11 days till Harry Potter. 21 days till The Sea Change

[pbray]

THE SEA CHANGE hits stores three weeks from today. If you're interested, there's an excerpt up on my website at http://www.patriciabray.com.

I'm managing to persevere despite the heat and working frantically on THE FINAL SACRIFICE, with encouragement from the folks over at novel_in_90.

I realized last night that the timeline in the book is hosed, so in the spirit of forward momentum I inserted a line that said

REVISION NOTE: FIX TIMELINE

and kept on writing.

You see, if Ship One leaves port and heads north at y-knots, and Ship Two leaves the same port three weeks later and heads northeast at z-knots, and meanwhile Ship One has wrecked so the passengers are now on Ship Three which is heading east....

It's actually more complicated than that, but you get the idea. I've gotten better at keeping distances straight in my head, but building in time for messages to travel back and forth is where I lost it. As I've written it now, in order for Ship Two to rendezvous with the passengers who are now on Ship Three, Ship Two needs to have left harbor before hearing the news of the wreck of Ship One. Which is a problem, since that was the motivation for their setting sail.

I'm so used to the age of instantaneous communication that I subconsciously forget that in this world, the only way to get a message across the sea is for someone to physically bring it.

It can be fixed--it's just a matter of tweaking the time references, and tinkering with the departure of Ship Two. But it means sitting down and laying out timelines, which is something I need to save for the revision stage, not the "get the damn draft down on paper" stage.

Next time I write a fantasy, there's going to be a telegraph. Or twinned chisels that carve messages in stone tablets, like very slow e-mail.

Comments

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things that is so cool about writing fantasy, it really makes you think about things like how much slower people, letters and news traveled in the days before cars, planes and computers. Then, you have to figure out how you're going to work with those issues. I love that, it really helps put me in another time and place.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I love it too... except, of course, for when I hate it :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Or pigeons. Always remembering, of course, that pigeons only go one way...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I did think about using pigeons, but the logistics were problematic for exactly that reason.

Still something to consider, though, if I can't make the timeline work elsewise.

[gerbilicous.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with pigeons is that fantasy worlds are full of things that can eat them. A snack with a note attached, it's like a fortune cookie with wings!

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Mmm, tastes like chicken!

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, you got around that quite nicely in the Devlin books with the GPS (Gods Positioning Stone) device. :-) So the folks back home knew instantly when the hero was in trouble, many months' journey away.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

The soul stone was pretty awesome, wasn't it?

*Sighs and thinks of the good old days when I wasn't trying to manage a conflict that spanned the known world.*

[janni.livejournal.com]

Clearly your next fantasy needs teleporting dragons and significant dreams. :-)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

OMG, wouldn't that be like so totally awesome! And sparkly unicorns that can gallop for days without getting tired.

Of course next time I read something like that, I don't know if I'll wince, or merely think "Yeah, sister, I know why you took the easy route."

[janni.livejournal.com]

You mean you don't just make all your horses magic horses, on general principles?

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Darn, I knew I was missing something!

[gerbilicous.livejournal.com]

Wow, it actually makes me feel really good to know I'm not the only person who screws up her timelines! I am all set to pick up the Sea Change and wash the HP out of my system!

Funny story - when I wrote my first book I had the whole plot packed into 5 days. Only when I finished the book did I realize that nowhere in those five days had I let my characters eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom... oops.

Good thing Defax doesn't come after authors!

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Hee! Just think, if you were writing for 24, that would be 5 whole seasons right there :-)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Look on the bright side: you've discovered the problem while you're still writing, instead of, say, while reading your page proofs, so you've still got loads of time to fix it ... ;^)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Good point. My beta reader is wonderful in many respects, but she's crap at this kind of stuff and would completely miss it. Luckily my editor would catch it. But always better to fix before I send it in, rather than to provide evidence that one of her authors can't count.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Indeed ;^).

(Many of my authors can't count. I remember a paper where the authors said that 1 was 1% of 88. The good thing about being an editor and a writer is that wearing the latter hat makes you more sympathetic when you're wearing the former hat...)

[elaine-brennan.livejournal.com]

I suspect that she'd prefer that one of her authors couldn't count rather than couldn't write.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

So true!

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

This editor definitely prefers that. Alas, her wish is seldom granted, in that while many of her authors can't count, far more of them can't write.

/snark

[larryhammer]

Yanno, you sound exactly like the grumping of hard SF writers working out the machanics of relativistic spaceships without an ansible.

Just sayin'.

---L.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Precisely! If I ever write SF, it will be space opera, with beam messages and FTL drives.

And phasers blasters.