Joe Vasicek

Another awesome writing meeting!

So, we had a writing meeting last Tuesday! There were quite a few people there! Gamila, Jakeson, Danke, Travis, Drek, Kaci, Ben (his board name is the same as his real name, believe it or not!), Tom, and Patrick (I think that’s it, but I’m not sure. If I forgot your name, please forgive me!), so altogether there were about ten people! We definitely filled up the small library room, and the discussion was very lively!

We had some excellent stories, and I don’t think there were any stories that were boring or turned everyone off. One story was a little bit edgy, but not unacceptable, and it didn’t cause any schisms or anything. In fact, some of the more conservative members of the group complimented me personally afterwards for how I handled the situation. Quark has been shaken up by some trouble stirrers in the past (you’re welcome for the compliment, Joel), and I’ve been a little bit worried about how to handle controversies in the group on my watch. I’ve been chatting up with Aneeka and Reigheena, two former Quark writing vp’s, on this subject, and I think people from all the different perspectives appreciated how this situation was handled. And really, I did like the story that was submitted. Even though it was edgy for a squeaky clean BYU club, it wasn’t unacceptable at all, and I thought it added to the story rather than weakening it.

A lot of people liked how the meetings went, and found the feedback to be helpful but one of the old timers contacted me on g-chat a couple days later with some possible areas that we need to improve. The areas he suggested had more to do with us as a group than me as a leader, though I’ve definitely got a role to play. Basically, we need to learn some better etiquette, both as writers and as critiquers. His suggestions have spawned off a thread on the Quark forums, so I’ll refer all you quarkies to that for the full discussion on this topic, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Basically, we need to remember three things:

1) Try to avoid tangents (like anime and star trek)

2) If you’re the writer, don’t argue with the feedback you receive

3) Try to adhere to a sense of order in the way we give feedback: let people with comments on page one go first, on page two second, etc.

To that, I’d add a very helpful fourth guideline that Jakeson suggested:

4) If you’re submitting an excerpt from the novel, give a short synopsis at the beginning of the piece, so we know whether the excerpt is from the beginning, middle, or end, and can give relevant criticism.

Gamila also suggested to me on g-chat that writers should also describe what part of the writing process they’re in; whether this is a rough draft, one of the first revisions, or whether the author is trying to polish up a final draft. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I haven’t yet brought it up with the others. I plan on doing that soon.

There have been some suggestions that we break up the group, since it’s becoming so large. In general, though, I think it’s best to wait that out. I had the idea while g-chatting with Drek of splitting the group into a fantasy section and a sci fi section, where we’d meet every Saturday at the same time and place and alternate between the sections. Under this idea, people would still be free to come to every meeting, but we’d lower the submissions-per-meeting to about four and get someone to moderate the fantasy section (since I already have way too much free time as it is).

Of course, this depends on how many people we retain. I think we should keep things as they are for now, then wait and see how many people are still coming regularly in November and December.

It was a good meeting this week, but I was surprised because it really did leave me exhausted. The closest parallel I can think of is when you’re a missionary and you come out of an intense-but-disorganized lesson with an excited investigator who loves to talk. It left me exhausted like that. It was a good meeting, and I hope that in the future we’ll learn to build off of each other and find our “groove.”

Thoughts on the universe of my story

I’ve been thinking in the last couple of days (it hurts, but I’ve found that it generally pays off well). Specifically, about the culture of this world that I’m creating for my novel.

It takes place in the far future, after a 300-or-so year war with hostile AI. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, with the Cylons. But really, the story has nothing to do with that war. It has to do with what happens after the war is over.

Just so you know, world building is one of the things I love to do when I write. I don’t get as into it as some epic fantasy writers, with inventing new languages and naming every landform on the face of their world, but I really do get into it. I think that sci fi world building differs from fantasy world building in that sci fi focuses more on how some sort of technology, historical event, or other thing would alter basic humanity as we generally know it, whereas fantasy tends to be about building a world from the ground up. Sometimes I have a hard time getting into fantasy for that reason–I’m more interested in what it is that’s causing the fictional reality than in the fictional reality itself. And it can also be annoying to have to remember more than a couple dozen proper names full of multiple apostrophes.

<spoiler alert> So, in this world, just as the war was starting out, a group of refugees (like in BSG) got stranded from the rest of humanity, and fled out into unexplored space. They ended up landing on this planet that had just been discovered and explored a few years earlier by a group of scientists. The planet was uninhabited, but in all ways it was able to support unassisted human life. Basically, it was like a second earth, with its own biosphere, seasons, and everything else. This is significant because all of the hundred or so other planets that humans have colonized up until this point have basically needed to be terraformed before they could be inhabited by large numbers of people.

The refugees land on the planet and set up a sort of EMP field in orbit that basically fries a certain type of futuristic computer circuitry when it enters the field. This is to defend the refugee colony from the hostile AI, which they believe has completely wiped out humanity by this time. They land in the fertile areas of the continent, near the ocean and river deltas, but almost as soon as they touch down they find remnants of an ancient civilization (is it human? is it alien? how did it get there? bwahaha!) and are violently chased off of the land into a desert by these strange robotic things that shoot anything that comes near the ancient ruins.

So now, completely deprived of everything and poor and starving on a strange planet, the society is in turmoil, loses its history, its technology, most of its accumulated knowledge from the outside world, and exists in a state of starving chaos on the edge of a desert. After about a generation or two, it reaches a tenuous equilibrium, with the development of some basic agriculture and a rudimentary economy, but the political system is very authoritarian and the rule of law is thrown out when it’s convenient. Social justice is a distant dream of only the most optimistic, and there really is no moral code that everyone abides by. The strong do what they wish, with the weak at their mercy.

After a couple of generations, a new prophet comes out of the wilderness with a revolutionary religion. It spreads quickly until it becomes universal throughout the community. This revolution teaches the principles of social justice, establishes a new theology and cosmology, exhorts its adherents to live a moral lifestyle, and creates a new culture that, in many ways, washes away the negative effects of the years of chaos in the generations before. It establishes a stable social order in which the civilization can finally start to grow and progress.

Of course, it doesn’t come without negative consequences, since over the next couple of generations religious schisms divide the people, political entities seek to use the religious framework to justify their attempts to conquer each other, and a few short religious wars cause limited trauma and destruction. However, generally speaking, the religion does a tremendous job of bringing about civilization in the midst of barbarous chaos. From this, a unique and exotic culture develops over the next hundred years in isolation from the rest of humanity.

The novel begins as the main character, Ian Steffek, finds himself suddenly thrown out of the world he has known and into this strange and exotic culture. As the remnants of humanity on the other planets slowly start to rebuild after the terrible war, they come increasingly into contact with this unique and–in many ways–alien culture, and a clash of cultures starts to develop, with the main character caught in the middle. <end spoiler alert>

Basically, I need to create a tribal/medieval culture for this civilization on the lost planet. And, since I’m studying Arabic and the Middle East, and because I want to use this novel as a way of sorting out my thoughts on contemporary issues like the allegedly inevitable clash of civilizations and the many terrible conflicts that are causing so much pain and suffering in that troubled region of the world. Apparently, I’ve been doing a fairly good job, because many of the comments at the last writing meeting went along the lines of “I really like how you’ve written about Arab culture here.”

But the thing is, is it really such a good idea to base a fictional culture so much off of a real culture?

Of course, my response is that I really don’t know very much at all about Arab culture–REAL Arab culture–and so the stuff in my novel is going to be different. But is it different enough? If people look at this book and say “basically they land on a planet full of Arabs,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? I tend to believe I should think of some ways to make this culture unique and have it stand on its own, apart from anything else we know. But do I really need to do that?

I don’t know. But I don’t really want people to point at my book and say “look, it’s a bunch of Arabs on another planet.” I want them to point and say “look, it’s a culture that feels as foreign to us as the Arabs.” Because, really, I can’t write about Arab culture. It’s just too foreign to me. I’d butcher it up really bad. I can write about what I think Arab culture is like, but it won’t be an accurate representation of the thing itself.

But really, I don’t want this culture to represent the Arabs. When I started out, I did. I basically started with this vague notion of trying to symbolize different Middle East struggles by the conflict of this society with the rest of humanity. I scrapped that idea really fast–not only because writing fiction with a conscious and clearly defined normative message in mind is generally a very bad idea, but because I actually started to learn something about the Middle East, and realized that there’s no way this civilization could effectively mimic the Middle East as we know it today. There’ s just too much history and too many complications. I’d fall flat on my face with every word.

So, that’s where I’m at now. I need to create a culture that can stand on its own, with a story unique to itself. I’m not here to tell the story of the Arabs or the Middle East, I’m here to tell the story of Nova Salem (I might change that name sometime in the future…) and the Lost Colony that landed there (I’m definitely going to change that title).

How to do this, I don’t really know. But I’m going to do it, because come April, the rough draft WILL be finished!

400 words, but hey

400 words tonight. I tried, really I did, to write more, but after a while I simply became completely incoherent. It seems like my brain shuts down and goes to sleep before my body. Towards the end (as in the moment before I wrote this blog post), my mind was just swimming. I couldn’t think straight or visualize the scnees too mcuh. bleha and typiwing was paingful. As it si now. tomorrow inshallah

640 words and thoughts on momentum

640 words today, in two thirty minute chunks. The first was between classes, and the second was just now, at night. And I need to get some sleep, so this will be short.

We had an awesome quark meeting yesterday, but I’ll write about it tomorrow, inshallah. I’ve got so much stuff to do, and to top it off, one of my good Arab friends called tonight wondering where I’ve been, so I’ll probably end up hanging out with him and his roommates and friends until late tomorrow night. For those of you who don’t know Arab culture, there is an expectation that friends see each other every day. This is a good friend of mine, and I haven’t seen him in about five days or so. I want to keep up these Arab friendships and learn this culture. So, on top of a couple of tests, a hundred plus pages of reading in one class alone, and much more, tomorrow will be VERY busy.

Fortunately, I’ve noticed that setting daily goals has been helping. Or, in other words, I noticed that when I didn’t do it today, I was a lot more lost and squandered a lot more time than I did the days before when I had been planning. So, I figure the best way is to go to the library at around eight in the morning and just do homework all day. It goes fast when you focus on it. Gotta train myself for nanowrimo, after all.

But as far as the story itself goes, I noticed today that because I haven’t been writing in it very regularly, it was hard to figure out what I wanted to do next. By the end of the day, I’ve got it figured out, and the momentum is back again, but it’s much easier to write when you’ve got some daily and weekly momentum. Once I lose the momentum, projects get put off until I forgot what I wanted to do with them, and I’m left with a bunch of half-finished storylines that I have no clue where to go with them.

But momentum is not hard to build. It requires a little bit of focus, and a lot of time spent just thinking about the story when you don’t have to think about anything–walking to and from classes, driving here and there, walking to the creamery on ninth, etc. Just thinking about the story does a lot to build momentum again, and renew the excitement. At least, it does that for me.

I know what I want to do in the next twenty or so pages, and I’m excited to do it! New characters, new conflicts, solving some of the old ones and creating new ones in the process, and describing the culture of the people indigenous to Nova Salem. It’s going to be fun to write! IF I can freaking find the time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

miniscule progress

Busybusybusybusybusy!!!! But, I did write a little. Mostly, though, I was busy today with homework and the writing group. We had an AWESOME meeting that I’ll write about tomorrow (inshallah), but it left me really drained and tired. I did take a few useful suggestions, though, and that’s really what I worked on mostly this evening; revising the stuff that I submitted rather than adding new material. I did, however, advance the story one more paragraph. WHOOOO HOOO!!!

Holy cow, I’ve got to do better. But now that Tuesday’s writing meeting is out of the way, and I’ve got about a week and a half until the next one, I think I’ll find the time to advance the story as much as I’d like. I would have written more tonight, but by the time I’d done enough homework to be functional in my classes tomorrow, it was two AM, and when I tried to write, the only thing that would come is a garbled mess. Blech. A foretaste of nanowrimo. Man, writing fiction when you’re busy full time with school is HARD.

This show made me retch

Alright, this isn’t necessarily related to anything I’m writing, or anything science fiction / fantasy, or even writing in general, but it got such a strong reaction out of me that I had to blog about it, and this seemed like an appropriate place.

There is this excellent radio show each week on NPR called This American Life, where the main writer, Ira Glass, collects unusual stories from people around the country and puts them together in a fun and interesting way. The show also publishes a fully syndicated podcast. Usually the show has a theme of some kind. This week’s theme was “it never dies.” That should have been a warning to me.

Out in the world of popular culture, they say that Science Fiction is strange, weird (which I actually take as a compliment), disconnected from real life, pathetic, escapist, and just plain a waste of time. These snobs should take a good look at the rest of society. Compared to the people who were on this week’s episode of This American Life, the sci fi geeks are living life to the fullest.

The first story was about a guy who was picked on in high school and went back to his high school reunion to try and confront the bullies. It’s not the first time that This American Life has done this kind of a story (though strangely it is the first time when the story has nothing to do with America or American culture), but this one surprised me because usually I can sympathize with the victim to some degree. After all, I got made fun of quite a bit in elementary, middle, and high school. But this guy started off his story by bragging that he was a bestselling writer and that he makes more money than the people who used to bully him. He then keeps repeating over and over this one incident where the alleged bully threw him into a pond.

Ok, first of all, I find it hard to sympathize with someone who brags about how much money he makes. If someone is a jerk, I’m going to see them first and foremost as a jerk, and I despise jerks. Second, GET A FREAKING LIFE DUDE!!! So, you were thrown into a pond twenty years ago. And? Get over it! Life is tough! Move on! I understand that it was a bad experience, and you were victimized and all that…but what’s the freaking point of holding a grudge for that one single event for twenty years? IF YOU @#$@#! HATED HIGH SCHOOL SO MUCH, STOP LIVING IN IT!!

He meets up with the two bullies at his high school reunion. The first guy remembers the event completely differently, but in a very believable (though false) way. The bully no longer sees the guy as inferior or anything, and in fact regards him as an old friend. That might be weird, but it’s hard for me to hate the guy. Is this guy really an evil “bully,” or a regular human being who hurt someone’s feelings once?

The second “bully,” though, hits the nail straight on the head. He remembers exactly what he did and why he did it: the guy was being an ass and he threw him in the pond for it. Honestly, at about this point, I wanted to do the same thing, because the “victim” was STILL being an ass, in so many ways! The alleged bully then continued: “it seemed that so and so always wanted to be the popular kid, and because he tried so hard to be one, he just wasn’t.”

EXACTLY. You don’t have to have been the popular kid to still have your life stuck in high school. And that’s where the geeks and nerds differ from everyone else. When they were getting picked on and shunned by all the popular kids, they renounced the clicks and in-crowds and formed one of their own. They all got together and did their own nerdy things, like playing computer games, watching sci fi / fantasy movies, doodling dragons and spaceships, and reading and writing sci fi / fantasy stories WITHOUT CARING WHAT THE POPULAR CROWD THOUGHT. And because of this, it’s easier for geeks and nerds to grow out of high school and get on with their lives. Thank freaking goodness I was a nerd in high school!

This rejection of the popular culture by the geeks and nerds, many of whom would become avid devotees of science fiction and fantasy, seems to have played a big role in keeping the genres as good as they are. Postmodernism has taken the hero out of fiction and screwed it up in dozens of different ways. The literary elite tells us what is “good” fiction and “bad” fiction by arbitrary standards carefully calculated to create an in-crowd where they are the ones in charge. They preach their values and fashion metaphors and symbols that keep you from thinking honestly and independently of things–in the name of “open mindedness.” Mainstream fiction and popular culture believes these lies and changes with them. Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, has gotten away relatively unscathed. There are still heroes in sci fi and fantasy! There are still good stories! It’s still fun and enjoyable to read! It still makes you question and think about the world! Hooray for the geeks and the nerds!

I stopped listening through the first story on the podcast after about two minutes. But the next day, when I had nothing else good in my mp3 player, I turned it on again. Boy, if I thought the first story was bad, I was completely blown away by the second on!

It was an episode from some sort of podcast/radio show that a guy wrote that was all about…his ex girlfriend. It was ridiculous! He had an “ex-girlfriend sighting” segment, where people would talk about whether or not they saw her somewhere, a segment where he and a bunch of his friends got together and talked about how physically beautiful this girl was, a segment where he encouraged people to walk up to her and tell her how much she was missing, and all kinds of other stuff like that!

HOLY COW. If I were this girl, I would have gotten a restraining order on this guy and thrown every possible law against him! If that’s not stalking, I don’t know what is! It was just CREEPY and GROSS.

And then, a friend of his called up and said “dude, get a life! It’s over! There are hundreds of other girls in the city–go after them! Let it rest!”

To which the creep responded “you don’t know what true love is.”

WHAT???

I know what true love is! It’s in the Ender’s Game series, where Andrew Wiggins stays with Novinha even though she lashes out at him for the problems that she’s unable to deal with in her own life! It’s in hundreds of other places in sci fi / fantasy as well! Maybe, if this guy would just leave his miserable can’t-get-over-the-breakup-with-her life and escape into a good story, he could learn a thing or two about “true love.” And they say that people who like sci fi / fantasy are escapists who don’t know anything about the real world! Honestly, sometimes the only way to keep your sanity is to escape the “real world” for a little while! You can carry it to extremes, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t do you good!

Holy cow!

Listening to This American Life is, among other things, one of the ways that I keep in touch with “mainstream” culture (whatever that is). And it’s an awesome show–I would highly recommend it. But quite frequently, I see stuff in these stories of people’s lives that makes me think “holy cow, why are they so bothered by that? Why are they letting that ruin their lives?” And I don’t want to be snobby about this, but sometimes I’m really glad that I left the popular crowd for geekdom when I was in high school. Listening to this last show is one of those times.

If you’ve read this rant through it’s entirety, I congratulate you. And please, if this post ends up getting linked to and flamed by tons and tons of fans of This American Life, just like my criticism of Firefly was flamed by dozens of Firefly fans, please realize that this is just a rant, and it probably contains a ton of inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Rgggh!!! No time!!!!

Nope, no progress on the story today. !!!!حرام!!! حرام Shame!!! Shame!!!! And there are like four or five things I’d like to blog on as well. WHY do I never do the important things until 1:00 am?! Shame!!!!

Well, the news that I DO have is that I’ve decided to start organizing my life better. I made a list today of all the things that I have to do, and sorted it according to priority. I learned this pretty good system from my father, where you prioritize everything according to first priority, second, and third, and then within each of those groups, you prioritize according to A, B, and C. I made one list for all the periodic things I need to do, and another for the things that will be finished once I complete them. I plan to pick and choose maybe five or six things each day and write them on a 3×5 notecard that I’ll carry with me. Since I’m learning a language, I have PLENTY of cards.

Hopefully, I can use this to better discipline myself. As an experiment, I tried to do my homework first thing for a couple of days, and it was very surprising how liberating it was. I need to do that more often.

Something is happening to me that I NEVER thought would happen–I’m getting sick and tired of school. I figure this is God’s way of pushing me to graduate, because up until now I’ve loved college so much that I haven’t wanted to leave. God, being all knowing, knows that I’ll never leave this awesome university until I’m pushed to do so. Unfortunately, this only leads to more complications on my end of things. But I’m not complaining–God knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing it for my own good. I only wish I weren’t so stubborn–maybe then, God wouldn’t have to push me so much.

Mahlish. Tomorrow is a new day.

Why are writers so self conscious?

This is something I’ve noticed: that aspiring writers are generally introverted and very self conscious–to the point even of being fragile. It’s hard for them to feel confident and very easy for them to feel depressed because they think that their writing is all bad.

I’ve been in the same boat–and now that my latest attempt at a novel is starting to really become something, I’m starting to feel the same way again. In fact, I spent an entire year during high school vaguely depressed because I became frustrated and discouraged with my writing (there were other factors, of course, but my own feeling of failure about my writing was what really triggered it).

I was chatting with Aneeka via gmail the other day, and I asked her “why are writers so self conscious?” The conversation went like this:

Me: why is it that writers are almost always so self conscious?
Aneeka: because writing is a talent that is so subjective.
Me: what does subjective talent have to do with it?
Aneeka: subjective talent means if you think you do well and a few other people do too, you can be devastated when someone else says it’s awful and you realize that that’s completely right for them.

I think Aneeka was saying that it’s so easy to be self conscious because people can both lift you up with the highest praise and tear you down into the dirt with criticism, and both views can be right at the same time. The idea is that since writing is so subjective, different readers can say different, even contradictory things about your writing, and be right about it. Because of this, it’s very hard to hit a point where everyone can say “this is good writing,” and so long as someone can rightfully say that it’s bad, it hurts.

However, to my mind, this doesn’t exactly answer the question. It points out how the self-consciousness comes about, but it doesn’t address the root cause itself–the question “why.” At least, it doesn’t seem to to me.

In my opinion, there are at least a couple of reasons why writers are so self-conscious. The first reason has to do with the amount of effort and emotional commitment that goes into the act of writing and telling a story. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a piece of good fiction–not just physical or mental work, but emotional work as well. It’s only natural that a significant piece of your identity becomes invested in such a tremendous undertaking. Because you spend so much effort on the story, you feel that you yourself will succeed or fail according to how the story succeeds or fails. And, as Aneeka said, because stories are so subjective, it’s very easy for someone to write off your story as crap. Thus, consciousness about your story’s quality is transformed into self-consciousness.

The second idea is related, but slightly different. It has to do with the way that we, as a society, build boundaries around our lives.

The degree to which our lives are ruled by social norms is incredible. Most of these norms we don’t even notice even as we obey them. When we communicate with each other, we do so through a set of filters–not just on the receiving end, but on the transmitting end as well. When I’m talking with a girl that I think is cute, I will express my thoughts in a completely different way than I’ll express them when I’m around my roommates. Indeed, there are many thoughts that I’ll completely filter out, depending on the situation. It’s not just because society expects me to do it. It’s because I myself want to run things through this filter–that I feel a need to put on a mask. It might be a small mask, or a mostly transparent mask, but the mask is still there.

However, in order to be a good writer, you have to break down these personally-enforced filters and take off these masks to express your most personal and embarrassing thoughts and ideas. This comes from the idea that you can’t really write anything that you haven’t experienced (which, I’m learning from my Phil 202 class, was argued by Hume). The characters that you write are going to have different bits and pieces of you in them–otherwise, you just wouldn’t understand them. It’s possible for you to imagine the setting or the storyline or any other part of the story, because you can piece it together from things that you’ve actually experienced. The emotions that your story draws upon and (hopefully) invokes are emotions that you yourself have experienced.

In order to make sure that the characters are real, the setting and plot are believable, and that there is real emotional depth to the story, you have to take your mask off. You have to expose your real self to the paper, without filtering it for the girl that you’re trying to impress, or the roommates that you’re trying to get to accept you, or any of the other people that you interact with. As soon as you start filtering, you hold yourself back from really using that part of you, or of your experience, to generate that really interesting character, or that really amazing world, or that really powerful emotional depth. Your story will suffer.

According to this take on the question, learning to write well is learning to stop filtering yourself and completely expose yourself, in a hundred different ways, to an audience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. No wonder, then, that it’s so easy to be self-conscious! The more you work on your story, the more you take down your filters in order for your story to be good, and the more exposed and vulnerable you make yourself.

I could keep on running with this thought, and wonder how this relates to what seems to be a correlation between self-consciousness and introvertedness among writers–whether one causes the other, vice versa, or a third variable is causing both–but I figure that this post is long enough as it is, without my rambling on. Maybe that’s a subject for later.

1800 words and breaking the 100 page mark

My story is double spaced, in 12 point Courier New, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome to break 100 pages. What’s surprising to me is that that translates to 77 pages in single spaced 12 point Times New Roman. I thought that my story was advancing really fast, but now, I’m not quite so sure. A lot has happened so far, but I’m just getting to the point where Ian really begins to interact with the people of the strange planet–the part where his presence starts to upset the established order and turn society upside down. Well, if it’s not progressing exactly as fast as I thought it was, at least it’s not progressing too slow. This is probably a pretty healthy pace.

I was going to do a lot of other stuff tonight, but then I thought about how if you really want to be a writer, or into writing, the only real rule that you MUST keep is that you must write. So that’s what I decided to do. And it’s only barely midnight. Maybe I’ll actually finish some of my homework. Or maybe I’m too tired…

This really is the point where things start to get more difficult. The act of writing was a lot more difficult for me now than it was a while ago. I don’t know exactly why. The words didn’t seem to flow out exactly the way I wanted them to, so I had to change my sentences a lot as I was writing them. I’ll probably end up completely changing them again in the rewrite, but it was hard just to put the stuff out. Writing is a lot of work.

I am really happy, though, that things are progressing well. I’m just about where I want to be, in terms of the stopping point that I want to arrive at before November (and <gasp> nanowrimo comes upon us!!!). I’m going to have to put this story on hold for nanowrimo. I hope that nanowrimo doesn’t kill me–or my grades.

But another good thing is that I’m getting good ideas for what happens in the next few pages as I’m writing. For example, about a month ago, I had a vague idea of a couple of characters that might be interesting, a possible rivalry between a naive Ian and a jealous prince, and some vague ideas about how the ancestors of the people of this planet pray towards the spaceships that brought them to the planet’s surface, much like how the Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca. As I was writing, those ideas began to take a much more definite form, and I know exactly how I want the main plot to progress (I didn’t necessarily know that a month ago). Now, as I’m preparing to introduce a couple of the new characters that I’d thought of a month or two ago, they seem to be taking life in my head, as if I know who they are and know exactly how to start telling their stories. I just want to get to the point now where they start to come in, so I can have them interact with the other characters and make the story more interesting than it already is.

Another good thing happened just yesterday. I was at the quark opening social (which was AWESOME!!! Almost a hundred geeks like me gathered into a tight, confined space, watching sci fi and anime, playing computer games, and talking about Final Fantasy and other rpgs), and one of the new members (Danke) of the writing group asked me about my story. She was asking specifically about the plot, so there really was no way I could get around telling her all about it (I tried–“it’s about a clash of cultures”–but that wasn’t enough). To my surprise, after about ten or fifteen minutes of me monologuing about the plot of the story, she was still interested. This leads me to two conclusions: 1) girls who like sci fi are AWESOME and 2) the story in my head has got some good potential.

Well, it’s only 12:30, but I just laid down for a couple of minutes, and it felt so good that I think I’m going to bed right now.

Things are becoming busy, but I’m still writing

Yesterday was an extremely busy day! Much more than I was expecting. I probably would have accomplished more with a better plan and more self-discipline, but it was a good day. However, there were a few things I didn’t do–like write.

I think things are still going well, though. The day before, I wrote 1,300 words. I want to get to a certain part of the story before nanowrimo in November, because we’re probably going to do something for that contest as a writing group. Several people have voiced interest, and I would also like to participate.

For those of you who don’t know, “nanowrimo” stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s basically an informal worldwide (despite the name) contest, where the goal is to start and finish a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November. The idea is to focus less on editing and rewriting, and more on actually finishing something.

I would personally like to do this, since I’m so bad about finishing any of my stories. Also, there has been some interest in the club, and I think this could really be an awesome writing group activity as well. It takes place during an extremely hectic time, but I think we can do it–if we really want to.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for the writing group to do it if the leader of the writing group wasn’t doing it as well, so come this November, I’ll probably end up putting aside The Lost Colony for a while and focusing on the nanowrimo project.

I think that my story needs a lot more work than just writing the stuff down. There are some things that I’m going to need to think through a little more carefully. I watched a movie today in my Middle Eastern Geography class, about pastoral nomads in the Zagros mountains. It made me ask some questions about the nomads in my own story. I’m patterning the culture of the people of the lost planet loosely off of Middle Eastern cultures, and I’m getting to the point where questions about this culture are becoming more and more important.

As I watched the movie, I started thinking about the nomads that Ian runs into in the second chapter. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Why are they nomads? What do they produce? Do they have any flocks or herds? If not, what else do they do? Why do they travel with their women and children on their raiding forays? How do they migrate? What are their relations with the villages and kingdoms in the more pastoral lands? World building questions like this.

Fortunately, this is where half the fun is. If I didn’t invent worlds like this in my mind for fun when I don’t have anything else that I have to think about, I probably wouldn’t want to be a writer. It does take a lot of thought, though, and that takes time and effort. Probably I’ll be spending most of my time between classes thinking these things through–you know, when you’re walking from one part of campus to another, and don’t have to think about anything.

But still…one month…and I’ve got a lot of ground to cover! This is where I either start getting serious or where things putter out. But this time, I’m going to be serious!