Update: Ah, yes, This Again
Okay, so a fairly major dilemma, with which I am presented about four times per year, is:
What should I work on now?
And usually there are multiple plausible answers. Sometimes I make a call that turns out to be insanely wrong, generally because of terribly mistaken premises. This year, that sequence of events went like this:
I think I’ll write Hedesa because that will be fast; then I’ll finally pull out the long-ignored fantasy novel I have handy, which will probably be a serious pain in the neck to revise so putting it off makes sense; then we’ll see.
And then Hedesa went really slowly, and, when I finally looked at Eight Doors, it turned out to be in fine shape, and now I wish I had dealt with them in reverse order and thus had books ready to release throughout the year, rather than cramming them all into the last five months of the year. But here we are. Lack of omniscience, it’s a pain in the neck at times.
Right at the moment, I am working on two (or three, depending on what counts as “working on it”) different projects:
A) I sent Eight Doors to most early readers last week. I don’t expect to do a lot beyond minor tweaking and proofing at this point; it’s basically good to go; I’ll put it up for preorder as soon as I have a cover. Otoh, tweaking and proofing will continue right up to the last week before release, so it’s not like I’ve put it entirely away. I’ve scheduled a chapter to go live tomorrow at my Patreon, and that will continue until the full and final draft drops. That will most likely happen in the middle of August, though naturally that sort of thing is subject to change depending on things such as WHERE IS THE COVER??? and the other complications that can occur.
In the future, I won’t enable the “sell the post” function at my Patreon until I’m pretty sure all the typos (or essentially all) have been cleared out, meaning one week after the epub drops. Since I didn’t have the basic common sense to do that for past books, anybody who has bought a post at my Patreon and then I dropped an updated version? You are welcome to contact me and I will send you the updated epub separately. I’ll say that at my Patreon too, later, when Eight Doors drops there.
B) I’ve re-read No Foreign Sky, highlighting in blue allllll the ten million details that are or might be relevant to the sequel. Some I will just remember without trouble (“The turun and therefore the humans who are part of their society tend to sort concepts into sets of four rather than into dichotomies”), but lots I would not remember without a bulleted list of details (“tables are about two feet high”), so I am creating that list.
For an absolutely astounding and very welcome change, I already know the title of the sequel. That will be Unforgiving Sky. I like the sound of it, it’s clearly part of the same series, and I will find a way to justify that title. I mean, I have ideas about how to justify it, but I will make sure to actually do so. Someone will probably say or think that phrase, probably near the end, in a context where it makes sense.
Although this will be a direct sequel, I’m shaking up the pov protagonists because I just feel like it. Gerstner will most likely remain as a pov character, not entirely sure, but Samuel Lockwood will definitely take over the pov from Taya – he turned out to be one of my favorite characters, and he’s both distinctive and, as we move forward, in a much more interesting and challenging position. A turun will also pick up a pov role. That’s three, and that’s possibly enough, I don’t think we need an uman point of view. Samuel can serve as an eye into uman attitudes and customs. An acerbic, untrusting, borderline hostile eye.
I have not quite started actually working on this sequel, however, because –
C) I don’t want to make the Hedesa vs Eight Doors mistake twice in one year, so I’m actually prioritizing Sekaran. It is surely (surely!) more sensible to finish Sekaran FIRST and then worry about Unforgiving Sky. Sekaran right now includes, let me see … twelve chapters that are finished or nearly so, plus five that are unwritten or nearly so. Plus any other chapters I might suddenly decide to add, because who knows. But five chapters … more than two weeks left in July … I ought to be able to finish this draft by the end of the month and that is my goal. We’ll see what early readers think – it’s such a strange “novel,” stepping through time like this – it’s not really a novel at all; I’m not sure what to call it. I hope everyone will enjoy it, though, and if I can hand it off to early readers around the first of August, then it will be on track for release in early October or (if it needs a lot of work, which I don’t expect), maybe November, but certainly this year with no trouble.
I’m writing it in LibreOffice, by the way, because Word locked up as it periodically does – Microsoft demands that you connect to the internet and sign in every three months or so, and will abruptly lock Word if you don’t. This is of course infuriating, and last time it happened, I opened Sekaran in LibreOffice so I wouldn’t have to bother taking my laptop to the office to let it connect to WiFi for thirty seconds so Microsoft would be happy. For the first time, I decided to just keep working on this one book in LibreOffice, learn where everything is – styles are harder to get to, but they are there and modifiable; certain display options are different in annoying ways; the paragraphing menu is there if you keep poking around long enough to find it; it’s probably adequately functional, is what I’m saying. After I use it for this book, and provided the file loads to KDP without incident, I may just continue using LibreOffice rather than Word.
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Side note i: Meanwhile, I don’t like LibreOffice as well. The way it displays text is not as smooth; and the Find command doesn’t highlight words, which is super useful in Word; and you can’t do accent marks with keyboard shortcuts, or if you can, I haven’t figured out how. It would have been INSANELY annoying to work with Eight Doors in LibreOffice if there’s no good way to do Aûn and Vaàncu and Cuón Róc with keyboard shortcuts. Autocorrect options might be possible, which would solve the problem. I should check that out and see if I can make it work. But the thing is, in Word, I can type with accent marks almost as fast as without, and if I had to stop and do some sort of insert-symbol thing each and every time, I would go insane.
For names in Eight Doors, I started off with a specific Vietnamese name that caught my eye. This is exactly like doing the Russian feel for the Ubez language in Invictus because the Russian word “Ubezhishche” caught my eye and I took that word and did a whole bunch of names based on that and a handful of other Russian words. In the same way, the Vietnamese name Bích caught my eye. I liked the way it looked – I still like the way it looks – but this is an absolutely impossible name for American readers, obviously. The fact is, the pronunciation is not what it looks like, but what it looks like is utterly crucial to American and English-speaking readers in general, and it is therefore not a possible name.
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Side note ii: I am especially sure of this because I’ve seen how many people are deeply upset when I use the word “bitch” to refer to a female dog in a Quora answer, which I have done rather often because it irritates me that the correct term for a female dog is considered unusable even if all you’re saying is “Twenty-five percent of all intact bitches will get pyometra, which will quadruple the cost of the spay even if she survives the experience, and if you’re extra unlucky you will pay for this enormously expensive spay and THEN she will STILL DIE, so you should spay your bitch before she is, say, seven years old.”
Which is true, by the way. To extend this side note, I have personally had three bitches with pyo: one at two years, one at three years, one at five years of age. I’ve known of two puppies who had pyo after their first season. So even though the condition becomes more likely with age, every single person with an intact bitch needs to look up pyometra and memorize the signs, and fundamentally every single time a bitch “looks sick” three to five weeks after she has been in season, that should be treated as an emergency until you are sure it is not. Though I would not suggest rushing to spay all puppy bitches because pediatric spaying screws up orthopedic development and, bonus! also predisposes the puppy to various aggressive cancers later in life, so that’s not great and I therefore suggest spaying around eighteen months of age, or two and half years for big breeds. But spaying at a better time for orthopedic soundness and cancer means letting the bitch go through a couple of seasons and that means you need to watch out for pyo, even though this is relatively rare in young bitches.
At this point, I diagnose pyo by intuition, meaning the last time a girl of mine had pyo — at two years of age — I stepped through the front door, looked at Naamah, and said, “Hmm, you have pyo, don’t you?” I called my vet and said, “I realize you are in theory closing in ten minutes, but even though there’s no sign of a discharge, I’m pretty sure Naamah has pyo and I wonder if you would let me bring her in immediately, confirm that, and then spay her right now, this evening.” I was right, they did the spay fifteen minutes after she first “looked sick” to me, and she recovered much, much faster than any bitch who is allowed to get sicker before the emergency spay either saves her life or fails to save her life.
But returning Side Note i, the thing about names:
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Beats me why some words and names appeal to me so much, but I really liked the look of Bích on the page, so I picked a different letter to put in front, which means it’s probably not pure coincidence that the letter is a V, as that is directly next to the B on the keyboard and I was a little peeved at feeling obligated to change the name. Then I looked at other Vietnamese names and segued from there to Thai names and then picked up a book of Thai poetry with phonetic English spelling with accent marks in addition to the English translation and the original akson thai, which looks like this: อักษรไทย.
So that is a neat little book, by the way, and here is my favorite poem in the book, though I grant I haven’t read them all:
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When walking the eightfold pathof right understanding,
right intention,
right speaking,
right acting,
right living,
right effort,
right mindfulness,
and right concentration,
There is one thing you must bring with you,
one thing that will guide you
back to the path when lost in the woods,
one thing that will shelter you
when the rains come,
one thing that will deliver you
to the other side
when your faith wavers.
The thing you must bring is patience.
***
ANYWAY, obviously I let myself wander way off the topic there, so back to Sekaran.
Because Sekaran is so close to finished, I want to finish it first, even if I’m also thinking about Unforgiving Sky at the same time. If I begin serious work on Unforgiving Sky in August … five months from there to the end of the year … SURELY I can have it about ready to go by the beginning of 2026, EVEN IF it is slow, which it probably will be. Say 2000 words per day, give or take; that is a painfully slow pace, which may be realistic for this book, not sure. Five months; 100,000 words, there you go. Not that it’s likely to wind up that short, but still.
If I get TOO stuck with it for any reason, I’ll probably back up and see about writing the long-ago prequel that deals with the discovery of the abandoned human colony, the remnant human population, and early days in that first contact situation. That should somewhat echo Little Fuzzy, though only to a very limited degree, of course. One echo will be how tremendously cute turun think humans are, though with a lot more emphasis on delicacy rather than fluffiness.
MEANWHILE
I hope you are all enjoying summer, unless you’re in Australia, and in that case, I hope you’re enjoying winter. Let’s have a blast of orange flowers that suit the hot weather we’re having here:
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