Paksworld

One really good thing about train travel is terrain.  Lots and lots of terrain.  Some of it isn’t useful for these books (south Texas brush country) but some will be (desert, mountains, sandstorms, grassland…)   In a car, I have to keep the car on the road and notice terrain and plants and wildlife only very peripherally (except the wildlife driving the other cars and trucks.)   In a train…though I can’t control where we go or how fast, I also don’t have to worry about it–there are tracks, and someone up front with their hands on the controls.  (Or so I’m told.)

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I’ll be spending a lot of time on a train in the next week, and the rest will be tied up in meetings and stuff I have to do as a SFWA officer.    Though I’ll have the laptop along, I won’t have much time to post to any of the blogs or reply to comments.   (Right now I should be washing my hair and packing …)

For your entertainment while I’m gone…one of the new PBS subchannels that popped up in our area has a program called AfricaTrek, where two French-speakers walked Africa from end to end, the long way.  I think the woman, Sonja, looks like Paks, at least in the face.   Your opinions?  She’s not as muscular in the upper body, and yet there she is, walking the length of Africa with a pack on her back.

Does the man of this couple look like any character in the books, to you?

For that matter, should miracles happen and someone good want to make a film of this thing (they won’t–it’s too long)  tell me who (that’s alive now) should play Kieri, Dorrin, Arcolin, and the Marshal-General.

When you hear “Dwarfmounts,” what mountain range do you think of?  Do they look like the Alps, the US Rockies, the Canadian Rockies, the Southern Alps in NZ…something else?

So, I ship the combed, braided, polished manuscript back to my editor,  and after a few hours to breathe deeply, look at flowers, avoid rattlesnakes (unlike yesterday)  I open the book I was working on before the editor’s comments came.

“Hi,” I said to it, as I came in.   “I’m back!  Ready to go?”

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And lo, the book is now just under 170,000 words, which was my goal (not my editor’s insistence…she just said snippages might have to be made, and I was motivated to do my own snipping.)    Yes, Old MacDonald’s Farm was running through my head as I was doing the last part (you get silly,  if you weren’t to start with.  “Snip, snip here….snip, snip there…here a snip, there a snip, everywhere a snip, snip.”

In the process I found problems I would have sworn (falsely, it turns out) weren’t there, or had been fixed two weeks ago.   Surely I’d already corrected that clumsy phrase…was Word’s stupid little paper-clip assistant hopping along behind me and unfixing what I fixed?   Surely I’d already noticed that typo in a name (the name is Astil, not Astin…)  and fixed it…but no.  No also to the pair of semicolons side by side, the missing last letters on several words (! what was I thinking!), another couple of pronouns whose antecedents could be misunderstood…all the sawdust and bent nails on the floor of the novel-building workshop.   (Sweep, sweep, sweep,  but there’s always something…)

If there’s one mistake–one typo, one clunky phrase, one factual error, one continuity error–you folks will find it and (even though you’re probably too polite to do this) someone will wave it in the air like a trophy.   But I’m done.  I’m wiped.   It’s going back to my editor tomorrow, and maybe I won’t see it again until the copy editor’s tromped all over it.  Which reminds me, I need to work on a note of gentle guidance for the copy editor.

This is a try at pasting something from the ms.  by way of Wordpad, which is supposed to strip off all the Word formatting.    I’m going to put the whole snippet behind the “read more” break, so if it erupts into formatting you won’t have it all over your feed (if you’re one of the feed-followers.)

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Final days of  my work based on the editor’s notes.   What left for NYC already a few thousand words shorter than it had been, is now almost 3000 words shorter than that…and you would not miss one of them.  Well…maybe a half dozen, but you’d have to have read it before.

How do editors and writers decide what to cut?  Well…think of the classic example: Michelangelo saying that to make a statue all you do is cut away the stone that doesn’t belong.    It’s much the same with words, though figuring out what doesn’t belong is a bit tougher.  After all, if you’re carving a cube, and there’s this triangular lump sticking out one side…that doesn’t belong.   If the “David” had chin-wattles, that wouldn’t belong.  But with a story, especially the first of several that share a story arc…does the bit about the pony and the wildcat belong or not?  (There was no bit about the pony and the wildcat: I just made that up.   I made the whole thing up, but you know what I mean…)

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My editor just told me–the publication date for Oath of Fealty will be March of next year.  March 2010, that is.

I think March is a fine month to launch a book, especially as it’s my birthday month.

(Imagine author bouncing around the room, making silly sounds.)

I’m working on the last of the revision stuff now, and that will probably take me another working day, at most two.

Since Holy Week kept me away from writing or posting new stuff last week, it seems appropriate to share a little background material on the holidays and celebrations of the Paksworld universe.   (The main religious background material is here for those of you just joining the party.)

The biggest–recognized in all the religions though celebrated differently–are the four big astronomical markers: the Eveners (spring and fall) equivalent to our Equinoxes, and the shortest day/longest night (Midwinter) and longest day/shortest night (Midsummer.)

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This is only for those who know the Paks books well.

Remember Vladi, the Cold Count, and Vladi’s Spears?   Vladi ran/runs a polearm mercenary company.    Somewhere in Paks I, I think his full name is given, probably in a conversation about other companies with one of the sergeants.   I can’t find it; I thought it was either of two places and it wasn’t.   I don’t have Paks I in a format this computer can read (I have a floppy *somewhere*…haven’t found it, any more than I’ve found the background notebooks. )

I know he’s supposed to be Kostandanyan…and it would really help to have his full name, if it’s there (if it’s only the background notebooks, I’m sunk.)

When I looked at the one editorial request that I just could not make work, and then finally figured it out, I realized it was a perfect example for study.   My editor correctly noted that the emotional high point of a relationship’s end was not at the end…there was an anticlimax scene.

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