predators.\u00a0\u00a0 Small continents, lots of islands of various sizes, so less desert than we have–and at the moment I’m not dealing with every ecosystem on the planet, just one.\u00a0 So…bears?\u00a0 No bears?\u00a0\u00a0 Bears would be cool, but…am I indulging myself with ecology when what I really need to be doing is Story?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are days I wish I were Granny Weatherwax and think of knitting stockings like that, but my present form is more that of Nanny Ogg, who in other ways I don’t much resemble.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 Anyway:\u00a0 Stuff has been going on, of several forms and various levels, and you folk have been neglected.\u00a0 My apologies.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,53,5],"tags":[108,112,20,107],"class_list":["post-2436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436"}],"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=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2437,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions\/2437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}