Bringing Stella Home – Page 22 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Oh crap

Dang. I just looked at a calendar for the next two months, and it looks like I’m going to be busy.

I want to get Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home polished and ready before World Fantasy 2009, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Genesis Earth is almost there, but Bringing Stella Home is going to require a HEAVY rewrite. I’m in the middle of that now.

I’m currently about 25k words into the rewrite, with between 100k and 110k words to go (I think…could be more). I want to finish this by the last week of September / first week of October. That leaves me three working weeks in August (I’m taking off a week for vacation at Cape Cod, though I will probably write a little there as well) and five weeks in September.

But really, once school starts again, I’m not going to have much time available to write. I’ve got two capstone papers I’ll be writing, a ccouple of poli sci classes to take, and to top it all off, I’ll be taking a 400 level English class where I’ll probably be writing a DIFFERENT novel–holy cow! September is going to be a CRAZY month!

How the crap am I going to juggle all this?

Well, I figure if I write 4k minimum a day in August, I can get between 60k and 75k of Bringing Stella Home knocked out before school starts. It’s going to be tough, but it won’t be significantly more than what I’m already writing. Definitely doable.

That way, I’ll only have 35k for September, which comes to a meager 1k per day. Considering that this is revision work, which tends to go a bit quicker, I think I’ll be able to handle it.

But 65k in August…can I do that?

Well, in June, I wrote a grand total of 81k, and in July I wrote 85k. Most of the stuff in July, too, was revision work that I counted differently, excluding passages that I’d recycled from the previous draft.

Considering this, I think I can do 65k in August, even with a week’s vacation. I’ll probably even write a bit on the break, maybe 1k/day, just to keep some momentum. We’ll see.

But, just as an aside…81k? 85k?? That’s more than the novel I worked on my entire freshman year of high school! And I did that…in just a month? That’s encouraging!

Maybe I’m finally getting toward the tail end of my million crappy words. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll finally write my first good word before too long.

🙂

Holy crap! 5,373 words in one day

That’s right–5,373. And I was only going for 4k! How did this hapen?

Well, I was revising a couple of powerful, gripping scenes. The way I’d had them before, they worked okay, but when I followed the suggestions from the writing group, it made them ten times better. By midafternoon, I was hooked in my own book–I just wanted to keep writing.

The funny thing is that I never got hyperfocused while I did it. I would write a paragraph, check email, write a few more sentences, delete them, write a few more, cut to google images to do some research, get distracted, come back, etc. At the same time, it all seemed to pour out, so I must have been doing something right.

If only the rest of the book would go like this. Maybe it can! Bringing Stella Home is a lot more like a thriller than anything else I’ve written, so if there isn’t a hook on every page (or at least something to raise the stakes and keep the reader reading), I’m probably not doing it right. And if I’m hooked while writing it, chances are the reader will be hooked while reading it.

In totally unrelated news, check out this awesome Mega Man remix!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is finished!

That’s right! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 269
words: 74,687
file size: 525 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 8 July 2009
end date: 25 July 2009

Wow, I finished this rewrite in seventeen days. Seventeen days! Hard to believe it’s only been that long. I hope the quality of this work went up in that time. I still feel like I need to run through and proofread it, make sure that the language flows well and the dialogue isn’t stilted.

In the process of writing this draft, I added or deleted 37,159 words from the previous draft. Going by the wordcount of the previous draft, 51.98% of the text changed.

Now I need to start submitting this book. It’s going to be kind of hard–I’m not sure whether it’s YA or not. On the one hand, the main characters are older teenagers and experience a lot of personal growth over the course of the novel. On the other hand, the (pseudo)science is a little dense, and the prose isn’t…well, it doesn’t read like most of the YA that I’ve read.

Well, I guess the only thing to do is shop it around and see who picks it up. In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into finishing Bringing Stella Home. The 2.0 draft of that novel is going to be AWESOME!

Refocusing

If you’re a regular of this blog, you may have noticed that I took off the statusbar for Ashes of the Starry Sea 2.2. I’ve decided to discontinue that project for the foreseeable future, while I work on Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home.

It’s not that I think that Ashes doesn’t have potential, or that I can’t rewrite it. It’s just that I don’t want something good to keep me from doing my best.

Ashes, in its first incarnation, was very much a practice novel. It has potential, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get it publishable. In the meantime, I’ve got two other novels that are much better–much more workable. I don’t want them to be any worse because I’ve diverted too much attention toward something else.

When I wrote Ashes two years ago, I cringed at the thought that this was going to be just a practice novel. It was my magnum opus, the best thing I’d ever written! Well, since then, I’ve written a lot of other stuff that is much better. I’m able to let this baby sit on the back burner while I polish the better stuff.

(baby…back burner…okay, disturbing image)

In unrelated news, I had an AWESOME story idea today at Leading Edge!

Ever read the Illiad or the Odyssey? Didn’t you think that the Greek gods were just so petty, with their stupid feuds and their dumb wagers? Did it disturb you how they toyed around with humanity, ruining people’s lives just for sport?

Well, imagine this: an ancient Greek Van Helsing who slays gods instead of vampires!

Yeah, man! That’s gotta make for some interesting story material right there! The godslayer…the man who dares to challenge fate and takes up arms against the forces of the universe, slaying the immortals, overpowering the omnipotent, and outwitting the omniscient. Sounds like…like Richard Dawkins meets Sparticus. =P

Anyway, that’s the idea. What’s your take on it?

Uh oh…more projects?

That’s right. I recently formed a writing group with some friends, and decided to workshop Bringing Stella Home through it. They went through the first chapter yesterday and tore it apart. I appreciate the help a TON, but I’m going to have to start making revision to it now, so that subsequent submissions to the writing group won’t have the same issues.

So, that makes three major ongoing projects for me now: the Genesis Earth 3.0 revision draft, the Ashes of the Starry Sea 2.2 draft, and now, Bringing Stella Home 2.0. It’s going to be very hard to juggle all three, and one of them will probably fall through the cracks (probably Ashes, to be honest). However, I’m going to do my best to give them all equal time. We’ll see if I succeed.

In order to accomplish this, I’m probably going to have to make some changes to my daily routine. Right now, I work out, eat breakfast, read the Book of Mormon, and arrive on campus ready to write…at about 11:00 am. And that’s on a good day. I write until about 2:00 or 3:00 pm, then go home for lunch, take a nap, check the internet, be lazy, etc. At about 7:00 or 7:30 pm, I head back up to campus and write until about midnight.

So far, it’s been working. I’ve been averaging 4k words per day pretty regularly these past couple of weeks. However, if I’m going to work on these projects, I might have to focus and up that wordcount a bit.

Therefore, I’m going to try to cut back on IMing while I’m writing. Usually, during the day, I’ve got gmail open on my browser and I check it from time to time. I’ve got a couple of friends with whom I usually keep a running chat for the entire day, which can be maddening when you’re trying to concentrate.

I’ve been thinking about cutting back on the IMing for the last few weeks, but thus far it hasn’t been too much of an issue. However, if I’m going to buckle down, something’s got to go. Sorry.

(Of course, it remains to be seen if I keep this resolution. Internet habits die hard.)

In unrelated news, I cooked the AWESOMEST chili today! Best chili of my life, and what’s even better, I cooked it in MASSIVE amounts! Here’s what I put in it:

corn
diced onions
ground beef
kidney beans
pinto beans
black beans
crushed tomatoes
diced jalapenos
plain yoghurt
spices

The secret ingredient was definitely the yoghurt. Adds a creamy texture, like sour cream without the unhealth stuffy. Also give it a rich and interesting flavor.

Good stuff!

Goal shift for Ashes

These past few weeks, I’ve been killing myself trying to write Ashes of the Starry Sea. I’ve made some good progress, as you can see on the sidebar. Today I broke 200 pages. Not too bad.

However, the pace has just been killing me. 4k words per day is something I can do…but 4k words per day on the same project? It’s burning me out.

What’s more, to keep up the pace, I’ll have to put all my other projects completely on hold for the month of July. That, or write MORE than 4k per day, which would be excruciatingly painful.

So I looked at my calendar tonight and figured that if I pushed back my self-imposed deadline for Ashes to the weekend before school starts, I can cut my daily wordcount in that book in half. 2k per day in Ashes–not bad. That I can do.

What’s more, with the other 2k, I’ll have enough room to work on my other projects, Genesis Earth 3.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0. I’m starting to get really excited for those, very motivated. For Bringing Stella Home, I’m practically chomping at the bit. I want to make that story shine!

Inshallah, juggling two projects at a time will be helpful, not harmful. During the school year, when I was juggling work, school, and writing, it didn’t work. Now, however, with writing the only major obligation, I’m hoping that two projects will help keep my creative mind fresh, if that makes sense. When I get burned out on Ashes at 2pm, I can switch to Genesis Earth and work on something that excites me. When I get burned out on that at 9pm, I’ll be excited about Ashes again. Etc etc.

Besides, if I want to be a professional writer, project juggling is an important skill I’ll need to learn. Inshallah, I’ll get it to work this time.

Wow! If all goes according to plan, I’ll have all three novels finished and polished before school starts at the end of August! July to write Genesis Earth 3.0, August to write Bringing Stella Home 2.0, and both months to finish Ashes of the Stary Sea 2.1. Yeah!

In other news, Charlie finished Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson and reviewed it on her blog. I was also reading Warbreaker, but about 200 pages in found that it just wasn’t working for me. I’ll probably finish it someday, but for now, it’s on hold.

I hate to say anything bad about it, since Brandon has been something of a mentor to me (and his Mistborn books are some of the best fantasy that I’ve read!), but I shared many of Charlie’s complaints with the book.

The biggest thing, however, was the way he fell into long, frequent info dumps about the world. Every time, I felt that it stopped the action and jolted me out of the story, like reading a college textbook. The world was okay, but the way he presented it just didn’t work for me.

That, and the way the characters acted. When Siri got carted off near the beginning to be the wife of the God king, the fact that she hardly showed any fear or anxiety about have sex with the guy just threw me out. She was just like “oh, well,” and was nervous about everything else EXCEPT for the sex part. From then on, I had believability issues with her character.

Finally, let me just say that when I write my steampunk flower novel, I want to make one of the characters a Circassian janissary. I just think it would be really cool to put a Circassian in the book, as either a good guy or a bad guy (or, more likely, a grey-area guy). If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the video below:

Bringing Stella Home 1.1 is finished

A few minutes ago, I finished the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home. This is my third completed novel. Huzzah!

It needs a ton of work, too…there’s no way I’m going to let this thing see the light of day, not until I finish the second draft.

In fact, I should probably set down tomorrow and start listing all the plot holes that need to be fixed in the revision, before I forget them all. It feels like there are dozens and dozens of holes. Not a good feeling.

Still, IT’S DONE!!! All that worrying and fretting and gtalk rants at Charlie along the lines of “GAH!! THIS NOVEL SUCKS!!!” have paid off, and I’ve got a draft I can work with! Inshallah, it should be downhill from here.

I remember when I wrote Genesis Earth, how all throughout the process of writing the rough draft, I felt that the work was terrible. And it’s true–the rough draft needed a lot of work. However, I think revising comes easier to me than drafting, and the process of writing the second draft was much, much smoother and more enjoyable than the first one.

So, what I have now is a hunk of rock roughly in the shape of a face. I can’t quite tell if it’s th face of a man, a woman, or a monkey, but it’s a face nonetheless. That’s better than an unworked block of stone, at least. Maybe someday it will be a decent work of art, if my hands don’t slip and I shave the nose off by accident.

I’ll let this draft sit for a few weeks, maybe a month, then pick it up again for the revision. In the meantime, on to other things.

And really, as rough as this draft may be, it feels awesome to finally have it finished. Reality sets in tomorrow, when once again I find myself staring at a blank page.

Bringing Stella Home 1.1

mss pages: 416
words: 118,596
file size: 791 KB
chapters: 21
start date: 6 May 2009
end date: 10 June 2009

POSTSCRIPT: Hahaha! MS Word just popped up a dialogue box saying “there are too many spelling and grammar errors to underline them all” or something like that! HILARIOUS.

Heaven’s library

2,943 words today, even though today was the first day of Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers. I’ve reached the major climax of the book–the moment I’ve been replaying over and over in my head. Perhaps this novel is not as bad as I’d thought–perhaps I can pull this off. The current incarnation is terrible, but I can see in my mind how good it can be in its second or third incarnation. Inshallah, I’ll pull it off.

Today was the first day of BYU’s writing conference, and it was great! The speaker in the last workshop I attended, Dandi Mackall, was exceptional. I don’t have my notes with me and the BYU library closes in twenty minutes, so I’ll recap the best part of her presentation, the story she told in the last five minutes.

She said that once she had a dream where she died and went to heaven (thank goodness!). When she got there, the angel who greeted her offered to show her around, and asked what she wanted to see first. Her answer? The library, of course!

In heaven’s library, she found shelves stretching as far as she could see, full of the very best books. She picked out a few and recognized some of her favorites, the ones that had impacted and changed her life.

After a while, though, she started to get a little disappointed: all of the books in heaven’s library were books we already had down on Earth. Why was that? Didn’t heaven have anything new–anything we hadn’t already seen down below?

“But all these books were here first,” said the angel.

Still, she couldn’t accept that as an answer, so the angel took her down a long, winding, narrow corridor. The deeper she went, the narrower and dustier it became, until she started to feel uneasily. This part of the library was dark and dirty. It was clear that hardly anybody every came down here

Finally, the angel led her to a door covered in cobwebs. He brushed them aside and opened the door, leading her inside. Here was a room many times larger than the first, with old, dusty bookshelves stretching higher than she could see.

She picked out a book and started reading through it. It was one she’d never heard of, but it grabbed her. She could tell that it was really good. She picked up another one, and realized that it was just the kind of book that one of her friends would have loved to read. She picked up another one, and realized that this one could have helped out another friend when she’d gone through a terrible life crisis.

All of this made her angry. “Why didn’t we have these books?” she asked the angel. “They are just as good as the ones in the other room. Why didn’t they make it down?”

“These are all the books that remain unwritten,” said the angel. “Each one of these is a book that a writer, somewhere below, has in them but fails to write down.

“This one is by a writer who just won’t let anyone touch her writing and give her the criticism she needs to improve her craft. This one is by a writer who doesn’t have the discipline to write consistently and finish what he starts. This one is by a writer who doubts her story and doesn’t think she can ever get it to work.”

At this, she nodded and let the angel lead her back out to the main room. As she left, she saw one final book near the door. It had her name on it.

What a great, encouraging story. I didn’t do nearly as good a job retelling it as Dandi did the first time, but it had a tremendous impact on me. I hope sharing it with you, it does something of the same.

For some reason I don’t understand, fate, God, or genetics (or some malicious combination of the three) conspired to turn me into a writer. I don’t write for fame or fortune; I write because I can’t not write. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m making a mistake trying to turn this into a career, into something that will feed myself and my future family. Looking at the millions of other floundering writers like myself, it’s easy to feel anxious. After all, only a tiny fraction of us will ever get published, let alone make a professional career out of this. Do I even have a fighting chance?

But then I hear a story like this one and I remember why it is that I write. Not for fame, fortune, publication, personal gratification, or even just because I can’t not do it. It’s because storytelling itself is important. It helps us connect with the world around us, to see its beauty and wonder. It helps us to appreciate ourselves and understand others. It stimulates our imaginations and, by so doing, helps us to life our eyes from the ground and see the divine potential that is all around us. It helps us to grow through vicarious experience–it helps us to live and to love.

Writing, at its best, is a sacred act, an important act, and if by grace we have been touched by inspiration and given a story to write, we should consider it noble and honorable to bring that story incarnate into the world, to touch the lives of others and lead them to what is good and true.

Outlining for a discovery writer

I’m almost finished with the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home, but I can’t shake the feeling that this draft really sucks and is full of holes.

Part of that is probably that I wrote the whole thing out of the top of my head. The only part that I really took the time to outline was the back histories of the mercenaries–and that gave me material to make the story a LOT stronger. This probably means that I need to do more outlining in the future.

I think I know now what to do and not to do. Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts for someone like me who is more of a “discovery writer”:

Do’s:

Keep a list of brief explanations for setting elements (history, cultures, traditions, technologies, magics, etc). These do not need to be full length articles, but they should have enough information to trigger your knowledge and/or record the things that you are likely to forget.
Keep profiles of all the major/viewpoint characters. These should:
–Briefly explain their backstory, including parents/family/origin, childhood, education/training, major formative events, etc. This part should be fairly extensive, and will help you discover even more things about your character as you write your story;
–Explain, in some detail, their motivations–not just their desires, but the basis behind their desires. These usually grow out of the backstory;
–List some basic stats: age, height, distinctive physical characteristics–basically, the stuff someone is going to get on a first impression;
–List their important strengths. This part can be sparse, but you should at least be aware of the things in which they are competent;
–List their important flaws/handicaps. This part can also be sparse, but it should be extensive enough to at least make you aware of and/or get you to think about the potential conflicts that will arise;
–Explain why this character is sympathetic–why the reader is going to like this character. You MUST make a conscious effort to think this out. As the writer, you will love your characters simply because you created them, but the reader will not share in this euphoria. Write this section like a pitch, as if you’re addressing the reader (I haven’t tried that yet, but it sounds like a good idea and I’m going to try it on my next project).
Keep an ongoing list of all the major plot conflicts, with a checklist for each one of things that must/should happen in order to make the conflict as juicy and story-rich as possible. These lists should be sparse: one sentence to explain the conflict (character vs. character), and each point of the checklist should also be one line. You will flesh out each of these points as you go along, and you may even add new conflicts and get rid of old ones as your story takes shape.

Tip: None of these sections needs to be extensive. Sometimes, it will work better if you simply cut and past excerpts from your novel in the appropriate places in your outline. This may be especially helpful for setting elements and minor characters.

Tip: Not all of your outlining has to be done before you start writing. The outline should be an organic document that expands and changes with your draft, and your best ideas will come as you write the story, not as you write the outline. The outline exists to serve the story, not the other way around.

Don’ts:

Don’t feel that you have to write encyclopedia-style articles on all of your setting/worldbuilding elements. You are the only one who will see these, so you don’t have to extensively edit or proofread these sections.
Don’t try to explain every detail of your characters’ personalities. When you have a clear backstory, these will come out naturally. To write believable characters, figure out the basics and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and let them take over.
Don’t outline the plot; outline the major plot conficts with their necessary events, but expect these to change as you write. This should be the most flexible part of your outline.
NEVER feel that you have to fit your story to the outline. The outline exists to serve the draft, not the other way around. Use it as a reference and a set of guidelines, not a set of rules. You will discover your story as you write and daydream about it, not as you write your outline.
Don’t worry if your outline is spotty and full of holes. You’re not writing this to an uninformed audience; you’re writing this to your future self, who can fill in the holes quite well. In fact, your outline only exists to fill in the holes in your future self’s head and point him in a clear direction.
Don’t worry if your story gets ahead of your outline on the rough draft. For discover writers, outlines are more of an after-the-fact thing anyway, and your outline will continue to grow and expand in the rewrite. In fact, you may find it more productive to write the rough draft in a burst of frenzied creative energy, leaving 90% of your outlining for the rewrite.

These are a few of the things that work for me, as a discovery writer. I haven’t tried out everything on the do’s list, but looking back, I can see that they would have helped tremendously if I’d done them while writing Bringing Stella Home.

Just because you’re a discovery writer, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep an outline. It just means that you need to keep a different kind of outline, one that will enhance your discovery writing process rather than constrain it.

Fine tuning and David Gemmell ROCKS!!!

With Danke’s help, I’ve tweaked the site yet some more: updated the header image, put in the site description under the title, moved the comments link at the bottom of each post (where it really belongs–having it at the top is confusing), etc. Now, the site is even better than ever!

All this playing around with CSS and the site code is making me wish I had majored in computer science or graphic design–this stuff is kind of fun! I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a ton of job opportunities for graphic design (though I haven’t really been looking)–maybe this is something I could teach myself and figure it out while on the job? It sounds like fun, but where to start?

Speaking of which, I need to do something useful with my photoblog. I’ll bet I could make money off of it, I’m just not sure what the best way to approach it is. I’m thinking a “tip the artist” button somewhere unobtrusive, a “buy this image” kind of thing, perhaps some kind of a print-on-demand coffee-table book…well, probably the BEST place to start is to drive more traffic to the site. 30 unique visitors per day isn’t all that impressive. =P

In miscellaneous updates, I picked up a book by David Gemmell at the library. Gemmell writes some amazing heroic fantasy, and I’ve realized that that’s kind of what I’m shooting for with Bringing Stella Home. I’m reading some other novels, too, but none of them have really grabbed me (in fact, I put a couple of them down just out of disgust and content issues).

This Gemmell book I picked up, however, is awesome! Hooked me on the first page, with some fast action, engaging characters, and interesting philosophical reflections. Unlike the other stuff I’ve been reading, most of which I’ve been reading over the past few weeks, I’ll probably finish this Gemmell book in a few days. Good stuff!

And…it’s past 2am. Bah.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that I decided to pick up Hero in Exile and revise it.

I’ve completely revised my outline (translation: I threw it out wholesale and decided to play it by ear, with a vague idea of the ending instead of a firm plan) and decided to give one of the side characters a viewpoint, since I don’t think the main protagonist has enough of a story to drive the entire novel by himself. Renamed him from “Tristan” to “Cavin,” and I’ll probably change the title as well.

The first chapter is still shaky, but meh, it’s good enough for a first draft. I’ll probably throw it out once I’ve written the ending and start somewhere else.

There are two reasons I decided to pick up this project–three, actually: 1) I enjoy writing in the universe of Bringing Stella Home, and Hero in Exile is where I got most of my setting ideas for that novel; 2) I need practice writing endings, so I didn’t want to leave this as an unfinished project, and; 3) I feel I need a second project to work on when I get exhausted with the first one.

Hopefully, instead of getting tripped up, can recharge my creative batteries for the one while working on the other. At least, that’s the theory; we’ll see how it translates into practice.