Author's Commentary on Somewhere Else Entirely: Chapters 7 to 10

Edits to these chapters consist mostly of corrections to spelling and adjustments to style. There is one sequence which required further adjustment which I will note below.

Titles

Where titles have been used in speech to the person concerned, I have now made sure that these are, as is proper, all changed to upper case. In situations where the person is referred to by title only in a conversation by two or more others, it is sometimes more appropriate to leave the title in lower case. Where they are referred to by title and name they would of course be upper-cased.

Aye and Yes

When I originally began writing this I understood that all speech would be in the local tongue - which still does not have a name, by the way. So I used colloquial English, US dialect, with the assumption that readers would understand that it wasn't English and make allowances. This is a common technique used in almost every genre for different reasons and it is well understood by everyone who reads.

As the story developed I began to notice that certain eccentricities of speech were creeping in but I was not particularly worried to begin with. After all, one might expect the inhabitants of a palace to speak a little different than the common man in the street or field.

One of these eccentricities was the use of the word "Aye" as well as the word "Yes". I have no particular policy regarding when one would be used instead of the other but it seems to me, from reading the story back, that "Aye" would be used more by men than by women; more when someone of lesser status agreed with or acknowledged a remark by someone of greater status, and also when acknowledging a direct command.

There are also the "Customary rejoinders": "As you say" can be seen as an agreement whereas "As you command" is obviously a response to a direct command. "As you wish" and "As you desire" are somewhere in the middle. These have become common mannerisms in the local tongue. I have sometimes used these to avoid having to use a common English phrase such as would be used in the US or the UK.

I intend to slightly rework the earlier chapters to give the same flavor of dialect as developed in the later chapters. Naturally, Garia's speech does not follow the above rules, but mostly resembles the way Gary would normally have spoken on Earth.

US and UK dialects and phrases

I decided from the outset that my protagonist would be a US citizen and that the story would be written entirely in US English. I'm using the US spell-checker on my LibreOffice Writer software and this has mostly worked, except where both forms seem to be valid.

This has been generally successful except where I have occasionally tripped up over word differences and usages. This means that I have used for example "trainers" instead of "sneakers". Any of those that I find I will correct as I go along.

Upstairs and Downstairs

I had a slight problem here, since I am British and Gary is supposed to be American, and the majority of the readers will be American too. This is because in Britain we refer to the lowest floor above ground as the "Ground Floor" while in the US that would be the "First Floor". Above that would be the "First Floor" in Britain but the "Second Floor" in the US.

I decided to avoid the problem entirely by not using either convention. I used "Upper Level" or even just "Upstairs" and "Lower Level" or "Downstairs" instead. This meant that the palace has only two levels (apart from the towers) but that made sense too. The whole of the Great Valley is alluvial soil which means that buildings generally wouldn't be too tall because the ground would be too soft.

Chapter 7, Unexpected Visitors

This begins with Garia attempting her Tai Chi. "Is that a dance, Mistress?" Of course, although I did not realize it at the time, this turns out to become a running joke throughout the whole story.

The 'tea' is of course the herbal drink known later as pel. At this point I had not named it, even though I knew I would have to eventually. It is a direct equivalent of tea and is drunk by absolutely everyone.

Garia's demonstration of knowledge blows Morlan away and makes him reconsider what she is. He sees possible gain to himself and begins to think of ways of making use of his advantage. All this is merely hinted at here since my ideas about antagonists had not yet formed at all.

Garia's temper also begins to make itself known here, although she manages to keep it under control. I did not want her to be either placid or completely unmanageable but perhaps just on the fiery side of 'normal' and able to make use of her 'mental exercises' to control herself. Of course she hasn't really encountered her female hormones at this point...

"A cloth for your Mistress"

I wrestled with this one for a fair while since I tried hard to avoid using the word "handkerchief". I reasoned, probably incorrectly, that the locals wouldn't have a local equivalent of that word so it wouldn't be heard in the 'automatic translation' going on in Garia's head. Hence, cloths appear which get used for everything. As I subsequently use words like "scarves", etc it probably wouldn't have mattered much.

Those of Yod

Thought up literally on the spur of the moment to advance the plot, Those of Yod turn out to become somewhat more important to the story than I originally imagined. What I was aiming for was something like a 17th-century version of Nazi Germany, softened slightly by the fact that nobody has gunpowder so no state would be more powerful than any other. We don't learn, even at the end of SEE, exactly what is going on within Yod. That will probably be revealed in a later tale.

The Yodans behavior at the banquet is interesting. They don't want to offend their hosts but equally, they feel that their own status is higher than that of any of the locals. Their responses are very non-committal. When asked about the meal Farber Blackshield does not actually reply to Garia's question but deflects it.

The banquet also provides an excuse to let Keren and Garia interact more closely together in an adversarial environment. Garia is the first to realize that something doesn't ring true about the visitors, but Keren is a quick thinker as well.

Chapter 8, A Bump in the Night

I dreamed most of the first part of this chapter the night after I wrote the previous one. It all flowed so well and so naturally that it didn't take long to write down at all. Most of what happens is a logical consequence of what went before so isn't difficult to work out. At this point I had not decided whether Morlan was innocent or not, so just made him disappear for a while.

Parlor and Sitting Room

At this stage I had not really thought greatly about the organization of the palace except that it would be large and have many rooms and corridors. As originally written, I have Garia taken to the parlor, which is on the lower floor, but later taken a short distance to Elizet's room because I was thinking of the sitting room instead, which is part of the Royal Suite and therefore on the upper floor. I have now fixed that, and also the inaccurate description of the placement of Elizet's and Malann's suites.

Vast, Multi-Dimensional Beings

Actually, I hadn't wanted to call them that to begin with, which is why in chapter 8 they are referred to as Immense Multi-Dimensional Beings. I was of course conscious of the Douglas Adams connections, having listened to the original radio broadcasts all those many years ago. I was mildly concerned with copyright issues. Subsequently, I forgot that I had changed the name slightly.

For Garia to have appeared on Anmar at all there had to be a plausible reason, one which could also account for her turning up in the wrong body. I fully intended this story to be about Garia's experiences on Anmar and her romance with Keren but in the back of my mind I always knew that I would have to resolve the essential how and why of the transfer eventually.

I did know at this point that (i) she was real and not dreaming, (ii) she was, as she explained, a copy and not the original and that (iii) her time on Anmar was strictly limited to one Earth year. At this point I had not even thought of a calendar and there was no timeline for when anything happened, since I had no idea what would happen anyway.

The final section just makes known to the reader that there is something else going on than just a lost girl being put up in a palace. My intention was to ignore the Beings until near the end of the story and that is mostly what happened.

Chapter 9, Conversations with the Queen

Aftermath of the previous night's activities. This brings home to everyone - including the author - just how important Garia will be to the whole region.

The enforced inactivity gives Garia the chance to tell Terys - and incidentally, the reader - about her background. This also introduces the curious concept of the two Captains of the Palace Guard. I had not completely determined how that would play out but it became apparent soon enough. This is where we also discover that Morlan has been working on his own plans.

The subject of martial arts is introduced, and I freely admit that I know little of the subject. That is one reason why I have been deliberately vague about what she practiced and fine details of the exercises she did. I don't think, in context, that specific knowledge of that kind would be useful to the average reader except perhaps to trip the author up.

The Queen knits

This was entirely an atmosphere thing. An alert reader might discover that no further mention of Terys knitting occurs anywhere else in the story. The same reader might wonder just who the Queen is knitting for. The answer is probably that Terys is knitting baby clothes for the children of one of her daughters and that once these have been dispatched, she would not make any more because she would not know what size to make. Or something.

"Yes and no"

Another phrase which ended up appearing all through the story, entirely by chance. None of what she says in response is contrived, the phrase is honestly said, but by the end everybody is making fun of the phrase.

Gerdas

A Questor, but someone much more amenable that Morlan. He is astonished by what he is told but has no problem believing Garia. He proves an ally to Garia in subsequent conflicts with local custom.

Chapter 10, Astronomy, Cutlery, Murder

Garia adapts to life in the Royal Corridor. This provides an opportunity to ask about local conditions and so on, broadening the range of what everybody knows. Later she attempts to satisfy Gerdas's questions and the full import of her situation is brought home to her.

Then we introduce, entirely by accident, the single item which begins the whole Industrial Revolution. That is, of course, the fork. Nobody has the faintest idea what is going to happen, including the author. The whole idea of getting involved in such a huge undertaking had not occurred to me when I began writing this. I think that if I had not had to write that into the plot the story would have ended up at the original 30-40 chapters intended.

Of course, once I thought about it I realized that I had no alternative. Unless I completely invoked the Prime Directive there was little chance that Garia would remain in Palarand and not tell them of developments that could progress their society.

Besides, it occurred to me that starting an Industrial Revolution might be the whole reason she was there in the first place. But I couldn't just jump to that conclusion either, which is why we end up with the Council of the Two Worlds.

This raises an important point when writing stories. If you come across a plot point that is difficult to resolve, try and let your characters do it. That is the principle I have followed most of the way through this story. Sometimes you have to over-rule them but usually they will do what they need to do for reasons that make sense both to them and to the reader.

There is a potential plot problem when Garia goes off with Keren and Gerdas to Morlan's study to measure her jeans. She does not have a female chaperone and Terys notices. I decided that, although Terys could have let one of her maids go with Garia, she allows them to proceed without a companion because nobody has yet come to terms with Garia's real importance to Palarand.

Somewhere Else Entirely

Of course, I knew before I began that was what I wanted to call the story. It only became apparent much later on that the phrase kept appearing all the time. Again, there is no contrivance, no desire to have the phrase in every chapter, although at times it certainly seems that way. All the mentions are entirely appropriate to the occasion.

The calendar adjustments

For some reason I wanted to have three moons in the story. Kalikan obviously has to be a Lunar replacement, in order to get tides and menstruation right, amongst many other things. Annis is set closer with an orbit of ~7 days, which provides a convenient basis for the use of a week. The smallest moon, Teide, is based on Phobos and is just there for fun.

I decided to make the calendar usage different than Earth's by having the weeks, months and years adjusted frequently to keep in step with the moons. Our Western calendar is based solely on the annual cycle and goes back to Babylonian times. Even then it isn't accurate, since the start date is arbitrary rather than being based on the Winter Solstice. Some societies and religions do use Lunar cycles but I don't think they resemble what I did here.