Hameji Cycle – Page 25 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Where will Joe go?

Just a quick and dirty update before bed, because hey it’s been forever since I’ve posted to this thing.

Holy crap, this last week was CRAZY for my family! Youngest sister got married, middle sister had a baby, and oldest sister…well, I’m not at liberty to discuss that yet. But congratulations to all of you!

It was fun to get out and see everyone, but now that I’m back, man I’m looking forward to the next month. Wrote 2.5k words today in ITND, only two more chapters and an epilogue to go.

And strangely enough, I don’t feel like the project totally sucks. Usually by this point, my fingertips are bleeding it hurts so much to write. But no, even though this is a rough draft and it needs some major story level edits, I don’t feel that it totally sucks (knock on wood).

Now, whether that’s a sign that I’m maturing as a writer, or simply self-delusion …your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, actually.

One thing I’m really wondering about, though, are my post-summer plans. Originally, I was thinking of taking a year to teach English someplace where I could earn enough money to live off of until I break in with my novels. Now…well, I’m not so sure. I’d love to go back to the Middle East, or maybe someplace like Georgia on the TLG program, but Korea…I dunno.

As some of you know, I’m in a local Provo band. Right now, we’re just writing music, but it’s coming along quite well, and we’re hoping to start putting on shows in August. Except…that’s when I’d be leaving, if I were going to Korea. For a year.

Also, I’d miss out on some prime opportunities to build my writing career, like Worldcon, and that seems rather foolish if what I really want to do is be a writer.

The TLG program looks interesting because 1) it’s closer to the Middle East, geographically and culturally, 2) it’s much shorter, and 3) the program isn’t quite as rigorous. In short, it seems like a great way to test out whether I can juggle a TEFL career with my writing, whether I’m suited to TEFL, and whether dropping everything to travel for a while is really a good idea.

Trouble is, the program doesn’t pay much, so I wouldn’t be any better off financially once I get back to the states. Also, if I sign up now, I’d still be there through much of the fall, cutting me out of band stuff.

But if I do decide to stay in Utah for the medium term, I feel like I should at least get something out of it–like, say, a master’s degree. In something. Not sure what yet, but I’ll start looking into that ASAP.

Man, I can just imagine my parents cringing as they read this…

But I still haven’t nixed Korea as an option. The applications are still going through, and I plan on completing the online TEFL course this month. Perhaps finishing the course will help me find out if this is what I want to do. I don’t know.

But what I really want to do (besides go back to the Middle East) is write. And I’m not going to lose sight of that, no matter what happens.

Back in Mass

Mass = Massachusetts = “back east,” for all you unwashed Utahans!

My sister’s wedding is this weekend, so I’m back at my parents’ place helping them get everything set up. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow, but I’ve got my netbook and will probably get a couple good hours of writing in.

I managed to write a bit on the plane today, but not as much as I was hoping. My goal is still to finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 by May 14th; I’ve got about 15k-20k left to go, and since I’m taking the next few weeks off to work on writing projects, I shouldn’t have any problems meeting that deadline.

Yesterday, I took the unedited manuscript of Genesis Earth and formatted it nice and pretty so my friend Laura could read it on her Kindle, and…man, it looks like a real book! There’s something about seeing your work in the actual form that people are going to read it in that is just…well, for lack of a better word, magical. It’s definitely motivated me to get GE up quickly, as well as Journey to Jordan. More on that in the next few days and weeks to come.

It’s getting late out here and I’d better get some sleep, but before I do, I want to put a plug in for my new favorite webcomic, The Zombie Hunters. Ross Wolfe, Quark’s renowned zombie expert, introduced me to the comic a couple months ago, and I have been totally hooked ever since.

The comic is set in our world after the zombie apocalypse, where a band of five thousand survivors struggles to rebuild civilization on an island that was previously the site of a major research campus. The zombie plague has a dormant phase, where the infected can live normal lives, but turn into zombies when they die.

The infected live in segregated barracks as second class citizens, but teams of them regularly venture out into the wastelands to salvage supplies from the zombie-infested ruins. The comic basically centers around one of these teams of zombie hunters; their struggles and challenges, their relationships with each other, and their hopes and dreams for the future.

The storytelling is fantastic, the characters are engaging and real, the post-apocalyptic setting dark, gritty, and yet totally immersive and frighteningly believable–man, it’s just awesome. And the longer it runs, the better it gets! I can’t wait to find out how Charlie the half-life fits in with his ability to communicate with the zombies, or to get the full backstory with Jenny and Milo. And I love the banter between Jenny and Sammie, her alcoholic sociopath best friend.

Right now, though, the main storyline is on hold while the author works through some business problems, but the short story is absolutely fantastic. I love her fantastic use of point of view–how she gets into the little boy’s head and shows the apocalypse unfold from his perspective. And the kid’s grisly end…man, zombies are even freakier when you never see their faces! I wouldn’t be surprised if I have nightmares tonight about it–I have in the past. Crazy awesome zombie nightmares, heh.

As a side note, may I point out what may quite possibly be the perfect weapon for the zombie apocalypse, the AA-12 shotgun. All it needs is a bayonet and like a bajillion clips of ammo. A must-have for any zombie contingency plan.

But yeah, let me just say I am in awe of The Zombie Hunters. Awesome, awesome story–every time it updates, I get immersed again in the post-apocalyptic world, and it is amazing. If I ever end up writing a zombie apocalypse story (which will probably involve starships and space travel in some fashion), I would be tickled if it’s even half as good as this excellent webcomic.

Goals for May

The last two weeks have pretty much decimated my writing routine. Between family stuff and a 40 hour per week temp job, I’ve pretty much fallen behind on everything.

However, the good news is that with the money from the temp job, I can afford to take a month off to work exclusively on writing projects. Here’s what I plan to accomplish, in order of importance:

Finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1.
Finish the online TEFL class.
Publish Journey to Jordan on the Kindle.
Finish >50% of Worlds Away from Home 3.0.
Prepare Genesis Earth for publication.
Release the short stories on Nook, Smashwords.
Switch to Linux.

A hefty bill, especially considering that my youngest sister’s wedding is next weekend. However, I think I can definitely do it. I’ve got about 18k words left in ITND, and with the feedback from my first readers, I’ve got tons of ideas for WAFH. That project is going to be fun.

Journey to Jordan shouldn’t be too hard, either. I found a good WYSIWYG html editor and played around with some test files today until I figured out how to make it work. Now, I just need to play around with an actual Kindle to see how small I need to make the interior illustrations/photos to make sure they look good. After that, it’s just copy and paste from old blogs, with a little spot editing and some time to write a foreword.

Journey to Jordan is going to be a lot of fun. It’s a travel journal, not a science fiction novel, but my experiences in the Middle East definitely shaped my writing style, and it might be fun for readers of my novels/stories to see where the influences came from. If all goes well, I can have it up by the 14th.

But above all else, my priority is going to be writing. I want to get back into a steady routine, plugging out a good +2.5k words each day until ITND is finished. The deadline for that is the 14th, but I want to have it finished sooner if possible. It’s going to be hard with my sister’s wedding, but I’ll do the best I can.

Of course, this is all assuming that I can take the whole month of May off. However, Pioneer Book called me up on Saturday to set up an interview–they’ve got a position open, and I’m pretty optimistic that they’ll want to hire me.

If that happens, great! I’ll just push some of this stuff back into June and juggle part time work with these writing projects. Full time work is much harder to juggle, but if things don’t work with Pioneer Book, the guys at the temp job want me to come back in June. So either way, I won’t be broke (inshallah).

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the writing pay the bills. That seems more possible to me now than ever before, but it’s still a ways out there. 2015, though–that’s the goal. I want to me making a full time living as a writer by 2015.

But for now, I’d better get some sleep. After all, I want to write +4k words tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Killing the sacred cows while doing data entry

Sorry for the lack of blog posts; I’ve been working 40 hours a week at this temp job, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for other things outside of writing. I’m still plugging along at about 1k to 2k words per day, but a lot of other stuff is falling behind. Fortunately, the job only lasts another two weeks, and that should earn me enough to take the next month off and focus on writing. I’m really looking forward to that.

This job isn’t too bad; it’s tedious, but I can read blogs and listen to podcasts and music while I do it, so I’ve been catching up on a lot of business research. Last week, I read all of Kris Rusch’s The Business Rusch Publishing blog series, and right now I’m working my way through Dean Wesley Smith’s Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.

Let me just say, this stuff is pure gold. Every post (and a surprising number of the comments, especially those by Laura Resnick) have been extremely eye opening. At the outset, almost everything Dean or Laura say about the industry seems absolutely blasphemous…but it all makes so much sense.

Like the post about how agents shouldn’t be giving authors any career advice… because they’ll usually advise you to write to the market, not to what you’re passionate about (and can therefore write well). Or how if you’re a midlister, it’s usually in the agent’s best interest to side with the editor, since they may have ten or more clients at stake in this house and you only represent a $3k annual revenue stream to them (or less).

The best piece of advice across the whole series so far comes from Dean:

Don’t listen to rules (myths) and do what works for you and if it doesn’t work, try something else, and when that stops working, try something else. Don’t do it my way or Larry Brooks way or Laura’s way or Harlan’s way. Steal parts from all of us and do it your way.

The thing I find most gratifying, however, is the fact that I figured out on my own that submitting to agents first probably isn’t the best way to break in. But man, there is so much awesome, paradigm-shifting stuff in these posts, it is amazing. Pure gold.

In the meantime, Into the Nebulous Deep is going surprisingly well. I should have it finished by mid-May, and though it will probably need some serious revision (unlike Dean, my creative mind gets more fired up in the revision process than the drafting process), the major story arc is coming along very nicely.

I wonder if that has to do with the fact that ITND will be my fifth completed novel. My first one, Ashes of the Starry Sea, was mostly smooth to write, but it was also a practice novel and as such royally sucks. Genesis Earth went through an EXTREMELY convoluted writing process, but it was good enough to get to the quarter-finalist stage of the 2011 ABNA contest (and in two days, I’ll find out if it made the semi finals…<fingers crossed>). Bringing Stella Home was also pretty tough to write, as was Worlds Away from Home, though the revisions have been more straightforward so far.

So does this mean I’m starting to come into my stride as a novelist? I hope so, because I want to start pushing myself. After ITND, I want to revise WAFH in six weeks or less–and I’ll probably throw out 1/3 to 1/2 of the material and completely rewrite it. After that, I want to do Sholpan in two or three weeks–but that shouldn’t be hard, because the material is mostly there already. Whether Genesis Earth wins or loses the ABNA contest, I’ll want to write Edenfall–before August, if I can manage it. And then, there’s always that post-apocalyptic blight project…

Anyhow, sorry for the rambling. The point is, I want to take my writing to a new level this summer, and after this temp job is finished, I’ll be in a great position to do it. In the meantime, I’ll merrily watch Dean kill the sacred cows while I fill out UPS shipping data for the next two weeks.

And now, here’s some candy for your ears:

Good things are coming

…I can feel it.

I got my tax return today, and it was significantly more than I was expecting. Between that and the money I’m getting from my current temp job, I may have enough to last through this month and the next. The last time I took a month off to focus exclusively on the writing, I accomplished quite a lot; I’m hoping I can do that again.

My current job is a 40 hr/week data entry position at a local alarm company. The work is kind of tedious, but I can read blogs and listen to my mp3 player while I do it, so it’s actually kind of nice.

The workplace is pretty laid back, the people are way cool, and the work looks to be steady at least for the next few weeks. A 20 hour or 30 hour job would probably be more conducive to writing, but for a short term gig this is pretty good.

Also, I’m seriously considering releasing Genesis Earth as an indie ebook if it doesn’t make the next cut in the ABNA contest. Recent developments in the publishing industry make me think that this might be a better path to go with my career.

In February of 2011, ebooks surpassed all other trade categories (hardback, mass market, etc), taking ~30% of the market. Just a couple of months before that, ebooks were around 8%. At the same time, Kris Rusch has evidence that traditional publishers may be under-reporting ebook revenues (and underpaying authors) by as much as 90%. I can’t go the traditional route without giving up my ebook rights, and with the current climate and royalty rates (14.9% of cover price for the (indefinite?) life of the ebook), that’s looking like a worse business decision every day.

So here is what I’m thinking of releasing, in the order (more or less) of when I plan to release them:

Journey to Jordan: Basically, a combination of blog posts and private journal entries from my experiences in Jordan. It’s non-fiction, not a novel, but I think it’s the best project to practice on (probably because it will require the most formatting work). Besides, I put a lot of myself into it, and it deserve to find an audience.

Genesis Earth: This is a full length novel, and has received a lot of positive feedback from friends, reviewers, and people who’ve picked up the free excerpt from the ABNA contest. If it doesn’t make the semi finals, or (better) if it makes the semi finals but doesn’t win the grand prize, I’m seriously considering releasing it as an ebook. It would certainly be a leap, but honestly, what have I got to lose?

Sholpan: This is a novella based on Stella’s story from my novel, Bringing Stella Home. I haven’t shopped BSH around the traditional markets much yet, and I think it could find a home there, which would certainly give my career a terrific launch. At this point, I’m looking to build my career more than earn a living, so I probably won’t release BSH until after I’ve shopped it around…but Sholpan, I think, would be a good way to test the waters and build things on the indie front.

Bringing Stella Home: At the same time, if Sholpan does well, and things start to take off in a surprising way, I’d seriously consider releasing Bringing Stella Home as an ebook. I don’t anticipate releasing it any earlier than August or September, but you never know. Also, this one has an advantage in that it’s part of a series; Genesis Earth is just book one of an unfinished trilogy.

So far, my short stories aren’t doing spectacularly well, but that’s okay–my goal with them was mainly to get some practice, not to make a ton of sales. And even so, they are selling at a modest rate, though it’s too early to notice any definite patterns.

I’m curious, though, because it seems that readers are drawn more to novels and full-length books than short stories. Will things be different when I release a few novels? There’s only one way to find out.

Overall, though, this is very exciting. As Kris Rusch says, I’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain. I definitely feel that good things are coming my way.

A word about ebook formatting

So it turns out that ebook formatting is a lot harder than I’d thought. I was hoping to finish chapter 13 in ITND tonight, but I’ve spent the whole #$@! time just trying to get “From the Ice Incarnate” up on Amazon.

Fortunately, I think I have a much better idea of what I’m doing now.

For “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and “Decision LZ1527,” I just uploaded the .doc file and had Amazon reformat it automatically. The stories were short and simple enough that it worked rather well.

Then I decided I wanted to put the cover in the body of the ebook, and foolishly thought I’d just put it on the first page of the .doc file I was uploading. Long story short, I discovered that that’s not a good idea–the ereader doesn’t read it as a cover, and it looks like crap.

Also, I discovered that the ideal size for an ebook cover is 600×900 pixels (for a standard 2:3 aspect ratio). From now on, all the covers I upload will be 600×900.

So then, when I uploaded “From the Ice Incarnate,” I kept noticing these weird indenting problems in the preview. No matter what I did to change the .doc file, it wouldn’t go away. Out of frustration, I downloaded the html file that Amazon had formatted it into and noticed these weird <div> tags popping up on short, one line paragraphs where they should have been <p> tags. Don’t ask me how they got there, but they were a pain to fix.

So then, I tried uploading the modified html file, and found to my great joy that the problem had been fixed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any way to put in the cover–and the cover for “From the Ice Incarnate” is REALLY awesome.

Frustrated but undaunted, I turned to Mobipocket Creator, an open source ebook creating program. I’d tried playing with it before, but found it complicated and confusing. Well, now that I knew what I wanted it to do, it wasn’t hard at all to figure out how to make it work.

First, I created a new project in its own designated folder. Then, I added the corrected html file to the “publication files” page. Where it asked for a cover image, I uploaded the 600×900 jpeg (I do all my editting in The Gimp, in a much larger .xcf file). Then, I filled in the metadata, such as book description, suggested cover price, etc.

When I was finished, I hit “build,” and voila! A slick looking .prc ebook file that looked EXACTLY how I wanted it to.

I uploaded it to Amazon, and it looked great in the preview. I’m not sure what it’ll look like in the finished product yet, since it takes 24 hours to upload, but I fixed “Decision LZ1527” as well. Once I knew what I was doing, it took maybe five minutes to create the ebook on Mobipocket Creator.

So here’s what I’m going to do from now on. I’m going to bypass the whole .doc thing altogether (since I use Open Office, not MS Word) and go straight from .odt to .html using a WYSIWYG html editor. For the cover, I’ll use The Gimp, with the project files as .xcf and the finished images as 600×900 .jpegs. I’ll combine it all in Mobipocket Creator, and upload the .prc ebook file to Amazon / Pubit / Smashwords / wherever.

Sound daunting? (Charlie, I’m talking to you, hehe) It’s actually a TON of fun, once you get the hang of it. And let me tell you, when I saw the finished product, it was awesome. Totally worth it.

Trouble is, I haven’t had any time to work on my novel, which is frustrating, because I’m working an 8 to 5 job now. It’s temporary, which is nice for a full time artist/creator like me, but man, I’m going to miss all the free time I used to have. I want to finish ITND before the end of the month, but I’ve still got a long ways to go.

In the meantime, let me give you a sneak peek on my next ebook. It’s a short story based on an excerpt from Genesis Earth, which won first place in the 2009 Mayhew short story contest at BYU. Of the stuff I’ve posted up to Amazon so far, I think this one is far and away the best.

Here’s the cover:

Pretty cool, eh? I ripped the font from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. The image is from NASA, taken by the Hubble space telescope.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on with my ebook venture. I’m kind of glad I haven’t done much to publicize the other stories, because they need a lot of work. If you bought one already, don’t worry; the stories haven’t changed at all, just the formatting. I’m not sure if you can re-download those once you’ve bought them, but if you want one of the new ones, let me know and I’ll figure it out.

And if I’m missing something in terms of html or ebook formatting, please let me know. I’m not quite hopeless, but I’m still horribly ignorant when it comes to this kind of stuff. Any suggestions (especially for a good WYSIWYG editor) would me much appreciated.

Just another update

A few updates, in case you’re interested in what’s going on with me:

I’m getting ready to post a new story to Amazon. This is going to be the one that won first place in the 2009 Mayhew short story contest at BYU. It’s also an excerpt for Genesis Earth, which is currently in the quarter finals for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. More news on that as it comes out.

Into the Nebulous Deep is coming along. Surprisingly, the rough draft follows a very tight, coherent plot structure. At this stage, every other novel I’ve written is usually all over the place. This one looks like it’s going to be twenty chapters, with four parts of five chapters each.

Right now, I’m in the middle of chapter 13. I was hoping to finish it this week, but my sister was in town this weekend, so I spent most of my time with her instead. Not that that’s a problem; I can probably catch up tomorrow. I’m hoping to finish part III before the end of next week.

It’s going to be tough, though, because I’m starting a new temp job on Monday. It’s 40 hours per week at $9, which is pretty sweet, especially since my tax return is basically going to cover all my expenses this month. Hooray for cheap Utah summers! The full time work is going to be tough on the writing, though.

Which brings me to my last update: the guys at Pioneer Book called me back today and set up a job interview on Tuesday! Hooray! I’m totally stoked–this bookstore job would be awesome. I might even postpone my TEFL plans for a while if I get the job. It probably won’t be full time or pay much more than minimum wage, but dude, it’s a bookstore. Plus, part time work is perfect for writing. As long as I have enough to get by, I’ll be happy.

And to close, let me leave you with this awesome trailer my brother in law shared with me. I haven’t seen this movie, but it looks absolutely freaking awesome–like the kind of film my old roommate Steve Dethloff would make.

Man, Steve and I would make an awesome duo in a post-apocalyptic world. I should move to Dallas just so we can be ready to team up when it happens. If they made a movie of our exploits together, it would totally be just like this. Lost Vegas…

Steve, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that there’s no one I’d rather be killing zombies with than you.

Q1 report, 2011

So in terms of writing, this was a pretty decent quarter. Nothing too prolific, but definitely making progress on my writing goals for 2011, which include:

1) finish at least two polished novels,
2) finish at least three new rough drafts,
3) start at least four major new projects.

The spike in the graph from the beginning of the month is from the final revision of Bringing Stella Home, which was pretty much just a final polish. After that was finished, I had a little difficulty picking up the next project, but once I did, I was able to be pretty consistent.

In mid-January, I picked up Worlds Away from Home and worked on that until the beginning of March. This was a pretty huge overhaul, especially for the end, but it still needs a lot of work. Basically, this draft was just to get it to the point where I could send it out to my first readers without being eternally ashamed.

After finishing WAFH 2.1 in the beginning of March, I launched right back into the sequel for BSH, Into the Nebulous Deep. I figured it would be good to have the sequel in hand, in case I decided to go indie with BSH, as well as to practice writing sequels.

All throughout March, the writing was surprisingly steady, but recently things have kind of gone off kilter. Maybe it’s all the increased distractions (job interviews, EPIK application, the TEFL course, other random crap), or maybe it’s just that I’ve become less disciplined, but I don’t feel like I’ve been writing very consistently in the last little while. And the graph doesn’t really show that, because I recently started a few other projects which have sort of taken the place of ITND.

The first of these is currently untitled, but it takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of our world which I’ve code named “The Blight.” I don’t want to say much about it, but it’s REALLY REALLY REALLY cool…trust me. Think lone man, wandering the ruins of civilization two hundred years after its fall, trying to make a life for himself when everyone else around him dies at a ridiculously early age because of this blight that has swept across all of humanity.

I’m having a TON of fun building this world, and the story is practically writing itself. In the interest of finishing what I start, though, I’m going to sideline it until ITND is completely finished (which should be by the end of April, inshallah…).

The other project is a novella version of BSH, basically taking just Stella’s viewpoints and telling the story of her capture and eventual ascension to the Hameji throne. This project shouldn’t be too hard–basically, I’m just frankensteining it from BSH, with a few tweaks. My main reason for writing it is to have a novella-length work that I can release as an ebook, possibly to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home.

Speaking of which, in March I released a couple of short stories as ebooks on Amazon. It’s a little early to gauge how well they’re doing, but I’m learning a lot from the experience, and the sales are gradually trickling in. Once I release a few more works and start promoting them, I expect the sales will grow.

So in the last three months, I’ve finished one polished novel (Bringing Stella Home), started two new projects (Sholpan and untitled (the blight)), and made progress on polishing Worlds Away from Home. I wrote / revised through 170k words, about 30k to 50k of which were all new material. I also ventured into indie publishing and released two short stories on Amazon, which are earning me a buck or two each week.

Overall, it hasn’t been as prolific as other quarters, but it’s not been too bad either. Now to finish ITND and make some progress on that freaking nashostomo…

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.