Paksworld

I have finished (structurally) another story in Paksworld, although it’s still in the polishing phase.  I would like it to be a tight little thing about 5000 words, but of course it would like to stretch all boundaries and and grow…so I’m patiently snipping sprouts and hoping the topiary approach works.

It is a Horngard side story and some of it occurs while exciting & suspenseful things are happening in Horngard, which is why if shared now it’s spoilerish…no, actually it IS a spoiler if shared whole.  Or maybe…(eyeing it sideways and up and down)…it’s spoilering several aspects of Horngard I.   On the other hand, it’s a bouncy, energetic story and I’m happy with it and am dying to share it.  I would’ve shared it with a good friend last night or this morning, to get her comments (she gives excellent comment) BUT I’m having problems with phone quality, hers and mine, and her husband can be impatient, and was in an impatient mood today, it seemed like.  He, like one of their sons, is usually in a mood to hurry someone along, which I find very tiring these days.  It’s also affected her ability to listen and respond to the whole store, since she said it was starting too slowly one paragraph in. That’s not like her, and neither of the other first readers (both now unavailable)  commented that this draft’s beginning was slow.

ANYway.  Since she’s hundreds of miles away at this point and he seems to be charging around at full speed wanting her to come along here, come along there, I’m extremely tempted to share one ore more snippets with you, steering around the things you should not know, before having read Horngard I.   Maybe just talk about the protag, who’s a new person on the scene here.

Grethan D’Anzo is a small (one-wagon) trader specializing in supplying mercenary units with foodstuffs.  A sutler, in fact.  She’s the senior partner in the inherited business (“D’Anzo Sutlers”) with her sister, who is blind.  Small traders are often used by larger traders to provide part of an order, and since a small trader can’t afford to hire guards for their one wagon, they usually join the caravan of a larger trader, who charges a fee for the services the large trader provides: guards for the whole caravan.  This of course reduces the already smaller profit of the one-wagon snall trader.  They are often limited to trade within one city and its immediate environs.   The Sutlers Guild grades sutlers by their reputation for  the *volume* of goods sold.   This often (usually) determines what level of licensing they can achieve in each city where they do business.  And *that* is revealed by how many digits their license has.  Low-numbers are great numbers.  Four digit numbers…much lower tier.  Grethan has a 4-digit license in Valdaire and can’t even get a license in Foss Council cities: she’s considered not worth a space in their markets.

So when she realizes a new market may be opening somewhere else, she wants to pack a wagon and go, hoping to get there in time for a low-number license.  But she’s never been there, it’s a long way, there may be a war, and it costs to take time off and lose even the piddly profit she can make where she is.   If she makes it, she’ll be much better off, but if anything goes wrong, she’ll be in a hole deeper than she’s been.

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.

Last stitch is still annoying me.  Lots of good things have been accomplished with Kate’s help, but I will need to keep at it after she goes home next week.  And for the next few days, of course, as well.   Boxes and bags of stuff has gone out in the trash.  Yarn and stacks of off-season clothes have gone into bins for later final sort and storage.  All the tech stuff but one has been accomplished, including some unexpected wins and some (expected but not exactly welcome) fails.  The most visible difference is in my study, but there’s more to do there, too, and no room is *completely* done: three are markedly better, however.

I have managed to pull off an additional thing…a thank=you to the ER crews at the hospital, which should cheer them up when working on a holiday weekend.   Really, REALLY happy with the cooperation of a pizza shop!!  And a Paksworl-related short thing is coming together nicely, though I can’t work on it steadily while we’re trying to do this other stuff.

…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.

Deeds of Youth release date (AKA book birthdahy) is JULY !8

LINKS:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Deeds-Youth-Paksenarrion-World-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B0C3P6CFVM/?tag=awfulagent-20
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deeds-of-youth-elizabeth-moon/1143406204?ean=9781625676375
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/deeds-of-youth
Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Elizabeth_Moon_Deeds_of_Youth?id=BLm7EAAAQBAJ
iBooks: https://apple.co/444oq0A

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!