Paksworld

This week I finished (for now, anyway) a Paksworld story that does not involve any swords, any fighting, anything (as some would say) exciting.    But Paksworld, though founded on adventures of the military sort, is a bigger world than that.  Behind every military society is its nourishing civilian root system.   Even the nomadic tribes of Central Asia, even the ones who trained girls as warriors and considered a young woman marriageable only when she proved brave enough to kill, had a civilian root that kept the warriors alive from birth until they qualified, and fed them and clothed them afterward.  Somebody cared for the herds, trained the horses, tanned the hides that made the leather armor, made the saddles and bridles and bits.  Somebody milked the mares and sheep or cattle, made the cheese, ground the grain for meal or flour to make the noodles or dumplings.

The big civilizations in our world depended on agriculture, yes…but also on trade.  No one place had every useful mineral:to make bronze, you need copper and tin both.  Traders came to ancient Britain for tin.  So in Paksworld, resources are distributed unevenly…and as a result expertise is distributed unevenly.  A maritime culture must have an abundant source of wood…and something you can make sails from…the kind of sail material affects the sails you can make from it, how heavy they are (and thus how they stress the wood they’re hung from.)   A horse-using culture must have an abundance of grass nutritious for horses and terrain they an run on.  If you want a society that uses wheels, be sure you provide them with what it takes to make useful wheels in both simple and more advanced forms.

In this story, “Bank Transfer,” the setting is in the most advanced human culture that invented world has: Aarenis.  It has cities and towns with quite competent stone and wood buildings.  It knows how to mine, refine, and fashion tools and weapons of steel (though stone blades are not unknown, just always considered old and rare.)   Its trade networks span much of the continent, with regular movement of food, raw materials, manufactured goods from place to place, and local manufacture of goods in most towns and cities.   Its monetary system is unified across Aarenis by the Guild League, the association of most occupational guilds to form a strong political and economic force, and intersects with other monetary systems by clearly understood exchanges under the authority of the Moneychangers Guild.  For the registered members, paper exchange has been replacing  (at least for short terms) the movement of physical coinage.   A letter of credit between a bank in the South and one in the North allows a loosening of supply during the winter, when no physical travel is possible.  In the near term and close by, a banker can issue a draught–a letter–to one of its depositors, and it functions like one of our paper checks used to…the bank and the gulld its member bank belongs to guarantees payment.  The process itself is different: a draught for, say, 100 natas (a large sum)  is carried by the bank customer, and will be annotated with the amounts due to as many merchants as it takes to use up the amount, with their signature.  It’s normal for a draught to be in use only within a set time (1-3 days is common)  and for a set number of recipients, within one city.  It saved the customer having to walk around with a large, thief-tempting, amount of coinage.   And it’s useless to thieves, unless they’ve killed the customer and stolen their seal, which is stamped on each annotation on the draught, as well as the merchant who collects from the bank.

So in this story a woman in her early thirties is a trader–a sutler, a supplier to the military, any military.  She’s near the bottom of the sutler hierarchy: she has only one wagon, she’s not as busy as she wants.  Her father was a one-wagon trader; her grandfather came to Valdaire with a pushcart, selling whatever he could, often rags.  She and her blind sister live in a building she inherited, along with the business, about 12 years ago when her father died.  She and her sister live in one room of that building (she has rented out the rest, except for part of the ground floor and cellar, where she stores what she sells and the horses that pull the wagon)  and her life is tightly constrained by her responsibilities and the effect of a theft shortly after her father died.  She’s working hard, but not making progress toward an easier life.  When opportunity appears, she must not only choose between risk and opportunity, but convince her banker–and others–that she is capable of turning opportunity into actual profit.  (It is not an accident that I see her in her early thirties…my mother was thirty-two when she fled from an unsafe marriage and traveled almost 2000 miles (it may have been more, given the old roads back then) and started a new life as a mother, after I was born.  Grethna isn’t pregnant, has never been married, but the journey she undertakes has distinct echoes, to me.)  What Grethna has is the stolid kind of courage that persists and persists and persists.  How will she deal with her banker, who still thinks of her as a mere girl?   How will she deal with this opportunity that beckons but demands abilities she’s not sure she has?

The story has major spoilers for the book that’s Horngard I (I hope someday in reality!)  and thus can’t reasonably be published until I find out whether Horngard I will be published, and wait out its birthing.  Meanwhile I’ll be thinking about whether Grethan is thickening into character who might generate enough plot for a full book, or a longer piece.  Why not just write that?  Because Horngard I needs to come first.  I started this story right after the faceplant, when I had the quite reasonable fear that this new head injury might permanently put me back to “no longer able to write.”  I knew I wouldn’t know the full extent of the concussion’s damage for at least two months, maybe more, because that’s how long it takes to assess  a repeat concussion.  What you get the week right after isn’t the full story….things could get worse or better.  So I started a story intended to be fairly simple and short, as a test: can I still “round” a plot to a conclusion, and tighten it into a good solid, satisfying knot.  After the 2018 concussion, I couldn’t.  Not for years.  I’ve done that now, and my two best first-readers agree.

However, it was not an easy task, and  I can tell the concussion has left residual damage.  It will take longer to work it all out and see how much, but…at least I can write a short, relatively simple, piece.   Now to write another, about something else.  I wouldn’t mind being stuck in Paksworld for the rest of my life, but I’d like the ability to switch back to SF occasionally if I can.  The two types seemed to generate stories for each other 20 years ago.   Only way to know is to start something short there, too.

However again, when it’s not past bedtime on a hot summer night in Texas, I will hunt up a snippet of Horngard I  as soon as I can.  You deserve it.

Third However….Sharon Lee & Steve Miller have a new book Liaden Universe book coming out, SALVAGE RIGHT, and it’s a fast-moving fascinating book.   Science Fiction with autonomous self-aware ships and space stations, characters that include many-times-reborn not-exactly clones, Liadens, Terrans, persons not easily defined, spies embedded in rescue organizations, wheels with wheels within weirdness, the Uncle’s unsociable sister, mysterious holdovers from a previous universe, a norbear, instances of Korval’s Tree, and much, much, more.  We finally see the end (I hope!) of the old Tinsori Light, but not the end of the Lyre Institute for Exceptional Children, alas.

Sometimes I doodle for awhile.  Sometimes a doodle is inspired by something some real artist put up online, that I saw while doing *legitimate* research.  In this case there was an image of a hill, a giant hump on the image, with fields going straight up and down and little doohickies representng different crops in different stripes.   And a tree or two at the top of the hill.  My doodle was also based on previous doodles when I outlined a space (sometimes square, sometimes triangular, sometimes octagonal, sometimes, as here, a rectangle) and filled it with other shapes and then treated the other shapes with textural notation (dots or lines) to suggest…something.  Occasionally color.  The recent re-organization of the office meant that my colored pencils were now…handy.  I love colored pencils.  (And inks, and paints and so on, but the PENCILS were handy.  Sp were some 3 x 5 cards, pastel colored, lined on one side and plain on the other.    I had already, a previous week, doodled another of my filled shapes with what suddenly looked to me like the English countryside views I see when indulging in horse videos.    And that B&W doodle inspired this one, which isn’t quite complete but was a “could this work for a landscape, given the limitations of size, media, the green card instead of a white background and so on.   I got to draw fiddly lines , play with the colored pencils, regret some of the lines, and then figure out what to do with the sky so it would look hot and summery and like there was a nice rainstorm over there on the far side of the near hills.  Then I had to get the thing into a camera (cellphone camera, n this case) and fiddle around until I remembered the fairly cockamamie way my cellphone can have images sucked out by the computer.

I”m not thrilled with it (why it’s not completely colored in, among other things) but I like the concept, and I like working in a small, well-defined space.  Yes, there’s a river, and a reservoir, and a variety of crops, and some woods, but…even finishing the coloring won’t fix its fundamental problems on the right side, and my white pencil barely shows the cumulus cloud structure, thanks to the green background.  OTOH it was fun and made good “breaks” in the writing work now and then.   I’d fill one section then let it sit, then later another one.  Other doodles of the week were all scratchy B&W, inspired by fighting with a ballpoint until it agreed to write again and then seeing what I could make of the strong up-and-down-slanted strokes of the “YOU WILL WRITE!” argument.  As soon as I “crossed” them with scribbles they looked like a coniferous woods (sort of!).

None of this is great art.  It’s mind-cleansing when stuck, though, and that works for me.

On the last workday of the work on my office, I found a large 3 ring binder, blue in color, that proved to contain much (not all) that I’d thought permanently lost of the background material for Paks.  Including the story of the shepherd who tried to rob Dort the Master Shepherd of some strands of wool from Dort’s sheep, who all have golden fleeces.  That story will come out later.   There are two versions of Torre’s tale, and two of Falk,  and more verses to the songs mentioned and sometimes partly quoted in the books, and so on. A story about the great bardic festival and the division for “martial music” performed by mercenaries.  About the way the Mother of Unicorns regained her sight after her eyes were stolen, about a young yeoman marshal’s mistakes and the justice of Gird

Why had I not found it years ago, before the Great Mess reached its height?  Well…memory was that those things had been put in a BLACK 3-ring binder.  And this one was BLUE.  So apparently, I didn’t look at the blue binder when searching for those lost things.  Only at the black binders.  One black binder did contain good stuff…printouts of my earliest-published stories, as submitted, from “Bargains” through to “Gut Feelings”.  Might be time to consider a collection of the early SF stories.

The study as it looks now, about 99% of the reorganization is finished.

But in the meantime and right now, a present for you:

Fair Were the Towers (C) 1985

Fair were the towers whose stones lie scattered,

White in the sun those ramparts rose.

Sweet were the flowers that twined in the gardens,

Then came the storms to them.

Fair were the princes whose bones lie scattered,

White in the sun their helmets gleamed.

Sweet were the ladies who bloomed for their pleasure,

Then came the wars to them.

Mikeli Vanyn the fair-spoken singer,

Bright harper of dances, will dance no more

Kevye the swordsman and Argalt his brother

Gannis and Torhal have died in the war.

Princes of Aare, their bones are all scattered,

The towers have fallen that called to the sky.

The Sandlord has taken them, Liart’s bane gnawed them,

All the fair gardens are withered and dry.

From notes:  This is the original version, said to be sung after the destruction of Old Aare by a singer called “The Black Harper”.  It became a favorite funeral song, with changes in the words as necessary: commonly the insertion of the names of the dead instead of the Aarean princes’ names, and a different final quartet.

…is hanging on like the last leaf on a tree in the fall.  “No, I still have juice, I’m not ready….”

I’m ready.  Next to last stitch came out this morning.  Last part of scab came off, too, so the furrow in my nose…shows.   Feels interesting, looks a bit like someone who had an accident (yes!) but not horrible.   A few places still have a dull sort of ache, where though the skin was only scraped, the bone under it was bruised.  But it’s not bad.

Along with that,  more horse feed sacks full papers and old magazines have gone out.  The supply of empty and *whole* (not rat-holed)  feed sacks from the feed room is WAAAY down.    We both have computers up and running our familiar software (well, sort of familiar, mostly familiar) .   I have learned to text images taken with the phone camera: a selfie of post-injury face the day after, and one of the much improved face (minus scabs, the sold row of stitches on the upper lip, etc.)   Still haven’t learned how to get the images in the camera into the computer.  Hmph.  But the new Paint Shop Pro is close enough to the old (aside from not letting me put several images into the work space to compare side by side) that I can certainly enjoy it.

The new Paksworld material (Horngard related) is coming along, over 3000 words, though I don’t know if they’re the *right* words yet.   I like the main character, Mardet DiAnzo.   And the journeyman baker.   And so on.

Important wildlife bit of the day:  the first yellow-billed cuckoo call  at our place this afternoon while feeding the horses.   Sun’s down and a cardinal started singing…no, not a mocker mocking a cardinal, the cardinal.  Sometimes in May birds just sing any old time.

Recovery from fall…much better.  Some stitches out, others will be soon.  Only one scab chunk left, but it’s starting to itch.

Both R- and I have new machines that are up and running;  new headphones that are more comfortable with better sound (so we can each enjoy our own favorite music, You Tube sites, etc.) without bothering the other.)  (Yes, it’s luxury.)   The complete tech overhaul is well along; there’s still some more stuff (I still don’t have a new printer; the Faure Requiem is still stuck in old machine’s CD drive, the RAM upgrade wasn’t accepted by new machine, data recovery will, I hope, pull all the old photos off old machine’s disk, but we’ll see.  But the improvement so far is MAJOR.

I’m working on some new material related to Horngard I, still uncertain if it will fit in Horngard II or be pulled out into a separate story/novella.  Happy with the feel.   I didn’t lose consciousness, even momentarily, in the faceplant, but I hit hard enough to be stunned (still sore places on bones that met the sidewalk) and there were little blinks of “not there” time from the 4 hours in the hospital, which after the effect of the 2018 concussion had me worried.  Not now.  I’ve read some seriously technical material  in two different journals and understood it fully and the writing itself tells me the brain’s healthy…or at least functional.  2018-2022 showed me I can’t write coherent, hangs-together fiction if the brain is seriously upset.  In fact, in 2018, I could barely write a coherent paragraph describing a current activity at first…so being able to write about merchants on a journey is reassuring.

Now it’s feed time for the critters.  We had an inch of rain we very much needed last night.

If it itches on the stitches, do not pull or scratch.  Endure the itch.  No, it’s not ready to come loose yet.

Do not catch a stitch with your thumbnail as you turn over in your sleep, or you will wake up wishing you hadn’t.

If your medical folk told you to use just warm water and gently pat…do not decide to use hydrogen peroxide.  (I didn’t.  I have experience with hydrogen peroxide.)

They will itch and sometimes they will hurt.  It’s OK.  It’s less hurt than the injury itself was.  Keep that comparison in mind.

If you have loose, dead, dry, skin hanging down and getting entangled in a stitch, you can cut that off (better, have someone else do it if it’s your lip skin…most of us have crappy depth perception at that distance.)

Like your mother told you when you skinned your knee or something…do not pick the scabs when they start coming loose at the edges. (I always did anyway.   And made them bleed again.  And got scolded for it.  We humans learn *slowly* unless the pain is substantial.)

When you thnik you just *have* to scratch or tug or pick, remember that “It’s all material for something…”  The next time your character has that injury, a stitch in that place, that many stittches or whatever…you have firsthand experience to write it powerfully or humorously or whatever you choose.

I’m telling myself this.  At this moment.  Guess how much good it’s doing and how well I follow my own advice.

Yesterday I  did myself an injury.   Tripped and went down hard, bled  all over a sidewalk, and spent hours in an ER  before I was finally sent home with a goodly number of stitches in my face and a bunch of related bruises, scrapes and cuts.  My only pair of bifocals was pretty much destroyed so I’m having to type w/o being able to see the screen clearly.  Renewed awareness of how much misery you can feel when not actuallly badly hurt.  And how lucky you can be when a bloody mess of a face does not involve any broken bones, lost teeth, damage to eyes, ears, mobility, etc.   Functually, stuff is working.  Yeah, I’m stiff, sore, and the worst parts of the face hurt some, but ye gods it could have been worse.  It will be ouchy for some days, we hope the stitches stay put for ten days, and  so on, but once I was stitched back together, the worst is the effect on those who see it.  I look like someone who was punched hard and more than once in the face (due to managing to hit most of my face in one fall.  The nose is a particular gruesome vision.

The only picture I have (the hospital took more, before the stitching, to plan the reconstruction)  is on my phone and I don’t know how to get itt from there to, say, a horror to show my friends.  Saves them wincing, as long as they don’t come visit.   As with all things that happen to writers, it’s *material*…at some point, details will show up in something I write.  Wonderful husband made me pudding (soft  custard) to eat last nigit annd today since I’m not supposed to chew anything firm for some days lest I dislodge a stitch beforetime.  Now I’m going to try soft scrambled eggs…without being able to see when they’re done.

There’s a move in sword & buckler fighting known as “giving him mustachios with the buckler”  and I can now say I have a clue what that feels like.  A pebbled concrete sidewalk makes a good “buckler.”

Deeds of Youth will be released in mid-July (roughly)  and I will post links for pre-purchase as soon as I get them from publisher.  The collection has eight stories, arranged pretty much by age of the main character (that is slightly messed up in the last story, but it’s pretty close.)  Total length is, I think, once again a little under 50,000 words and it should look like a green book the size & shape of Deeds of Honor. and

I should be able to reveal the cover and the exact date,  and the links, within the next couple of weeks.  The release date is on my husband’s birthday, which I hope he will accept as part of his birthday celebration.  Wondering if I can get the bakery down at the big supermarket to do a version of the cover with DEEDS OF RICHARD THE BEST on it for cake decor.  Don’t tell him.  (He doesn’t read this blog.  I don’t think he reads this blog.)

Meanwhile I’ll be checking copy edits (due by May 13), working on putting together a new computer system for both of us, and trying to get the horses to the vet’s for their annual shots, Coggins test, and dental stuff.

I got sick last week.  I’m better now but not well.   The Covid test was negative.  When I quit having spasms of uncontrollable coughing and a headache half as big as Texas, I’ll be much happier and online more.   Don’t worry…today is a LARGE improvement over yesterday!

Having acquired the hub with an SD card slot,  I finally got brave and put my working “fiction” SD card in  (not easy as it requires me to put it in upside down…it wouldn’t go in at all first, either way, but finally did work.  I had the camera card for testing.  I still don’t have my favorite photo software on this machine, so that’s next…getting the writing straightened out is primary.

So I put that card in this morning, mental fingers crossed…and yes, both Horngard I and Horngard II are in there, apparently unharmed.  I had also saved the Paksworld stories folder, and the specific “Deeds of…” folders before the wreckage started, so I have those files again.  The stories I least wanted to have to type in from the books they were in, and  the unfinished ones and some notes.  And some others of serious interest, including some passwords.  Also realized that I’d made a continuity error in Horngard I (from Limits of Power, which I was re-reading to check up on something for Horngard II.  Ha!  Porfur was Marshal in Ifoss, not Fossnir (as I foolishly wrote in Horngard I.)   In fact, I’d conflated the layout of Fossnir to be more like Ifoss…so I’ve got to deal with all that and redraw some town plans (did not have the old town plans anywhere I could find.  SIGH.

How could I be that careless, you ask?  Well…time and concussions will mess things up.  Alone or together.  Gwennothlin, Aris’s older sister, spends some time in Fossnir, which is closer to the Andressat border than Ifoss.   Aris visits Fossnir a few times as a courier earlier in Horngard I, but there’s no interaction there (readers know he’s come from there on one assignment, but not anything he did while there.  Gwenno, OTOH, has a reason to be there and interact with people.  (Wait, you say, what is Gwenno doing in Aarenis at all?  Well.  That’s a long story. Patience.)

Turned in the letter for the annexation today, too, so I hope the city accepts it.  Probably not before the May council meeting.  Otherwise, I need to make another trip to a bigger town (with a Target store…)   SIGH.