Paksworld

Pruning, re-ordering, and now gap-filling…chapters have numbers now, and are in what I believe (!) is the correct order, all 33 of them.    Some are much longer than others, and some of the very VERY long ones may be split.    Very short ones may be combined (if same POV and adjacent.)

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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)  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 sees, still untitled.  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.

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I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut/alteration that’s going on now.

This one is about horses.   I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s  horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown at Prix St. George about a year before she died.    I myself had never ridden at that level.   But K- was giving me some lessons on him, in the hope that he would connect better with me (not really–or not for the first five years at least.)   In the process, I learned to ride some advanced movements that were a lot of fun, and obviously would be of use to someone riding a horse in battle.

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Something has been brooding in the depths of the plot for this entire world (not just this book, or the previous, but I’m finding its shadows on sonar of the oldest–in story time–books, Gird & Luap as I re-read them for continuity)  for years.   Now it’s rising slowly  into view.   These are foundation-level conflicts that I’ve never really examined, having just discovered outcrops of apparent bedrock on which to put the foundations of the world 27-28  years ago.

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Sleep, Shakespeare said, knits up the raveled sleeve of care.   I wish something would knit up the raveled sleeve of prose when loose ends of yarn are hanging out and there’s not a knitting needle in sight.    However, the authorial crochet hook is working hard.  (My mother, who was incredibly good at needlework, pointed out one day that knitting and crochet are the same thing, really, except geometrically in some relationship I forget.  Upside down and backwards, maybe.)

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Though I can almost hear the cries of Woe! No! from here, the braiding process always results in dropping some overwritten sections (or parts of them) and tightening this and adding to that.  Unlike cooking, where once you put the salt or the spices in, they’re in for the duration, writing allows do-overs…trying whether something works and then removing it if it doesn’t.  (Would love to have had that option the time I put way too much tarragon in the tarragon chicken!!)

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(GRUMP: just erased the whole post I was about to send.  My right little finger hit *something* (I wasn’t looking at it, so don’t know) and it all disappeared.  So this is not the post you would’ve had but the post’s general gist as I remember it after that moment of shock, useless attempts at recovery, and then writing a GRUMP.)

This week has been about reorganizing the POV sections into chronological order and writing connections when the lack of them became apparent.  I’ve also been noting places were cuts could be made later, to accommodate the additional material that will bring the book to the conclusion I’m trying to achieve…for which I need a LOT more room.    Right now the book’s just under 163,000 words,  but it changes daily up and down as this is trimmed slightly and that is added for connectivity and this other bit now turns out to be wrong, and here I’ve added a chunk…etc.    There’s a lot of front-loading in this book, so anything trimmed there has to be carefully done so the plot-threads can run smoothly on, without fraying to nothing later.

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In Kings of the North, which only the alpha readers among you have yet read,  the POV characters leave Aarenis at the end of the campaign season, so whatever happens there between, say, a few tendays before the Autumn Evener  and Midwinter is offstage for that book.   And in that book, what happens in Aarenis isn’t relevant to that book, but it is relevant to the next…the one I’m on now.

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Yesterday’s 2700+ words and today’s 2000+ have rolled over the writer-odometer another satisfying amount.   More important for your reading enjoyment, Stuff has been Happening to multiple characters, some of whom are being revealed as not what I thought they were.  You may be smarter than I am and guess earlier that X is not really X but R’.    Or not.

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Sometimes I’m amazed at what the Plot Daemon has been up to behind my back.  I was not feeling well for several days after the trip, and couldn’t get more than a hundred words or so out at a time.    Far below my daily goals.    (I was waking up unsure where I was–mostly thinking I was on the train, but once still in a hotel–and the writing itself was peculiar.  I knew certain scenes would be difficult, but usually those difficult scenes come embedded in their full context.  This time…not so much.)     But underneath/behind all that, the Plot Daemon was busy.

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