Category: Heart of the Nebula

Spinning out

Just a quick post before I go to bed…and I really should, because it’s freaking late.

I feel like I’ve been getting more and more busy, yet less and less productive.  It’s @%$! frustrating.  In the last two weeks, I’ve had numerous job applications and interviews (though not as many interviews as I’d like), tons of complicated paperwork for the EPIK job in Korea I’m hoping to take come September, the only TEFL course I’m taking (in which I feel I am constantly behind), and all sorts of other random crap.

Oh, and then there’s writing.  I’ve been averaging only about 1.5k words per day, which is kind of pathetic when you realize that I don’t have regular work.

I wish I could say that I’ve been spending a lot of this extra time socializing, but sadly that isn’t the case.  I haven’t gone out on a date in months, and with each passing week I drift further and further from the people in my ward.  I’ve been pretty active with Quark, though, so that sort of makes up for things, but not enough.

One of the good things, though, is that I’ve been getting up relatively early all week–and by “relatively,” I mean before 9:00 am.  Next week’s goal: go to bed by 1:00, and get up before 8:00.  The timestamp on this post can probably tell you how much of a head start I’ve got.

Oh, and I have been exercising regularly.  That’s a good thing, I suppose.  Haven’t seen many results of that, except perhaps a slightly more active lifestyle, but it’s fun and I’ll keep it up.  Running is where I catch up on old podcasts, and I subscribe to quite a few.

I don’t know if this late night rant is useful in any way, except maybe to empathize with what it’s like when you’re busy all the time but never feel like you’re getting enough done.  I guess most people feel like that at one point or another, but it’s good to look back and see what you accomplished, like I did here.  For all the spinning out, I suppose it wasn’t a total wash.  And really, it almost never is.

But yeah, the main thing that makes me angsty is that I never feel that I’m writing enough.  I hear from everyone that with the way the publishing world is changing, fast writers have a huge advantage over slow ones.  And I know I have the ability to write fast, it’s just that I never really do it consistently.

Fast, in my mind, is 4k words or more per day.  I can hit it when I’m on, but that’s fairly rare.  Most of the time, I average between 2k and 2.5k, and my personal deadlines reflect that.

At least with ITND, however, I’ve been writing consistently every day…except today, when I took time off to revamp a short story (“From the Ice Incarnate”).  But my wordcount graph  hasn’t had any huge spikes or valleys, which is good I suppose.  The novel is coming along, if slowly, and that’s a good sign.

Anyhow, enough of this rant.  Time for bed.

A Fascinating Moral Dilemma

For FHE* tonight, we had an interesting discussion about ethical dilemmas and moral absolutes.  It started with the following question:

If you were a prisoner of war, would you consent to have sex with the prison warden if it would set you free?

The overwhelming answer, predictably enough (at least from a bunch of Mormons), was “heck no!” So then, the teacher upped the ante by asking: what if it would free one hundred other prisoners who were scheduled to die the next day?

I was a little surprised (but not really) when I was the only one who admitted that I probably would.  After all, there’s precedent for something similar in the Book of Mormon, and a very real question of whether or not the blood of the dead prisoners would be on your hands if you didn’t.  Also, I would still consider it rape, since I draw a distinction between the act of sex and the act of saving lives–IOW, the sex itself isn’t strictly consensual; it’s the cost of saving the other prisoners.

Laying aside completely the question of whether or not you can take the warden at his word, it’s a very interesting dilemma, and one that gets at the heart of what people really believe.  The fact that so many of my Mormon peers wouldn’t sleep with the guy tells you a lot about Mormon culture.  My follow up question would be: if it meant freeing yourself and the other prisoners, would you kill the warden?  Because I’m pretty sure most of them would say “heck, yes!” even though murder is typically considered to be a more heinous sin than fornication.

But anyway, the point here is that all of this makes excellent story material.  For your characters, what are the moral lines that they absolutely will not cross?  The ones where they’re a little more fuzzy?  What, for example, would a character be like whose method for choosing between two undesirable courses of action was to flip a coin–no matter the stakes?  And what about the characters like Ender Wiggins who flip the dilemma on its head by stabbing the giant in the eye?

This is the kind of stuff I love to read, and the stuff I love to write as well.  I’m hoping to pull off a really good one in Into the Nebulous Deep, but not for a couple of chapters.  Gotta set things up, get the story moving, and give the romance a little momentum.  But once the characters are all fleshed out and the stakes are insanely high, that’s when the fun begins.  Bwahahahaha!!

Man, I would make an awesome prison warden. ;P

Image courtesy postsecret.

*FHE (Family Home Evening) is, for young single Mormons, roughly the equivalent of a college-aged church youth group meeting.

Momentum slowly building

I wrote about 2.2k words today in ITND–not a bad amount, but I feel as if it could have been much more.  I think I spent more time thinking about the novel than I did actually writing it, which is either 1) a sign that I’m procrastinating too much, or 2) a sign that I’m slowly building momentum.

Trouble is, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.  When I haven’t worked on a project for a while, I’m often restless for a couple of days before I settle back into the zone.  The weird thing, though, is that while I’m pacing restlessly around, I’ll be writing out lines of dialog or paragraphs of description in my head.  Weird.

I think I’ve got a good idea where I’m going with this project, though.  The thing that hung me up on the first attempt was that I did a poor job introducing one of the viewpoint characters (Kyla Jeppson), even though I did a good job outlining her.  I’ve given that scene to my online writing group, so hopefully they’ll give me some good feedback tomorrow.  However, I still have to read the other submissions, and it’s getting late, so I’ll probably just cut this short and go to bed.

But first…what the heck, provo craigslist?

I swear, one hundred years from now, our contemporary attitudes towards women will seem as wrong-headed and despicable as the last century’s attitudes seems to us.  Honestly, which is worse: turning women into domestic house slaves, or turning them into mindless sex objects?  And we consider ourselves feminists…

…but that’s a post for another time.  G’night!

Change of plans

So I was going to start Edenfall this week…but then, I realized I wanted to spend some more time in the universe of Worlds Away from Home, so I decided to work on Into the Nebulous Deep instead.

ITND is a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior.  Basically, it grew out of the realization that James’s story wasn’t anywhere near finished.  Like WAFH, I’m trying to throw in some romantic elements…how well that works out remains to be seen.  I’ll probably get it all wrong on the first draft, but make it shine in subsequent drafts.

Anyhow, here’s the soundtrack I’ve put together.  Most of the songs are from ocremix, but there’s also a good bit of U2 and a little Daft Punk, as well as a couple chiptunes that probably no one’s heard of.  Man, I love chiptunes.

I’m going to try to write through this rough draft as quickly as possible.  Right now, I’ve got a deadline for April 16th, but I wonder if I can finish before that.

Part of that has to do with my new goal of two novels per year; I want to train myself to write quickly, so I can be putting out more work.  More than that, though, I want to try and tap into my creativity in a deeper way.  If I can train myself to write quickly, I’ll be less prone to self-edit, which hopefully will help the creative part of my mind to flourish more freely.  That was certainly the case with WAFH 2.1, and I want to do it again.

I stopped ITND 1.0 back in December in order to work on Bringing Stella Home; not because it wasn’t working, but because BSH needed a little more work.  After that, I ended up picking up WAFH.  Now, it’s time to go back and finish this project.

Change in direction

Just a quick update on things before I go to bed.

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided to put Into the Nebulous Deep on hold for the time being.  The main reason for this is that it’s a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior, and if the first one doesn’t sell…yeah, not the best business decision.

I figure the best way to do it is to have a series of indirectly linked standalone novels set in the same world.  That way, a publisher could pick up any one of them after rejecting all the others, but if you want to bundle them into a series and sell them together, you can do that too.

That’s my strategy–I like the universe I built for Mercenary Savior, and I’m going to keep it for the foreseeable future, but for now, the trilogies and duologies will have to wait.  In any case, I’ve written down my major ideas for ITND, so I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up where I left off if/when MS sells.

Instead, I’m going to start working through the second draft of Worlds Away from Home. It needs a ton of work, but having finished the rough draft, I know that the story has potential.  At this point, I’m actually very enthusiastic about it, so hopefully that will help drive momentum.

Right now, I’m in the outlining stage.  I’m taking a page from Dan Wells and using his seven point story structure to draw out all the plot lines and character arcs.  When I did this for MS 4.0, I had to outline about fifteen arcs before I felt it was sufficiently tight; it will probably be the same for WAFW 2.0 as well.

Currently, I’m in the middle of outlining chapter six.  If all goes well, I’ll finish outlining and start writing by the end of the week.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of submitting.  Sent out another short story to Leading Edge–oh, and by the way, they accepted a poem of mine, so expect to see that in a forthcoming issue.  I also submitted the latest draft (5.0) of Genesis Earth to a few agents, so hopefully that will lead to something positive.

In other news, I’m looking for a job again.  Oh joy.  I’m hoping things will work out with the wilderness job, but if not, I still need something to tide me over for the Christmas season.  It’s stressful, but at least I’m not broke yet, which is good.  If I can’t find work and have to buy gear for the wilderness training, however, I just might be.

I’m confident things will work out, however.  I’ve found that they always do, even if not in the way I wanted or expected.  Just keep swimming.

In the meantime, check out this AWESOME 8-bit remix of one of the tracks leaked from Daft Punk’s upcoming album for the movie Tron. Dude…this makes me so incredibly happy.  And the 8-bit art!  I nabbed it and turned it into my avatar for the Quark forums.  In case you want to use it, here’s a copy.

8-bit Daft Punk FTW! The only thing more epic would be if Daft Punk and E.S. Posthumus joined forces–but if that happened, hosts of heavenly angels would descend upon our planet and usher in an era of global peace and universal prosperity. But dude, I would give my firstborn son to acquire that music.

You laugh, but I’m only half joking…

Thanksgiving report from Texas

So for Thanksgiving this year, I drove down with my sister and brother in law to have Thanksgiving in Houston with my other sister’s family.  It’s Friday night, and I’m about to hit the sack to get prepped for the long 24+ hour drive back to Utah, but let me say, this vacation has been great!

It’s so good to spend time with family, especially when you live across the country and can’t see each other very often.  My niece has grown so much in the past year, and she is so freaking cute it’s unbelievable.  Earlier tonight, we were watching slide shows on my sister’s projector and playing around with my niece: “Where’s Aunt Dot?  Where’s Oopah?  Where’s Uncle Joe?” Heh, Uncle Joe.  I will do my best to live up to the awesomeness of that title.

Thanksgiving dinner was AMAZING.  Holy freaking crap, my sisters can cook.  They put together a traditional dinner from scratch, and everything was perfect.  I’m so glad they’re sending a bunch of leftovers with us on the drive tomorrow, because I would much rather subsist on that than random junk food from gas stations.

Besides family, though, one of the coolest parts of the vacation was visiting the Houston Space Center and seeing mission control and one of the original Saturn V rockets.  That’s right–see that room in the picture?  I was there.

Which immediately begged the question: Why am I not in space right now?  Seriously, I would do just about anything to go up in space.  Thinking about the Pilgrims made me think about colonizing other planets, and how the difficulties may be similar and yet different.  It also made me think about my latest novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, which (I’m hoping) is a colonization story set in space, and how I can use some of the stuff from the Pilgrims in my own work.

Speaking of which, the writing has been going very slow recently.  A lot of it has to do with interruptions from the vacation (which frankly are more important), but it also has to do with my growing frustrations with the current project.  I’m about 15k in the rough draft of ITND, and…it just doesn’t seem as good as my other work.  Of course, it’s just a mental thing–none of my rough drafts has ever been any good–but man, it’s tough to get through.

To complicate things, I’m going to have to find a job for the Christmas season, at least to tide me over.  I’m really hoping to get that wilderness job, but the training starts January 13th, and I don’t have the funds to spend all my time writing, like I have this past month.

I’ll know for sure the first week of December whether I’ve been invited to the training–and if I am, it’s going to throw a real kink in my writing routine.  Each job shift lasts a full week, during which time I’ll be completely unplugged, living in the wilderness.  I might get some time to work on poetry or short stories, but no novels.

The upside is that I get six days off completely free to do whatever I want, but I’m worried that it’ll be difficult, at least at first, to regain sufficient momentum in that short time.  I’m sure I can get used to it eventually, but for the first few months, it will probably be tough.

For that reason, I want to get as far in ITND as I can before January 13th, perhaps even finish it (HAHAHAHA!!!  As if that’s going to happen).  So the fact that I haven’t progressed from this one scene for like a week is really killing me.  Throw in a temporary job for the Christmas season, and I’ll probably go crazy.

That’s what my writing angst says, anyways.  In other words, everything is fine and life is great.  Now I’m going to get some sleep before driving across the freaking country all day tomorrow and Sunday.  Night!

Juggling projects isn’t a good antidote to procrastination

Yeah, the title basically says it all.  I’m working on Genesis Earth 5.0 and Into the Nebulous Deep 1.0, and while I’m doing really well in the one, I’m not keeping up so much in the other.

First, Genesis Earth. Since I finished the previous draft more than a year ago, I thought I’d find a lot of problems, especially with my prose.  Instead, while a lot of the sentence/paragraph level stuff needs tightening, I’m finding to my surprise that the writing isn’t all that bad.

Today, I breezed through over 8k words, and that between running, donating plasma, FHE, and a bunch of other distractions.  If I put even a moderate amount of effort into this, I can have it finished before next week.  That’s good, because I had an agent at World Fantasy request to see it; if I can put it on her desk before Thanksgiving, that can only be a good thing.

But as for my other project, ITND 1.0…yeah, it’s not coming along as well as I’d hoped.  The reasons are stupid, too–mostly just lost momentum and writer’s avoidance.

Right now, I’m stuck in a scene where I’m trying to build romantic tension between two characters.  I feel like I have a decent handle on who they are…but for some reason, it feels a little too shallow.  Maybe that’s because I’m still discovering who these characters are, maybe it’s because I tend to go deeper than most–or maybe it’s just because it’s the kind of scene that’s hard to get into, but once you’re in, it really flows.  I just haven’t forced myself to write it–maybe once I do, these problems will go away.

I do feel like I’m doing a pretty good job setting up the story.  Last week, I ran the first chapter through my online writing group, and while it definitely had issues, everyone said that they would keep reading if this was a book they’d picked up off the shelf.  That tells me that at least I’m starting in the right place.

The characters, though, and the conflict…I worry that it’s not as deep or as hard-hitting as the first book, Mercenary Savior. I skimmed over that book just a couple days ago before sending it out to a friend from World Fantasy, and…wow.  I don’t want to brag, but I think I did a good job with that one.  A damn good job.

So can I pull off that kind of depth and impact in the second book?  That’s the fear, that it won’t live up to the first one.  And certainly, the rough draft won’t be as good–not by a long shot.  But the subsequent drafts?  I don’t know.

Maybe I should just write and worry about it later, though.  When I was in the middle of Worlds Away from Home, I constantly thought to myself how crappy the draft was.  When I got to the end, though, and looked back on how far the story had come, I realized that it had potential to be at least as powerful as Mercenary Savior–perhaps even more.  And to be honest, that came as quite a surprise.

I don’t know.  I hope I’m not just deceiving myself–it can be hard, when you’re toiling in obscurity, to separate the truth from your own self-deception.  But for now, things are going well–I’m making good progress in Genesis Earth, and while Into the Nebulous Deep has lost a lot of momentum, all it really needs is a good solid block of undistracted writing to get it going again.  Life is good.

Word splurge and refining the query

So this morning, I worked on the fifth draft of Genesis Earth while Facebook chatting with some friends I made from World Fantasy.  Next thing I know, it’s 4:30 and I’ve revised through 6.5k words.

To be fair, most of that work was pretty simple–polishing the prose, cutting unnecessary verbage, and the like.  But…wow.  Talk about a splurge.

Because of that, though, I didn’t get any work done in my other project, Into the Nebulous Deep. However, I did do something I’ve been needing to do since before World Fantasy: draft a query letter for Mercenary Savior. Here it is:

Dear _______,

My name is Joseph Vasicek, and I am writing to query my science fiction novel, Mercenary Savior.  I thought my work would be a good fit for you because ______.

As the galactic empire slowly collapses under the onslaught of the starfaring Hameji nomads, the sixteen year old James McCoy sets out to rescue his older brother and sister, Ben and Stella, from the Hameji conquerors.

Things look bleak until he meets Danica Nova, captain of a down-and-out mercenary company, who takes him in and becomes his mentor.  James reminds Danica of her brother, whom she failed to save when the empire slaughtered her family years ago.  Now, she hopes to find some redemption from her demons by saving James from his own.

However, as the two of them spiral onto a collision course with destiny, neither of them realizes that Stella has become a concubine to the Hameji overlord–and that Ben has been brainwashed and made an elite shock trooper in the unit sent to hunt them down.

Mercenary Savior is approximately 120,000 words long.  While it stands on its own as a complete story, it has potential for at least one direct sequel and several indirectly connected novels set in the same universe.

My previous publications include one short story published in the December 2009 issue of Leading Edge.  I have also won first and second place in the annual Mayhew short story contest at Brigham Young University (for 2009 and 2007 respectively).  In addition, I keep a regular blog at http://onelowerlight.com/writing.

Thank you very much for your consideration.  As noted in your submission guidelines, I have included _____.

Cordially,

Joseph Vasicek

So what do you think?  Does the pitch work?  Does it resonate well, or is it boring / cliched / confusing in any way?  Any thing else egregious that I should fix before I send this out?  Please let me know!

I really suck at submitting stuff.  Right now, I’ve only got three or four queries out on Genesis Earth, and one on Mercenary Savior. Like most things, though, the only way to change that is with practice.  By next week, I want to send out at least five queries on Mercenary Savior and have the synopsis ready to go.

Also, my friend from World Fantasy had an interesting suggestion for me: try to break into the small presses with my science fiction stuff, to build a name for myself, and work my way up from there.

This runs directly contrary to Dave Wolverton’s break in with a bang philosophy, but it makes sense; very few major publishers seem to be publishing much space opera these days (with the exception of Baen).  From what I gathered at World Fantasy, science fiction is a difficult sell these days, and several sf writers are going this route.

I could write more, on other subjects, but that’s enough for now.  Good frickin night.

10k words and going strong

Today I crossed the 10k mark for my newest project, Into the Nebulous Deep. It’s a little bit behind in terms of nanwrimo, but I’m confident it will be on par before the end of the week.  I wrote 2.6 words today, and I’m hoping to keep that fairly steady as I move on into the month.

Since I’m between jobs at the moment, I’m hoping to get my daily word counts up to between 4k and 5k and keep it there consistently.  Sounds daunting, but I know it’s possible because I did it back in June and July of 2009.  If I could enjoy that kind of productivity again, that would be awesome.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a good, hard look at my routine from that time to figure out how I did it.  Here are some of the key things that stood out to me:

1) I was waking up each morning in a timely manner.
2) I was exercising regularly.
3) I was splitting my time between two projects (one revision, one drafting).
4) I would leave my apartment and go somewhere else to write.
5) I had a short ritual I’d go through to focus myself on the project.

Of these, I think the most important were 1, 2, and 3.  A strong, early start to the day is always helpful, and exercising is not only good for you physically, it boosts your creativity for a short period of time as well.  For that reason, I recently bought a pair of good running shoes and started running.  Today was the first day, and it felt great!

Three was the most surprising, because whenever I was busy with school, I found it impossible to juggle two projects at once.  But out of school, it makes sense: work on the first one until you hit a rough patch, then shift gears and work on the other until you find what you need to pick up the first one again.  It helps to exercise two parts of the brain, so juggling between revision and drafting t is probably for the best.

As for going somewhere else, I’m reluctant to do that since my only other computer is a tiny little netbook–but if things get rough, you may start seeing me around the Provo Library more often.  I remember over the summer, this one chapter in Worlds Away from Home was just killing me, so I took my netbook to the Provo river trail, sat down on a bench, and muscled my way through it.  It surprised me how quickly I punched through it–because if I were at my apartment, I know it would never have gotten done.  It was just too tough.

The last one was kind of a quirky little thing for the second draft of Mercenary Savior (I called it Bringing Stella Home back then), but it would be a good idea to do the same with these other projects.  For Mercenary Savior, it involved watching the opening credits of Fistful of Dollars.  For Into the Nebulous Deep, I’m not sure what the ritual will be, but whatever it is I’ll make it awesome–without spending too much time on it.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on on the writing front.  In response to a nibble from an agent, I’m doing a fifth draft of Genesis Earth, but I haven’t gotten past the first chapter (which I posted).  Soon, I’d like to be doing about 2k to 2.5k on Nebulous Deep per day, and 2k to 2.5k in the revision of Genesis Earth.

There’s more, but I’m starting to fall asleep at my keyboard, so it’s time to wrap this up and post it.  Keep up the writing, nano-ninjas, and good luck!

New projects and other stuff

So I started the sequel to Mercenary Savior today; I figure I can take a couple months off to finish the rough draft, then leave it in the trunk until the first one sells.

The working title of this one is Into the Nebulous Deep, which captures the main premise quite nicely (though let me know if it doesn’t jive with you).  It takes place five years after the events of Mercenary Savior. James is a lieutenant in the Colony’s civil defense forces, and has made a name for himself as an ace gunboat commander.

The basic premise is that the Colony is falling into economic ruin and must therefore make a mass exodus in order to survive.  Their only real option is to flee into the Good Hope Nebula, where FTL drives don’t work and the Hameji can’t follow them.

Deep in the nebula are newly born stars with planets and proto-planets, and they hope to re-establish themselves there.  Of course, nothing happens quite that smoothly, and James is going to find himself putting out fires most of the time.

While all that is going on, however, I hope to put him in the middle of a love triangle.  I have the ending of it planned out, and it can ONLY happen this way in a science fiction novel.  Oh man, the twist is going to be way interesting–and incredibly hard to pull off well.  I’m up for a challenge, though, and I can already tell this one is going to be fun.

For some reason, things worked out so that I started this novel on November 1st.  Because of that, I suppose I’m doing it for a nanowrimo–since hey, the rough draft is probably going to be between 120k to 140k words long, and I want to finish it before January.  Sounds tough, but I’ve got the money saved up to take off a few weeks and work on my writing, so that’s what I plan to do.

In loosely related news, I hope to start running soon.  My brother in law ran a marathon this year, and he’s going to help me get set up.  Basically, I need to get in shape for the wilderness job I hope to train for in January, and also because hey, I need to take better care of my body.  Besides, I’ve found that exercising boosts my writing tremendously, which is something I definitely need.  Exercise = win/win/win.

The most pressing thing on my mind now, however, is the article I need to write about the history of “the class that wouldn’t die.” I’m working on a very tight deadline, and absolutely must produce.  I wish I hadn’t been so flaky with the previous deadlines, but it is a volunteer magazine and I have had other pressing things taking up my time.  Not any more–I’ll get it done right away.

In the meantime, I’m tired and must get some sleep.  I wish I could function like one of Stephanie Myer’s vampires, but reality is a harsh and unforgiving mistress.  One of these days, though, I’ll be free of her–just you wait!