Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

29. December 2008 · 1 comment · Categories: Ashes of the Starry Sea, Desert Stars, Genesis Earth, Novels · Tags:

So is trying to hit 3,000 words each day.  For the past week, I’ve been doing between 1,500 and 2,500 words every day, but lately it’s just been really hard.  I’m on break, and I know that I should have more time for this kind of stuff, but I don’t know.

It has been a while since I’ve worked on this story, and that might be a part of it.  I dropped it in the summer and just picked it up again a week ago.  That might have something to do with it.

I think it’s more than that, though, and I’m not sure what it is.  Instead of savoring the time that I have to write, I dread it and find myself putting it off and finding other things to do.  Most of my writing has been coming late at night, at the end of the day.  If I really was driven and enthusiastic about writing this novel, I think I’d be doing all my writing earlier on in the day.

Bah.  It’s like there’s some law of the universe that the closer you get to the end, the more you think it sucks and the less motivation you have to finish the damn thing.  At least, that’s the way it is for me.

But I will finish it before school starts up again.  That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish.  Even if it ends up being less than 50,000 words, which is quite possible.

Right now, I’m just over 35,000, and right on the cusp of the central climax of the story.  At least, that’s the way I’d originally envisioned it–the rest should mostly be winding things down.

The really interesting thing is that now that I’m banging my head against a wall with this story (Genesis Earth), the other one that I was struggling so much with before (Hero in Exile) doesn’t look nearly as bad.  I could almost pick it up and work on it again.  And the novel I finished last year–the one that I want to workshop in Sanderson’s English 318 class this year (The Phoenix of Nova Terra)?  When I wrote the last chapter, I felt like the book was pretty crappy.  Now, though, I can’t wait to work on it, I think it has so much potential!

It’s all so weird.  All I can hope for is that something publishable will come out of it all. 

The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!

25. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Ashes of the Starry Sea, Desert Stars, Genesis Earth, Novels · Tags: , ,

A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols.  Fascinating stuff!  Really epic!  Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols.  When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?

This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow!  This would be so cool as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.

Here’s what I came up with.  I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.

First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization.  That much is obvious.   The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.

The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle.  Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.

The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer.  Similarly, the  Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military.  Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high.  Basically, every Hameji ship is a warship.

Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.

First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian.  That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature.  When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise.  There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated.  What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job.  Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.

In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community.  But basically, it was rule by strict tradition.  With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law.  Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe.  They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.

Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal.  They believe in a ruling class and a following class.  Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.

Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born.  Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock.  Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.

You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive.  They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing.  Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.

Mongols in space.  How cool is that?  It’s definitely got potential, I think.  I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict.  We’ll see which one ends up getting written.  It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth and The Phoenix of Nova Terra get written.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

24. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Bella and Svetlana have both struggled hard to break into leadership positions in DeepShaft, an interstellar mining company that pushes comets to mining platforms back near Earth.  Bella is the second in command of the Rockhopper, and Sveta is one of the chief engineers.  Both women are the best of friends.

While conducting an operation on the edge of the solar system, however, Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, breaks out of its orbit and quickly accelerates out towards Spica, a distant star.  As the ice falls away from the small moon, observers realize that Janus is actually some kind of alien spacecraft.  Due to its unusually high rate of acceleration, nobody at Earth can scramble a mission fast enough to intercept the alien structure.  Only the Rockhopper stands a chance of intercepting the craft.

As if the dangers and unknowns of making first contact with an alien race were not enough, this surprise mission comes at a very difficult time for the crew.  The captain, Jim Christholm, has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and command falls to Bella.  A ruthless company auditor shadows Bella, seeking to undermine her authority and discredit her through playing dirty in company politics.  When Sveta discovers a corporate cover-up that may cost everyone their lives, Bella has to make some difficult leadership decisions that may threaten their friendship.  And when they do reach the alien structure, rifts arise among the crew, raising the chances of mutiny and even murder.

Pushing Ice is a recent novel, published in 2005.  I’ve heard a lot of good things about Alastair Reynolds, both from my roommates and from friends last year in English 318.  My roommate Colby said that one of Reynold’s books gave him nightmares when he was reading it out in a cabin in the woods.  After reading Pushing Ice, I can definitely say that Reynolds can put together some gripping, thrilling, page turning stories.

I enjoyed Pushing Ice quite a bit, but I think that the first half was considerably better than the second half.  It took me a while to figure out all the characters, but when I did, I was immediately drawn to them and their conflicts with each other. Like Crichton, Reynolds can write some truly dispicable corporate bad guys–the kind of people you just want to meet in real life and beat the crap out of them.  Slimeballs.

He also writes some very interesting, complex, and believable protagonists.  The thing that hooked me, that made me stay up late reading hundreds of pages at a time, was the conflict between the characters.  He created some people that I really came to care about, and a disastrous character conflict that I had to see resolved.

The first half of the book is set in a rich, complex, and highly believable near-future universe.  The Rockhopper was a fascinating spaceship, and the dynamics of the crew were also believable and interesting.  The political situation back on Earth, the company politics of DeepShaft, and everything else all rang true.  I could feel like I was actually there, and that really drew me in.

Around the middle of the second half, however, things started to break down a little.  Once the aliens made their appearance and the humans started coming into contact with alien technologies, I felt that the believability started to fall apart–not because I have to have an explanation for everything, but because it felt that Reynolds started doing some handwaving.  He’d throw in new alien cultures and technologies so quickly that I started to lose a handle on what was going on.  I found it harder to believe that I was actually there because the “there” was changing so much.

Also, I feel that towards the very end, he started to rely too much on cheap cliches.  Some of the alien cultures, especially in the last hundred pages, sounded like something out of Ascendency or Star Control II. What began as a compelling, believable story of human-alien contact became another cliche space opera where all the alien civilizations were too monolithic, too similar in terms of technological capabilities, too human-like in their underlying worldviews and interactions with each other, and too…stereotypically alien.  Too shallow, not enough depth.

I don’t think this is due to a lack of skill on Reynold’s part, however–probably more a lack of time.  I think he spent so much time on the first half of the book that he was rushed during the second half.  He’s definitely a very powerful, very capable writer of science fiction.  I would like to try out his other works–the ones that he’s better known for.  And, despite my misgivings about the book, I would still recommend it to friends of mine who love good science fiction.

2,850 words more than I thought I could write today

24. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Ashes of the Starry Sea, Genesis Earth, Novels · Tags: , ,

Yes, that’s true. I wrote 2,850 words today, and it’s more than I thought I could do.

I’m trying to finish up Genesis Earth, but it’s difficult because I haven’t been with these characters in a long time and I’ve forgotten a lot of their motivations. I look at what I’ve written before and I see all these inconsistencies in the things they say and do. Not that regular human beings are without inconsistencies, but I just worried that these ones were too…inconsistent.

Eventually, I had to come back down on that cardinal rule that you have to allow your first draft to suck. Yes, not everything they say or do really runs together, but I’ll be in a better position to make sense of it once the first draft is done than while it’s still mostly a cloud of ideas in my head.

Today, I just kept on putting off writing, and I started wondering why I was doing it. Was it because my characters aren’t making sense? Was it because I’m finding my own story to be unbearably boring? Am I really cut out to do this for a living when I’m struggling with these things? Those are some disturbing questions.

I took some time to watch The Empire Strikes Back, on the twenty five year old VHS copy my parents taped it on when it came to HBO, with all the wavy lines and fuzzy resolution–the one that captivated me when I was nine years old. It’s such a classic! Space opera at some of its finest! Yeah, there were holes all through the science, and the romance is kind of cheesy at parts, but the script, the overall story, the buildup and the climaxes–so classic! In some ways, I think that Empire is the best movie of the entire series.

It got me thinking, maybe I just need to get interested in my story again. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. Genesis Earth, while still being a primarily character driven story, has a lot more hard science to it than the epic space opera that I tend to write. Maybe I’m more cut out for space opera than the hard stuff.

I got about a thousand words in, watched a movie with my family (it was Elf–reminded me of everything I hate about Christmas and Hollywood, simultaneously), and sat down to blog and go to bed, but I noticed that I’d only done 1,190 words, and decided I’d at least finish the chapter.

I’d no sooner picked up the story than the characters started to take on lives of their own. Yeah, I might not have them figured out before this point, but I can fix that later. Better to focus on what they’re doing right now.

And as I did, things got really interesting. They went from almost killing each other (especially scary, considering that they’re both alone on a small spaceship twenty light years from anyone else) to rolling on the floor together, laughing and giggling and letting loose with all the things they wanted to say back at home but couldn’t because of what everybody else would think. When you’re alone on a spaceship, you’re free from a lot of social norms and pressures.

It goes to show that the way to get out of writer’s block, or writer’s avoidance, is to ignore all the doubts, worries, and negative thoughts in your head and just write. Those doubts and worries are all just illusions anyways. The story is still there, underneath it all. Give yourself to the story and you’ll figure it out.

Genesis Earth is now around 27.7k words. I’m making progress but I want this thing to be a full blown novel, so I’ve got at least 22.3k words to go. That’s roughly 2,000 words a day before school starts. My goal is 3,000 words a day from now to January 5th. That should be enough to tie up all the loose ends and finish it up.

And when that’s done, I can focus on rewriting The Phoenix of Nova Terra! I’m really excited for that!

Freedom!

19. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Genesis Earth, Novels · Tags: ,

YES!!!  Exams are over!  Finished them just a couple of days ago, and now I’m at home back in Massachusetts.  Ah, sweet freedom!  No school obligations, no stresses for papers or projects or grades or anything!  Lots and lots of free time!

…and with that free time, I’m going to undertake something almost ridiculously impossible: finish Genesis Earth 1.0, the novel I started (but never finished) last year for English 318.  The one I was going to write over the summer but never really finished.  The one that got all caught up in clumsy rewrites and edits even before the rough draft was finished.

But that’s ok, because Jurassic Park just came on on Pandora, which means that I can do it!

Seriously, I think I can do this.  If I can ramp up the wordcount to 3k a day and totally immerse myself in this world, I think I can finish it.  Plus, I already know where I want this story to go.  I’ve already discovered most of the main ideas and I know how I want it to end (at least loosely).  Now that this miserable semester is over and I don’t have to worry about it anymore, I can focus on this stuff.

Blah blah blah.  Yeah, I think I’ll be able to do it.

I’m at home now: had a very interesting trip out here.  I was originally going to go to my cousin’s wedding in Washington D.C. with my parents, then drive back to Mass with them, but two major snowstorms are hitting the East Coast this weekend, and my parents don’t feel comfortable driving nine hours up and back in whiteout conditions.  You know, they’re getting older and all, so they don’t have energy for that sort of thing.  Honestly, I don’t blame them.

I had thought that I was going to have an exam on Thursday afternoon, so I had Pop book me for a red eye flight that left at midnight Friday morning.  There was a connection at JFK, but I cancelled it and bought a train ticket from Penn Station, New York.

So I left Utah at midnight, tried to catch some sleep on the flight (it was really hard…not the  least of which because of the TV shows you could watch on the inflight screen, like This American Life!  Great radio show, great TV show!), then caught the subway at 6:00 am and rode it to Manhattan.

This is when I realized just how insulated I am in Utah: I stepped onto the subway car, and everyone was black!  After living in Provo for so long, that was something of a shock to me, but I got over it before too long.

So I had a four or five hour layover in Manhattan before my train left, and…no, I didn’t do anything really cool.  I did walk around a little bit outside, bought breakfast from a street vendor, checked out the Empire State building from where I stood…but didn’t really go anywhere. Boo.

I would like to come back and spend some time in New York City, though.  My friend Steve wants to go there after he graduates, and it would be a cool place to spend a few years.  I don’t know what I want to do for grad school yet, but I wouldn’t mind living and studying in or near NYC.  Plus, that’s where most of the publishing world is, so it would be easier to make contacts and hit up the conventions if I were in this area.

The layover at Penn Station was long and somewhat miserable, but not too much so.  Got some breakfast and lunch, napped a bit, and caught the Vermonter up to Springfield.

I love trains!  They are so much more comfortable and relaxing than airplanes, even if it does take longer to get from place to place.   The chairs were so wide, and reclined back so much!  Must more restful than the airplane.

I did a little bit of work on my novel while on the train.  Basically, I’m trying to catch myself up to the point where I left off, so that I can pick it up and start writing tomorrow. You’ll notice that all of the wordcount meters are dismally low right now–that’s because of exams and general end of semester craziness, not to mention this huge shift in direction.  It won’t be down so low for much longer!

So then, met up with my dad outside of the station, rode home in the blinding whiteout of the storm that’s raging outside right now, enjoyed dinner with my parents, and now I’m getting ready to FINALLY get some sleep.  That’s what I’ve been up to all day.  It’s a dramatic change of scenery from just a week ago, but I think it will be good.  Very good.

The Christmas spirit

15. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

When I was a missionary, my mission president had us all take a break from the work during the Christmas season to watch A Christmas Carol–any particular version, no matter.  When I first came out it was only a couple of months before Christmas, so I was a little bit surprised with this rule–after all, isn’t the missionary work the most important thing to be doing? (I was an extremely hard working missionary, especially in my first year)

However, after watching the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol (the one with George C Scott), I saw exactly why the president felt it was important to take time out to catch the Christmas spirit.  Charles Dicken’s story is just so classic, with its stingy, lonely, greedy protagonist who finds his life completely transformed by the values and virtues Christmas was meant to celebrate: charity, love, kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity, empathy, cheerfulness, compassion–a love of God and an understanding that “mankind is [our] business.” When you get right down to it, that’s what Christmas is all about–that’s the culmination of all of our cheery Christmas songs, our beloved holiday traditions, all of the crazy things we do only once a year.  It’s great.

We’ve got a few quirky traditions in my family, but now that my sisters are married, I’m starting to find out that we’re not the only ones!  Every year, the Law’s throw a movie marathon with nearly a dozen different film versions of A Christmas Carol.  I showed up for the last one around 10:15 pm, the one (big surprise!) with George C Scott.  Holy cow–nothing could have gotten me more into the Christmas spirit than that!  Such a good movie–such good acting–such a magnificent transformation–such a wonderful message.

Christmas isn’t about material things.  With the economic crisis and the financial meltdown hitting us full swing, it’s not hard to feel like this is the year that the Grinch stole Christmas.  But really, it’s not about that.  It’s about love and giving, about appreciating the people in our lives, and the blessings of God to all of us.  It’s about remembering that Jesus Christ gave us an infinite gift, and that no matter our trials and hardships, he will always bring good things to our lives, because he loves us.  It’s about remembering that mankind is our business, and that showing our love and doing good, kind things for each other is more important than any of our material comforts and luxuries.  Christmas is Christmas whether it comes to the rich or the poor, and because of Christ, all of us are blessed.

When I’m married and have a family of my own, I want to make it a tradition to watch this movie every year.  It’s good.  Charles Dicken’s story shows us what Christmas is really about, in a profound and timeless way.  What a beautiful story.  What a wonderful time of year.  What a wonderful gift that God has given us in his son, Jesus Christ.

I am SO ready to wash the dust of this semester from my feet

13. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

Ugh.  I feel like this has been my worst semester yet.  Not in terms of grades, or in terms of social life, or even in terms of workload, but just…in terms of my classes.  Classes, and just school in general.

Here’s what I’ve figured out.  My best, most enjoyable classes are the ones that really push me, and the most miserable classes are ALWAYS the ones that are too easy.  If it doesn’t help me to learn and grow, if it doesn’t change my perspective, if it doesn’t open new doors of knowledge to me, I hate it.  All the rote things that we do for grades–tests, papers, homework, attendance quizzes, extra credit assignments, all that stuff–if it’s all for the grade’s sake, I just go crazy.  I can’t stand it.  And if it’s all about memorizing data and spitting it back like a machine, I feel like I’m going to lose it.

Well, that’s the way I’ve basically felt all semester.  To make it worse, all of my classes overlapped to the point where it started to feel like I was listening to exactly the same lecture over and over again.  When that happens, what little there is about the subject that is interesting just seems to dissipate.

I can work really hard when I have the motivation.  When I’m doing something that I love, I can really accomplish some amazing things.  But when I don’t have the motivation…it’s almost impossible to bring myself to sit down and do it.

That’s basically been the story of this semester: trudging through day after day of work, pushing myself to do things that I didn’t really want to do. I suppose I did a good job of it…but it was very draining.  It took almost as much work just to force myself to sit down and focus as it did to actually do the work.  As a result, even though the workload wasn’t particularly hard or particularly exhausting, I never felt that I had the time to do what I wanted to do.

I suppose it would be immature to say “I’m not going to do what I don’t want to do,” but at the same time, life is too short not to get out and have fun.  If you’re doing what you love, you can have fun and work hard at the same time.  Like this Earth, I don’t have an inexhaustible supply of energy.  I need to find and develop renewable resources–the things I love to do, the things that engage my imagination and passions and really energize me–and build my life on those.  I wouldn’t even care living poor, so long as all my needs were supplied.  I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and utterly burned out.

Interestingly enough, because of this crappy semester, I am more motivated than ever to break into publishing and get paid full time for writing novels.  My plans haven’t changed yet, but now I want, more than ever, to actually make a living doing this stuff.  Most of my inhibitions now are gone, it’s just…well, that first step.  It’s pretty hard, and I don’t want to build up my expectations too much only to find myself out of school, without a job, and without money to pay the rent.  Especially not in this recession.

But I do want to become a full time writer now–at least, more than before.  I don’t know if it will ever happen, but if I’ve dedicated this much of my life to it, why shouldn’t I shoot for it?  I don’t know.  We’ll see.

Change of plans

13. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Ashes of the Starry Sea, Desert Stars, Genesis Earth, Novels · Tags: , ,

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit.  I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story.  I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later.  The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character.  From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it.  In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on.  Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind.  A lot harder than Phoenix.  With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was.  Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding.  I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider.  The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space.  I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next.  It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this.  But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard.  This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel.  Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum.  With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step.  I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back.  Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler.  I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward.  What’s more, I’m excited about it again.  When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely.  I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas.  As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off.  I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better.  Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins.  I think I can do it.  Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less.  I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words.  With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day.  I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter!  Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it.  I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing.  I’m excited.  I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009.  One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes.  It basically details where I see the story going from here.  I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense.  However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time.  When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner.  Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far.  On to Genesis Earth!

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