Joe Vasicek

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

I just today finished this wonderful piece of science fiction. Ursula Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction classic and an excellent piece of writing. Although it’s pace was much slower than what I’m used to, I enjoyed it very much.

It tells the story of a man named Genly Ai, who is an envoy from the Ekumen, a sort of confederation of planets, to an independent world known as Winter. His mission is to convince the people of this world to join the Ekumen in alliance. Because the Ekumen doesn’t want to make mistakes in reaching out to new worlds, he was sent alone and unarmed, the first man from another world to visit this planet.

He finds a very strange race of human beings on this planet. Apparently, several thousand years ago, the planet was used as a sort of laboratory where experiments were performed on human sexuality. The result was a colony of people who are neither male nor female, but instead have a periodic sexual cycle, where for one or two days every lunar month, they come into “kemmer” and develop working sexual organs–sometimes male, sometimes female. After the outside worlds lost interest in the experiment, they left the colony to itself, and over thousands of years of isolation it developed into its own complex civilization.

The planet Winter is in a deep ice age, and everything in the Gethanian’s culture (that’s the name of the people of this world) revolves around both their peculiar reproductive biology and the severe weather in which they live. Their cities are designed for winters that drop dozens of feet of snow, and their culture is very hospitable and welcoming of strangers. The people are generally very passive; they never drive their vehicles faster than 10 or 15 miles per hour, people live in the same villages and towns where they were born without really caring much for the outside world, and scientific innovation progresses at a very slow pace. There are, however, two major countries on this world, and as Genly Ai starts his mission, the leaders of these countries are preparing for war.

It is a tale of a strange, exotic world, with a very deep mystical and religious structure, and many interesting ramifications from the unique biology of its people. It is also a tale of political intrigue and xenophobia. The plot is not all that complicated, but there are a couple of interesting twists. However, towards the beginning, Genly visits a hermitic sect of religious sages who have the ability to foretell the future, and learns how the story will basically end, so you really don’t have to do a lot of guessing.

That ends up to be a good thing, though, because it keeps you from thinking too much about the plot so that you’re free to focus on the beautiful way that LeGuin tells the story. Her descriptions are wonderful, and paint a very beautiful picture of the world and its culture. The focus of the book is not so much on the alien technology, or the history of the Ekumen or Winter, or even on Genly as a character, but on the culture of the Gethenians and how Genly interacts with them. In the end, he comes to feel closer to the alien culture than his own.

The concept of the Gethenian sexual cycle is fascinating, though I don’t necessarily agree with all of LeGuin’s conclusions. The way she describes it, it’s not obscene at all; in fact, she does a remarkably excellent job discussing sexuality in her work. Other pieces of Science Fiction tend to use sex and sexuality as a way to thrill or entertain the reader (or, failing that, the writer), and usually it ends up being puerile and shallow. But LeGuin approaches it entirely from a cultural perspective, to answer “what would a culture of people with this peculiar biological cycle look and feel like?” I found it mostly believable, though I disagreed with the idea that without a constant libido, mankind would not be very aggressive or innovative. However, that didn’t really take away much from reading her book.

I’d rate this book an eight out of ten. I loved the journeys that Genly went on, especially towards the end when he and one of the aliens traveled together across the frozen waste to escape to safety. The descriptions were wonderful and beautiful, and I could feel like I was making the journey myself. There isn’t a lot of action in this story, but it makes up for it in depth and in the very thorough conceptualization of this wonderfully alien culture.

2,000 words and some thoughts on the characters

I got out of classes today at 3 pm and had this really strange sensation. I wanted to go anywhere but the place where I was. It was very wierd. All through my last class, I’d been watching the clock, counting down the minutes, and when the time finally came, I still felt really cramped. So, naturally, I headed right over to the library and worked on my story.

I think it helped. I made good progress. It took more time than I was expecting, but I spat out about 2,000 words and I’m really excited to keep working on it. I just got through the scene where Leila and Ian meet each other for the first time. Now, Leila gets back at the women who abused her, Ian cluelessly follows her until she takes him back to the kingdom.

I’ve got Leila and Aaron’s character figured out fairly well, I think. They tend to match some archetypes that I’m pretty familiar with. Aaron is kind of like the gritty, reckless fighter pilot / mechanic type guy, the kind who has a magic touch with machines and spaceships, who shoots first and asks questions later, who talks and laughs in a brash, unrestrained way, and who has a fierce loyalty to his friends. He’s kind of like Starbuck from BSG, or maybe Hagrid (in some ways, but not all). Leila is an adventurous, strong, self-willed woman who has a lot of curiousity, an optimistic self-confidence, and a clever mind. She’s kind of like Mulan, or maybe Yuffie (ha, since I’m listening to the new FF7 album from ocremix).

However, I really don’t know very much about Ian’s character. He’s still a mystery to me. That’s not very good, because I really need to know who he is if I’m going to tell his story. He doesn’t seem to fit into any stereotypes that I know of, though in some ways I imagine him to be like myself before my mission. His greatest strength is that he’s got a very strong sense of justice and mercy, of what is right, etc. His greatest weakness is his own self-doubt. He has talents that he doesn’t know anything about.

Here is his story, as I imagine it now: He was born on a beautiful planet that was destroyed by the Naimechs when he was a child. He and his mother escaped and became refugees, while the rest of his family died. Soon afterwards, his mother died, and he was taken in by the government. He went through the military academy and found a home in the military. He was trained as a lower level technician and basically spent most of his late teens and early twenties going from battleship to battleship without anyone noticing him. He’s comfortable with that, and is basically a yes man, content to live in his little sphere without any interruptions or disturbances. However, he gets chosen for this mission to the lost colony world of Nova Salem, which completely throws him out of his comfort zone since he’s the chief navigator. When the ship gets hit by an sort-of EMP and he gets stranded basically alone on the surface, every barrier he’s built to keep his life from falling apart basically breaks down, and the real man emerges. He’s revered by the natives as a powerful religious figure, and eventually comes to be an ambassador for that world. He goes through a number of crises, where his true leadership talent and strong sense of right and wrong help him to find his way through them. He also comes to have a greater capacity to love, to serve others, and basically becomes an uncorrupted hero.

The story is basically about how he grows from being a nobody to a hero, by finding out that he had the capacity the whole time. It’s about more than that, of course, but that’s one of the key parts. The problem is that I don’t really understand him on a gut level–I don’t have this idea in my head of who he is and how he’d respond if we were just hanging out and doing stuff together. I don’t have a real pattern for him, and it’s hard to start from scratch.

Oh well. If you have any suggestions, I’d like to hear it. Other than that, this story is progressing surprisingly well.

Cool writing music

Ocremix came out with a new album. This time, it’s based on the soundtrack for Final Fantasy VII. Like all of their music, it’s completely free.

The arrangement for the JENOVA theme has got to be one of the best takes on this excellent piece of Nobuo Uematsu’s work that I’ve seen yet. Soft, but still retaining the tension of the original, with an excellent techno beat. Just right for zoning out the outside world when you’re trying to write.

Here’s the link to the album’s website: Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream.

Awesome Quark Meeting!

So, we had the first meeting of the Quark writing group yesterday, and it went very well! I was a little bit nervous, since I’m definitely a newcomer to this club (I only joined up with it last winter, whereas most of the core members have been around for four or five years!) and not so sure how to lead things. It went very well, though! I think that just about everyone got some really good feedback, and it didn’t seem that anyone’s feelings were hurt, so that’s good!

Gamila and Jakeson were there, now as a married couple (yeah, the writing group’s marriage statistics are so high they’d make most BYU bishops jealous!), Drek, Dragonswriter and Asyr (who I don’t remember meeting last year, so it was good to meet them), and a new guy named John, who heard about the club through Joel (who showed up a little later). He’s an engineering major, so it looks like he’ll know something about physics and how realistic/unrealistic are the elements of sci fi technology in any given piece. I learned from Jakeson not to mention Ceasar in any of the meetings, but on the flipside if any of us need to know anything about the Roman empire, we have a resident expert. I think that we’ve also got quite a few experts on midieval weaponry, judging from the feedback I got last year from my story The Clearest Vision.

I thought that Drek’s piece in particular was very good. It was the first of three parts in a short story he’s writing for a contest deadline this month. Maybe some of the old timers have read it before. It starts out with a backcountry vet and his goth assistant who get a very strange visitor. The visitor drops off a humanoid/canine creature the size of a man, and asks him to operate on it. It’s got this real sense of mystery and some wonderful tension in it. At one point, the strange creature manipulates the vet’s emotions and makes him feel this intense fear. It was pretty cool to read. I’m looking forward to the rest of the story!

Joel also is a part of Inscape now, and he said they’re looking for submissions. They’re not a paying market, but it sounds like a great way to start getting published! I think I’m going to send out my short story The Clearest Vision to them, since it didn’t win anything in the AML short story contest and I don’t see it having much of a broader appeal beyond the realm of Mormon society (although I could try sending it to some Christian publishers, so long as I can find some that don’t outright reject the doctrine of the pre-existence. Muslim publications, maybe? Dunno. I’ll try with the Mormons first and see how it goes).

The feedback I’ve gotten from the boards is that there are several members of the group who can only do Saturday mornings, so it looks like that’s what we’re going to be doing. I’m thinking about alternating between Tuesdays and Saturdays, since that seems to be what we’ve done in the past. I’ll schedule it tonight and send up the email.

We do need new members, so if anyone out there would like to join us or knows someone who would, send me an email! I’ve put up several fliers around campus, and I’ve gotten a couple of emails with some interested people. We’ll see how it goes.

So, things are going well, and I hope that they only get better!

1673 words and things are AWESOME

Yeah! 1673 words, and that doesn’t include some major edits I made of the first chapter. I got some good feedback from the Quark writing meeting, and made a few edits to the first chapter. Some pretty sizeable edits, in fact, but I’m very satisfied with them.

Now, my philosophy is not to make any really major edits until I’ve finished what I’m working on, so I don’t plan on going back, rewriting the chapter, and submitting it again to the writing group. In fact, now that I’ve implemented the suggestions that I found useful, I’m probably not going to hardly touch it until I finish the whole thing. It would be violating Heinlein’s third rule of writing to do that (as if I haven’t violated enough of those rules already 🙂 )

The awesomest part was rereading the story from the beginning. Honestly, just from the perspective of a reader, I really enjoyed it. It surprised me because (for some crazy reason) I wasn’t really expecting it. There were a couple of scenes that really stuck out to me, where I felt I was in it, and it was awesome. It makes me feel that this is actually a pretty good story, that it has the potential to go places. Wow!

I’m finding, also, that I’m thinking more about my story in the spare (or not so spare) moments I have. During my somewhat boring History class, I read an essay on the Hero cycle and started applying that to the general idea I have for my story, which got me thinking for the rest of the day about what’s going to happen, what the plot is about, and what the major themes are, etc.

So yeah, things are going AWESOME! It’s funny, though, because the worse things seem to get for Aneeka, the better they get for me. Maybe there’s some kind of a cosmic balance going on here, in which case, I hope she writes a dozen more suicidal poems, destroys her computer and all the backup files of her novel Cursed Cure, and runs away naked with amnesia into some Elven forest, only to remember who she is twenty years later and throw herself onto her lover’s sword (a ripoff from the Silmarillion, in case you aren’t a true blue Tolkien fan). jk! You rock Aneeka! (and your freaking security code sucks)

So, it’s late now, but I’m going to finish this blogfart by making a list of the posts I would like to do in the next week or so:

An in depth review of Escape Pod
Discussion of the two main characters of The Lost Colony, Ian and Leila
Discussion of the major themes that I have in mind while writing The Lost Colony
A review on the Quark writing group meeting that we had today and how awesome the group is
Upload the fliers that I designed for Quark
Review some of the other good writing podcasts that I listen to

That’s about it for now. It’s late, and I’ve heard that sleeping is good for your health. Tusbah al-kheer!

About 1,200 words and a goal modification

It’s late at night, but I just got finished writing and I wanted to blog in about it. It went fairly well. I introduced a new character (Leila) and tried to develop her a little bit, show the different sides of her personality and how she reacts to trials and difficulties. I hope that I got started off on the right note and that she’s an interesting character to read about. I probably didn’t do all that good with the main male character (I’ve changed his name to Ian) and should probably revise that before I submit it for the Quark writing group. It can be challenging to make your characters interesting in those first few pages when you introduce them. You’ve got to be efficient.

I’ve decided to modify my goals a little bit. I’m going to shoot for 4,000 words a week instead of 500 a day. That way, if I miss a day or two, I’m still good.

For me personally, I don’t think that writing is the kind of thing that lends itself to doing a little bit every day (which is why I decided never to be a full time writer). I do much better when I write sporadically in big chunks, rather than consistently spitting out very small pieces every day.

I am a little bit worried that I’m too wordy in my writing, but I’m not going to worry too much about editing and rewrites until I actually finish the whole thing. I’ve got to allow myself to suck if I’m ever going to be any good. I’m optimistic about all this.

I’m wondering, though, if I should try to think out the entire story in my head, including the ending, before I go much further. I tried that a couple of times with some of the other stories that I wrote, but things always changed so much midway that it didn’t really work. On the other hand, if I have at least the skeleton of a complete story in my mind, I might believe in it more as I write it. That would provide motivation and keep me from wondering if I’m just making a fool of myself as I write this.

And, one quick note, in case you’re getting sick of reading nothing but my whining about writing, I do plan on doing some useful things on this blog, such as reviewing some podcasts, talking about Quark, and doing some other things. It’s not just going to always be me saying “well, this is how my story is going but I don’t want to actually post it on the internet since I may want to sell it someday.”

I hope that you enjoy my stream-of-conscious ramblings anyways. That’s what blogging is about–random ramblings on interesting subjects. At least I’ll try to keep it short!

This is where my goals start to fall apart

Ok, so I haven’t written in the past two or three days in the story. I was going to write in the morning Wednesday, but I ended up sleeping in until just before class, and the rest of the day was extremely busy. Then, today, I was also going to write, but I ended up reading my scriptures in the morning (just got a new set), went to classes, did some readings for one of my classes, then had a meeting with the Quark leadership to plan for the semester, then did some work on the computer, then visited friends, went grocery shopping, and visited some Arabic friends (which went WAAAAAYYYYY late, I’m only just getting back having not finished my homework), and it’s nearly 3 am and of course I have no time to write. With classes starting and everything else, this is when things start to fall apart and I start finding it hard to meet my goals. What should I do? This is tough!

Taking a break tonight

1,127 words yesterday and I started class today, with TONS of Arabic homework, so I decided to take a break and go to bed early. I need the sleep.

Yesterday, when I started writing, it was difficult at first because there wasn’t much action, but as soon as the action picked up the writing just flowed. It was beautiful. The scene that I saw in my mind matched the scene I was writing. It’s moments like this that I enjoy writing.

It shows me that if it seems hard to write, it might be a good idea to cut out all the unnecessary stuff and get right to the action. That’s very similar advice, actually, to what I’ve heard in my political science classes. In academia, there’s a real problem with people writing in the passive voice. It can make an article seem more prestigious than it really is, and put the reader to sleep at the same time. In PLSC 200 they are nazis about passive tense, even when it’s actually legit. The result is that your writing is simple and the action is clear. Apply that to fiction, and it helps as well.

Even though I didn’t write anything tonight, I do need to keep the momentum going. I’ve experienced this before, where I’ll have a great story idea and lots of fun writing it out, but then a few days go by without me working on it, which quickly becomes a few weeks, then a few months, and then it gets buried. I may or may not pick it up again, but it’s usually a bit harder than it would have been if I’d have kept the momentum going.

On the other hand, there is a reason why I decided long ago that I would never become a professional fiction writer. That reason is that writing would become a chore if it became my job. I don’t want that. I enjoy writing. It’s creative, expressive, therapeutic sometimes, meditative in others, and sometimes it can even be exciting and invigorating. To keep it that way, I’m reluctant to let writing become the primary focus of my life.

When you’ve got momentum, though, it’s beautiful. That’s why I’m a “binge” writer. I don’t usually force myself to sit down and write (out of fear of turning a recreational activity into a chore), but when I do do it, I get in this sort of trance and I don’t want to get out. Hours become minutes and pages flash by faster than my mind can notice. It’s beautiful. I could spend a whole afternoon doing that, once I’m in the right groove.

I’ll try to wake up a bit early tomorrow and write a bit, as an experiment. Morning writing vs. evening writing. More on that tomorrow.

Writing and the Sabbath

Today was my first Sunday in a new ward, and we had a really good Elder’s quorum lesson on keeping the Sabbath day holy. This is an area of living the gospel that I really need to improve on, and I need to both stop doing things that aren’t appropriate for the Sabbath and start doing things that are.

My question is this: in your opinion, is it breaking the Sabbath to work on a particular story that you’re writing?

It’s not as spiritual as reading the scriptures or doing service, but it’s not as worldly as watching TV or playing Halo. It is an activity that requires creative thought, and I suppose that it does have the potential to draw you closer to the savior if you can see gospel principles in action in the story you’re telling. On the other hand, it can really distract if the story is full of bloodshed and craziness.

I’m pretty liberal when it comes to Sabbath day worship, but I think I’ve been a little too loose in the past, and now I need to set up some personal guidelines to help preserve the spirit of the day. That’s why I’d appreciate the feedback.

I know that everyone is going to have different ways of living this commandment, and that’s perfectly fine. What helps one person to keep the Sabbath holy may or may not help another person, and what distracts from one person may or may not distract from another (for example, I think I need to stop browsing my blog subscriptions on Sunday!)

What I really need is some way of thinking about it. I really don’t know on what terms to consider this; why exactly it would or would not be considered a Sunday appropriate activity. That’s why I’d like to hear your thoughts.

1,257 words tonight and where I’m going with the storyline

1,257 words tonight. That should make up for yesterday’s missed goal.

The great thing is that I’m starting to really get into this story. In my mind, I’m already thinking out the details of the events in the next couple of chapters. Now, I just need to make sure to keep up with it!

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually start writing until after midnight. That will hopefully change. I don’t want to be going to bed after 2 AM every night.

I’m coming up to the part where the main male character, whose name is Sayed (though I’ll probably change that) meets up with the main female character, whose name I haven’t yet figured out. Sayed and two of his crewmates are stranded on the planet and separated from the captain and the rest of the crew. They decide to walk out of their situation and try to find the captain. Along the way, they come across a group of bandits who roam the desert on these bipedal lizardlike creatures and make a living stealing from the local tribes.

Of course, Sayed and his crewmates don’t realize this, so they approach the bandits peacefully without expecting a fight. When the bandits attack, a firefight ensues, in which the bandits are cut down like butter by the superior weapons of Sayed and his friends. All of the bandits, about thirty or forty, are killed. However, one of Sayed’s crewmates is fatally injured, and his other crewmate Aaron is severely wounded.

Sayed doesn’t know it, but this group of bandits has recently captured the main female character. She is the daughter of a local tribal leader of some influence. While the men went off to rob and plunder from the strange foreigners, their wives and the princess stayed behind. The wives of the bandits are jealous of the princess and treat her abusively. When their husbands don’t return, they are scared and force the princess to go and find out what’s going on.

She comes across Sayed and Aaron at the site of the battle, but Sayed (who is peaceful at heart) sees that she is unarmed and doesn’t attack her. They try but fail to communicate, because of the language barrier. When the princess sees how sad Sayed feels about his wounded comrades and the bandits they killed, she realizes that he’s a good person at heart and won’t hurt her.

However, she connives a scheme to get herself back home–and to get back at the women in the process. She takes Sayed and Aaron back to the wives who abused her and tells the women that these foreigners have come to rescue her–and capture them. When Sayed tries to communicate with them, she pretends to speak on his behalf, and Aaron has such a jittery trigger finger that the women quickly come to believe what she tells them.

She then leads Sayed and the others back to her home, where, to Sayed’s great surprise, he is treated as a prince and a hero. The plot thickens from there.

That’s the basic gist of the story at this point. I don’t want to reveal too much in this blog, but I also don’t want you to read about my writing without having any clue as to what’s going on in the story.

I think that’s enough for now. As always, suggestions are always welcome.