Author: Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

Christmas break 2009

Christmas was great this year!  I spent it in Texas, with my extended family–the family on my dad’s side, who I almost never see.  The break has been a lot of fun so far!  No school or work obligations, lots of time to lay back and relax, plenty of games to play and books to read, plus fun people to hang out with–it’s been great!

Most of my cousins are young teenagers right now, and are a lot different than I remember.  However, I was able to get some presents for them that I think worked out well.  David is into his iPod, so I got him some U2 albums (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and Joshua Tree).  Savannah and Nash are both avid fantasy readers, so I got Savannah Mistborn: The Final Empire and Nash Victory of Eagles (the one chain bookstore in Midland didn’t have His Majesty’s Dragon, so I got him another from the series).  Daniel, I didn’t know what to get, so I gave him my old camera.

Ashley (who is older) was telling me about how she lived abroad and wants to spend some time in Australia, so I got a travelogue on Australia by the same guy who did A Walk in the Woods. Based on her reaction, I think she’s going to like it!

It was much easier to get stuff for direct family, since I know them better.  For Kate, I got Soulless, a steampunk / paranormal mystery novel that had an awesome release party at World Fantasy 2009.  I don’t know if she’ll like the book, but the party was very steampunk / regency fantasy with the cosplayers, so I think she will.  I got Danny The Screwtape Letters, since I know he likes that kind of religious fiction–turns out he’s been meaning to read it for a while!  Mykle, I got the first book in C. S. Friedman’s latest series, since I know that she’s his favorite author–24 hours after Christmas, he’s already 200+ pages into it!  And for Sarah and Mykle, I got them both $20 gift certificates to Pioneer Book in downtown Provo.  They were very happy with that!

I wish I’d had the time to get presents for everyone in the family, but with moving out, coming here so quickly, and not having a car (or much of an idea what they wanted), it just wasn’t very practical.  I did get my mom a gift certificate to B&N, but I haven’t gotten anything for my dad yet.  I will, though–he wants stuff from our Christmas memories, and I happen to have all my old childhood journals in my carry on luggage.  Lots of Christmas memories in those!

I’m satisfied with what I got, even though it wasn’t all that much.  Besides the generic clothes, socks, ties, candy, popcorn, and other stuff, I got a spiffy tool kit from Robin and a flexible tripod from pop.  Very nice!  They will add some weight to my luggage, but I think I can give some of it to mom or pop to bring home.

As far as writing goes, I’m less than 13k words from the end of Bringing Stella Home 2.0.  It’s not quite ready for alpha readers yet, but I want to get it ready soon (it’s going to take so much work! <sob>).  If I average 2.6k words over the next five days, I’ll have it finished in time to start something new by new years!

That’s the goal.  As for what the next novel is going to be about…let’s just say it’s Homer’s Odyssey meets C. J. Cherryh and Ursula K. Le Guin in space, where Telemachus is a girl and the story is primarily from her point of view.

I hope I can pull it off!

Never a good time to write

I’m on vacation now, staying with my uncle in Midland.  The rest of the family will be out here in a couple of days.  In the meantime, I’m visiting with relatives, going Christmas shopping, and trying to finally finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0.

It’s not going to be easy, though, with all the family stuff going on.  I managed 1,221 words yesterday, but most of that was after midnight.  I get the feeling this is going to be pretty common for the rest of the time here.

There’s never a good time to write–but I think that’s the norm.  If I’m not busy with exams or schoolwork, it’s family obligations or traveling.  There is never a steady routine that gives me time to write.

I suppose part of being a writer is learning to write anyway.

So anyways, my goal is to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 before the new year.  I’m about 26k words from the end, so with only 10 days or so to go, that’s going to be almost 3k words per day.  A little steep, but definitely doable.  Also, since this isn’t the polished draft that I’m going to be sending out to publishers, it doesn’t have to be perfect–just good enough for me to make perfect on the next pass.

And now my Dad’s calling me, asking if I’m up and ready to go.  I’ll have to cut this short here, but in the meantime, check this out: explanetary systems forming in the Orion nebula.  Holy crap, this is awesome!  Maybe I should go back to school and become an astronomer.

FINISHED!

YES!  My last semester of classes at Brigham Young University is FINISHED!

And now I’ve got to grade a million tests and papers, mail my books home (the ones that I’m willing to pay to keep), clean out my car, sell it (I hope), pack all my junk in two >50 lb. bags and a carry-on…all before Monday.  Yikes!

It’s too late to be up.  I need to sleep.

But…school is finished!

Finishing and beginning

Classes for this semester are over, I’ve turned in all my papers, taken all my exams but one, and now I feel like I have this giant void in my life.  I was walking around on campus today with literally no idea where I was going or what I should do.

It was…strange.

With school out, I’m getting ready to leave Provo for good.  I won’t be coming back for the winter, seeing as I’ll be in Washington DC.  As for post graduation plans, nothing’s solid, but I probably won’t be coming back to Utah.  Not for a while, at least.

It’s exciting and scary, but mostly exciting.  2010 is going to mark the end of my academic career and my first venture into the real world.  Beyond this internship, I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’m starting to formulate some plans.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Post-graduation options:

  • Go to grad school
  • Work side jobs while writing novels
  • Travel across the Middle East for a year or two
  • Start a career in Washington DC

The first option (grad school) isn’t going to happen right away.  I’ve already decided that I’m not going to go to grad school until I have a definite plan for what I want to accomplish with it (an “exit strategy,” if you will).  Interning in Washington might give me an idea of what I want to study, but I’ll probably take a year off from academics just the same.

The second option (side jobs & writing) is an interesting option that I haven’t really thought through.  It would involve a lot more focus on writing and trying to get published, but it would also involve a lot of uncertainty until my writing career really gets launched.  However, I’d have a lot of flexibility in where I could live.  I could stay in Washington DC, or move back to Massachusetts, or come back to Utah.

The third option (travel) is definitely the most exciting and adventurous of the four.  It would involve living in a Middle Eastern country for a year or two, teaching English to support myself while I see the country and work on my writing.  Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, even the Gulf…man, it would be awesome!  I have friends from the MESA program who are doing it, too.

Man, that would be fun–and definitely give me a lot to write about, besides awesome life experiences!  Finding a girl and settling down, though…probably not going to happen until I get back.  That’s the downside.

The fourth option (career) is entirely dependent on what happens this winter in Washington.  If I find that I love what I’m doing with my internship, I’ll probably look to get a job with WINEP or an organization like it.   I’ve got to admit, it would certainly give me a comforting degree of direction and certainty if such were the case–to graduate with a job in hand, doing something that I love.

At the same time, however, there’s a danger that a career in this field might not leave me with much time to pursue my writing.  My dream job is still to be a full-time novelist, and I need to remember that while I’m in Washington.  If I find that my work with WINEP leaves me with little to no time to write, I’ll have to re-evaluate my plans.

So really, this internship in Washington is going to be more about testing the waters than anything else.  I’m going to have to periodically ask myself 1) whether this is the kind of work I find enjoyment and personal fulfillment doing, 2) whether this is the kind of work I can balance with a writing career, and 3) what opportunities are available for me in this particular field.  Since it all depends on how the internship goes, I can anticipate one of three things happening:

Possible reactions to my internship:

  1. I love the work that I do for my internship.
  2. I hate the work that I do for my internship.
  3. I am utterly indifferent to the work I do for my internship.

If #1 is the case, I should focus on getting a job from my internship connections, provided I can still make time to write while doing this kind of work.  If not, I can probably still find a similar career path that does allow me enough time to pursue a writing career on the side.

If #2 is the case, it means that policy making and research is not my thing, but I still have a passion for the Middle East.  Taking a year or two off to travel will become a very appealing option at that point.

If #3 is the case, it means that I’m going to have to completely retool.  I have no idea what I’ll end up doing if this happens.  Travel, maybe–but what good would it do me, if a Middle East related career doesn’t interest me?  Maybe I’ll take a year off to work on my math and go back to grad school for astronomy.  Maybe I’ll work odd jobs like Robert Charles Wilson until I get published.  Maybe I’ll become a hobo and vanish into obscurity.  I don’t know.

Whatever happens, writing is going to be a priority.  If I can make an adequate living writing fiction, I’m going to do it.  Which makes me wonder–what does that mean about all my other plans?  Is all of this Middle East stuff just a temporary fix until I get published, hopefully in the next five years?  Or is it something more permanent?

I have absoultely no idea, but this post is already getting pretty long, so I’ll cut it here.  Regardless what happens, however, I’m 100% confident that everything will work out in the way that it should.  These life changes are more exciting than they are scary.  I’m looking forward to the new year very much!

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Urras and Annares, a world and its moon, separated by the gulf of space and two hundred years of mutual contempt.  On Urras, capitalist and socialist nations vie for dominance over the world’s rich and abundant resources.  On  Annares, the anarchist exiles scrounge for a meager living, but live in peace–and in hope.

Shevek has never known any other world than the anarchist utopia of Annares.  His life’s work is to develop a unified theory of simultaneity–a tremendous feat that will rework the paradigm of space travel and communication.  When the people of Annares reject his theory, however, he voyages to Urras in the hopes that by offering his theory as a gift to all nations, he can bridge the gap between the worlds.

Hopelessly inexperienced in the cutthroat ways of the propertarians, Shevek has no idea what he is getting himself into.  In his gilded prison, with nations vying for control of his person, can he find allies who share his idealistic, utopian vision?  Or is he alone in a world of greed, lies, and murder?

This is, quite possibly, one of the most impressive and beautiful works of literary science fiction that I have read.  It may be the best novel I’ve read all year.  Le Guin’s characters are so deep, her ideas so compelling, her worlds so rich, her writing so poetic and beautiful that I hardly know where to start.

One of the many things that made this book so good was the depth of Le Guin’s character development.  The story had a plot, and Le Guin dropped just enough pieces of it here and there for you to know that there was one, but more than anything this book is a portrait of an incredibly interesting man, Shevek.

The book actually contains two stories that merge into one in the end.  One taking place in the present, after Shevek arrives at Urras, and the other is a series of flashbacks showing how he arrived at that point.  Le Guin alternates brilliantly between past and present to reveal insights into Shevek’s character that would otherwise remain unexplored.  By the end of this novel, I felt that I knew this man–and loved him–better than anyone in real life, including myself.  It blew me away.

Le Guin’s worldbuilding, too is incredible.  Before reading this book, I didn’t consider myself an anarchist, but after spending so much time in the utopian society of Anarres, I almost want to become one.  Le Guin meticulously extrapolates her world from her highly perceptive understanding of human nature, paying such attention to detail that her anarchist world is not only surprisingly plausible, but enviable as well.  This is the kind of world that I would like to visit, explore, and perhaps even settle down in and live.

Her ideas, like her world, are meticulously well thought out and incredibly compelling.  In the Hainish cycle, Shevek is the inventor of the ansible drive, the technology that eventually enables peaceable diplomatic missions to other worlds, such as the one chronicled in The Left Hand of Darkness. Shevek’s struggle is to find a way to let this technology bring peace and break down walls, rather than empower tyrants to conquer and destroy.  Time and again, Shevek’s egalitarian, anarchist values come to the surface, clashing not only with those of capitalist Urras, but with our own.

All of this would be enough to make this a compelling, memorable story–but Le Guin’s stunning, beautiful prose puts this book into a league of its own.  The rhythm and beauty in her words made every page a joy to read, with descriptions that kept me entranced and dialogue that made her characters leap off of the page.  Above all, her prose conveys with powerful and compelling clarity the many life-changing ideas and themes of this story.  The book’s last words still haunt me.

The Dispossed is, without a doubt, is one of the best works of Science Fiction that I have read.  I would even go so far as to claim that it is a superior book to Le Guin’s better known work, The Left Hand of Darkness. If I could read a book this insightful every month, I would be a much better man, and have a much deeper and imaginative understanding of the world than I presently have.  This book is a true masterpiece.

Genesis Earth 4.0 is complete!

And it’s about time. I started this back in September, thinking I could easily get it done before World Fantasy 2009. More than a month after the convention, and five days after the last self-imposed deadline, it’s done!

Alright, here are the stats:

ms pages: 270
words: 73,009
file size: 492 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 28 September 2009
end date: 4 December 2009

Wordle: Genesis Earth 4.0

When I finished, I was listening to “To far away times” from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. It fit the mood perfectly–absolutely perfectly. The epilogue might be a little cheesy (if you were one of my alpha/beta readers, you’ll know why–thanks, Gini!), but in a good way, I think. Anyways, here’s the track:

It took me forever to finish this draft, but that’s what happens when you’re swamped with school, I guess. If this were the summer and I had nothing else on my plate, I probably could have finished it in 17 days (or less) like the 3.0 draft.

For a more detailed breakdown, here is a graph of my daily wordcount for the project:

Genesis Earth 4.0 daily wordcount

Overall, though, I’m very satisfied with my work.  I’m sure that if/when it gets picked up by a publisher, they will have a multitude of editorial critiques and suggestions, but I can honestly say this draft is as neat and polished as I can make it.

It’s time to send it out!

An existential time of year

School has been kicking my trash this semester. Maybe it’s senioritis or something, but I feel like I’m doing half the work I did as a junior and still, all I can do is put out fires.

I was hoping to be finished with Genesis Earth 4.0 by now, but it’s looking like that won’t happen until the end of this week.  If I really push myself, I could probably get it done tomorrow…in fact, I may just do that.  Schoolwork can wait–this is what I want to do with my life.

Around this time of year, my thoughts tend to become morose and existential.  Maybe it’s the lack of sunlight, or the end-of-semester crunch, but I always wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing, what the point of it is, where I’m headed in my life–that kind of stuff.  For some reason, I get the feeling that my life is empty in some way.

It’s not overwhelming, fortunately.  I don’t have depression or anything like that.  Just…a sense of discontentment.  Maybe it has to do with finals.  I don’t know.

But I do know that it sucks to be pulled in so many different directions all the time.  Classes, work, writing, classes; finals, papers, papers and finals to grade, writing, more papers and finals.  It sucks.  I can’t wait until graduation!

(talk about famous last words o.O )

In any case, Genesis Earth is just about finished.  I’m finding that the closer I get to the end, the more I find that needs to be revised.  I’ll probably have to insert a new scene in the second to last chapter, just to tie them closer together.  For some reason, the last chapter feels too…short.  And disconnected.  Dammit.

And then, sometime between now and my personal exodus from Provo, I need to look up places to submit this thing.  I haven’t even begun to do that.  Crap.  Since this is the most polished draft of anything I’ve done up to this point, I’m going to be pretty hard core about submitting.

And then, somehow, I need to finish the second draft for Bringing Stella Home before New Years.  Holy crap, that novel is so full of holes.  I’m not going to even begin to be able patch them until the third draft, whenever that happens.  Inshallah, I can get that done over Christmas break…inshallah.

And then, something entirely new!  But it’s past 1am, so I’m not going to elaborate.  I’ve got some cool ideas, though–some crazy cool ideas.  Stay tuned.

FF6 Werewolf Tribute: fifth day

[NOTE: this is part twelve in a series of posts lifted from the quark message boards where I recently GM’d a game of Werewolf.  The theme was Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs.  To see the other posts in the series, click here.

WARNING: there will be spoilers here, and lots of them, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 6, do yourself a favor and play the game before reading on!]

Shafts of light from deep within Kefka’s tower break through as the walls and floors begin to break apart. With Kefka dead, all magic passes from the world in a great and tremendous storm. The magicite shards of the Espers disintigrate into thin air. Kefka’s tower, held aloft only by magic, begins to collapse.

Cyan makes a mad dash for the Falcon, but when he gets there, he realizes that without Setzer to pilot it, he’s lost. The upper floor of the tower collapses into ruin, and Cyan falls with the Falcon to his death.

At least he dies knowing that he helped save the world from annihilation.

The “innocents” lynch Drakon, the last surviving innocent!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the tower…

SHADOW (to INTERCEPTOR): Go on, Interceptor. Take care of yourself, boy…

SHADOW (to self): Relm, Strago…….it looks like I can finally stop running…

With everything collapsing all around him, Shadow leaps from the highest parapet of the collapsing tower, falling to the earth, to his death…

But as he falls, a familiar presence envelops him…the presence of a young girl, barely ten, and an older girl, not entirely human…

With the last of her ebbing magic, the ghost of Terra wraps her glowing arms around Shadow’s body and lowers him gently to the ground. The ghost of Relm, who has followed Shadow through the power of the Momento Ring which he wears, summoned the Esper girl’s spirit to his rescue. With the last of her strength, she saves him and gives him a chance at a new life.

With Kefka’s evil, draining presence gone from the world, the clouds begin to break up, allowing the sun to shine through once more. Life and color returns to the ruined world, and with it, hope…for life, love, hope, and the promise of rebirth.

Before Relm’s spirit departs to the Phantom train with the others, her presence lifts the darkness from Shadow’s troubled heart. He takes off his mask and resolves to return from his self-imposed exile from the world and leave his dark past behind…forever.

Victory for the Assassin!

PLAYER ROLES:

Avulsion: MAFIA
Baggins: NECROMANCER (Bannon)
Barigirl: INNOCENT (Edgar)
Caysyka: INNOCENT (Sabin)
CptSqweky: INNOCENT (Gau)
Drakon: INNOCENT (Cyan)
Drek: DETECTIVE (Terra)
Fredward: INNOCENT (Celes)
Jerle: MAFIA
Locke: INNOCENT (Locke)
Lunesar: MAFIA RECRUIT (Setzer)
Onlera: ASSASSIN (Shadow)
PharaohsQueen: INNOCENT (Relm) DL ASSASSIN
sunstarr12: MAFIA
ZeroMoon17: INNOCENT (Strago)