Splinter Universe

So, I made a wrong turn at the end of Plan B.  Publication order has the reader going from Plan B to Local Custom, then Scout’s Progress, and then I Dare.

Instead, when I hit the end of Plan B, I just leapt straight into I Dare.

I blame the authors.

The I Dare anniversary edition just came out last year from Baen, so I proofread it recently, but I haven’t read it for . . . a while.

And it did not disappoint.

What struck me particularly this time is that Pat Rin — a properly enclanned Liaden — moves through this most of this book knowing that he is alone, a terrifying condition. Yet, he finds the resolution to go on with his Balance, not, as he tells Natesa, because Balance will restore his clan, but because people who will murder an entire clan for their own gain ought to be stopped.  A determination he has made as Korval-in-Fact; the last of his clan left standing.

On the other side of the street, we have the clean-up after Plan B — I adore the collaboration between Shan and Edger, to effect Val Con’s healing.  I also adore — and I remember that Steve and I talked this over for some time — would Shan get rid of the Loop?  We decided that, no, he wouldn’t, because it’s clear that Val Con value the thing, whatever it is, but he does make it considerably less feral, and safer to use.

I love Ms. Audrey and that Pat Rin finds not only allies, but friends.

The return of Daav and Aelliana to the bosom of their family, Nova — oh, dear, Nova, and Clonak, and teaching the Rifle to play poker.  As one does.

And I adore the meeting of the cousins at Solcintra.  “I won’t hurt him,” Val Con says to Cheever McFarland, echoing the agent in the prologue, “The child was asleep.  We did not wake him.”

Oh, and one more!  Daav returning to Liad after being sent to /s/a/f/e/t/y negotiate with the Clutch.  “I hear on the port that we are unemployed, outlawed, and homeless, all in one canny throw.”

A good book, that moves right along, despite — if that 151,000 words noted on the story card is accurate — still holding the record of the longest Liaden novel.

 

 

When I declared a read-along of all the Liaden Universe® novels in publication order, I failed to consider that the IRL universe would take this as an opportunity to throw everything it had at me.

I have, as a result of Life, gotten very behind in my commentary, and am operating in a manner that is Staggeringly Chaotic, even by my standards.

All I can do at this point is offer apologies.  I am still reading, though I screwed up the order a bit in my own reading enthusiasm.  Of which, as they say, More Later.

Specifically regarding Carpe Diem — I had a good time with it, and found it much more intelligible than the poor copy writer responsible for the back cover copy.

“Bloodthirsty alien pirates,” was one of those phrases that Steve and I used as shorthand for between ourselves, to denote, um — Terrible Danger.

I loved watching the partnership between Miri and Val Con strengthen and deepen, even before the lifemate link wakes up. I love that neither one of them is perfect, that each has something to bring to the partnership and to teach the other. I love that they made friends of fellow musicians.  I love that they are musicians, and able to embrace art.

And, speaking as a Small God, I am very proud of Hakan Meltz as a character.

It’s kind of hard to believe that it was our third novel, and that we’d had to strip half of its guts out.  It’s also hard to believe that it was written before Steve and I moved to Maine.  The main street of Gylles is a dead ringer for downtown Madison-that-was.

 

When last we saw our Intrepid Authors, they were rolling the last page of the fair copy of their first novel, Agent of Change, out of a literally burning typewriter.

That typewriter being Officially Declared Toast by the technicians at the local stationary store, Lee and Miller were at something of a technical disadvantage with regard to their chosen field of endeavor.

An expedition was planned to the Giant Graveyard of Used Office Machines in Baltimore City, for a day when both authors were free of their day-jobs, but before that expedition could be mounted, Sharon arrived home from work one day to find a brand new and blue Swintec “electronic typewriter” on her desk.

I’m not sure I ever got the details of the deal that had resulted in this rather major miracle.  We were broke, and I really don’t think we had anything to sell for funds sufficient to purchase a state of the art typer.  Let it merely stand as a fact that suddenly! there was a working typewriter in the house, and?

Writing could go forth.

As we shall.

Conflict of Honors was written on the blue Swintec, which, oddly for us at that time, had no name other than The Swintec, which was as different from Uncle Harry as Conflict was from Agent.

Not only was Conflict different, it was better written.  Mind you, Agent had been good enough — the prose got the job done, and the narrative showed not only flair, but an interesting touch with character and worldbuilding.  Plus, there was all that action!  My goodness, a lot happens in Agent of Change, and as a foundation story by writers who were still discovering Almost Everything, it’s really quite amazing.

Conflict of Honors had the advantage of being our second novel.  Even though we were firmly convinced that what we were doing was writing a short story, the experience of already having written one novel was salutary, though the process of writing the second book was vastly different from writing the first.

Agent of Change was a three-month wonder, written all in a rush.  It got a read-through after we had typed The End on the first draft, but not much else.  Well.  Except for the chaptering.

Not only was our first novel written all in a rush, it was written as one continuous item. We made liberal use of the two-blank-lines-and!-new-scene method, but we didn’t do anything remotely resembling chapter breaks.

After reading our draft, I Felt Strongly that we ought to have chapters, but I didn’t have any idea how to decide where the breaks ought to go.  Steve had been told or somehow thought he knew that chapters were 10 pages long.  So, he went through the draft and on every 11th page wrote a number at the top.  He handed the manuscript back to me, and unfortunately my immediately and heartfelt reaction was —

“That’s not right!”

Steve went for a walk.  Or possibly a drive.  Maybe both.

And I sat down to re-read the book, and break it into chapters when it . . . felt right.

This is called “learning.”

Once the chapters were in place, I set about typing the fair copy that would become our submission draft.

Conflict of Honors was — after we realized it was a novel — not only more ambitious, but it took longer, physically, to write — very nearly two years, if the story card is to be believed.

Then, there were the chapter heads.  Far from simple One, Two, Three — the chapter heads in Conflict of Honors tell you things:  Where you are, what day it is, what shift it is, what hour it is.  It was insane, really.  Making up the shift roster for the Passage, so we would know who was on duty when took days.

Steve did question whether this was necessary, but I was a driven woman.

When the first draft was done, and we had both read it, I brought a suggestion to the table.  I wanted the Healers to be active.  I wanted them, in fact to be able to fix trauma, and to nudge people in the direction of embracing change.

Steve wasn’t completely onboard with us, not because he didn’t want psy powers in the SF — we’d already established Val Con’s “hunches” were a sort of precognition, and said straight out that he’d been tested and found to have a negligible talent for telekinesis.

No, Steve’s objection was that making that change — making it explicit that Healers are interacting with those they help — would alter the story we had in hand.

He was not wrong, but, yanno?  You just can’t tell some people; they have to learn it the hard way.

*waves hand weakly*

Two things came out of my desire to have interactive empaths in the Liaden Universe:

1   I learned the Change One Thing Rule.  Oh, boy, didn’t I.

2   Conflict got a second, and a third draft, which made for a smoother end product.

3   Healers and psy powers became warp and woof of the Liaden Universe, long before the Tree-and-Dragon Trade Mission sets foot on Colemeno.

For the record, I regret nothing.

Moving on to the text, very briefly.  I will note that Shan tears up several times in Conflict so the folks who attribute men crying to the authors becoming Woke in their dotage are, um — wrong.

I honestly didn’t know that we had been so imprudent as to actually describe the Passage.

While I’m not sure that Shan’s version of Korval’s foundation is actually what we recorded in the Crystal books, I am amazed that, even then, we knew there had been an exodus from another universe.

I was surprised by the constant use of “galaxy.”

I am . . . amused by space travel that’s a lot like catching a taxi.  Witness Mr. dea’Gauss popping back and forth between Liad and the Passage, after complaining how much he hates to travel, too.

Back to the subject of foreshadowing, already it’s set up that Korval is very thin, and most of them young, with only two members of the former generation available to them — Kareen and Luken.

Really, it was like we knew we’d be working these fields for a good, long time.

And here ends my summing up of Conflict of Honors.

 

 

So, I finished reading Agent of Change some while back.  A couple of things struck me, that I’ll talk about here in no particular order.

First is that the reviewer who said that there was more action in this one book than in many trilogies, was not indulging in (too much) hyperbole.

I, as many, continue to adore the Clutch in general, and Edger, specifically.

The panic attack that locks Val Con into the Loop on Edger’s ship — that was Steve, who, unfortunately, was prone to panic attacks for all the years I knew him.

I recall the conversation, when I was waving my hands in the air and trying to explain the shape of what I thought needed to go right here, and Steve said, suddenly and firmly, “Right.  He has a panic attack.”  And he got up from the kitchen table, carried his wine to the typewriter, and wrote that scene, right there, right then.

We’ve told this next story many times, but for those who may have tuned in late — the original “outline” had Val Con steal Edger’s ship.  I was lead on the book, and was typing merrily along on my day off (I was working three days a week at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the Modern Languages department at that point), got everybody up to the space station and it was time for Val Con to steal the ship and!

My fingers stopped.

The story stopped.

Val Con stopped.

I got up, got myself a diet Pepsi, came back to the typewriter — nothing happened.  I looked at the sheet of paper where Steve had written our “outline.”  I showed the sheet of paper to Val Con.

“It says here,” I told him, “that you have to steal Edger’s spaceship now.”

He refused, and the story stayed stalled until Steve came home, and asked how the writing had gone.

“Val Con won’t steal the spaceship,” I told him.  “I tried talking to him, but he just won’t.”

“But he’s got to steal that ship,” Steve said.  “They can’t stay on the station; they’re on the run.  If they stop, the Juntavas’ll catch up.”

“I told him that,” I said.

“Well,” Steve said.  “I’ll go talk to him.”  And he headed for the typewriter.

I finished getting dinner into the oven, and, noticing a lack of keys clicking from the other room, went to find out how the man-to-man was going.

Steve looked up from the unmarked sheet of paper in the typewriter, and said, “You’re right.  He won’t steal the spaceship.”

So, that was when we learned the priceless lesson, “If the story stops, you took a wrong turn.”

We sat down at the kitchen table with our typescript, and went through it.

“How about this,” Steve said.  “At the party at the Grotto, what if Edger gives him the ship?”

“That might work,” I said.  “The reason he won’t steal it is because Edger’s his friend — his brother.  And he won’t steal from a friend.  It’s an honor thing.”

“Then, let’s change this here –”  he pointed at the paragraph.  “And have Edger maybe remind him that the resources of the Clan — which include the ship — are his to use, if he needs to?”

It was my turn to go to the typewriter.  I made the change, and the next day when I sat down to see how things were going at the space station, the story flowed like water.

It struck me when, on Edger’s ship, Val Con presents himself to Miri as a man with a couple cantra in his pocket and a minor skill on the omnichora.  It seems from this that he doesn’t intend to go home.  Of course, we didn’t at that point know what was going to happen, going forward, Clan Korval being not much more than a name to us.  But now — resonance being what it is — it seems like the Loop was still acting on him.

The exchange with the Yxtrang commander was a little — um.  The hysteresis effect was all Steve, as were the workings of the electron substitution drive, and what it would look like in operation.

Another story we’ve told before:  Agent of Change was written on Uncle Harry, a second hand “electrified” typewriter we’d bought on time at the local stationery store.  (“Electrified” meant that the machine had started life as a manual typewriter and later on, someone had “converted” it to an electric typewriter.  You still had to hit the return by hand, and when you turned the machine on, it RUMBLED, and you could hear it not only in all rooms of our (very small) townhouse, but out into the parking lot.)

So, I was typing the clean, submission, copy of Agent, and I smelled — smoke.  I figured maybe the next door neighbors were having a cookout, and ignored it.

As I was taking a page out and rolling another in, I noticed that the smoke was coming from Uncle Harry.

I considered unplugging him — no, really, I did.  But I only had two pages to go, and we were so close to having the book finished, and I did type really fast.

So, I gambled.  And, not to brag — I won.  I was in fact typing the last page with little flames coming out of the back of Harry, and Steve had just walked in to ask if I smelled smoke, when I was rolling the last page out.

He pulled the plug, and notably didn’t ask me if I was nuts.

We put Harry in the trunk of the car and took him down to the stationery story, but — there was nothing to be done.  Uncle Harry was dead.

And we had a manuscript to submit.

 

 

Some people have noticed that the Liaden Read-Along has, to put it gently, foundered.

Some people, not necessarily the same people, have wondered what the heck is going on with that.

I will explain.

For those who are short of time and impatient with explanations, or excuses, the short form is: I was over-ambitious.

That’s it.  You may move on, as the rest of what I’m going to say past this point is an elaboration on that single fact.

Still with me?

OK.

So — over-ambitious.  I had a book to finish — not due until mid-April, but I had already missed two self-imposed deadlines for producing a draft that was complete enough that I could ask beta readers for help.  Ordinarily — ah.  Old speech forms. What I mean to say is — Previously, I would have talked out scenes, concepts and characters with Steve and he would, in essence, since I’m Lead on this book, help me catch unfruitful discursions on the fly.  I no longer have that luxury, and so find that I don’t know how long it actually takes to write a book, single-brained — thus the missed deadlines.

The alert reader will have noticed that mid-April isn’t getting any further away, so I — pushed to make it to An Ending, basically ignoring everything else in the process.

I wasn’t helped in my last minute push by the manifestation of Murphy, who decreed that I would catch a “viral something” just after the new year, so I couldn’t write for a few days.

However!  I have just achieved the Good Enough for Rock ‘n Roll Draft and will be putting out a call for Beta Readers.

Which means I’ll have a couple weeks to catch up on all that stuff I let slide.

Including commentary on the Liaden Books.

I will not be continuing in a chapter-by-chapter sort of way — for one thing, I’ve been reading in the evenings, and I’m half-way through Carpe Diem, while the commentary stalled at Chapter Six in Agent of Change — and for another, that really wasn’t working for me.

What I will be doing is commenting on the books, on things that struck me, surprises, dismays, and reflections of Real Life into fiction.

And that?  Is where we are.  Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm for the concept of a read-along, and I hope you’ll continue to read on until the end of Diviner’s Bow.

I certainly intend to do so.