This Writer's Diary

July update

The first migratory shorebirds are heading south, and An Unwise Prince is with its first readers. Turning points, both, halfway through this year.

The Greater Yellowlegs and the Solitary Sandpiper reported on e-Bird this week for my locale are likely unsuccessful breeders. An Unwise Prince, I hope, isn’t an unsuccessful third draft – but neither is it close to finished. My first readers are people I trust with the story, who know what I’m trying to do, know my world, and, for two of them, know my characters after 28 months of messages back and forth about our respective books-in-progress. They’ll tell me what works, what doesn’t, where the middle section is the muddiest, whose character needs further development.

Meanwhile, there’s the sequel, A Distant Obligation, to consider. I have the barest framework for it. I know how the story ends for two of the characters; I am fairly sure for two more, and for one, I simply don’t yet know. I know some of the major plot conflicts, not all. And until I outline it, and then begin the background research, I won’t know. Even then . . .

An Unwise Prince is not quite the book I thought I was going to write. But in one session of a course on the Mongol invasion of the Middle East I took on-line, the professor mentioned in passing an article he’d written, about an Englishman who ended up as a translator for Batu Khan, one of Genghis’s grandsons, surfacing in history when Batu invaded Hungary in the middle of the 13^th century. The unnamed Englishman had been exiled for unnamed crimes, but gambling was one of his vices. And so was born – almost immediately – a secondary character who changed both the overall story and the backstory of one of the point-of-view narrators, and, who will be important in the second book too.

So, what will appear to change the plot of A Distant Obligation? I’ll find out as I research.

Yesterday a friend and I drove up to the marvellous Great Books used bookstore in Williamsford, Ontario. Housed in an old mill, there are three floors of books, more-or-less organized by topic, and a rather nice café (with the best bacon-and-tomato sandwich I’ve had since the last one I had here!) We spent about three hours lunching and browsing, with making note of two books by Michael Asher about crossings of the Sahara and Arabian deserts. The crossing of an equivalent desert is a possibility for one of my characters, and if I decide that’s what’s going to happen, then I’ll go back and get these books. Regardless, it was a lovely drive; barley turning golden; soys and corn looking healthy, second-cut hay being baled. On the verges orange day lilies brightened the Queen Anne’s lace; the blue sky held puffs of white clouds; I had both good company and a day away from the computer. What more could I ask for?