{"id":2820,"date":"2022-07-26T23:05:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-27T05:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2820"},"modified":"2022-07-26T23:05:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T05:05:51","slug":"milestones-whizzing-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2820","title":{"rendered":"Milestones Whizzing Past…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Book is now at 82,000+ words and still going strong.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s feeling like a “long” book, more like other Paks-world books and less like the SF books, which usually finished up around 120,000 to 130,000.\u00a0\u00a0 The Paksworld books, as y’all know, run 150,000-plus.\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t tell yet if it’s actually going to be multi-volume or not, but it keeps gaining “weight” (and so am I as I write it…which isn’t good, but I’m not going to strangle this book for the sake of dropping a size of jeans! )\u00a0\u00a0 Minor characters are acquiring the kind of backstory that could mean they’ll be more important in a subsequent book.\u00a0\u00a0 Locations are waving signs at me saying “Important things happen here!\u00a0 Right here!\u00a0 Look at this terrain–you’re going to need it!”\u00a0 There’s another pregnant woman in this story and it’s summer and she’s uncomfortable because she may (or may not) deliver by the end of her husband’s part in this book.\u00a0\u00a0 She’s not major (yet; she has potential)\u00a0 but her husband is a plot-mover by position;\u00a0 he’s also just a wee bit OCD about some things (they don’t have OCD in their vocabulary but you know what I mean.\u00a0 He wants to get everything exactly, precisely, to the nth degree right<\/em>.)\u00a0 There’s a horse with a problem, a family with several problems, a Marshal Judicar who remarkably learned some humility between the last book he was in and this one (he, like everyone else, is older, but I didn’t expect him to do that; I thought he’d be crustier.)\u00a0 I will admit that my own once-broken ribs ached in sympathy with those of\u00a0 a character hanging over a pit,\u00a0 and that childhood experience in crawling along a ditch under thick vegetation plus seeing real hedges in England resulted in someone having to crawl along close under a hedge while enemies were searching for them on the other side.<\/p>\n

So far there’s not enough food in the story (may be why I keep eating while writing??)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are horses and a few dogs, a fire in a hay barn, weaponry including hay forks, lances, poles, sticks and stones, swords, daggers, crossbows (no longbows yet), and chamber pots.\u00a0 Blame a little book in Fondren Library at Rice U., which I checked out over and over; Welsh Ballads<\/em> ed. Ernst Rhys had a poem about a medieval wife who defended the home fort when her husband was out raiding, driving off the intruding force with the amount of stuff she and the other women threw down on the attackers.\u00a0 It ends with a little praise of the husband’s fighting skills, and then says:\u00a0 “but better still than Ievan, Ievan’s wife!”\u00a0 Cities, yes.\u00a0 Towns, yes.\u00a0\u00a0 Places where villages were, but haven’t been for years.\u00a0 Ruins. Locations known by what used to be there (still common in rural areas–we were once given directions to someone’s house that included “turn onto the road just past that pasture where [name if person who used to live there] had that big paint bull.”\u00a0 Roads in several Texas counties weren’t given numbers for decades, even now some are known by the name of the ranch at the end of the road (Greenwood Valley Ranch, for instance, in Real County.\u00a0 That’s ree-AL County, and it means “royal.”)\u00a0\u00a0 That road wanders through two other ranches before it gets to Greenwood Valley where there’s a little airstrip in the narrow valley and hills all around.\u00a0 Anyway, Old Forge had a forge once, and was a village, but now it’s a wide spot in a grass-and-dirt road where the Woods Way ends.\u00a0 More-or-less south of Old Forge, the road meanders on, and eventually through, Serrostin lands, and more-or-less north it crosses the River Road between Verella and Fin Panir.<\/p>\n

So far, the story’s working toward the second meeting of two characters, and this volume may end with that.\u00a0\u00a0 But there are floating loose ends that may bump into one another and lock on.\u00a0\u00a0 Where’s Dorrin, these days?\u00a0\u00a0 Is Torfinn still king of Pargun or did he die, and if so did his youngest son inherit or….?\u00a0 Ganlin of Kostandan married the king of Tsaia’s cousin Rothlin Mahieran,\u00a0 but what about Elis of Pargun?\u00a0 Arcolin’s adopted son Jamis has turned out to have a gift for languages, and speaks gnomish better than Arcolin…and has also learned the horse nomads’ language…ability like that doesn’t exist for nothing; he’s going to have an interesting life one way or another, besides inheriting his father’s lands.\u00a0 Will he also become a gnome prince?\u00a0 Or…um…find a horse nomad girlfriend?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the back corners of my brain, where the shadows are and shy little mouse-like ideas come out at night to see if they can find some cheese and grow bigger, there’ve been some high-pitched squeaky discussions of Old Aare, which isn’t just barren sands and heat anymore.\u00a0\u00a0 People are starting to sail over to take a look; some ships (not the largest) even dare to venture into the great bowl that was a shelter for multiple harbors at one time, and look at the plants now growing in the shores and the wild animals and think about moving in.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile…it’s late and I need to write more tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Book is now at 82,000+ words and still going strong.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s feeling like a “long” book, more like other Paks-world books and less like the SF books, which usually finished up around 120,000 to 130,000.\u00a0\u00a0 The Paksworld books, as y’all know, run 150,000-plus.\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t tell yet if it’s actually going to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,4,5],"tags":[108,22,106,107],"class_list":["post-2820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-contents","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-characters","tag-contents","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820"}],"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=2820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2821,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820\/revisions\/2821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}