The first round of 3rd quarter honorable mentions for the Writers of the Future contest are in. I’m not in them.
I also haven’t received a rejection yet.
<crosses fingers>
It’s true. This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:
Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently. If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.
Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.
This week was particularly busy. I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation. Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.
Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes. Ugh.
The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers. The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good. I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class. Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.
Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class. While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea? And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.
With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm. Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play. Every day, I come home exhausted. And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class. Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.
Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it. In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do. I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.
I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that. In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.
In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project. Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.
I really do.
School is difficult, because you can never really separate yourself from your work at the end of the day. You’ve always got homework to do for the next day, or some project to prepare, some reading to do. There’s never a defined time where it “ends.”
This semester so far has been pretty crazy–not as crazy busy as some semesters, but it’s starting to approach it. I’m taking my capstone class, and it’s fairly rigorous. Today, I’m doing a research proposal presentation, and I just discovered, after looking in the syllabus last night, that a 2 page mock grant proposal is due Wednesday. On my birthday. <groan>.
I’m stressing out a bit about this presentation. Professor Christensen is a real stickler for presentations. Going over 6 minutes will dock your grade 10%+. Looking at the audience for less than 90% of the time will dock your grade about 5% or so. It doesn’t help that I’m going on the last possible day.
Now, I’m probably stressing out more than I need to. I’m just unfamiliar with this format for presentations, and that’s getting to me. The result is that when I sit down to write, I find it very hard to concentrate because my mind is on this other stuff. And since I could be using any writing time to work on my presentation, I usually end up doing that. Unfortunately, because I’m not very familiar with this kind of assignment, I don’t think a lot of that time is particularly productive.
It will be nice to have a job that ENDS at five o’clock and gives me the rest of the day to do what I want, without having to worry about the stuff that happens from nine to five. In some ways, it will probably be more conducive to my writing, even if it does require more time than my classes. It’s very hard to have the mental space for writing when you’re over your head in homework.
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Hundreds of thousands of years ago, an ancient race of sentient aliens known as the Amarantin went extinct just as their civilization experienced a golden age. No one knows why, but archeologist Dan Sylveste is determined to find out. Unlike the other colonists on the remote planet of Resurgam, he believes that the answer may be important.
He has no idea how right he is.
Just as he’s on the verge of a major breakthrough, a team of rebels takes over the administration of the colony. Sylveste becomes a prisoner of war, and his research comes to a frustrating halt.
Meanwhile, on Yellowstone (the nearest human-inhabited planet to Resurgam), a mysterious entity known as The Mademoiselle hires assassin Ana Khouri for a special mission: kill Dan Sylveste.
The only ship headed in that direction, however, is an ancient warship commanded by a rouge crew of Ultras, genetically modified transhumans. They seek Sylveste in order to heal their captain, who suffers from a plague that melds human biology with advanced technology. The de facto leader, Illia Volyova, hires Khouri to replace the ship’s gunner, who went mad and mysteriously died.
But neither Khouri nor Volyova realize that the thing that drove the gunner mad still resides deep in the ship’s systems. It is neither human nor AI–and it knows what killed off the Amarantin nine hundred thousand years ago.
Revelation Space is a space opera unlike any other that I’ve read, with the possible exception of Dune. The far-future universe Alastair Reynolds created for this book is incredibly complex and expansive, almost completely unrecognizable from our own, with technology bordering on godlike, posthuman and transhuman races that are all but commonplace, and nothing but a blurry, indistinct line dividing the human and the machine. On every page, I felt as if I had left the real world behind for something completely (and often disturbingly) alien.
Setting, by far, is the strongest point of this book. In fact, as an aspiring writer, I found it somewhat intimidating. Reynold’s Revelation Space universe was completely alien, but in ways that made perfect sense for the far future in which it was set. From this, I’ve learned that to make a far future setting believable, you have to make it…well, as alien and complex as Reynolds makes it. It shouldn’t be an exact copy of Reynold’s mold, of course, but if it’s 500 years in the future and everyday life still feels exactly like our own–well, there had better be a reason for that.
As for character and plot, I did not feel that those were particular strong points of this book. It’s not that they were done poorly, it’s just that they weren’t done well enough, in my opinion.
The characters in Revelation Space did not particular engage me at first; I found that I had to force myself to keep reading, rather than read because I had to find out what happened to them. Later on, as the story progressed, they grew on me, but I never felt that I intimately knew them.
As for plot, I felt that every fifty or one hundred pages, Reynolds would pause the story and throw something in from left field, simply because he had to foreshadow something coming up. In this way, the book seemed a little choppy–like a debut novel (and, in Reynold’s defense, this is his debut novel).
Even with these issues, however, this was an incredible book, and it’s stuck with me even months after finishing it. Reynolds pulled off an amazing ending–very satisfying, with a twist that I had not foreseen but that made good sense. The final scene, and the last two sentences of the final scene in particular, were just awesome. They made me want to clap my hands and say “bravo.”
If I could describe Revelation Space in terms of other works, I would say that it’s a cross between Neuromancer and Stargate the movie. While it’s solid space opera, it has a dark and gritty feel that borders on Cyberpunk / post-Cyberpunk. It’s not exactly the kind of stuff I want to write, it comes pretty darn close.
Just passed the major climax in the middle of Bringing Stella Home. In a moment that I hope is as poignant to the reader as it was to me, I…well, let’s just say I’m glad I’m not my main character.
I hit the climax doing a 1,765 word sprint, with this song playing on repeat:
So awesome. I just hope that when I wake up from this daze, my writing doesn’t suck.
Next, gotta finish up the chapter, clean up the mess, give the denouement. After every emotionally poignant climax, I think it’s critical to have a good denouement to give those emotions their proper release and bring everything full circle, bring some proper closure. Best denouement of any story I know: the Throne Room from Star Wars IV:
The denouement for my story will not be nearly so triumphant. But then again, it’s not the final climax–there’s a lot more to come, a lot more pain and suffering for my main character to endure.
I’m 2/3rds of the way through this rewrite now. I hope I’m not being too melodramatic, or that the story sucks. They say it’s not enough to be good–to make it as a writer, you have to be brilliant. Does this story have that potential? Gosh, I hope it does. As it stands, though, it sure needs a lot of work.
But still–it’s been awesome writing it.
I’m in the middle of revising a major battle scene right now. This is supposed to be one of the more important climaxes of the book, adding a lot more tension and emotion as the novel approaches the main climax.
Let me just say, writing a good battle scene is tough. The first version of this one…yeah, it sucked. Hardcore sucked. I’m cutting whole sections at a time–five hundred words, eight hundred words–and completely rewriting them from the ground up. I’m not sad to see these sections go, either–they were BAD.
I think the most difficult thing is to keep the pacing up without confusing the reader. For that reason, I reconceptualized most of the action here and made it simpler. I also repeated several times the main point of tension–basically, will we get out of here before reinforcements come and kick our trash? I hate it when a fight scene is so confusing that the tension just leaks out. I don’t want that to happen here.
At the same time, I’m trying to filter everything through the viewpoint character. Too often, I’ll read an action scene that’s just a blow-by-blow of the physical action. That gets boring REALLY fast. Without character, you have no stakes. I want the stakes to be high from the very onset.
Still, it’s hard. I don’t know if I’m succeeding yet. I probably won’t until I distance myself from what I’ve written tonight and take a good, hard look at it.
Since I can’t do that until the third revision, I’m not going to worry about it. Better to write it out now and move on than to try so hard to get everything perfect that I can’t see the story for the words.
On the plus side, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Star Wars battle music while writing this. That’s always fun!
