A State of the Writer: Ker-Flop and WIPs

Okay, after long weeks of only being able to work on it in fits and starts, chapter 16 of Long Road is finally roughed out. With luck I’ll get to print that today so I can do revisions, edits, nitpicks, etc. (Augh thump flop.)

This chapter should finish the fic. I have ideas for two specific codas; Nie Mingjue meeting Ashkevrons, and Ancar’s mind-controlled soldiers meeting the Yiling Patriarch. But brain is currently blanking on the details. And I want to get going on Colors of Another Sky. So… I’m doing that.

In bits and pieces. Jason’s landing in a new world is a serious crash, and there’s going to be more than a bit of tension, sheer terror, and body horror. I know how it goes, I just may need to be more rested to write it all the way through. So I wrote the end line of that section, and then jumped to Lee Cheong’s POV for the other side of the rescue. Much more hopeful stuff to write.

(And necessary, ‘cause Jason’s going to be KO’d for a bit. It’s a very dicey rescue.)

It’s rough going, in part because the holidays are never a good time of year for me and I’m having to recover from nonstop Christmas music every day at work, which makes things much worse. But it is, at last, going.

Of course, in the process I keep finding bits of info I either need to research more for the story, or make sure I add to a glossary at the end for people who have not spent weeks, months, years digging themselves in deeper to the history and fantasy of Northeast Asia. Currently the glossary includes cultivators, fox spirits, Namhansanseong, and wokou. I’m sure it’s going to grow from there. (Suggestions welcome!)

I’m also finding out more about how the demon-callers are structured, because Lee Cheong may be young but he is not an idiot. And the last guy in charge from whom he recently took over was equally not an idiot. The people on Lee Cheong’s “strike team”, so to speak, are not the commanders of their respective divisions in the Callers, they’re his personal team. The commanders he needs doing their commanding. The one exception may be Jue Chin-Sun, who’s the best medic they have when it comes to supernatural stuff and probably does lead their medics… when Lee Cheong’s not in combat.

…So I need to come up with these seconds-in-command. Okay, that’s what “add X name here” notes are for….

I’m also noting various nonmagical events and hazards that sane people are going to tend to after picking up a couple of foreign strangers. For example, variolation. That’s going to take some interesting translation attempts to get across. And also some pure luck, because Jason’s old enough to have a good idea of what a variolation scar looks like. Mary, not so much.

(Yes, I know, the historical Chinese version was “blow it up your nose”. The skin route is safer and with medical cultivation people would have been able to figure that out.)

Thoughts, suggestions?