Topped 50,000 words today.\u00a0\u00a0 Interesting things have happened.\u00a0 A bit more information about who did what to whom when, which will lead directly into who’s doing what to whom now, and who wants to do what to whom in the future.\u00a0 Some bad guys have been foiled by some good guys.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s become obvious that not all branches of law enforcement are on the same page.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s become obvious that Plot A may have been more about Objective C than about Objective A.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So what IS Plot A?\u00a0 Who, what, where, when, why and all that?<\/p>\n
The roots of motivation in this book stretch back beyond even the first Ky Vatta book, because we’ve never found out exactly who planned and executed the attacks on the Vatta family.\u00a0 Was it Osman Vatta’s revenge against being kicked out?\u00a0\u00a0 Was Gammis Turek one of his sons, and did he do it (with or without Osman’s order?)\u00a0\u00a0 Was it the construction mogul Quindlan family, who built Vatta’s headquarters (the one that blew up?)\u00a0 And why did any of those entities do it, if they did it?\u00a0\u00a0 Moving into the present book, complications and some attacks aimed at Vatta are coming from…who?\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 (Why is always the more interesting question, at least to me.)\u00a0\u00a0 Sex?\u00a0 Unlikely.\u00a0 Money?\u00a0 Very likely.\u00a0\u00a0 Power?\u00a0 That, too.\u00a0\u00a0 Market share is a motivator for many businesses do so underhanded things, but in our world (barring organized crime)\u00a0 most business crooks stick to white-collar crime, at most planting false evidence that the other guy’s company puts cockroaches in their canned peaches or something similar.<\/p>\n
To Ky & Co., right now all the problems look like one big tangled conspiracy, with lots of people down on them when really, they’re the victims (Ky thinks.)\u00a0\u00a0 That might be true (no spoilers in this post)\u00a0 but it might also be a convergence of conspiracies with different motivations.\u00a0\u00a0 Ky’s family has some familial skeletons rattling away in closets she doesn’t know exist.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile I picked up at WorldCon two books by Theresa Nielsen Hayden, Making Conversation<\/em> and Making Book<\/em>.\u00a0 I have met her, but don’t know her well.\u00a0 At one point I used to wander over and read her comments on the site nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight<\/b><\/cite>, but stuff happened and I ran out of time and energy to do it often enough to be part of the community.\u00a0\u00a0 At any rate, I devoured them at the convention, and have mulled over them since–some parts are just amusing posts she made various places in the past, and some are deeper thoughts, and some are solid information on publishing and editing–the core of her skillset, or at least her profession.\u00a0 Well worth looking at and thinking about.\u00a0\u00a0 Tor made a bid on The Speed of Dark–<\/em>when it went to auction,\u00a0 though of course I didn’t know who my editor would be if they ended up with it.\u00a0 (In the end, Del Rey outbid them, and I’ve been happy there.)<\/p>\n These books were published by NESFA Press, in attractive trade paperback format, and for anyone who is thinking of getting into the writing biz, they both offer good value.\u00a0\u00a0 I may buy another two copies of Making Book<\/em> to give to people I know with an interest in doing copy editing in fiction (one has experience in copy editing nonfiction; the other doesn’t.)<\/p>\n And meanwhile…I need to go do something else for the rest of the day (eyes house, dishes, laundry, and the like.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Topped 50,000 words today.\u00a0\u00a0 Interesting things have happened.\u00a0 A bit more information about who did what to whom when, which will lead directly into who’s doing what to whom now, and who wants to do what to whom in the future.\u00a0 Some bad guys have been foiled by some good guys.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s become obvious that 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":[16,32,10],"tags":[17,7],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241"}],"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=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}