Time for some snippets, yeah?<\/p>\n
This one will not be in the final book….it is the original start of the book:<\/p>\n
Camwyn had no memories of his childhood, only those begun in a dark cave, when he woke from grievous injuries.\u00a0 He knew of his past only what he’d been told by Dragon.<\/p>\n
…………………………………………………………………………………………….<\/p>\n
This was followed by pages of past-history stuff and landscape descriptions that (aside from describing\u00a0 a gorgeous view of the Vale of Valdaire and a good opening shot for the movie, maybe)\u00a0 have nothing to do with the story because he’s never there again.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, there’s no tension.\u00a0 People who’ve read the Paladin’s Legacy<\/strong> group know who Cam is, what his injuries were, and that he’s lost his memory.\u00a0 People who haven’t will be thinking ‘How many pages of infodump before I have a reason to care about this character?”<\/p>\n Worse, the next person being shown is thinking about how disappointed he is that on his last trip over the mountains, there’s fog and he can’t see his favorite view.\u00a0\u00a0 Interior monologue with nothing happening but the fog lifting and a horse whinnying.\u00a0 Ho-hum, ho-hum, the starting point is dumb…and then it goes into pages more of trivia that’s interesting to ME, because I was working back into this invented world, checking that Fenis Kavarthin & Sons were still in the building they’d been in that previous book, that this and that were in the right place and the right kinds of interactions were going on. Fine, for a book on the economics of merchant-run late-medieval cities, but this is supposed to be a story.<\/p>\n ………………………………………………………………………………………..<\/p>\n So now we have the result of a complete mental reset:\u00a0 When the problem is a static passage, nothing really going on, AND it’s in the POV of a known character who’s a protagonist…don’t whittle away at it hoping for something better.\u00a0 Take a big leap.<\/p>\n The blade lay lightly, but dangerously, on his neck, just under the side of his jaw. \u00a0“You haven’t paid your bill,” said the voice in the dark.<\/p>\n ………………………………………………………………………………………….<\/p>\n The next sentence tells you who “he” is…Ilantides Balentos.\u00a0\u00a0 Those who’ve read the short story “Mercenary’s Honor”\u00a0 may have a vague memory of an Ilanz Balentos who was Aesil M’dierra’s uncle and the reason she became a merc commander.\u00a0\u00a0 Ilanz in that story is a middle-aged merc commander who helps a village win independence from its greedy neighbor city, and when that city hires a much younger Aliam Halveric to attack, and Aliam sends out his squires to a recon mission, Ilanz meets Kieri Phelan for the first time. \u00a0 Between then and now is a story of the young Aesil M’dierra and how she met Aliam and Kieri in dire circumstances–unfinished, still.\u00a0 Maybe now I can write it.\u00a0 Ilanz left his company (and some money) to M’dierra when he died.<\/p>\n This isn’t Ilanz; this is Ilanz’s much younger relative (and thus, more distantly, M’dierra’s relative.)\u00a0 You don’t yet know who the other person, the voice in the dark,\u00a0 is (and won’t, thanks to, ummm, errr, mmph, and mumble-mumble-writers-keep-secrets.)\u00a0\u00a0 But you know, every one of you, that you do not want that voice in the dark in YOUR bedroom, and you already suspect Ilantides may have a shady side.\u00a0\u00a0 You also want to know if the guy gets his throat cut and what happens next.<\/p>\n Does this 13 page segment connect to anything else in the book?\u00a0 Yes, it does.\u00a0 It foreshadows events already written some chapters later (and thus was easy to think of and write) that make other connections…and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 So when mmmrff happens, readers (the more astute ones) will be thinking “It’s those Balentoses!” while at the same time wondering if fffnnf can possibly make it out and can vlkksr get there in time.<\/p>\n ………………………………………………………………………………………………<\/p>\n But remember the entire first chapter had problems of insufficient forward motion and insufficient tension.\u00a0 Yet certain precursor things had to happen before other things could.\u00a0 A had to meet B.\u00a0 B had to not meet C.\u00a0\u00a0 D had to misjudge a situation.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 So what should come after that 13 pages that makes it clear the initial engine is putting tension on the same overall plot, getting the whole thing rolling?\u00a0\u00a0 Who gets the next POV slot, and why, and what do they do with it?<\/p>\n To keep the tension on, the next logical POV will be either the other conspirator or…another potential victim. The other conspirator has no further appearance in this book, as who he is, at least.\u00a0 Readers are free to think he took part in a certain nefarious deed, or to think he was in another part of the same organization.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter.\u00a0 Another potential victim is<\/em> already in the book, several chapters ahead, and was going to be in chapter 1 anyway, but from a different angle.\u00a0 Well, then…make the next POV that of that potential victim’s POV and take a first look at Protagonist through that potential victim’s eyes…and at Balentos through that victim’s eyes as well.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Another big leap.<\/p>\n So the next POV is Aesil M’dierra’s but not in an exciting moment, though exciting moments are referenced, and a Significant Moment occurs in that POV segment when she walks into The Golden Fish and sees an obvious newcomer.<\/p>\n …………………………………………………………………………………………<\/p>\n She noticed a striking young man at the front window table, richly dressed in yellow and black over mail and–her experienced eye recognized the way the cloth laid over it–breast and back plate.<\/p>\n ……………………………………………………………………………………….<\/p>\n Other necessary nubbins have been dispensed in this POV section before this moment, relating to the matters her cousins have kept bubbling on the legal stove, adding to the tension of *that* plotline, but this is where another and major plotline’s rubber hits the road.\u00a0 The naive reader (the one who hasn’t read the previous volumes) doesn’t know who he is, and even the experienced reader–though perhaps guessing correctly–isn’t sure either.\u00a0 The last black and yellow colors shown so prominently down here were–as far as readers know–on Siniava, the Honeycat.\u00a0 Who IS this fellow?\u00a0 Why hasn’t he doffed his heavy-weight armor, or taken the coif off his head?\u00a0 M’dierra (experienced readers will know) knows every merc commander in Valdaire…this isn’t one of them.\u00a0 So who and what is he, and what is he up to?\u00a0\u00a0 That’s revealed in their conversation, or the part of their conversation that’s shown, so the main direction of that plotline seems to be clear and straightforward.\u00a0 The book is going to visit a place none of the previous books have shown, but that’s been mentioned a few times.<\/p>\n Another POV section is coming, which introduces two well-known characters from previous books but in different roles, and foreshadows (obscurely) a major road-block in the major plotline that’s just been shown, though the actual roadblock isn’t at all clear.\u00a0 One of those two is the second, co-equal protagonist.\u00a0 And Dragon, who, though a plot-mover, isn’t a protagonist, and gives readers the chance to question Dragon’s good will, sanity and, um, “wisdom.”\u00a0\u00a0 If humans have holes in their logic, and gaps in their knowledge, how is it possible for a creature of such length of age and vast experience and desire for all to be wiser…to be so blind to certain things?\u00a0 Why isn’t Dragon the perfect deus ex machina<\/em>, instead of…well…fallible?\u00a0 Or are the humans just misunderstanding the nature of the beast, so to speak?<\/p>\n But that would be telling, not showing, says the mischievous writer, running off to work on other chapters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Time for some snippets, yeah? This one will not be in the final book….it is the original start of the book: Camwyn had no memories of his childhood, only those begun in a dark cave, when he woke from grievous injuries.\u00a0 He knew of his past only what he’d been told by Dragon. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,61,52,127,45,115,5],"tags":[108,22,51,107],"class_list":["post-2838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-craft","category-editing","category-progress","category-revisions","category-snippet","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-characters","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838"}],"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=2838"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2842,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions\/2842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}