Joe Vasicek

Idea: hibernation

I had an interesting story idea today.

It came to me in the last few hours of work at the writing lab. I was dead tired, and started thinking about how awesome it would be if I could carry over sleep from one night to the next. You know: sleep 12 or 16 hours on the weekend in order to be awake for two or three straight days without getting tired.

I started talking about it with my coworkers, and from there we took it even further. What if you could hibernated for two or three months and spend the rest of the year completely awake? That would be pretty sweet.

So then, I started thinking: what if there were an alien species that actually operated this way? Their life cycle would probably evolve around the seasonal weather cycles of their home planet, so they would hibernate in the “winter” and spend the rest of the time awake.

Before they developed enough technology to be able to control their environment, the entire society would have followed this cycle. Everyone would hibernate roughly simultaneously, and spend the rest of the time awake. With new technological developments, however, the cycle would be broken up, with aliens coming and going out of hibernation as they chose.

How would this affect society? How would they have to structure their economy, their community, and their other social functions? How would this affect their relationships with each other, if for three months out of a year these aliens would just sleep? How would this complicate their military? How would it affect their colonization of other worlds?

This is not a very well developed idea at this point, but it’s a good launching point. Besides, it’s just kind of cool. If I could have a superpower, it would be the ability to go indefinitely without sleep and not suffer any physiological consequences.

It’s a novel!

Genesis Earth is now officially over 50,000 words. That means, by most standards, that it is officially novel length.

What’s more, I’m on the verge of finishing it. I’m only about 2,000 words from the ending, and despite the fact that this story has hung me up so many times (including right now, in the last chapter), it’s exciting to think that it’s almost complete. When it’s done, it will be the second novel that I’ve followed through to the very end. Excellent!

Now, I need a group of first readers. I’m looking for friends who are willing to read the whole thing (it’s only about 200 pages double spaced), write down their comments, and be honest in their reactions to the story. The comments need to be written (preferably electronically) because I won’t start the rewrite for a few months.

If you want to be one of my first readers, please drop me a line or post a comment here. I’ll get in contact with you.

3rd novel? I’m going for it.

Ok, I have officially decided. I’m going to write a new novel this semester instead of simply rewriting The Phoenix of Nova Terra (or Terra Nova?) for English 318.

The working title is Bringing Estella Home, and it is going to have a lot more action than Hero in Exile and Genesis Earth, my last two novel attempts. It starts with a massive invasion of the Hameji (basically, space Mongols) that splits up a family. The rest of the story is their struggle to find each other again and rebuild their lives.

Here’s the basic storyline, as I currently have it conceptualized. The McCoys are a family of local merchants in the Kardunash system. There are three younger siblings who fly on the shipping runs: Ben (the oldest), Estella, and James (the youngest).

When they arrive at Kardunash IV, Ben and Estella leave the ship to have some fun, while James remains with his father to handle the offloading. Within the hour, a massive Hameji war fleet jumps into the system and launches an all out assault on Kardunash IV. James and his father are forced to retreat, leaving Ben and Estella behind.

The Hameji destroy Kardunash IV with mass accelerators and capture or destroy every ship in the system. Ben and Estella survive as prisoners. Ben gets shipped off to a slave world where he is tortured, broken down, and eventually turned into a empathically manipulated slave warrior of the Hameji. Estella is given as a concubine to the new Hameji overlord of the Kardunash system.

At first, Estella is terrified of everything and everyone. She’s treated like cattle, right up until the point where she enters the overlord’s harem. At that point, her captors start to treat her more civilly, and she learns some interesting things about them and their culture. The brutal, inhuman barbarians turn out to be human after all, and she grows to understand them and even sypathize a little. Eventually, she realizes that she has the power and influence to save her people from brutal enslavement in the new order.

James, in the meantime, is completely devastated. He pledges to save his lost brother and sister, and dedicates all of his energy towards that end. However, he learns something frighening about himself; he can’t take a human life without compunction. This is something he must struggle with as he joins up with a band of mercenaries and goes deep into the occupied territory, putting his life at risk.

It’s going to be a fun story to write. I’m going to kill at least one of the siblings, possibly two of them. I still don’t know how it’s going to end, however. That’s still a surprise to me–one that I’m very eager to find out.

My goal now is to finish this novel by the end of winter 2009. I wrote about 70,000 words last semester, and I don’t expect this novel will be much longer than that. I want to keep it short, fast, and brutal.

The best part is that if I accomplish this goal and finish this novel, I’ll have three rough drafts done before the summer. Three! That’s the magic number I’m looking for World Fantasy 2009! That’ll leave the rest of the summer to revise them…difficult work, but at least I’ll have three rough drafts.

Wish me luck!

Assessment

Well, it’s a new year now, and English 318 has started! We had a wonderful class yesterday, getting things set up, figuring out our writing groups and all that. I am so looking forward to this semester!

With all of these changes happening, I thought I’d do a little recap and assessment of the last six months. I tried out a lot of new things over this time, and learned quite a bit about myself as a writer. I wish I could say that all of my experiments were successful, but at least I know a little bit better what works for me and what doesn’t. Here goes.

Experiment #1: Extensive planning and prewriting

About three months before I started Hero In Exile (the book I was writing last semester), I downloaded wikidpad and wrote a huge collection of articles, all about the world and the story plot. I spent a lot of time in worldbuilding before I’d even written a single word. I wanted to try this because I’m a discovery writer, and in my previous writing I tended to figure out the details of my world on the fly, as I wrote out the story.

This experiment was largely a failure, I think. I stopped writing Hero In Exile because it became too massive to write. As I wrote the story, I kept receiving story ideas and tried to integrate those, but towards the end of the first part, I realized that I was trying to doo too much. Planning didn’t stop me from discovery writing like I always do, and by the end everything was just too cluttered.

Experiment #2: Extensive prewriting of characters using Meyers Briggs personality types

I remember how a few months ago how I wrote a long post describing my characters using the Meyers Briggs typology (INTP, ESFJ, etc). I did this because I wanted more depth to my characters, and I supposed that by planning them out a little more, I would be in a better position to fully develop them.

My assessment on this is mixed, but overall I would tend to call it a failure. There were a handful of descriptions in the personality profiles that helped me to better understand these characters, but once I sat down and started writing, the characters started to do things that surprised me and that didn’t fit into what I had planned. By trying to describe their character before writing them, I wasn’t giving them enough room to show me who they really were; I didn’t give them enough space to act on their own and surprise me.

Studying the personality profiles was good in that it got me thinking more about my characters, but not a good way for me to conceptualize them before writing. I was simply trying to structure too much and not giving myself enough room to discover them and let them act on their own. By the end, I felt as if I were forcing my characters too much, and that made things very difficult.

Experiment #3: Waiting for the ideas to accumulate critical mass

For Hero in Exile, I felt all of my ideas reach a critical mass and converge while I was studying in Jordan. I then waited for nearly a month before sitting down and writing chapter 1. I did this for a couple of reasons: first, it simply wasn’t practical to start the project while I was studying abroad, and second, I had heard that a good novel is built out of a synthesis of several ideas, not just one, and I wanted to have all my ducks in a row before I started.

This also proved to be a mistake. Yes, it takes more than one idea to make a novel, but you don’t have to have all the ideas lined up before you start. I guess that planners do, but I’m not much of a planner, I’m more of a discovery writer. By waiting too long to start the book, I had too many ideas to work with.

However, with Genesis Earth, I had the exact opposite problem. I started way too early, before I had enough ideas to work with. Now, a year later, I’m struggling to wrap it up. The ideas have come, but the writing process was very choppy.

How do you judge when you’re ready to start? I have no idea how to measure it. It’s very touchy feely. I think I started Phoenix at the right time, but Hero was too late and Genesis was too early. At least I’m in a better place now to tell when is a good time to start.

Experiment #4: Spend more effort on detailed physical descriptions

When I wrote Hero in Exile, I found myself spending a lot of time on the aesthetics and physical descriptions of the world. I did the same in Genesis Earth. In doing so, I always tried to show, not tell, by giving some visceral or sensuous detail of something the viewpoint character was sensing.

I think this was a success. Whenever I brought in an excerpt from Hero into the quark writing group, everyone always complimented me on how how full and engaging my world was. The descriptions really added to the sense of wonder and helped them to feel that they were there.

Experiment #5: Avoid info dumps at all costs

Related to #4 was my decision to completely excise all info dumps from my writing. Anytime I found myself telling instead of showing, I stopped and focused on what was happening in the here and now of the story. I also withheld information to create curiosity and intrigue within the reader’s mind. Throughout this, of course, I always tried to keep my writing as clear as possible.

This, also, was a success, I think. At times, the readers became confused, but the withholding of information did create a lot of curiosity and desire to read more. Many times in the quark writing group, people said that they were sucked in by the writing and very much wanted to read on to find out what happened next!

Experiment #6: Create difficult ethical dilemmas and have the characters wrestle with them

I wanted to try writing stories that are more thematic and deal with controversial and difficult issues. For Hero, I had the main character struggle to keep his honor and chastity, where the people he trusted and loved the most try to manipulate him by tempting him to give in to his sexual urges.

I’m not sure if this was a success or not. I think that it was, but it was like pulling teeth, and some of the scenes are a little bit graphic. I guess that without giving my story out to some alpha readers, I have no idea whether it was a success or not. I have learned, however, that it’s not a good idea to sacrifice entertainment for a message. It’s possible to do both, and if your own story is something you’re not excited to tell, it’s not going to be easy to write it.

In short, last semester I wrote about 75,000 words total, without much to show for it except the unfinished rough draft of a flawed book, and a partially finished novel that I started last year. Still, I think I’ve learned quite a bit from the experience.

Back in school

So, school has started again! As fun as the vacation was, it’s good to be back.

I think I’ve more or less finalized my schedule by now. I’m taking an Arabic grammar class, a poli sci class on Islamic politics (taught by an Arab guy who drove ambulances in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion/occupation in the 80s), a class on modern Middle East history, a class on Islam and contemporary society, and…English 318! The one taught by Brandon Sanderson!

I took this class last year, and it was a lot of fun. Brandon Sanderson is the best selling author of the Mistborn fantasy series, as well as the Alcatraz YA series and Elantris. He also teams up with Howard Taylor and Dan Wells for the excellent writing podcast, Writing Excuses. Genesis Earth, the novel I’m currently working on, is a novel I started in his class last year.

Last semester was really miserable for me because few of my classes were challenging or interesting; most of them were easy, boring classes that I was only taking because they were required. Not so this semester. Even if two or three of my classes this semester turn out to be tedious and draining, English 318 is going to make it all worth it.

Here’s the thing, though; I’m not sure if I should rewrite one of my older novels or start a completely new one for English 318 this year. Brandon tends to encourage us to start with something fresh, but I would really like to revise the novel I wrote last year. I was originally planning on doing that, but then I thoought about it for a little bit, and realized that I wanted to do something with the Mongols in space idea before it drifts out of my mind.

In some ways, though, this throws a wrench in the works for my long term plans. I want to have three novels polished for World Fantasy 2009, and I was originally thinking about doing The Phoenix of Nova Terra, Genesis Earth, and Hero in Exile. However, if I were to start something completely new, that would mean throwing out all the work I did last semester for Hero in Exile and doing something completely new.

I don’t know, but before I can do anything, I’d better finish Genesis Earth, and fast. The first English class is in two days, and I don’t want to juggle two novels. That means I’m going to have to sprint these next two days to finish this novel.

New Blog

Hey, I have a new blog! You should check it out. It’s called One Lower Light Shining, and it’s a place for me to write about spiritual experiences and insights on the gospel. Essentially, something that (hopefully) will motivate me to study the scriptures more frequently. Check it out and let me know what you think!

What does your muse look like?

I’m reading this interesting book by Stephen King that is a mix of personal memoir and writing advice. It’s a very interesting book, even if the language is much more colorful than anything you hear in Provo (except while in traffic, that is).

At one point, Stephen King got off on a tangent and described what his muse would look and act like if he were a living, breathing human being. Interestingly enough, he described his muse as a scruffy, disheveled old man who hangs out in basements and grunts more often than he talks.

That got me to thinking: if my muse were a living, breathing human being, what would she/he look like?

First of all, my muse would definitely be female. Even though women’s minds constantly baffle me, my muse helps me to write and understand my female characters a lot better than most of my male characters. Even though the protagonists in both of the novels I’m writing are male, I think I have a preference for female characters.

My muse is about five years younger than me and three thousand years older. She listens to my intellectual inquiries and philosophical dabblings like a younger sister, but is a lot closer to the pulse and rhythm of this world than I have ever been.

She has a soft spot for Homer and the old Greek epics (I suppose that’s right around the time when she got her start at being a muse), but she’s been deeply in love with space epics since the days of Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov. In fact, her love of the stars must have started sometime back in the days of the Greeks and Romans, because that seems to be the only thing that’s ever on her mind. She’s definitely a night owl and I think she spends her nights stargazing while I’m asleep.

In contrast with my blunt, forward, and sometimes aggressive manner, she doesn’t really speak to me unless she knows that I’m listening. She doesn’t slap me upside the head to get me working, and she usually doesn’t come to me until I’ve been slaving away for at least half an hour. If I choose not to listen to her, she goes away without an argument.

As much as I love to toy with ideas and systems, she likes to touch, taste, see, and smell things directly with her own senses. She’s the kind of person who would take off her shoes to walk barefoot in the grass, even if it makes her late to where she’s going. She’s easily distracted and she never really lets me know where she’s going until we get there. If I listen to her and follow her, however, she almost always leads me someplace worthwhile.

My muse is very mischievous. Her favorite thing is to inconveniently interrupt me when I’m in the middle of something else to give me flashes of inspiration. I can’t tell you how many crazy ideas I’ve had in the middle of class, or a test, or general conference, or some other important thing. She teases me, too; if I don’t write down what she tells me, she won’t tell it to me a second time until I’ve racked my brain and beaten myself up several times.

My muse looks young and innocent, but don’t be deceived. It’s an act. She’s a wanderer who isn’t likely to settle down anytime soon. Blood, violence, battle, and death excite her. She thinks edgy stories are sexy and gleefully urges me to torture and confuse my characters as much as I can. Still, deep down, I think she wants the good to win out in the end, and the evil to be revealed for what it really is.

I have no idea why she came to me or why she stays with me, but she’s faithfully been with me as long as I can remember. Even though she won’t push me, she won’t let me ignore her either, and I know that whatever I do in life, she’ll be there with me. In some ways, that’s quite a burden, but in other ways, it’s very reassuring.

Happy New Year!

There must be a law that states that the climax of your story takes three times as long to write as you thought it would take. Back on Monday, I finished the previous chapter and thought I could bang out the major climax of the story in a day. Look how time has flown since then–and I’ve been writing regularly.

As far as resolutions, well, I’ve got a few. As far as my writing is concerned, I’d like to consistently hit at least 500 words a day (probably more like 1,000), so I can get some solid momentum going. I’d also like to start reading again. I plan on reading 3 novels a month and reviewing them here on this blog.

I’ve also noticed that I don’t blog much here anymore, except to whine and moan about my frustrations and other stuff. That must get really tedious and boring to read after a while, so I’m going to try to blog like I did last year, where I would finish writing around 1 or 2 in the morning and then hastily throw a cheerful blog post together about whatever was on my mind. Those posts are a lot of fun to look back on, and were probably a lot more entertaining to read.

As far as my goal to finish this novel, Genesis Earth, by January 5th? Well, I’m cutting it close, no doubt about it. But I still think I can do it. I’ve been thinking about the storyline in my spare time, and I’m starting to get enthusiastic about it. I know how I want it to end, and I know how to get there. The only trouble, really, is slogging it through.

Every time I sit down to slog it out, it seems to get longer and longer and longer…but I will do it! If I don’t finish it by January 5th, I will at least finish it before the first week of school is over. The main idea is that I don’t want to split my time between finishing the rough draft of this novel and rewriting Phoenix. I found out this September that that doesn’t work (especially after I revised what I’d written–I kept mixing up the main characters’ names for both the stories! This led to some entertaining comments and discussions in the Quark writing group; “What’s Ian doing in this story? I didn’t know he lived in the desert and drove nuclear powered dune buggies!”).

Anyways, I’d better get to bed. I’ve got lots of things I could write about, but that’ll have to wait for another post-midnight rant another time.Happy New Year! May 2009 be filled with at least as much awesomeness as 2008 and a whole lot more fun and success!

Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

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!

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.