Paksworld

The Paksworld books are largely outdoor books–sure, there are palaces, forts, inns, taverns, shops, cottages, etc., but much of the time the characters are outdoors.   As a result, it’s necessary for me to go out for hours at a time, noticing things.  Sights.  Smells.  Sounds.   The feel of the air,  the texture of different trees’ bark, different twigs, etc.  (It would be easier on the sounds end if we weren’t quite as close to roads, but no matter…)

Today I took several  hours off for a ramble, having missed some days in a row, including pretty ones.   We had a warm spell, quite balmy, so since I’m writing winter scenes in a very different climate than this, I was mostly just absorbing outdoorness.  Aloneness.  Seeing how alert I could be, how quiet (not quiet enough–spooked one deer out of cover across the fenceline.)  Trying to be fully open to the grassland, the woods, the brush as I moved from place to place.

I spent awhile following a deer’s track.  It’s been dry for weeks, but for one small shower (that didn’t leave a measurable amount in the rain gauges.)  So I had dents in the dust to look at and decide which were coyote and which were deer–and this wasn’t nice fine dust that took a good impression, either.  The slanting winter sun helped, by edging a shadow into even the shallowest and most open prints.  Then, in the woods, the deer went off the footpath across fallen leaves.  I stopped and looked at the trace and wondered why it had veered away there, when one of their usual tangles to rest in was ahead.  Had I spooked it?  Had something else?  Was it even today’s track?  (It’s so dry, I can’t tell.)

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1672 words so far today, for a book total of 67,430.

This is the second book in the new group, and right now we have Arian out in the forest west of Chaya with some old ranger friends. She’s bringing them up to date on Stuff, and they’re suggesting that she’s the right person to do an unpleasant errand for them. She’s not so sure.

Meanwhile, Dorrin has returned from the second coronation in book one, and still processing what happened there. I need to open up the strands copied over from the first book, when I chopped it off at Midsummer, and figure out what Dorrin did between then and the Autumn Evener, and from then to now (“now” being a day or so beyond the end of the first volume as originally written. Is that sufficiently unclear now?)

Going for a short walk and to feed horses, then I’ll finish up the goal for today, 2000. What’s odd is that I wrote most of the 1600 while waiting for the telephone repair people to call me back.

Total wordage on second book has now topped 65,000.  That’s not much in a week, but it was a holiday week.

That Character who was refusing to do what I said….was right.  We had several long, heartfelt conversations, which I discussed with one of my alpha readers, and Character is right.

I still have to finish an article on deadline before I can get back to the book full-time.

Most of us have had the experience of knowing someone so well we were sure we could predict their behavior in all circumstances….and then being shocked to the core to find out they did not behave as expected. It happened to me again this past fall. They weren’t hiding what they were–I just didn’t see it.

Non-writers sometimes think that fictional characters are entirely under the writer’s control–after all, we have a “delete” key, don’t we? (Or, in the old days, erasers and white-out.) Surely the writer can force the character to do what the writer wants…it’s not like the character is a real person who can slam the door and walk away.

Except…readers want characters to feel real. And one part of feeling real is a character’s ability to refuse cooperation. Even cooperation with the writer.

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When I was writing the first Paksenarrion books (before I knew they were books, back when I thought I was writing a rather long short story….but that’s another bit of history)  I realized early on that I needed some way to make the weather seem realistic.  Though writers get to make stuff up, if they make too much stuff up, or make stuff up the wrong way,  they end up making up what is easiest to deal with.

I don’t remember now when I first noticed this, as a reader, but I do remember somewhere, sometime, reading a book in which the moon was full whenever the writer needed more light at night.  This was our moon, not the moon of some other planet for which a different arrangement might be created.  Our very own moon was full at irregular intervals (and new at others) to suit the need for dark nights or bright nights–and the full moons only ten days apart were noticeable.  (Also, there were no clouds on nights of a full moon. )

Weather is–luckily for writers–more fickle than the moon, but even so you can’t (without risking reader annoyance–alternate blizzards and hurricanes every time you need a bit of excitement.

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This information on Policies is now posted on its own page (see links above) for reference, but I thought I’d stick it in as a post as well.  We’ve now had enough spam comments and comments that just weren’t quite appropriate that I thought it was time to reveal the rules by which comments are moderated.

This blog is for discussion of the books that make up Paksenarrion’s World and the background research that goes into them. See About Paksworld for more information.

At present, readers can comment without registration. That may change at any time if comments become a problem.

The first comment from any source does not appear on the site it’s been approved. Most pending comments will be cleared within 48 hours, holidays excepted. (Moderator has a life, quite full.)

Comments that look like spam will be reported as spam. Future comments from that source will be assumed spam and sent to the spam bucket.

Comments that contain inappropriate titles, topics, or language will be deleted without notice. If a first comment is deleted, the next from that source will also go to moderation before appearing on the site.

Titles: Comments don’t need titles; if used, titles should not look like spam–sex, money, politics and nonspecific greetings (“Hi”) lend a spam-like look and may get your coment deleted or reported as spam. If you want to use a title, make it appropriate to the topic-range of this blog.

Topics: Since topic drift is a constant of the ‘net-verse, moderator may let a conversation drift in hopes that it will drift back, usually with a reminder that this blog has a narrower channel than others, but eventually (and sooner in some cases) off-topic posts will be deleted. It’s non-negotiable.

Language: Verbal abuse and profanity are inappropriate here. Disagreement is OK; abuse and harrassment are not. Asterisks, exclamation points, and other typography can substitute for profanity when the unabridged dictionary isn’t enough (it usually is….)

Copyright. It’s not just an old-fashioned word, it’s the law. And it’s a law that matters. So don’t post copyrighted work here without permission (except for brief quotes in the course of a discussion) and cite the source for anything you do quote. Don’t post elsewhere (off this blog) anything you find here without permission of its writer, whether it’s the blog-owner or someone else’s comment.

Progress on the NEW new book–the one after the one that will be published next (which is, other than editor-requested revisions and production-related work–done.

Total wordage at the moment: 61,000 words.

New wordage (yesterday and today) 1700+ words continuous, plus some fill-in bits here and there.

As some of you know from my LJ and SFF.net newsgroup postings, most of this was written when I thought it was part of the “old” new book, Blood and Bone. Yes, if you’re going full-blast it’s possible to write almost 60,000 words past the end of a book…sort of like skidding past a stop sign. Now I need to get back up to speed…this gives me a nice start on the next book, which means I could finish it faster than the contract demands. That would be good for all of us. If it’s about the same length as the one I just did, this is just over a third of it. I’ll start pushing for 2000 words/day after Christmas. Or maybe today.

Surprise has already landed on me–I thought things were going smoothly in a certain quarter but discovered last night that Someone doesn’t like Someone else’s father, and this is going to put a very large monkey-wrench in the works.

Monkey-wrenches in the works make for good plots later on, but still…I wanted this one thing to work smoothly and monkey wrenches to cause a problem somewhere else.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled Sunday programming. (I’m home today for two good reasons, neither of them relevant to the topic.)

In Paksenarrion’s world different groups of characters have different kinds of magic–nobody has it all, and many people have none.

The sources of magic remain a mystery except for wizards’ magicks–a learnable, teachable technology.    The Elder Races are sure such magic as they have is part of their created nature, and consider their own gods responsible for it.  Magelords, the only humans with inborn magical ability, have variously believed the abilities came from their ancestors through normal inheritance, from the gods originally, or from specific techniques taught by a given deity.   Paladins believe their patron or their patron’s god grants the powers, and Kuakganni believe the green world grants theirs.

The difficulty for a writer inventing magic is to put the limits of such powers where they’ll do the most good for the story–and where readers can suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy the story.  Many readers like (and many dislike) the very thought of magic in a story.   Multiple magic systems may seem more complicated, but also allow for constraints that help define different character groups.

For instance, the two Elder Races of Earthfolk have innate magery–part of their essence–but theirs is limited to specific places and materials.   Dwarves and gnomes can do things with stone no one else can do,  but have no magic touch with “the green blood”–with plants or with most animals.    Though a dwarf may be individually charming, he will not be able to charm (in the magical sense) a human. Read the rest of this entry »

An internet-acquaintance writer (mostly nonfiction writer) posted a query on another venue about small-unit tactics–he’d been reading Caesar.   I read Caesar in high school Latin class, and recommended that he take a look at that wonderful British classic, The Defense of Duffer’s Drift, and then–if he needed combined forces–the far more stodgy and wordy,  but still useful, US training exercise The Defense of Hill 781.   Also Xenophon’s Anabasis for travel in hostile country, and his work on commanding cavalry units.  Then he found a couple of really REALLY good internet sources I hadn’t seen on Roman camp design.

At the same time,  while working on revisions of the new book, I was re-reading some small-unit engagements I’d written earlier in the year and inserting the revisions–both major revisions involved opening up engagements my agent thought were too compact and constricted (thus over too soon.)   So in the interstices of the conversation we were having online, I was looking at my work with reference to that conversation as well as sources I was using  and he was using, to the extent these were relevant.

One of the joys of having writing colleagues in very different areas of writing is this kind of unexpected and enriching overlap between their projects and mine, by which I gain new insight into what I’m doing.  I hope these experiences result in greater reader enjoyment down the line.    (The same is true of the non-writing experts whose brains I pick mercilessly on the way to learning what I need…but with other writers it feels more like ships passing in the night which nonetheless manage to send each other vital messages.)

A month or two ago, I wrote a post over on LiveJournal about cooties, following on a fun discussion at this year’s World SF Convention. In this context, cooties are elements of someone’s work to which a reader has an aversive allergic response. Stories that contain common cooties will repel segments of the possible readership. Cooties are most common in the areas of sex, violence, religion, and power/politics, but are so widespread that a writer cannot possibly avoid including some cootie-generating element.

Cooties generate their strong aversive signal because they’re associated (not always accurately) with an array of things the reader doesn’t like, and serve as a distant early warning of ick ahead. (“Ick” is a technical term for what sickens a reader if he/she encounters it.) Thus someone for whom girl-loves-horse storylines are Ick will see the appearance of a horse and a girl in the same book as a cootie. “Not another stupid girl and her horse!” Eye-roll.

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