Tasmakat Update

I hope you all had a great weekend, and if you’re in the US, a great 4th of July! I really did not pay a lot of attention to the 4th as such because mainly I was just happy to have an extra day to pour into Tasmakat. We live much too far outside of town to go to a fireworks display, especially when it is REALLY hot and unpleasant, which it certainly is. The humidity is through the roof right now. It’s like the Wall of Humidity when you step outside. The windows are literally steamed up and trickling with water in the morning.

Oh! We did have a thunderstorm this past weekend, which contributed to the humidity, but it was GREAT, because we had zero rain in June and all the trees and shrubs were curling up and going crispy and emitting those silent shrieks of despair, as plants do, and really, a thunderstorm was a Very Good Thing. We got an inch of rain and Boy 4 got his first exposure to thunder. He sat up and looked at the adults, completely unbothered, and went back to sleep. He did that for the first three cracks of thunder and there you go, probably that one experience conferred lifetime indifference to thunder, very handy. There are ways to ensure a puppy doesn’t develop a thunder phobia, but the easiest is definitely to have a lot of calm adult dogs who absolutely do not care one bit about thunder. He’s doing great btw and can now come up a whole flight of stairs on his own.

Anyway, other than appreciating that one thunderstorm, I’m just enjoying having lots of flow with Tasmakat, even though I also took a couple of steps backward.

I mean, I FINALLY reached the river, crossed into the summer country, and butted the beginning of the beginning up against the end of the beginning, so to speak. I am now connecting everything up. I wrote two connected scenes I have been dying to write for a year, and now I am going back and writing transitions to get to those scenes and then from one to the next and so on. In the process, I rearranged the timing of certain events and cut 7000 words, some of which may occur kind of soonish, but not here in the borderlands, it turns out.

So:

–I’m now past the 100,000 word mark, even after cutting 7000 words.

–I’m at the end of the beginning, or nearly, and about to move into the middle.

–I still haven’t written one fairly important scene and will need to go back and do that, but at least I have some ideas about it now. And I think that scene will be short. Relatively short.

–I’m still, as of today, doing some stitch work to get from one scene to the next, but I think I will finish that today. Or maybe tomorrow.

–I’m just about to be able to tie the last scene I have here into the narrative, rather than having it sit isolated at the end of the manuscript. It’s a scene I wrote a long time ago, not exactly important, but fun.

–I have re-introduced Esau, now with Keraunani. I can’t absolutely guarantee they’ll both still be here in the finished draft, but I hope so.

–Aras has now officially declined to execute Kerren Rahavet and his entire extended family, in a way that I believe makes sense given the setup from Tarashana while also contributing to the various problems everyone is going to face in Tasmakat. That’s not too much of a spoiler, right? You all knew he wasn’t going to do it, right?

–While we have not yet met her, I suddenly realized how I can make Selili, Aras’ oldest daughter, important enough to have her accompany everyone to Avaras! YAY! I’m not sure why that took so long because it makes sense in story terms, it also makes sense in worldbuilding terms, and it is pretty obvious now that I’ve thought of it. Also, I’m pretty sure Selili’s daughter, Aras’ granddaughter, does exist. Not completely sure, but pretty sure.

And that’s where we are.

I also read Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, so you can expect comments about that fairly soon.