Paksworld

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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