Joe Vasicek

The Christmas spirit

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

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

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!

…

This week has been rough. Last day of classes is tomorrow (today), next week is finals.

I’m going to take as many finals as possible on Monday, just to get them over with. Scholastically, it has been a somewhat disappointing semester, though I don’t think my grades have suffered much. I just want it to be over.

As a result, I’m not writing much. Or blogging much. Or sleeping much. But I will be back soon.

Crash course

Alright, I haven’t done any writing in my novel today. I admit it, and I admit that I have no excuse for it. I just didn’t do it.

The reason that I didn’t do any writing (not the excuse) is that I’ve been way too busy checking out this series of fascinating economic presentations.

These presentations, known as the “crash course,” are extremely fascinating. They go beyond the current housing bubble and financial crisis to put them into a broad historical context that explains how it all came about, and where it may ultimately lead. Besides that, it gives the big picture and points out a number of other alarming crises that are on the horizon, such as resource depletion, inflation and possible hyperinflation, skyrocketing national debt, the global population explosion, peak oil, etc.

When I first started listening to these presentations a couple of weeks ago, I was pretty skeptical. After all, the author went from scientist and university professor to rich financial advisor to living with his family out in the woods in New England, growing all his food and home schooling his kids. On the surface, that may look a bit suspicious (at least, the stereotypes might seem suspicious). But after listening to all of these presentations, I can say that this guy, Chris Martenson, is very reasonable and moderate. For the most part, his very objective and rational, and backs up all of his claims and arguments with verifiable facts.

I listened to the last ten presentations or so today, and they were very engrossing. They were also very motivating. This guy is not a pessimist or an end-of-the-world doomsday kind of guy–he’s actually very optimistic and pragmatic. After listening to his presentations, I’m very motivated now to start doing the things that the church teaches us to do: home storage, budget, etc.

Specifically, here is what I want to do:

Prepare a small, highly portable 72 hour kit.
Learn how to cook bread (pita bread to start with, then some other kinds perhaps)
Attempt to convert my pantry into a 3 month food storage

The first one should be kind of fun. I’ll have to plan it all out, look around for prices and stuff, etc etc. It’s more of a long term project, though, and I’ll make it one of my new years resolutions and put a finish date on it.

The second one should be really, really easy. I cooked pita bread for the first time this semester, and it was WAY easy. Really cheap, too. Now, I just want to get the recipe down so I can make it tasty. And really, the same applies to more than just pita bread, too. My mom gave me a granola recipe a while ago, and I’m going to try that out this week. I’ve already learned how to cook hummous and koshary, and those are also way good.

The last one is going to be difficult. Almost all the stuff I eat is pretty perishable, and I don’t really cook dinner most of the time anyways (since in the FLSR, I only have to cook it once a week). It will almost certainly take a lifestyle adjustment. Really, honestly, I don’t know how to do it. I’ll have to look into some other church resources for suggestions and stuff.

Anyways, that’s the plan for now. I should probably do a deeper inventory and more planning before I undertake anything drastic, but this is where I want to start. Basically, I want to start living the church teachings on home preparedness. It’s not something I’ve really thought about too much, but I know now that I need to start doing it. And really, I’m excited and very enthusiastic, too. Hopefully, this isn’t just a short term interest, but the start of a longer commitment. After all, if the church has been counselling us to have a food storage and be prepared and self-sufficient, shouldn’t we be living that way?

Not bad…but not where I need to be, either

959 words isn’t bad. But I want to be further along in the story than where I am. I need to get Tristan out into space so that he can meet the space trading family, fit himself into their dynamic on the spaceship, develop a new romantic interest, find out about their religion, and be all ready to get caught up in the religious wars once they land on his mother’s homeworld. Right now, I’m almost 2k into the second section and he’s still on Nova Gaia, where we left him at the end of the first section.

I’ve found that I tend to make more progress when I pick out major landmarks in the story and use those as daily and weekly goals, rather than a wordcount. I can spit out tons of words but still get stuck really bad because the story itself hasn’t been progressing. When I think in terms of major events and developments, I can keep the momentum going and know when I’m getting stuck.

Also, when I start a story, I really have no idea how long, in terms of a wordcount, it’s going to be by the end. My story is already long enough to be considered a novel, according to some definitions, and yet I’m only about a third of the way finished.

Fortunately, MY NEW COMPUTER JUST CAME IN THE MAIL!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’ll blog more about that later, when it’s not past three in the morning =P

The point is, now that I have a tiny, ultra-portable laptop, I can write just about anywhere. Hopefully, this will mean that I’ll write more often. As to whether that’s actually going to happen, we’ll have to see…

Section one complete

Yes! I finished section 1 of my novel Hero in Exile today (the rough draft, at least). The main character, Tristen, just had everything he thought he knew pulled right out from under him, and now he’s on his way “home” to a world he knows nothing about. New characters, new problems, change of scenery, and fresh new cultures and peoples to explore. One potential love interest down, another one about to come out of nowhere. Space barbarians and pirates threaten, and down on his mother’s homeworld, a religiously motivated genocide is about to begin. How incredibly exciting.

The really cool thing was that I read over all the stuff I’ve written in the past month that was really frustrating me. All of the edgy stuff that I was afraid I wasn’t pulling off right, and all of the twisted romantic climaxes that I was sure I’d done wrong. I resisted the urge to revise them, and when I was through reading them, I realized that there’s really something there. I could make this work. I might not be able to do it by the rewrite, but there is something compelling in there.

I’m also very happy with the overall structure of this section. It has a clear start, middle, and end, and all the major elements are clearly connected. Themes and events weave in and out of each other and affect the characters’ choices. It all leads up to a gloriously twisted climax that fulfills the promises of the structure while leaving the reader unfulfilled and wanting to read on.

At least, that’s how I see it now. Maybe I’m too close to the story to be a fair judge of its overall structure. In fact, I almost certainly am. Even if it hasn’t taken this structure on the page, however, it has taken structure in my mind. That is something.

When I started writing this novel, I only had a vague idea where I wanted to go. In fact, in the freewrite plot overview that I spat out back in Jordan, half of the events in this section didn’t happen, and the rest happened out of order. Prewriting was helpful, but ultimately the story took shape in my mind as I wrote it out. That everything eventually ended up tying back to the previous elements (at least in my mind) is very, very encouraging.

So, in short, I can say that this vacation was very much a success. I got through some of the most difficult parts in my novel, got over some severe obstacles holding me back, pushed BOTH of the wordcount meters deep into the red, rebuilt my enthusiasm of the story, and finished at exactly the spot where I wanted to end. I’m finally starting to get things right.

🙂

Hooray!

Yay! I’m FINALLY past the really difficult part of the story. And man, I’ve written so much these past two days. 3,199 words today, 2,727 yesterday! That’s something of an accomplishment!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’d ever let anyone see what I just wrote. Holy cow, it is so rough! It’s probably riddled with cliches and cheesiness, not to mention some awkwardly written edginess that would make half my friends from Quark throw the book across the room. I tried not to be too suggestive (and really, I don’t feel guilty for what I wrote), but everyone’s got their own opinions, and I probably erred on the side of describing things too much. Not to mention, it’s not all that well written, so if you don’t throw the book across the room because it’s too risque, you’d probably still throw it across the room just because the writing is so bad.

HOWEVER, all of that I can fix in the revision. ALL of it. Don’t tell me that I can’t. I’m not listening to you.

Seriously, though, I really am satisfied with myself for writing all this. Even if it isn’t anywhere near good enough to get published, it is good practice. I don’t want to only write cute adventure stories that sell, I want to write characters who are forced to wrestle with some serious issues and dilemmas. I want to challenge myself and write something that has some deep meaning to it, even if I don’t know consciously what that meaning is exactly.

Maybe I’m doing it here, maybe I’m not. Maybe I haven’t got my characters figured out well enough to really dive into things–maybe I won’t be until I finally do the revision. Maybe the revision is going to kill me. The important thing is that it’s DONE and now I can MOVE ON to the rest of the story.

Oh, and one other really cool thing: I’m exactly where I wanted to be by this time! I can finish this chapter in another 2,000 words or so tomorrow, and then it’s on to a completely new section of the book! Yay!

Vomitous

Ugh. This romance in my novel is so…vomitous. Awkward. I hope I’m doing something right, but I have no idea. It’s WAY harder to write good romance than it is to write good action. Stuff blowing up is so much simpler.

At least I can fix it in revision. That’s what I tell myself, anyways.

Unstuck

Happy Thanksgiving! Holy cow, I ate a lot. Had dinner with the McQueens, my sister’s husband’s grandparents, and all the inlaws. My sister-in-law can cook a mean chocolate pie. Holy cow. Delicious.

So, when I wasn’t eating or groggily digesting over at my in-laws’ house, I was writing. It was pretty tough, to be honest. Even though yesterday I got through the climax of the chapter that was hanging me up, I still felt really stuck today. It took me more time than I’d expected to finish the chapter, and I didn’t know how to start the next one.

I was really frustrated the whole day. There was nothing to do, and nowhere really to go. I took a break and walked down to campus in the middle of the afternoon, but it was dreary outside and all the buildings were closed. There was barely a car on the road, and even though it was good to get out and go for a walk, I didn’t come back with any good ideas for how to start things out.

To be honest, I contemplated putting this project on the back burner and working on something else for the next two months. My novel Genesis Earth is halfway done, and I could probably finish it by the end of January if I put this other novel away and focused all my energy on it. I’ve recently gotten excited about that story again.

But that would be an admission of defeat. I didn’t know if I needed to do that yet. I do have a lot of really good ideas for Hero in Exile–the trouble is, they all take place about a hundred pages from where I am right now! I should probably write them down before I finally get there and realize that I’ve forgotten them all.

I figured that things are hard just because I’ve been so distant from the story these past few weeks. I decided I needed to start the chapter out with some action–or, if not action, at least with some dramatic momentum–and figured the best way to do that was to have my two main characters kiss in the first scene. I was going to do that somewhere in the chapter, but I figured it would be better to start things out with it rather than gradually build up. After all, that’s not the climax–the climax is much more twisted and painful than that.

But then, before I could start, I had to figure out just how, exactly, these two characters would end up in that kind of a situation. I mean, it was hard for me to work through their motivations in my mind. I’ve been building up the tension for the last few chapters, but it all felt so distant, and it was hard to remember exactly how these characters are supposed to be feeling.

It was really frustrating. I had this kissing scene all figured out in my mind a few weeks ago, but I’d forgotten it all. As I kept mulling through my characters’ motivations, I got more and more frustrated. After all, things have changed so much from my original idea. Are these even the right characters to pull my story through to the end?

I started wondering if I’d made a mistake by starting the story when I did–whether all my ideas had truly come together to the point where they were ready to begin. Back about a month before I started, I thought I was ready–but now? I don’t know. It’s very frustrating and discouraging.

After all, maybe I bit off too much with this novel. My first novel, The Phoenix of Nova Terra, was more of a straight up adventure story. There were some deeper ideas and ethical dilemmas in it, but I felt like I had to slog through those parts. They didn’t work out as good as I’d hoped–the main focus was the adventure, the suspense. With Hero in Exile, I want to focus a lot more on deeper questions–like, what is honor? What is heroism? How do you keep your honor in a dishonorable world? Do you have to prove your heroism through some grand, daring act, or does true heroism manifest itself in other ways? These were some of my original questions, but now…I don’t know how it’s turning out.

As a side, note, that’s where I was going with my question a few weeks ago about depicting immorality as immoral without watering it down–how do you get your characters to deal with these challenging issues without driving away readers? It’s tough, and my main frustration has been that the scenes just don’t seem to be well executed–I’m afraid that they fall flat. I could be wrong, I could be overexaggerating, I could be trying to write a perfect first draft, and I could be doing all three of these at the same time, but it’s been really frustrating.

Oh well. At least I know I’m pushing myself.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I guess you could say that I had something like it today. I knew where I wanted to go, and I knew what I wanted to happen, I just didn’t know how to get there. So then, after checking email and facebook some twenty million times, I opened up my outline and decided to work on that. Ten minutes later, I remembered how I’d envisioned this scene, and I set down and finally started the next chapter.

Romance is kind of hard for me to write, not only because of my lack of experience, but because it’s hard not to fall into cliches when you’re describing things. Because of that, it took me a few hours to slog through the end of the opening scene–but I did it! And now, I’m excited about this story again! I know where we are, what we’re doing, and exactly where we’re going over the next few scenes. It’s great! I’m FINALLY unstuck!

So now, I just have to keep up at a good pace before I forget everything again. Shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of this vacation, but the next two weeks are going to be a tough sprint to the end of the semester. Still, it won’t be impossible. And after, I’ve got more than two weeks of winter break–with the netbook I went ahead and ordered a couple of days ago! Hooray! I can hardly wait!