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Author's Commentary on Somewhere Else Entirely: Chapters 19 to 22
In these chapters a major character gets introduced and Garia receives a shock which underlines her new reality to her. Otherwise, the business of introducing basic technology to Palarand continues.
There isn't too much in these chapters that required major attention.
Chapter 19, The Secretary
Although I had not originally planned it this way, it seemed to me that the way I had laid out the situation in the palace was going to cause grief to Garia. There's just so much going on in her life right now and she has only been there less than two weeks!
First, though, now that Garia has figured her own body out it is time to have some fun with the Prince. After handing him a drubbing he hadn't expected, he realizes that she really does have important things to teach the guardsmen... and that her chosen form of exercise involves some really intimate encounters.
Of course, I know squat all about any martial art, which is why you won't find specific terms and movements described in this story. It was important to the plot, though, so I have just gone [handwave] fusion [handwave] and that seems to be enough for most purposes.
Merizel
There aren't many people of Garia's age in the palace when she arrives - at least, not of a status that she would be able to be friends with. Doubtless the kitchens and stables have many boys and girls Garia's age, but she won't meet any one from there for a long time.
Enter Merizel, who is almost as much a fish out of water as Garia is. Since she is obviously not of the palace, she and Garia end up bonding as they discover how everything works together.
It takes a little time, however, and there are several bumps along the way. For now, though, the young noblewoman is just overawed by being in the palace but wants to 'have a go' since this should, as she thinks, earn her bragging rights after she is inevitably asked to move on again.
As usual, I pulled the names of Merizel, her father Baron Kamodar and their demesne South Reach out of... wherever such things come from. I hadn't yet crystallized the naming rules and if I were to do this again (as if!) I would probably have named her Merizet. Still, it works fairly well as is.
Chamber colors
I gave Garia the Lilac chamber and subsequently Merizel gets the Cerise chamber next door. It since occurred to me that these are specific shades as used on Earth, so I'm assuming that the reader understands that these are local colors of perhaps similar shades. The actual colors aren't important.
Chapter 20, Of Type and Typing
After paper naturally comes printing and Garia gets off to an early start, not just with a basic press but also the typewriter. Fortunately the process is fairly simple to explain.
One major problem about describing an industrial revolution is that of describing various developments to the reader, who may or may not have much interest in the subject. Since this whole thing was supposed to be a romance I tried, really hard, to minimize the amount of unnecessary detail but inevitably I have given in and probably overdone things.
After printing and the typewriter Garia speaks with Margra about the human body, health and managing illness and accidents. There is a natural wariness from those around the table about such matters, just as there was in the 17th-18th centuries here, but Garia points out that they will be forced to dig deeper into how a body works if they want to make any progress.
Yod and Ferenis
At this point I had roughed out the layout of the Great Valley but had gone little further than that. Yod was obviously going to be the long-term enemy but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to introduce a full scale war (or even a small war) into the proceedings. Yod invading Ferenis is only the first step in whatever their plan was, and just incidentally allowed me to provide some more background about the world beyond the palace. Keren conveniently gets out all the maps and explains most of the important points.
The Daily Dispatch
By accident it seems that I ended up writing many of the chapters as one per elapsed day. There are important sequences where a day covers more than one chapter but one per day seems to be the norm. I became so comfortable writing the story this way that I really had to concentrate whenever I needed to skip time.
Doubtless I could have done it all that way but since the story covers a whole (Earth) year there would have been double the number of chapters. Many readers might have liked that but a lot of the chapters would have been blatant fillers. (And it possibly might have been another six years before I finished it!)
An upside of doing it this way is scene-setting: we find out what the weather is each day and what Garia thinks she will be doing. At the end of the day she mulls over what she has experienced and thinks about how she is changing and what the future might hold. I think this contributes to the way the book flows.
Chapter 21, Educating Merizel
A great opportunity for the author to have some light fun at Merizel's expense. She still has little clue about Garia and the younger girl's activities in the Small Training Room come as a complete shock. It also provides a convenient method for giving the reader more information about the Palace Guard and customs inside the palace.
Tobin and Torin
It just goes to show that, even after repeated careful and close scrutiny, some mistakes will still get through. After leaving the Self Defense Training Room Keren answers some questions from guardsmen in the bigger room. In the course of the same conversation I managed to change the name of a guardsman from Torin to Tobin, although it could charitably be argued that he was in fact speaking to two different guardsmen. This was not the case, so I have now corrected all references to be to Torin. Tobin, does in fact, remain on the roster.
Looming storm clouds
Later, there is another visit to the Wardrobe, where the first signs of Garia's instability begin to become apparent. As we are already aware that she has a temper the real reason is not obvious to anyone. She swears at Rosilda, which naturally mortifies her. Being brought up as a reasonably polite person it upsets Garia that she has begun behaving like this.
I have to apologize for using a swear word. I didn't want to make this story one that was full of crude words but felt that it was appropriate in this case to show just how much Garia's temper had flared up.
There are one or two swear words used later on but mostly I have just referenced them rather than committing them to print. I have invented one, used later by Sukhana, and considered thinking up more but again, I didn't want the speech to be peppered with too many such words. This is, after all, supposed to be a relatively polite society.
Chapter 22, Definitely Female
This is the first day of that inevitable feminine happening, the period, or, as the locals name it, the Call of Kalikan.
Garia has a brand new body which has never experienced anything like that previously. There has been a careful gloss over just how the clone body was grown and how fast, but it is entirely possible that it has never had that experience before coming to Anmar. Consequently, the interaction of hormones, etc, provides a fairly brutal introduction to womanhood.
Some non-TG female readers have mentioned the, to them, un-necessary emphasis on periods but I think that in story terms this can be justified. There are women who have bad periods and Garia happens to be one of them. Her Calls subsequently play a significant part in the overall story.
Importantly, in this chapter we come to see how everybody else considers this to be normal and how all the women around Garia and Terys contribute to help her through this difficult time. It provides an important bonding experience while making Garia realize that there are good reasons for the world of men and women to be the way it is.
Merizel has difficulty getting her head around the idea that somebody could be fifteen Anmar years old and never had a Call before. Having been dumped into a situation totally outside her experience she struggles to make sense of what she is being told.
Since Calls seem to be synchronized to Kalikan, as Earth women are to the Moon, I decided to stretch physiology a little further and make it an exact sync. In other words, Calls will come on the exact same day each month for every woman on Anmar. Of course, events like illness and childbearing would cause shifts but the general principle holds true. That is also one reason for the strange month system, though I have wondered whether a similar system would work better on Earth than what we have now.
At the end Garia comes to terms with her new existence but she still has the memories and drives of Gary Campbell. The process of assimilation will take some time longer before she is truly comfortable in her new skin. The trick for the author was easing her from one point of view to the other over the length of the story.
Comments
Meri, et al
First, a personal comment about names. Having a naming custom for Anmar is all well and good, but there are bound to be exceptions. I like Merizel, it is a name that "flows" for me. Merizet just seems a 'harder' name. Certainly not as lyrical.
Now, about the "Call". While my late partner just seemed to move through her period serenely (that was pretty much how she did everything), I have known one woman that became a screaming banshee when she had hers. Every time. I think Garia's reaction is reasonable and certainly falls into the normal range of women I have known. Her purely physical symptoms are very similar to a young woman I know. She is 24 and according to her has never had what she termed a normal period. Again, there is no standard for this, like her mental reaction Garia falls withen what I would consider a normal range for women.
As for swearing, while I hadn't noticed it missing I would expect a certain amount of swearing by Garia, especially at first. After all, she had been a normal teen boy not that long ago. Especially for a teen that spent his summers on a farm/ranch a certain amount of swearing is to be expected. When working on a farm or ranch it is pretty much required in order to get things done. I grew up not all that far from Gary's home, when its 98 degrees and you are hauling hay the vocabulary can be pretty salty. As times go by and Garia adapts to the local customs her vocabulary would be tempered, but if she let slip a 'damn' or a "shit!" during times of stress it would certainly be within character for her. After all, shit happens.
About the encounter in Wardrobe, I think its safe to say that Garia does not "suffer fools gladly". Petty obstructionism runs counter to a teenager's nature, which can be summed up as 'I want it and I want it NOW!"
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
For not knowing much about
For not knowing much about martial arts, you covered the basics pretty well, especially as it wasn't a primary focus, both armed (quarterstaffs and hookblades) and unarmed, (punching properly, knife techniques, fighting stance, and manipulating skeletal mechanics to remove someone's balance (which is very much Ju do (don't know how to spell it))
As for swere words, i would probably have been surprised if they weren't at least mentioned on occasion, no matter how polite the society, there will always be times when such vocabulary is called into use, and if that vocabulary is lacking, new words will be invented to compensate, generally short words with harsh consonants, its human nature.
I think you balanced the technology side well, would have liked to see the industrial heart that is Teldor, but that's more to understand its layout and development, not the factories themselves and both times Garia went through there they were in haste, and it's not like she could really let herself be identified the first time.
Comments in general
Comments in general.
There can be an argument against too clean of language usage. I like it the way you wrote it.
FYI: A bit of fact and guess. How much can be saved by shipping coke over coal? (Using 3 loads for conversion (fact at least 25% weight lost in conversion, I used 25%.), 1 loads as fuel) So. We can expect at best a yield of 2.25 loads of coke from 4 loads of coal. 90 loads of coke = 160 loads of coal.
On the production of alcohol
I'm trying to reconcile, in an earlier chapter, that Garia finds she is only being offered wine to drink, to the mention in this set of chapters that alcohols were deemed too risky for human consumption. Pel rapidly replaced wine as the go-to drink by this time in the narrative as well; was this an element that just didn't work in the long run?
Alcohol
Brewed alcohol is fine, it is the distilled stuff that everybody is concerned about.
I doubt anyone there would refer to beer or wine as 'alcohol'. They probably wouldn't even make the connection.
Everybody (well, almost) drinks pel, but wine would probably only be available in the palace or a nobleman's household. Garia will drink small quantities of wine when guesting with nobles on the way back from Blackstone, for example. Beer, especially small beer, would be drunk by the common folk in many places as the quality of water supplies could not be guaranteed. The alcohol in brewed beer will kill off any waterborne hazards.
These practices are a straight copy of medieval Earth customs. It is only with the introduction of beverages like tea, coffee and cocoa from tropical countries that alternatives to beer and wine became available here.
Penny
Princess Eriana is the exception
Princess Eriana is the exception to the beer drinking
LOL
Except
I don't think they brew it dark and heavy enough for her tastes,
Thanks
Thanks for the updating of #20. Now I can put the first book into the longtime harddisk.. It will be interesting to follow the next chapters of SEE_V2_B02
Best greetings Ginnie
GinnieG