{"id":907,"date":"2010-10-12T10:39:20","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T16:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=907"},"modified":"2010-10-12T10:41:33","modified_gmt":"2010-10-12T16:41:33","slug":"untangling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=907","title":{"rendered":"Untangling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though I can almost hear the cries of Woe! No!<\/em> from here, the braiding process always results in dropping some overwritten sections (or parts of them) and tightening this and adding to that.\u00a0 Unlike cooking, where once you put the salt or the spices in, they’re in for the duration, writing allows do-overs…trying whether something works and then removing it if it doesn’t.\u00a0 (Would love to have had that option the time I put way<\/em> too much tarragon in the tarragon chicken!!)<\/p>\n

One of the large chunks recently removed will become a side-story when given a full-arc structure, and I plan to release it between the launch of Kings <\/em>and the launch of Book III.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a good story,\u00a0 just far too long for this book, especially where it sits chronologically–it unbalances it in several ways.<\/p>\n

Another chunk was removed both to save space for Something Else and because–though I <\/em>like quiet, leisurely, atmospheric openings–I have the advantage of knowing that the next crisis is just out of sight.\u00a0\u00a0 When I read someone else’s quiet, leisurely, atmospheric opening, I trust that writer to have the same aim in starting quietly that I do.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (And when it proves a mistaken trust, there’s another book headed for the giveaway box.)\u00a0\u00a0 Readers, I’m told by reliable sources, prefer a story to get moving, show some spunk.\u00a0\u00a0 They may have been disappointed too often by slow starts.<\/p>\n

So instead of that unadventurous start to\u00a0 everyone’s favorite “not-a-thief”‘s journey…we start with a tower of vultures and a dead body.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On reflection, nothing else in the journey to that point was likely to have any plot-relevance through the entire group of books.<\/p>\n

And instead of two POV sections covering the same time and the same events in the same place…we now have one.<\/p>\n

This kind of work needs to be done in long sessions (impossible to tell in five or ten minutes what sections need to be re-ordered, then move them and remove fossils), so the workdays are now running 7 am to near midnight, with a break for a short nap in midafternoon when my brain goes numb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though I can almost hear the cries of Woe! No! from here, the braiding process always results in dropping some overwritten sections (or parts of them) and tightening this and adding to that.\u00a0 Unlike cooking, where once you put the salt or the spices in, they’re in for the duration, writing allows do-overs…trying whether something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,45,5],"tags":[62,20,107],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editing","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","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\/907"}],"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=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}