This week I finished (for now, anyway) a Paksworld story that does not involve any swords, any fighting, anything (as some would say) exciting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But Paksworld, though founded on adventures of the military sort, is a bigger world than that.\u00a0 Behind every military society is its nourishing civilian root system.\u00a0\u00a0 Even the nomadic tribes of Central Asia, even the ones who trained girls as warriors and considered a young woman marriageable only when she proved brave enough to kill, had a civilian root that kept the warriors alive from birth until they qualified, and fed them and clothed them afterward.\u00a0 Somebody cared for the herds, trained the horses, tanned the hides that made the leather armor, made the saddles and bridles and bits.\u00a0 Somebody milked the mares and sheep or cattle, made the cheese, ground the grain for meal or flour to make the noodles or dumplings.<\/p>\n
The big civilizations in our world depended on agriculture, yes…but also on trade.\u00a0 No one place had every useful mineral:to make bronze, you need copper and tin both.\u00a0 Traders came to ancient Britain for tin.\u00a0 So in Paksworld, resources are distributed unevenly…and as a result expertise is distributed unevenly.\u00a0 A maritime culture must have an abundant source of wood…and something you can make sails from…the kind of sail material affects the sails you can make from it, how heavy they are (and thus how they stress the wood they’re hung from.)\u00a0\u00a0 A horse-using culture must have an abundance of grass nutritious for horses and terrain they an run on.\u00a0 If you want a society that uses wheels, be sure you provide them with what it takes to make useful wheels in both simple and more advanced forms.<\/p>\n
In this story, “Bank Transfer,” the setting is in the most advanced human culture that invented world has: Aarenis.\u00a0 It has cities and towns with quite competent stone and wood buildings.\u00a0 It knows how to mine, refine, and fashion tools and weapons of steel (though stone blades are not unknown, just always considered old and rare.)\u00a0\u00a0 Its trade networks span much of the continent, with regular movement of food, raw materials, manufactured goods from place to place, and local manufacture of goods in most towns and cities.\u00a0\u00a0 Its monetary system is unified across Aarenis by the Guild League, the association of most occupational guilds to form a strong political and economic force, and intersects with other monetary systems by clearly understood exchanges under the authority of the Moneychangers Guild.\u00a0 For the registered members, paper exchange has been replacing\u00a0 (at least for short terms) the movement of physical coinage.\u00a0\u00a0 A letter of credit between a bank in the South and one in the North allows a loosening of supply during the winter, when no physical travel is possible.\u00a0 In the near term and close by, a banker can issue a draught–a letter–to one of its depositors, and it functions like one of our paper checks used to…the bank and the gulld its member bank belongs to guarantees payment.\u00a0 The process itself is different: a draught for, say, 100 natas (a large sum)\u00a0 is carried by the bank customer, and will be annotated with the amounts due to as many merchants as it takes to use up the amount, with their signature.\u00a0 It’s normal for a draught to be in use only within a set time (1-3 days is common)\u00a0 and for a set number of recipients, within one city.\u00a0 It saved the customer having to walk around with a large, thief-tempting, amount of coinage.\u00a0\u00a0 And it’s useless to thieves, unless they’ve killed the customer and stolen their seal, which is stamped on each annotation on the draught, as well as the merchant who collects from the bank.<\/p>\n
So in this story a woman in her early thirties is a trader–a sutler, a supplier to the military, any military.\u00a0 She’s near the bottom of the sutler hierarchy: she has only one wagon, she’s not as busy as she wants.\u00a0 Her father was a one-wagon trader; her grandfather came to Valdaire with a pushcart, selling whatever he could, often rags.\u00a0 She and her blind sister live in a building she inherited, along with the business, about 12 years ago when her father died.\u00a0 She and her sister live in one room of that building (she has rented out the rest, except for part of the ground floor and cellar, where she stores what she sells and the horses that pull the wagon)\u00a0 and her life is tightly constrained by her responsibilities and the effect of a theft shortly after her father died.\u00a0 She’s working hard, but not making progress toward an easier life.\u00a0 When opportunity appears, she must not only choose between risk and opportunity, but convince her banker–and others–that she is capable of turning opportunity into actual profit.\u00a0 (It is not an accident that I see her in her early thirties…my mother was thirty-two when she fled from an unsafe marriage and traveled almost 2000 miles (it may have been more, given the old roads back then) and started a new life as a mother, after I was born.\u00a0 Grethna isn’t pregnant, has never been married, but the journey she undertakes has distinct echoes, to me.)\u00a0 What Grethna has is the stolid kind of courage that persists and persists and persists.\u00a0 How will she deal with her banker, who still thinks of her as a mere girl?\u00a0\u00a0 How will she deal with this opportunity that beckons but demands abilities she’s not sure she has?<\/p>\n
The story has major spoilers for the book that’s Horngard I (I hope someday in reality!)\u00a0 and thus can’t reasonably be published until I find out whether Horngard I will be published, and wait out its birthing.\u00a0 Meanwhile I’ll be thinking about whether Grethan is thickening into character who might generate enough plot for a full book, or a longer piece.\u00a0 Why not just write that?\u00a0 Because Horngard I needs to come first.\u00a0 I started this story right after the faceplant, when I had the quite reasonable fear that this new head injury might permanently put me back to “no longer able to write.”\u00a0 I knew I wouldn’t know the full extent of the concussion’s damage for at least two months, maybe more, because that’s how long it takes to assess\u00a0 a repeat concussion.\u00a0 What you get the week right after isn’t the full story….things could get worse or better.\u00a0 So I started a story intended to be fairly simple and short, as a test: can I still “round” a plot to a conclusion, and tighten it into a good solid, satisfying knot.\u00a0 After the 2018 concussion, I couldn’t.\u00a0 Not for years.\u00a0 I’ve done that now, and my two best first-readers agree.<\/p>\n
However, it was not an easy task, and\u00a0 I can tell the concussion has left residual damage.\u00a0 It will take longer to work it all out and see how much, but…at least I can write a short, relatively simple, piece.\u00a0\u00a0 Now to write another, about something else.\u00a0 I wouldn’t mind being stuck in Paksworld for the rest of my life, but I’d like the ability to switch back to SF occasionally if I can.\u00a0 The two types seemed to generate stories for each other 20 years ago. \u00a0 Only way to know is to start something short there, too.<\/p>\n
However again, when it’s not past bedtime on a hot summer night in Texas, I will hunt up a snippet of Horngard I\u00a0 as soon as I can.\u00a0 You deserve it.<\/p>\n
Third However….Sharon Lee & Steve Miller have a new book Liaden Universe book coming out, SALVAGE RIGHT, and it’s a fast-moving fascinating book.\u00a0\u00a0 Science Fiction with autonomous self-aware ships and space stations, characters that include many-times-reborn not-exactly clones, Liadens, Terrans, persons not easily defined, spies embedded in rescue organizations, wheels with wheels within weirdness, the Uncle’s unsociable sister, mysterious holdovers from a previous universe, a norbear, instances of Korval’s Tree, and much, much, more.\u00a0 We finally see the end (I hope!) of the old Tinsori Light, but not the end of the Lyre Institute for Exceptional Children, alas.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I finished (for now, anyway) a Paksworld story that does not involve any swords, any fighting, anything (as some would say) exciting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But Paksworld, though founded on adventures of the military sort, is a bigger world than that.\u00a0 Behind every military society is its nourishing civilian root system.\u00a0\u00a0 Even the nomadic tribes of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,129,53,102,5],"tags":[108,22,112,39,107],"class_list":["post-2980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-characters","category-life-beyond-writing","category-story-2","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-characters","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-story","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980"}],"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=2980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2981,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions\/2981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}