This is the point at which, in the old days, would lead to two to four weeks of flat out writing all day and half the night, every day–no stopping, eating only what appeared at my side or (occasionally) on the kitchen table, as I made the final dash to the end of the first\/rough draft.\u00a0 NewBook would like me to write that way now, but the older body is saying firmly NO WAY DO NOT WANT.\u00a0 Still…the brain is whirling faster and faster, and my fingers and shoulders and neck and sit-upon aren’t keeping up.<\/p>\n
But they’re not too far behind, so don’t worry…it’s definitely coming together, narrowing its focus to completing the first-volume-in-group story arc.\u00a0 The larger arc is still rising out of this volume and aiming toward the next.\u00a0 (I’m now past this point when I didn’t know which arc was which.\u00a0 THIS one completes here.\u00a0 THAT one is going to take longer to resolve.\u00a0 Is it the second-volume’s arc?\u00a0 I don’t think so.\u00a0 I think it’s THAT one, the one that hints “this little side issue thing isn’t a little side issue, it’s a big honkin’ screamin’ BIG ISSUE and it’s already been breeding unseen behind the arras.”\u00a0 So to speak in a mishmash of literary asides.<\/p>\n
We won’t talk about that.\u00a0\u00a0 What I will talk about is both the fun and the thinking involved in creating characters that last through years of book-time and more years of the writer’s life.\u00a0 We’ll start with the child Aris Marrakai, whom Paks meets in the second volume, Divided Allegiance<\/em> when she first arrives in Fin Panir.\u00a0 He was then the youngest son of the Duke of Marrakai and a mischievous, spirited boy.\u00a0 Perhaps the child you don’t want around the house when you’re going through a difficult twin pregnancy, the one that produced\u00a0 Julyan and his twin, who died in infancy, possibly even at birth.\u00a0\u00a0 Aris shows up again in Oath of Gold<\/em> when Paks comes to declare Kieri Phelan’s true nature and inheritance–now he’s a page in the palace, a couple of years older.\u00a0 We know his older brother Juris is the kirgan, heir, and Paks interacts briefy with both of them.\u00a0 By the start of the next group of books, it’s made clear that the kirgan is a close friend of the prince, Mikeli, and soon, with the disgrace of the Verrakaien and Mikeli’s concern about Camwyn’s best friend being Verrakai, Aris moves “forward” to see if he can be to Cam what Juris is to Mikeli.\u00a0\u00a0 And when Camwyn starts going out on the roof and Mikeli demands he always go with someone else, Aris is Mikeli’s choice.\u00a0 Camwyn saved Aris on the roof that time.\u00a0 And Aris saves Camwyn the night the iynisin are after the regalia.<\/p>\n At that time–writing those books–I was not consciously laying the groundwork for this one.\u00a0 Writing the original Paks volumes in the early 80s I had no certainty at all they’d ever be published, or what I’d write in between and how long it would be before I set mental foot to the ground of that world again.\u00a0 But looking back now, re-reading those bits, the deep logic was working its way to something I didn’t know about.\u00a0\u00a0 This has happened in other areas of that world.\u00a0\u00a0 It surprises me, and then shows me that the “surprise” was rooted way back.<\/p>\n Something else came up this week on Twitter in one of the science accounts I follow.\u00a0 A picture of a turtle with what appeared to be rather ugly white plastic “things” stuck to it.\u00a0 They weren’t plastic.\u00a0 That was a painted turtle starting to shed its scutes,\u00a0 those sections of shell that if they have a pattern, has a handy “space” between one scute and another, and which peel off individually (apparently!)\u00a0 at least in that species.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I already had a thing going in NewBook about Dragon and Dragon’s scales.\u00a0\u00a0 Was thinking “Could this even be possible?”\u00a0\u00a0 Snakes shed their skin (we’ve found a more than six foot western coachwhip skin in one piece) and lizards grow and shed theirs and turtles shed the skin on the parts of them that don’t have scutes…dragons certainly aren’t turtles, but they also aren’t snakes or lizards.\u00a0 (And they actually *aren’t*–they’re imaginary critters some of us love to think about.)\u00a0 But the scutes themselves (now that I’ve looked at *other* videos about turtles and shedding) \u00a0 So…there’s now another chapter in my head (not in the book) about the natural history of Dragon and Dragon’s…scales.\u00a0 Not exactly scutes. \u00a0 The “thing” about Dragon’s scales in NewBook will now go in for sure.\u00a0 You don’t have to do all the research before you start.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Be aware of things outside the work in progress; I had no idea that a Twitter post about a shedding painted turtle could lead to “Yes, this cool idea could totally work” about something else.\u00a0 One of the best writing tools is infinite curiosity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the point at which, in the old days, would lead to two to four weeks of flat out writing all day and half the night, every day–no stopping, eating only what appeared at my side or (occasionally) on the kitchen table, as I made the final dash to the end of the first\/rough Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,22,10],"tags":[20,7,26],"class_list":["post-1337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-science","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-the-writing-life","tag-tools-for-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1338,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions\/1338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}