…in both of my stories. In The Lost Colony, Leila, who’s a native of this somewhat primitive civilization that doesn’t understand spacefaring, stows away on a shuttle and experiences space for the first time. Pretty cool! And in The Wormhole Paradigm, tension builds as they set off towards the planet, anticipating that the aliens will intercept them at any time. When they don’t, Mike almost has a nervous breakdown–but that’s about 1,500 pages down the road. Altogether, I wrote 3,000 words tonight. Holy Cow!
There was also a Quark writing meeting today, and it really surprised me…
…mostly because most everyone seemed to enjoy the excerpt from my novel that I submitted. There was a lot of criticism as well–at one point, Eric said that Leila’s plan to save Ian from assassination was “just plain stupid” (and it was–long story), and other people didn’t like the point of view shifts, but overall I think that people enjoyed reading this. The criticism I got was really good because it gave me all sorts of ideas for how to fix the problem and take the solution one step further.
That’s the key to good criticism, I think–it motivates you and helps you to see ways that you can make the story better. And that kind of criticism is just gold.
I do have a lot of reading now in my classes–and now that I’m working, I can’t just do them on Monday morning. I did some of the reading today, however–read a fascinating chapter from a book titled The Rise and Decline of Nations, by Mancur Olson. That’s what I love about Political Science–we’re always studying either how to build the world or how to destroy it. Mwahahaha!!! 😈
But yeah, I have about seventy pages of reading to do, plus a response on 27 pages of it and a quiz Monday on the other stuff. But I’m optimistic, I think I can do it. Despite the fact that this is what usually happens when I try.
The thing that really gets to me, though, is that it’s become harder and harder for me to really keep the sabbath. I always feel like I’m doing some minor thing to break it–and when I’m not breaking it, I don’t feel like I’m getting it right. I used to be really good about keeping a good sabbath, but now…I don’t know what happened.
Now I have this personal rule where I don’t do homework until after seven, and before then I do more spiritual stuff like read scriptures, go for a walk, write in my journal, etc. But even then, something seems to be lacking, and I don’t quite know what it is.
If I were to guess, though, I’d say it’s the fact that I have my homework hanging over me. Which means that even if I don’t do homework until the evening, it still ruins the whole day. If only I could do my homework earlier…but man! By the time Friday comes around, I am so exhausted from schoolwork that I just need to take a break!
But that’s life. Especially when you’re Mormon.
As for something cool I want to share, I actually have three things (not counting that PHD comic I linked to above). They are three excellent blog posts I read from three Iraqi bloggers. You can find them here, here, and here. Reading these posts from these three amazing people made me step outside of my life for a few moments and think about things in a new way. The Iraq war is so controversial that it’s hard to talk about it without falling into one kind of opinion or another, but these three bloggers were basically saying “this is what my life is like right now, this is what I’m struggling with in Mosul or in Baghdad, but I really hope that it will get better.”
Man. I have no idea what it’s like to not sleep in my room for two years because it faces the street and we can hear gunfire every night, or to be rationed only 10 amps of electricity, or to have a platoon of American troops hole up in your house during a firefight, and actually have a friendly conversation with them. But wow! It is really amazing to hear people tell about this kind of stuff. Unlike those of us who stand at a distance and like to point fingers, these people don’t have an agenda to push. They’re just ordinary people living in the middle of it, blogging about their lives. And the thing that really gets to me is how optimistic they can be in the face of what they go through. Like I said, these three posts really took me out of the daily grind and made me think about something larger.
I think that that’s the real strength in blogging–the human connection that it gives us. There are better and more accurate ways to share information, and more concise ways to get ideas across, but when someone who is just an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation opens up and shares a piece of their life with you, that is amazing. And that is something that blogging, when done right, does better than just about anything else I know about.
It’s storytelling for the information age, and I love it.
