Paksworld

How did that happen?   I keep combing Crown, looking for possible snippets  that aren’t spoilers, but…the last book in a group is more spoiler than anything else.    Especially for a group of readers who are as sharp as you folks, who seize on the slightest clue and go straight to intelligent speculation.  Even when you’re off the mark, you’re interestingly off the mark (and sometimes, I confess, make me wish the story itself had gone that way.)   Hence the shortage of snippets from Crown.

What I can offer, sort of, is snippets from stories that will turn up in the related short fiction collections and background information that might lead…anywhere. 

And I can also reveal problems…such as The Story With More Background Than It Needs, a classic case of infodump swamping the story proper.  Remember when I said I had an idea about a knitting controversy story?   It’s pushing 6000 words right now, but a cold reading today (“cold” = long enough after writing on it to see it clearly) reveals that too many of those words are about the wrong thing.  Although background is interesting, it’s not that interesting when nothing happens.  Yea, though I write with words of 24k gold studded with Burmese rubies…if it’s all background, readers will soon look away.

Example of overmuch background on minor character–this is the protagonist’s aunt, and most of the background has nothing to do with the story.

Down the row, Grallin saw her aunt limping along with Seb carrying a hip basket for her, and Tia carried a bag that, Grallin knew, held their food for the day and water jugs.  Effa had been unlucky in marriage–her husband died of a fever after three years leaving her with two infant daughters–and then she tripped and broke her leg in two places.  No one had offered to marry her after.  She and the girls had lived first with Grallin’s mother and then with Grallin.  Two years before, the elder had married, but the younger had not.  Effa was a skilled spinner, able to make even yarn out of any fiber, any gauge from laceweight to the heaviest.

Readers need only know that Effa is Grallin’s aunt and holds down the booth for her when Grallin is away.   So this is the only time readers will see all that excess baggage stuffed into one paragraph (if the story proper grows, some of it might slip in, bit by bit, where the reader needs it, but otherwise…it’s the box of papers in the back closet that has something important in it, but sorting through the grocery receipts someone kept is a pain.

Sometimes the background is needed, and early on, so it must read more like a story of its own.  Here’s a bit from a story introducing someone you’ve met in the books as a young girl:

When the duke’s men rode into the vill and demanded a maid or two to take back to the main house for training, Farintod’s father pushed her out into the lane.  “Here she is,” her father said, his hands firm on her shoulders.  “A true parrion for cooking she has.”

 The soldiers looked her up and down.  “She’s over-young,” the leader said.  “How can you be sure?”

 “She makes good bread.  Better than most.  Take her and see,” her father said.  He pushed harder, sticking his thumb under her shoulder-blade to make her stand tall.  “A hard worker, too.  She’s stronger than she looks.” 

Readers don’t need to know what her father hoped to gain by offering his daughter–what favor from another family, perhaps, or even from the steward who oversaw the serfs in the nearby villages.  None of that enters the story, and it’s the only time the village, or the girl’s family, appears in the story.  But the day she was taken away, and what happened, is all important in making her the woman she became at the start of the present-day in the story, when one of the kitchen maids has been hurt.

A story trying to outgrow its writer’s intentions may not offer good snippets in its early stages, because the writer can’t tell how spoilerish any part of it is, yet.    But here’s one that may turn out to be a bad spoiler, yet…probably won’t, by stopping in time.

His grandfather led their two horses–ponies, the townsfolk called them–to the door, just visible in the light from the lamp inside.  No saddles, but wool-stuffed pads held on with a girth and a sheepskin over all.  His grandfather accepted the pack his mother handed him, and threw himself up onto the lead horse’s back.

Oktar had seen that before but never accomplished it.  Town boys who rode used saddles, with stirrups, and climbed on boxes to mount.  His father picked him up and set him on the horse.  “Don’t fall off,” he said.  “And learn better.” 

“But shoes–” Oktar said, fumbling in the dark for reins.  He couldn’t find them.

“Horsefolk don’t walk,” his grandfather said from ahead of him.  “They ride.”  He clucked to the horses and they moved off down the dark street. 

I’m not sure of the names yet.  I’m not sure of a lot of things about this story and it wants to grow.  But teasing out which of the things I’m being handed are first-person experience and which are that person’s memory (in other words, am I being given the story by the boy, or by the man remembering when he was a boy?)  is so far being difficult.   It was easy with Farinthod; here it’s still tangled.  Also, though I personally find every detail I’ve ever read about horse-based cultures fascinating, and every detail about horses fascinating, that does not mean all those details belong in the story.  Enough…not everything.

For instance, the kid has to learn the horse nomad trick of having the horse lift him up (a trick I learned from a Paint mare named Pokey.)   Pokey willingly let children too small mount otherwise  straddle her neck as she grazed, and with a tug on her mane would lift her head so they slid back to her withers and thence by squirming, onto her back.     I also learned how to climb up over her rump, using  tail and hocks as rope and steps.   Pokey was a VERY child-safe and patient mare.  When she was grazing, you could lie down on her back and gaze at the sky with your head on her rump.    You could sit sideways on her.    You could crawl under her.  She never stepped on anyone, never spooked.   M-, whose family owned her, would ride her bareback across town, with her two little sisters on behind, and I (much younger than M-, but older than S- and C-) could ride behind them, back to their house.

But the grandfather’s words in this snippet are the echo of something I heard a man say when I was a kid, about King Ranch horses.  Someone asked him why the King Ranch horses never came to the local horse shows.  “King Ranch horses don’t show.  They work.”  (That was not true later, but it was certainly believed where I grew up.)