{"id":952,"date":"2010-12-01T10:45:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T16:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=952"},"modified":"2010-12-01T10:45:45","modified_gmt":"2010-12-01T16:45:45","slug":"happy-december-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=952","title":{"rendered":"Happy December Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whatever the weather where you are, and your attitude about the holiday season…for me it means only three more months until Launch Month (not Launch Day, but Launch Month)\u00a0 for Kings of the North<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It also means only one month left before turning in Book III, which is ambling along towards the version the editor sees, still untitled.\u00a0 So unless there are major changes, I’ll be scarce on the blog while keeping the already abraded nose firmly on the relentlessly turning grindstone.<\/p>\n

Along with some filling-in of gaps and moving-around of still unattached bits, the deep combing of early chapters is going ahead briskly.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s been a lot of\u00a0 “I wrote that<\/em>?\u00a0 How could<\/em> I?\u00a0 DUH!\u00a0\u00a0 That’s not the right word!\u00a0\u00a0 Talk about dangling modifiers!!\u00a0 Wait–that’s impossible!\u00a0\u00a0 Who<\/em> said that?…” internal dialogue going on.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a promise that no such infelicities will exist in the finished version (they can slither through undetected, or creep back in via software conversion later)\u00a0 but it’s a statement that yes, yes, work is<\/em> being done on this kind of thing, and what you get will be lots better than what was there before.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Writers, including me, feel unjustly accused when someone points out a typo or two and announces that the writer is obviously a careless hack who doesn’t bother to proofread the work.)<\/p>\n

When I’m writing at a pretty good clip,\u00a0 I write it as it flows…which means things get out of order sometimes (more often than I like.) \u00a0\u00a0 I find what should be the first sentence buried in the paragraph, or syntactic reversals within a sentence (“Far in the distance he saw a fleet approaching” v. “He saw a fleet approaching far in the distance”\u00a0 or “hill, tall and green” v. “tall green hill.”)<\/p>\n

Sentence order in paragraphs must be sequential in terms of the action to keep the reader oriented (if a character whacks someone with a rock and then picks up the rock, readers will be either amused, confused, or annoyed.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fast writing–full flow writing–means I’m “seeing\/hearing\/feeling” events happening so fast that I may skip an intermediate (and necessary step) to get something down, only to “catch up” in the next moment–so the sentence isn’t where it should be.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some out-of-sequence sentences are just clumsy, not confusing, but every paragraph must be checked for that, specifically, because it’s something I do wrong multiple times\u00a0 in every first draft.<\/p>\n

Syntactic reversals are trickier.\u00a0\u00a0 Reversing “normal” word order is both natural (we do it when talking and thinking our way through what we want to say, as well as in colloquial speech, slang–for instance in the current usage of placing “not” at the end of a sentence to negate it) and very powerful in writing if used thoughtfully, intentionally, to create an effect.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It occurs in my first drafts in the “conversational” sense,\u00a0 but far too often to be useful in creating a deliberate effect (it has to be unusual for that purpose.)\u00a0\u00a0 And so the sentences themselves must be looked over for such unintended reversals.<\/p>\n

Then there’s word choice.\u00a0\u00a0 For every fictional milieu, there’s a culture (or more), and making it come alive in printed (or heard) words means choosing words that (in whatever language the characters really speak) would be used.\u00a0 In Paksworld,\u00a0 that’s particularly important.\u00a0\u00a0 The word-choices shift a little from the Gird\/Luap books to the main group (DEED and the new ones) to reflect the history between, but the real difference is between what I can use in the space opera\/space adventure books, and these.\u00a0 Yet I’m alive in the 21st century, exposed to current usage and slang, so first drafts acquire a sprinkling of words that don’t belong.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes it’s easy to change them.\u00a0 Sometimes it takes longer and another troll through the Compact OED.\u00a0 (And that always means I get distracted and wander off down lovely meandering lanes of language.)<\/p>\n

So…that’s what I’m doing this lovely cold clear day, rather than taking a walk out on the land.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Well, after doing some other writing-related business stuff first thing.)\u00a0\u00a0 Have a good one yourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whatever the weather where you are, and your attitude about the holiday season…for me it means only three more months until Launch Month (not Launch Day, but Launch Month)\u00a0 for Kings of the North. It also means only one month left before turning in Book III, which is ambling along towards the version the editor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,45,5],"tags":[62,51,107],"class_list":["post-952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952"}],"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=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":953,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions\/953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}