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The chapter I am working on is maybe the penultimate chapter of the book, depending on how many words it takes to write the things that are happening now, but it is more likely the chapter before the penultimate one. Oh, I'm sure it is, no matter how long this stuff goes, because certain things need to be in their own chapters.
This is the chapter in which the ghost soldiers defend the striking miners against the underage cadets on horseback. Since the writing is tightly bound to Yanek's point of view, and he doesn't get to see the horses begin to ride towards the miners' village, neither do we. But he can hear them. And he saw them forming up before he moved to his new position where he's drumming up the ghost soldiers and luring the cadets towards them.
All this is by way of saying this is kind of hard to write. I don't want to make obvious errors in military and equine matters, but I also don't want to spend a tremendous amount of time establishing authenticity. I'm finishing an Andre Norton fantasy right now, The Scent of Magic, and it is clear she didn't worry about authenticity! She just wrote the thing. So maybe I should too. Well, I am just writing the thing, but among the readers I hope to have are some military history types. Oh, do I have a horsey person to check me too?
There are other more salient issues in the writing of this. I'm worried about being boring, because I find most battlefield scenes and actually most action sequences in other people's writing boring. I consider it a success if I am reading a book and I don't want to skip the whole action part. But I worry about being boring all the time because isn't that the most frightening thing a writer can think of? But here is Yanek spending some hours on his own just behind the brow of a mound of lignite tailings, watching the cadets and thinking dire thoughts about the direction his life is going (he's not regretting being there, he's thinking he's not done much for other people with his life so far--which is first off, not nearly as true as he thinks it is, and secondly, he's barely 23 at this point).
All along I have been naming most of the minor characters who show up for a section of the book even if they are never seen again. I guess I got tired and I failed to do this in the first draft of this section, and now that the section has gone on this long I realize it's a mistake on so many levels, so I'll have to go back and give names to the handful of more prominent miners.
I know everything that happens from here on out, unless it changes. Something changed today and I was glad when I understood it because it will do a lot of things for the story (it's Bogdan and capturing). It will tie up some loose bits and it will introduce a crucial aristocratic misconception that matters in the aftermath of the battle.
So that's what's ahead: first, what I'm in the middle of, the battle between the ghost soldiers and the miners on one side and the cadets on the other side. No, the cadets do not have magic on their side this time. This time they have no advantages: even the horses are a liability. Then, the negotiations in the aftermath, which I think will be a difficult part to write too. And then, the last chapter, which is five years or so later, when the token prisoners are let out of prison and Yanek and the Traditional Drummers Association (which will have begun to exist by then) will meet them at the... prison gate? railroad station?
I kind of read Octavia Butler's Fledgling this week too. I skipped ahead to the trials because I am a wuss. It made me wonder just how much of her work is about blending. I will have to read more and re-reading more and figure this out. Also I read Emma Bull's Finder, which was fun enough that I inhaled it but I was also annoyed by its callowness.
On another front, I'm cleaning up the yard to make it pleasant for Frank and Hana when they come later in the month and also so I can see just how much progress I've really made back there. Which is a lot. I have planted a line of coreopsis along one side of one section of the brick path from the garage to Zack's, and parsleyalong the rest of it (and it's still not quite enough parsley for all Zack's and my needs). The front yard is almost cleaned up. After my hand heals from the carpal tunnel release surgery I'm having on Monday, I'll plant the two different abutilons and the one salvia I have in the corner by the almond tree. I have a couple of California milkweeds to plant--they have mousy looking litttle white flowers but they haven't, unlike the other milkweeds, been sprayed with BT to fight light brown apple moth. It's the law, but it makes the milkweeds toxic to the Monarch caterpillars too. So if I had bought one of those pretty ones I would have had to put a net over them for some time--a few months? I forget--to keep from poisoning the animal we're planting it for...
And I've established I can walk two miles and only be a bit tired (that is not very far, but if I can do two miles and not be bothered by it I can do four miles if I'm willing to be very tired). I'm doing that about once a week. But what I'm working on now is down. I am walking up and then down the steepest hill in the neighborhood (maybe every other day? I want it to be every day, but after two days of it my knees were stiffened a bit so I lay off it today) and I am taking the stairs with as much of a normal step as I can manage. These are not huge expenditures of effort, but they are more tiring than long walks. I believe it is a neurological thing--I hesitate to say "mental" because it evokes an attitude towards healing I am not partaking of. But since there was no cutting or tearing of any tissue except the skin, recovery is all about re-aligning muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones in this case: and that's all about communication between the various parts. Muscle does need to grow in better-balanced form than it used to have, yes, It needs to be stronger. And even without cutting, there is scar tissue that forms in response to the insult of being manhandled and disarticulated, and that needs to be broken. But mostly it's about my body learning its new shape and capabilities.
On the Zluta front, even though I don't know what I'm doing, we're reaching a place with the backyard barking that is bearable, I'm able to let her go out there freely for many hours a day before she decides to try to provoke the killer dog next door. My current method of breaking that up is to almost silently head her off, distract her with thrown apples, and herd her or carry her inside. Less shouting--which ramps her up-- and no hose spray--which excites her and is actually a reward, However, when I water the yard, I let her play in the hose as much as she likes. Yes, it is still warm enough for her to get wet outside. Though I turned the heater on today. It's set in the low sixties: I think 66 for a period in the afternoon.
Speaking of communication, she is using the wiggle method of communicating her needs much more than the open-mouthed, toothy swarm method. I try to respond immediately but sometimes I'm in the middle of a thing and she has no patience. I've had to exile her only once every couple-few days this last two weeks (it was getting to be two and three times a day, which is too much). Of course, part of this is her general greater contentment now that I am driving again and getting her to the dog park five days out of six.
She has an unfortunately tender stomach, apparently, and apparently I guessed wrong about her food, so that's a work in progress.
This is the chapter in which the ghost soldiers defend the striking miners against the underage cadets on horseback. Since the writing is tightly bound to Yanek's point of view, and he doesn't get to see the horses begin to ride towards the miners' village, neither do we. But he can hear them. And he saw them forming up before he moved to his new position where he's drumming up the ghost soldiers and luring the cadets towards them.
All this is by way of saying this is kind of hard to write. I don't want to make obvious errors in military and equine matters, but I also don't want to spend a tremendous amount of time establishing authenticity. I'm finishing an Andre Norton fantasy right now, The Scent of Magic, and it is clear she didn't worry about authenticity! She just wrote the thing. So maybe I should too. Well, I am just writing the thing, but among the readers I hope to have are some military history types. Oh, do I have a horsey person to check me too?
There are other more salient issues in the writing of this. I'm worried about being boring, because I find most battlefield scenes and actually most action sequences in other people's writing boring. I consider it a success if I am reading a book and I don't want to skip the whole action part. But I worry about being boring all the time because isn't that the most frightening thing a writer can think of? But here is Yanek spending some hours on his own just behind the brow of a mound of lignite tailings, watching the cadets and thinking dire thoughts about the direction his life is going (he's not regretting being there, he's thinking he's not done much for other people with his life so far--which is first off, not nearly as true as he thinks it is, and secondly, he's barely 23 at this point).
All along I have been naming most of the minor characters who show up for a section of the book even if they are never seen again. I guess I got tired and I failed to do this in the first draft of this section, and now that the section has gone on this long I realize it's a mistake on so many levels, so I'll have to go back and give names to the handful of more prominent miners.
I know everything that happens from here on out, unless it changes. Something changed today and I was glad when I understood it because it will do a lot of things for the story (it's Bogdan and capturing). It will tie up some loose bits and it will introduce a crucial aristocratic misconception that matters in the aftermath of the battle.
So that's what's ahead: first, what I'm in the middle of, the battle between the ghost soldiers and the miners on one side and the cadets on the other side. No, the cadets do not have magic on their side this time. This time they have no advantages: even the horses are a liability. Then, the negotiations in the aftermath, which I think will be a difficult part to write too. And then, the last chapter, which is five years or so later, when the token prisoners are let out of prison and Yanek and the Traditional Drummers Association (which will have begun to exist by then) will meet them at the... prison gate? railroad station?
I kind of read Octavia Butler's Fledgling this week too. I skipped ahead to the trials because I am a wuss. It made me wonder just how much of her work is about blending. I will have to read more and re-reading more and figure this out. Also I read Emma Bull's Finder, which was fun enough that I inhaled it but I was also annoyed by its callowness.
On another front, I'm cleaning up the yard to make it pleasant for Frank and Hana when they come later in the month and also so I can see just how much progress I've really made back there. Which is a lot. I have planted a line of coreopsis along one side of one section of the brick path from the garage to Zack's, and parsleyalong the rest of it (and it's still not quite enough parsley for all Zack's and my needs). The front yard is almost cleaned up. After my hand heals from the carpal tunnel release surgery I'm having on Monday, I'll plant the two different abutilons and the one salvia I have in the corner by the almond tree. I have a couple of California milkweeds to plant--they have mousy looking litttle white flowers but they haven't, unlike the other milkweeds, been sprayed with BT to fight light brown apple moth. It's the law, but it makes the milkweeds toxic to the Monarch caterpillars too. So if I had bought one of those pretty ones I would have had to put a net over them for some time--a few months? I forget--to keep from poisoning the animal we're planting it for...
And I've established I can walk two miles and only be a bit tired (that is not very far, but if I can do two miles and not be bothered by it I can do four miles if I'm willing to be very tired). I'm doing that about once a week. But what I'm working on now is down. I am walking up and then down the steepest hill in the neighborhood (maybe every other day? I want it to be every day, but after two days of it my knees were stiffened a bit so I lay off it today) and I am taking the stairs with as much of a normal step as I can manage. These are not huge expenditures of effort, but they are more tiring than long walks. I believe it is a neurological thing--I hesitate to say "mental" because it evokes an attitude towards healing I am not partaking of. But since there was no cutting or tearing of any tissue except the skin, recovery is all about re-aligning muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones in this case: and that's all about communication between the various parts. Muscle does need to grow in better-balanced form than it used to have, yes, It needs to be stronger. And even without cutting, there is scar tissue that forms in response to the insult of being manhandled and disarticulated, and that needs to be broken. But mostly it's about my body learning its new shape and capabilities.
On the Zluta front, even though I don't know what I'm doing, we're reaching a place with the backyard barking that is bearable, I'm able to let her go out there freely for many hours a day before she decides to try to provoke the killer dog next door. My current method of breaking that up is to almost silently head her off, distract her with thrown apples, and herd her or carry her inside. Less shouting--which ramps her up-- and no hose spray--which excites her and is actually a reward, However, when I water the yard, I let her play in the hose as much as she likes. Yes, it is still warm enough for her to get wet outside. Though I turned the heater on today. It's set in the low sixties: I think 66 for a period in the afternoon.
Speaking of communication, she is using the wiggle method of communicating her needs much more than the open-mouthed, toothy swarm method. I try to respond immediately but sometimes I'm in the middle of a thing and she has no patience. I've had to exile her only once every couple-few days this last two weeks (it was getting to be two and three times a day, which is too much). Of course, part of this is her general greater contentment now that I am driving again and getting her to the dog park five days out of six.
She has an unfortunately tender stomach, apparently, and apparently I guessed wrong about her food, so that's a work in progress.
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