I spend a couple of hours with Book III yesterday (all I had, due to Other Things) and had fun with the inimitable Arvid.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t know how much of this will fit in the final Book III–but it’s such fun to write.\u00a0 As with the story of the King of Pargun and his difficult daughter Elis, that we put up\u00a0 on the publisher’s blog site, I’ll find it a home somewhere even if it can’t stay in the book proper.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Arvid has had a very rough time lately, and–being Arvid–is determined that those who gave him a rough time will have a similarly rough time for his amusement.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Contact with Paks has not made him meek and mild, let’s say.\u00a0 At the moment, he’s in disguise, and happens to overhear a conversation that had to be overheard for plot purposes.\u00a0 (Not, originally, overheard by him, but using him means I don’t need another POV character.\u00a0 Given my propensity for inventing far too many POV characters, this is a good thing and you should all be grateful.)<\/p>\n
Stepping out of this book and speaking generally about setting hooks and pitons for the rest of the plot to be strung on, if\u00a0 “overhearing a conversation” is the best way to\u00a0 leak the necessary information to readers, it helps to have a conniving, sneaky character of ambiguous moral standing do the overhearing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (On the other hand, if you want the overhearing to confuse the protagonist, having it overheard by an straight arrow\u00a0 who misunderstands it works very well.\u00a0\u00a0 The trick there is writing it so your more perceptive readers will get the point…and the protagonist or other straight arrow doesn’t look too stupid for misunderstanding it.\u00a0 Bwah-hah-hah-hah…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spend a couple of hours with Book III yesterday (all I had, due to Other Things) and had fun with the inimitable Arvid.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t know how much of this will fit in the final Book III–but it’s such fun to write.\u00a0 As with the story of the King of Pargun and his difficult […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,61,5],"tags":[106,62,20,107],"class_list":["post-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-contents","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779"}],"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=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}