Desert Stars – Page 17 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!

A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols. Fascinating stuff! Really epic! Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols. When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?

This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow! This would be so cool as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.

Here’s what I came up with. I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.

First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization. That much is obvious. The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.

The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle. Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.

The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer. Similarly, the Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military. Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high. Basically, every Hameji ship is a warship.

Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.

First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian. That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature. When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise. There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated. What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job. Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.

In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community. But basically, it was rule by strict tradition. With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law. Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe. They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.

Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal. They believe in a ruling class and a following class. Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.

Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born. Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock. Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.

You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive. They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing. Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.

Mongols in space. How cool is that? It’s definitely got potential, I think. I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict. We’ll see which one ends up getting written. It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth and The Phoenix of Nova Terra get written.

Change of plans

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit. I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story. I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later. The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character. From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it. In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on. Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind. A lot harder than Phoenix. With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was. Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding. I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider. The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space. I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next. It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this. But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard. This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel. Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum. With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step. I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back. Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler. I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward. What’s more, I’m excited about it again. When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely. I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas. As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off. I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better. Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins. I think I can do it. Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less. I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words. With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day. I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter! Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it. I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing. I’m excited. I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009. One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes. It basically details where I see the story going from here. I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense. However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time. When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner. Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far. On to Genesis Earth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section one complete

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

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

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

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

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

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

🙂

Hooray!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vomitous

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

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

Unstuck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satisfaction

Yes. I finally broke through this one scene that’s been giving me trouble for the last few days. I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in writer’s avoidance, and I’ve had that for the past ten days or so because of this one chapter. I’ve really wanted–and really needed–to get beyond this section of the book, but this one part of Tristen’s journey has really been hanging me up. Now that the climax has passed, I’ve only got a few hundred words before the next chapter. Thank goodness.

As frustrating as the last few days have been, and as frustrating as it was to slog through 1,700 words to close up the major fight scene in this chapter, it felt really satisfying to have it behind me. These last few days, I haven’t been writing very regularly, and I’ve also felt kind of…down, a little. I don’t know if it’s connected to my frustrations with this novel or with something else, but it just really feels good to know that I wrote 1,704 words today and got past a major hurdle.

Productivity. What an aphrodisiac.

If I finish the chapter tonight with another 500 words or so, then that’ll bring the 7 day wordcount meter up around 5,500 or so. If I write another 1k or 2k tomorrow, that’ll push it up around 7,000. If I write another 3k or 4k on Friday (and that’s not unreasonable–I’ve got the whole day off), I can probably be in the red. If I keep up with at least 2k for the rest of the break, I can have both counters in the red for at least three days.

And hopefully, before Monday comes around, I’ll be at that part of the book where I want to end up–with my main character offworld, headed for his mother’s home planet.

There are other things about this book that I want to talk about, but the library is closing and I have to go. Fortunately, I went ahead and bought that tiny little laptop I was talking about in the previous post, so come next week I won’t be limited to public computers outside of my apartment. I’m excited to get this thing in the mail! Now that’s going to be satisfying!

playing catchup

Holy cow! I feel like I haven’t been blogging or writing hardly at all in the past week. Last year, I was so enthusiastic about the writing–and I still am, it’s just that school has freaking blindsided me. I had a 10 page history paper to write for today, and it threw off my schedule big time.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving break is almost upon us, and that means FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, you’d better believe it! I’ll be here in Utah for the break, probably having Thanksgiving dinner with my sisters and their husbands’ families. In the meantime, though…FREEDOM!!!!!!! Ah, how sweet! I am so looking forward to it!

So, to help me catch up with the writing, here’s what I plan to do, starting tomorrow. Every day, I’ll wake up early (I hate sleeping in anyways) and start off the day with some writing.

If I can get in just 500 words each morning, that will be awesome. I always put off writing until the end of the day, after I’m already tired from running around juggling fifty different things at once. By that time, I don’t want to write–I want to veg out on a computer game. As a result, it’s been hard to keep a schedule–something I absolutely must do if I’m going to be anything more than a hobby writer.

If I start each day with writing, that will help me in a couple of ways. Not only will I tackle the day’s wordcount before I’m too tired to do anything except rot in my unproductive disgustingness, but I’ll be thinking about the story a lot more throughout the day. That will help me to keep the story moving.

Right now, I feel like I’m still in the first third of the story, not even halfway through with the thing. I really, really want to finish this before the end of January–if I don’t do that, it’s going to be really difficult to have three polished novels by World Fantasy 2009. So, that means that before the end of the month, I need to get Tristen off of the planet and into the Mormons-in-space society that I have envisioned.

Except, I really don’t have it envisioned yet–nothing concrete, anyways. Augh! So much to do!

So this whole break, I’m going to try and hit 4,000 words every day. If I can’t do that, at least I can do 2,000. And before school starts again, I want Tristen to be off of this planet and into the next section of the book.

Oh, and I’m going to blog more. There’s so much that I want to discuss here that I just haven’t been able to post for lack of time (as well as general disorganization and disgusting unproductiveness). So, more updates during the break.

I’m playing catchup. Let’s hope that the vacation is awesomely productive as well as refreshingly liberating.

Pay no attention to the wordcount meters

That’s right. It’s 2:40 am and I just finished up for tonight. 1,924 words–that should catch me up a bit for missing the past couple of days. At least chapter four is finished right now. Some of you might throw the book across the room if you were reading this in print, but I don’t feel bad about it. At least I can always cut stuff out.

And now, since I’m operating under the illusion that I can get all my homework done tomorrow in the morning, I’d better go to bed. Goodnight.