The book has moved from the backstretch, where it was interfered with by sprinter-bred short story attempts, and is now on the turn toward home, though I can’t claim “homestretch” just yet.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s running smoothly at this point–10,000 words this past week, which is quite nice (the 3000 word day made my fingers hurt; I’m pretty much limited to 2000 on the day after day thing.) \u00a0 I’m a little over 89,000 words right now, and it will reach 90,000 words today.\u00a0\u00a0 Getting that short story concern out of my mind really helped. \u00a0 I can now hold the existing story (and what I know or surmise about the part that’s not written down yet)\u00a0 in my head and see better where it wants to go, like a jockey who’s finally worked a horse out of a bad pocket and has open track in front. \u00a0\u00a0 The story-horse is on the bit, eager to get to the finish line.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I consider this draft 75% complete, and what’s left to go in (in terms of content) should in the end fit into the 30,000 yet to do, plus or minus the usual 10-15%.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m still not removing the “wrong” section early on because\u00a0 there are details in it that should transfer without any problem to the stuff that replaced it, but working on it now would distract me from making the last quarter all in one strong dash.\u00a0 There are also notes to myself (in square brackets)\u00a0 telling me of places that need more, but the story was dragging me past at high speed so I couldn’t stop then:\u00a0 [could be confusing.\u00a0 Feather into background, clarify that bit about X’s motives]\u00a0 and [fact-check projected tech on this] and the like.\u00a0 Also of course minor character names not remembered from chapters before show up in ms. as [whatsisface] or [needaname].\u00a0 When the action is flowing fast, I don’t stop.\u00a0\u00a0 So handy to be able to search for [\u00a0 when it’s time to clean all these up and replace them with (for instance) Col. Greyhaus.<\/p>\n
So what can I tell you?\u00a0\u00a0 The opposition is well aware of the danger Ky represents and the danger the Vattas as a family represent–a danger they aren’t fully aware of.\u00a0 (They tend to see their danger to others as a business thing–they might gain an advantage in trade.\u00a0 Grace sees more than that, but not the whole thing.)\u00a0\u00a0 Grace’s new arm is adult-sized now, and almost full-strength.\u00a0 She wears long sleeves even more than she did before: one wrinkly, spotty old arm and one smooth perfect new arm get double looks from everyone.\u00a0\u00a0 Grace tells the whole family to be careful, but not all comply.\u00a0\u00a0 Ky eventually finds all the opposition agents among the survivors, but that doesn’t end her immediate peril (not even counting the climate, the season, these nonhuman contributors to danger)\u00a0 because, again, she has no reference points for the other stuff.<\/p>\n
I can say that my visit to the Field Museum in Chicago back in May has gradually percolated into the book, by changing the kinds of terrestrial fauna I ended up putting on the supposed “terraforming failure” continent.\u00a0\u00a0 That wasn’t the only influence, but it was probably the main one.\u00a0\u00a0 I went there to look at contemporary Arctic and sub-Arctic fauna but in thinking about the undergirding “long timeline” of the Vatta-verse,\u00a0 I saw no reason why a terraforming organization might not choose a different starting point for going out to mess with planets.\u00a0 No, there are no feathered dinosaurs.\u00a0 Wrong climate.<\/p>\n
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The book has moved from the backstretch, where it was interfered with by sprinter-bred short story attempts, and is now on the turn toward home, though I can’t claim “homestretch” just yet.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s running smoothly at this point–10,000 words this past week, which is quite nice (the 3000 word day made my fingers hurt; I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,5],"tags":[20,107],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-story-2","category-the-writing-life","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493"}],"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=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/2494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}