Writerly egos really do work this way.\u00a0 Inspired by the review copy of DEEDS OF YOUTH,\u00a0 I was able to finish the sequel to “Consequences” (last story in that volume) yesterday.\u00a0 MUCH faster than I finished the first one of the pair.\u00a0 Together they cover the entirety of Kieri Phelan’s first independent mercenary command.\u00a0 The original version I wrote in the neighborhood of 35 years ago hasn’t been found, so I was reconstructing from my memory of it.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m sure it’s not an accurate reconstruction, but nobody else knows the original at all.\u00a0 Ha.\u00a0 What you’ll finally get, when the collection after the new collection comes out, is\u00a0 all there is.<\/p>\n
An ego-correction was finding out, while doing what I thought was the final revision, that I had *reversed two characters’ names.”\u00a0 Between stories.\u00a0 Within weeks of having re-read “Consequences”.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, OK, I’m good enough to write an exciting story in less than two weeks, a story that involves blocking out a clash of militaries (size, location, terrain, opposing forces’ different weapons, mobility, background of military theory for each, etc.)\u00a0 and collapsing all the details the writer then knows into just the ones the *reader* needs to know to grasp what’s happening, the sequence of events, the personalities and back stories of the POV characters, and fitting all that into less than 7500 words at most.\u00a0\u00a0 But I’m not apparently good enough to noticed that between “Consequences” and (its current name, this may change) “Unintended,”\u00a0 Crown Prince G-‘s name turns into younger Prince H-‘s name.<\/p>\n
All fixed now.\u00a0 G- is back to being G- across the narrow temporal gulf between reading story C and writing story U.\u00a0\u00a0 Be sure that from now on in I will be looking harder when writing subsequent related stories to existing stories, and doing the name check *earlier* in the process. \u00a0 First-readers of story U liked it a lot.\u00a0 I still like it a lot today, having spent last night and today cleaning it up.\u00a0 Is it spotless and shiny, all ready for its debut later?\u00a0 I’ll know better after letting the resident Nitpicker at it.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a snippet.<\/p>\n
……………………………………….<\/p>\n
“Get a horse,” the king said.\u00a0 “A good one.”<\/p>\n
……………………………………<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in the daily life stuff, it’s been very, VERY hot so I’m feeding horses later and later in the evening and today moved the morning feed up to “nearly all hard feed in the morning because it’s cooler and better for them.”<\/p>\n
A US Senator (former football coach, whoop-te-do) is taking out his spite on the Department of Defense by blocking all promotions that require Senate approval and thus leaving many commands without a commander when the previous one reached legal retirement age.\u00a0 Including my branch, the Marines, who are without a Commandant for the first time in over 100 years.\u00a0 (And, dear friends, you really truly do not want to leave the Marines to their own devices without a solid command structure.\u00a0 You don’t want to leave ANY military that way, but we have particularly…strong…well…our nickname with at least one other branch is Uncle Sam’s Misquided Children, and our reputation is “If you want something absolutely totally destroyed, call in the Marines.”\u00a0 I, of course, am now a sweet old lady, perfectly harmless except for the razor edge on tongue and pen.<\/p>\n
I called said Senator’s Senate office today and gave a brief and non-profane description of his misdeeds (this is only one of them; the guy’s a raging racist and a contributor to the J6 insurrection) before calling on him to resign.\u00a0 He won’t, of course, but this is what I can do legally, for now.\u00a0 Let him know he’s not the strong noble hero he thinks he is but a pissant southern neo-Confederate who broke his oath of office, tried to overturn the government, and has pissed off a Marine veteran.\u00a0 At least one.\u00a0 Sure there’s more.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m feeling that the Senator, who never served in any branch, should perhaps contemplate the effect of Marines minus a complete command structure on something closer to his heart than the rest of the country, since he doesn’t care about the rest of the country, just his billionaire donors and the white folks in his home state.\u00a0 Needs to be reminded that the Senate doesn’t command the military.\u00a0 That’s an executive function, and it needs a whole, unbroken, chain of command from POTUS on down to the lowest level just-out-of-boot-camp E-1.<\/p>\n
So I think I need to call his office *daily* with things he clearly doesn’t know, and needs to know, about the real, serious, deal it is to stand in the way of the Marines having a\u00a0 Commandant.\u00a0 His name, in case you don’t know it, is Tommy Tuberville, and he pronounced it TUBBER-vill.\u00a0 Wouldn’t want to say a Senator’s name wrong, would we?\u00a0 (Rubber-Tubber?\u00a0 Flubber-Tubber?)\u00a0 I leave the cussing out to the senior NCOs, who are superb at it (an art form, once they’re up in grade)\u00a0 and recommend that former officers and lower grade enlisted just list any four or eight of his “errors” as politely as possible within the need to make it clear what a [redacted] he is.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writerly egos really do work this way.\u00a0 Inspired by the review copy of DEEDS OF YOUTH,\u00a0 I was able to finish the sequel to “Consequences” (last story in that volume) yesterday.\u00a0 MUCH faster than I finished the first one of the pair.\u00a0 Together they cover the entirety of Kieri Phelan’s first independent mercenary command.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,53,127,45,115,102,5],"tags":[112,20,28,39,107],"class_list":["post-2989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editing","category-life-beyond-writing","category-progress","category-revisions","category-snippet","category-story-2","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-snippet","tag-story","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989"}],"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=2989"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2991,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2989\/revisions\/2991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}