One Thousand And One Parsecs

Goal shift for Ashes

These past few weeks, I’ve been killing myself trying to write Ashes of the Starry Sea. I’ve made some good progress, as you can see on the sidebar.  Today I broke 200 pages.  Not too bad.

However, the pace has just been killing me.  4k words per day is something I can do…but 4k words per day on the same project?  It’s burning me out.

What’s more, to keep up the pace, I’ll have to put all my other projects completely on hold for the month of July.  That, or write MORE than 4k per day, which would be excruciatingly painful.

So I looked at my calendar tonight and figured that if I pushed back my self-imposed deadline for Ashes to the weekend before school starts, I can cut my daily wordcount in that book in half.  2k per day in Ashes–not bad.  That I can do.

What’s more, with the other 2k, I’ll have enough room to work on my other projects, Genesis Earth 3.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0.  I’m starting to get really excited for those, very motivated.  For Bringing Stella Home, I’m practically chomping at the bit.  I want to make that story shine!

Inshallah, juggling two projects at a time will be helpful, not harmful.  During the school year, when I was juggling work, school, and writing, it didn’t work.  Now, however, with writing the only major obligation, I’m hoping that two projects will help keep my creative mind fresh, if that makes sense.  When I get burned out on Ashes at 2pm, I can switch to Genesis Earth and work on something that excites me.  When I get burned out on that at 9pm, I’ll be excited about Ashes again.  Etc etc.

Besides, if I want to be a professional writer, project juggling is an important skill I’ll need to learn.  Inshallah, I’ll get it to work this time.

Wow!  If all goes according to plan, I’ll have all three novels finished and polished before school starts at the end of August!  July to write Genesis Earth 3.0, August to write Bringing Stella Home 2.0, and both months to finish Ashes of the Stary Sea 2.1.  Yeah!

In other news, Charlie finished Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson and reviewed it on her blog.  I was also reading Warbreaker, but about 200 pages in found that it just wasn’t working  for me.  I’ll probably finish  it someday, but for now, it’s on hold.

I hate to say anything bad about it, since Brandon has been something of a mentor to me (and his Mistborn books are some of the best fantasy that I’ve read!), but I shared many of Charlie’s complaints with the book.

The biggest thing, however, was the way he fell into long, frequent info dumps about the world.  Every time, I felt that it stopped the action and jolted me out of the story, like reading a college textbook.  The world was okay, but the way he presented it just didn’t work for me.

That, and the way the characters acted.  When Siri got carted off near the beginning to be the wife of the God king, the fact that she hardly showed any fear or anxiety about have sex with the guy just threw me out.  She was just like “oh, well,” and was nervous about everything else EXCEPT for the sex part.  From then on, I had believability issues with her character.

Finally, let me just say that when I write my steampunk flower novel, I want to make one of the characters a Circassian janissary.  I just think it would be really cool to put a Circassian in the book, as either a good guy or a bad guy (or, more likely, a grey-area guy).  If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the video below:

GRRRROOOSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!

New About page

Traffic to this blog has been picking up a bit, and I decided it’s time to change my “about” page.  This was the old one:

In some ways, I live a double life. By day, I study Political Science and Arabic at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, but by night I’m an aspiring writer of science fiction and fantasy. And I have NO IDEA where all of this is going to take me.

A lot of people dream of writing and being a writer, but the motivations vary. Some people are just enamoured with vague ideas of the bohemian lifestyle. Other people are looking for fame and the joy of seeing their name on a book. It’s different for me, however. I write simply because I can’t NOT write. I wrote my first story in 5th grade and I haven’t been able to stop since. Stories just flow out of me–it’s a part of who I am. Most of them are fleeting and pretty crappy, but hopefully, somewhere in there is a story that can bring something meaningful to somebody.

And so I write, not with any illusions of the fame, fortunes, and friends it will bring me, but because it’s who I am. And yes, writing is not glamorous. It’s about hard work and consistency. It’s about rejection. It’s about realizing that the story you love so much reads like crap because you have a LONG way to go before your writing is any good. I know that. I’m experiencing it now. And I can tell you that it’s not without reward either.

So join me as I blog about my struggles, frustrations, adventures, and successes as an aspiring writer. Read about the agonizing and exhilarating process of writing a novel. Keep me honest in my writing goals. Check out my book reviews as I try to learn what I can from what’s come in the sci fi / fantasy genres before. Get caught up in my imagination as I share the story ideas that pop into my head. And please, if something strikes you, drop a comment and let me know what you think!

Goals:

• Write and submit at least one novel per year.
• Finish 1st draft of The Lost Colony by 25 April 2008. ACCOMPLISHED
• Write three polished novel drafts before World Fantasy 2009 and attend the conference.

I don’t know if the new one is much better, but you can check it out.  Hopefully, it’s enough to give a good, honest impression of this site.

Also, I bit the bullet and finally signed up for twitter!  My username is onelowerlight; you can check me out here.

Movin’ along

I submitted a story to the Writers of the Future contest today.  Basically, I took the scene from Genesis Earth that won the Mayhew Contest this year, slapped just enough of an ending on it to make it feel like a coherent story (inshallah), changed a couple of universe details, and sent it out.  Time will tell if anything will come of it.

On Sunday, I home taught this girl who just graduated in astronomy!  She told me all about her capstone project, studying the variance in luminosity of a distant star getting its insides sucked out by a black hole / neutron star / something ridiculously cool.  We geeked out on stars more than on the scriptures!

Now I need to make friends with someone who works at the BYU observatory and hang out with them at their work.  With my next door neighbor the president of the BYU Astronomy club (no joke!) that might be a possibility.  And then we can order heavenly pizza and chill out reading The Leading Edge </inside joke>.

Ashes is coming along.  Did my 4k today, but it feels…like it isn’t going the way I want it to.  I’m  at 30% right now, provided the finished draft is under 150k, which might be difficult to pull off.  Lots and lots of sludging for the next month–I’m in the middle of the blue collar work of writing.  Middles are not my forte, but I think I’ll learn.

Dude, why didn’t I study astronomy in college?  I’m sorely tempted to change my major and go through another three years as an undergrad, just so that after I get my masters I can live at a place like this:

Thank you readers

I appreciate my first readers very much, even when it hurts.  Especially when it hurts.

Today I got the comments back from a longtime Quarkie friend on Genesis Earth, and she told me that, in her opinion, the book still needs a lot of work.  However, she made it very clear when (and why) she was bored, when (and why) she was interested, and where (and why) she would stop reading.  Thankfully, she kept reading and gave me useful feedback right up to the end.

My friend’s comments helped me to rethink several weak points  of my novel.  In particular, her anthropology experience helped her to pick up on some racist undertones that I didn’t intend and hadn’t realized were there.  If my story would have appeared in print like that, I would have been flamed up and down the sf community!  Without her feedback, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that.

The feedback did more than point out problems, however; it helped me to rethink these problems and begin to find new, innovative solutions.  Rather than getting me angered or depressed, the criticism stoked my creative engines by getting me to take a step back and rethink my story from the ground up.  Though the feedback was harsh (basically, “I’d throw this book across the room at this point”) it was extremely helpful and got me more enthused than ever to write.

Receiving criticism and advice is a very delicate thing, especially for a budding writer.  If you try to follow every peice of feedback you recieve, your book will inevitably tank.  However, rejecting criticism is also tough because you don’t always know why you’re doing it.  There is a fuzzy grey area between rejecting a comment because it’s not right for your story, and rejecting it because it rubbed your ego in the wrong way.

I don’t ever want to reject critical feedback because it hurts.  After all, it’s not about me at all–it’s about the story.

Criticism is never “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad.” It is only “useful” or “not useful.” To pick out the useful feedback, you always have to listen to–and appreciate–every piece of feedback that you get.  Only after you’ve done this can you can say (in private!) “no, this isn’t right for my work.”

In the meantime, thank everyone who takes the time and effort to read your work and comment on it.  They’ve done you a huge service, and the last thing they deserve is to be attacked by an egocentric, peurile, self-righteous amateur.  Honest criticism, no matter how much it hurts, is the best thing any writer can receive.

On that note, I want to thank all my first readers for helping me with my novel, Genesis Earth!  I genuinely appreciate all of your comments. You’ve helped me to step back and see my work for what it is.  You are helping me to make this novel a stronger, better book, and that means more to me than you know.  So thank you!