Most of you will know that four years and 5 months ago I was bucked off, landed head down, and got a concussion that messed with my brain quite a bit.\u00a0 It was only about six months after the previous concussion (that one involved a mountain bike and a pothole with an overbite) and…yeah, damage is cumulative.\u00a0 At first I couldn’t read more than a few sentences at a time (short simple ones) and couldn’t write anything.\u00a0 Also couldn’t knit worth beans, and couldn’t read music either.<\/p>\n
Long story shortened…it became obvious over time that although I recovered the ability to write coherent prose, I could not write fiction anywhere near my previous standard.\u00a0 And after four years and–was it two, or three, failed book attempts???–I pretty much quit trying and worked harder on what I could do to recover physically and the rest of mentally.<\/p>\n
Then, out of Paksworld,\u00a0 in May this otherwise frenetic year, came an idea begging to be written.\u00a0 And very tentatively, I started.\u00a0 And it…moved.\u00a0 Breathed.\u00a0 And is now behaving like my other books, in that it pulls me forward (rather than me trying desperately to push it forward) and hands me what I need to do a scene or a sequence, and has built interior and exterior connections the way a book-length work must.\u00a0 It’s at 35K words now, and shows no sign of quitting.<\/p>\n
This book is set after the end of Crown of Renewal<\/em><\/strong>, and though a lot of familiar characters are in it, they’re older and in a different time of life than they were.\u00a0 They’ve grown up, or grown out into new dimensions, or aren’t where they used to be.\u00a0 Well, except Dragon, who lives on a scale of time and space the humans (even the half-elven humans) don’t have.\u00a0 There’s Prince Camwyn, who was perhaps 15 or 16 when iynisin invaded the palace in Verella, and his friend Aris Marrakai, two or three years younger, who woke and discovered the danger but all else were enchanted.\u00a0 Camwyn’s been gone for years now, in Dragon’s care, it’s thought, without any memory of his past, Dragon has told the king.\u00a0\u00a0 Aris, grown to be of age to squire Arcolin in Aarenis, still misses his friend and worries about him, feels guilty that he wasn’t faster that night.\u00a0\u00a0 Dragon wants Camwyn on the throne of Horngard, the mountain kingdom in the Westmounts\u00a0 from which Arcolin fled long ago, as an abused bastard.\u00a0 Horngard has declined even more since Arcolin left, a series of bad kings and worse councils has left it poor, depopulated, half-forgotten by the rest of the world…and prey to banditry and petty tyrants warring over scraps and rags.<\/p>\n I’m a very happy writer, grateful that if the same plot daemon isn’t back on the engine room, someone is keeping the revs up and the process going.\u00a0 If you’re going through a bad patch in your work, whatever it is and whatever caused it…I hope you have a similar experience of unexpected success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of you will know that four years and 5 months ago I was bucked off, landed head down, and got a concussion that messed with my brain quite a bit.\u00a0 It was only about six months after the previous concussion (that one involved a mountain bike and a pothole with an overbite) and…yeah, damage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,92,5],"tags":[108,7,107],"class_list":["post-2812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-good-news","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-new-content","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812"}],"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=2812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2813,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812\/revisions\/2813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}