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.