Tag Archives: Laws of Power

Attached to the World, Attached to Things

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PeaveyBodyI managed another 1000 words on the third in the Laws of Power sequence, working title Power’s Shadow, knowing all the while I may be interrupted to work on something more pressing. I’m at the point in the book where I know what has to happen, but no clue how it’s going to happen. I’ll just follow my characters until they sort it out. They always do, but one problem with completely optional projects is that you can’t give them priority, but I have no doubt I’ll get it finished…eventually. I hope to do so while anyone still cares about it other than me, but I don’t pretend to know if that will happen.

Case in point, over the weekend I was working on another story, revising after an editor’s notes and checking line edits. Contracts aren’t signed yet—one of the joys of working on spec—but I’m reasonably sure I’ll have something to announce before too long on that one. The story, even though it falls earlier in its particular timeline, feels a bit like completing a cycle. I’m not sure what comes next with that series and it’s got me a little down.

Also suffering from a bad case of GAS (that’s Gear Acquisition Syndrome. What’d you think I meant?) I have a Crafter AE mini-jumbo acoustic guitar (yeah, I know that’s an oxymoron. Right up there with “jumbo shrimp.”) It’s a great guitar, but now that I’m getting a little more experience I realize that the body depth is just a bit too much, and is never going to be comfortable for me to play. I’m gazing with lustful eyes on a used Martin custom. Gaze is all I can do at the moment. I’m also looking at the Taylor mini GS(very good and more affordable), and the Larrivee OM3R(very good and less affordable). Not that I have to decide right away, since at the moment I don’t have the scratch for any of them, especially the Martin. But a guy can dream.

Something Like Progress

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Darling Du Jour, or Just to Show That I AM SO working on the sequel to Black Kath’s Daughter. The working title is Power’s Shadow. Subject to change, of course.

In this scene, Marta and her companion Sela are getting a report from Longfeather, a once and future pirate who, for Marta’s convenience, is currently a goshawk:

            It wasn’t long before Longfeather also returned from his scouting mission. He landed on a nearby pine branch and gave his report. “There’s not a lot of activity at the docks just now. There are two merchant ships making ready to set sail, but of course they aren’t going anywhere near the Five Isles. They’ll hug the coastline until they reach Borasur.”

           There was an aspect of the debt-bond that made it difficult, even painful, for the one who was in bond-service to work against the interests of the one who held the debt, in this case Marta. She could see how uncomfortable Longfeather was, and she easily guessed the reason.

                “Is that really all you saw?” Marta asked, and she put the power of the debt-bond behind her words.

                “No,” Longfeather finally admitted. “There was someone else.”

                The way he’d phrased his response wasn’t lost on Marta. Not ‘something else’ but rather ‘someone else.’ “No more dancing around the subject, Longfeather,” Marta said. “Tell me who you saw at the docks.”

                “I saw a vessel called Blue Moon. Her captain is a woman named Callowyn. She’s mostly a smuggler and does errands for Boranac, and so operates under his protection, but she’s a pirate, too, at opportunity. I do not trust her.”

                “And is there a pirate or smuggler that you do trust?” Marta asked.

                “Well…no,” Longfeather admitted. “Most of them are like me.”

                “So why did you feel it necessary to point out this particular lack of trust?”

                Longfeather apparently gave up. “This Callowyn…we have a history, of sorts.”

                   “What sort?” Sela asked. “Or shall we guess?”

                   Longfeather shrugged, and briefly displayed his wings. “She’d probably cut off my privates with a dull knife and spike them to her mast as a trophy before bothering to chop off my head  for the reward. That sort.”

                Marta smiled then. “A woman of taste and judgment. I think I like her already. But do not worry, Longfeather. She’s not going to see you. She’s going to see a goshawk.”

                Longfeather sighed, which was a very strange sound indeed, coming from a goshawk. “She’ll figure it out. I know she will.”

Janiform – When Looking in One Direction Just Isn’t Enough

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 It’s a new year, and it’s time to look ahead. Which I will now do by looking backwards. It’s not as much of a contradiction as it seems at first glance. How do we know where we want to go if we don’t look at where we’ve been? So now I look backward. Just a bit.

When I think about my first novel, The Long Look, it still scares me a little to think of how much I put into the book without being consciously aware of what I was doing. Now, I do have to make a slight distinction here. I was conscious of the story elements in a procedural sort of way, but if you’d asked me what this or that bit was about, why it was there, I probably couldn’t have told you, I only knew it had to be there. It wasn’t until I’d read the manuscript for possibly the fifth or sixth time, cold, during the line-edit phase that I finally realized what I had done, and was able to express it with any kind of coherence.

The Long Look bears some resemblance to Rashomon in that it has more than one character viewpoint on a series of events, but at heart it is two separate but intertwined narratives about those same events. The first narrative is a (relatively speaking) conventional fantasy adventure story with a quest, battles, magic, and a love match with just a tad of a complication. Ok, so it’s a pretty big complication. Yet this is the story that will become part of the history of the Twelve Kingdoms. Within the context of this universe, this will be the story that “everyone knows.”

The second narrative is something else again. It’s the story of what really happened. And how much work, danger, and adventure went on behind the scenes in order to make the first narrative unfold the way it should. I can’t say any more about it without getting into spoiler territory, but that’s not really the point. Those who read it will see what I mean. Or not.

What might happen is that those who read it for the first narrative are going to wonder what all the rest is about and why it’s intruding into their adventure story. Those readers who (am I kidding myself here?) are expecting something more along the lines of the second narrative from me are going to wonder what all that rubbish about alarums and excursions is doing taking up space and distracting from the real story. Thing is, both narratives together are the “real” story. The way the story appears, and the aspects of the story that must remain hidden below the surface narrative for all time.

The funny part is, that’s the book I meant to write. And yes, I feel a bit like the cat slamming into a plate glass window, then casually grooming its fur with an attitude of “I meant to do that.”  But I did. In the three years since its initial publication the book’s done all right. It sold out its hardcover run and moved on to ebook form. It hasn’t been to everyone’s taste, but what book is? I’m happy with the way it turned out, and enough reviewers and readers have reported in to let me know that most of them feel the same way. I did ok.

Maybe next time I can even do it on purpose.