Hameji Cycle – Page 27 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Deceptively unproductive day

Man, where did the day go? I don’t feel like I was lazy, yet I only wrote about 1.2k words for the whole day. And things were going so well the day before…

Well, I guess I was busy, just with a whole lot of other things. Donated plasma (which took all morning), got some groceries, started GMing another round of werewolf on the quark forums, did some more research into ebooks, started the online TEFL course, went to Leading Edge and signed a contract for a poem they’re going to publish–

Oh yeah, check it out! I signed my second publishing contract today–again, with Leading Edge. They’re going t0 publish a short poem I wrote about Gliese 581g, otherwise known as Zarmina’s World.

(which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to blog about NASA’s Kepler mission since forever. It’s an incredible mission which, I believe, will lead to some revolutionary astronomical discoveries–and may even rejuvenate interest in science fiction. But more on that later…)

So yeah. My goal is to finish WAFH before the end of February, which is going to require a lot of work. Two and a half weeks, with LTUE 2011 sucking up one of the weekends…it’s going to be tough.

Numbers-wise, though, it’s still quite doable. I want to keep this draft pretty close to 90k (no more than 100k), and I’m already at 53k words. With sixteen days left in the month, I need to write between 2.3k and 2.9k words per day to make it.

In the meantime, it’s 2 am, and I’d better get some sleep. Waking up late is definitely bad for productivity, and I hate it. If I could train myself to wake up every morning at 5 am like Aneeka, that would be awesome. Actually, I’d probably just complain about how much it sucked to get up early every day, but hey–the grass is always greener…

Deceptively productive day and other updates

Man, I revised through about 4k words today…and wrote a 1.5k outline for Edenfall to boot. Not bad, considering how much time I spent putzing around reading publishing blogs and job hunting on craigslist.

Things are going well with WAFH; after a slight dropoff at the end of last week, I’m rebuilding momentum rather quickly. But then again, I’m currently at an easy part in the draft. Pretty soon, I’ll have to throw everything out and start from scratch.

Job hunting sucks…but what else is new? I signed up for an online TEFL certification course, to the tune of $250 (youch!). Hopefully, that will help land me a good teaching job in an advanced pay grade overseas.

I swear, the job market here in the states is so bad that I don’t see any other way around it but to leave the country. Maybe if I was a CS major, or had no qualms selling people crap they didn’t need, or was willing to wipe up elderly people’s butts after they’ve defecated all over the place…no thank you. In any case, teaching English is an adventure, and I very much look forward to it.

In the meantime, there are a few local graveyard job openings that might allow me to write on the side while I babysit a desk. If those don’t work out, hopefully I’ll find something else before my checking account dries up sometime in March.

I’m getting really excited for Edenfall. Last night, as I was falling asleep, I ran through the basic storyline in my head. Fortunately, I remembered it well enough in the morning to write it all down. It’s going to be awesome.

I’m also starting to rethink my philosophy on writing direct sequels. I used to follow Sanderson’s line of thought; it doesn’t make sense to finish the series, because if a publisher rejects the first book, they won’t be interested in the others. However, with ebooks and self publishing becoming more accessible and lucrative, the ability to put out a complete trilogy all at once is a great strength.

I’m thinking very seriously about putting Genesis Earth out there, but it’s the first book in a trilogy, and it would probably boost sales of all three if I could put them all at once. Aneeka gave me a good suggestion today: put out the first book for free, while selling the other two at a competitive price. Sadly, it will probably be a year or two before the others are ready…but my writing skills are constantly improving, so maybe I’ll be able to produce them a little faster.

Which brings me to a very interesting post I read on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog yesterday about writing speed. Thus far, I’ve been shooting to produce one polished book per year, but after reading that post, I wonder if I should shoot for more. Can I write two books a year and still maintain a high level of quality? I’m not so sure; GE and BSH both required five rewrites before I got them fully polished, and Mr. Smith’s numbers don’t seem to take the revision process into account.

This year, though, I’m hoping to produce two polished books: Bringing Stella Home, which I’ve already finished, and Worlds Away from Home, which is my current WIP. I’m only on the second draft, and there are tons of story issues, but I’m working through them fairly quickly. I’ll probably put in another two or three rewrites before the end of the year, and still have time to finish a couple of other rough drafts–Edenfall and The Stars of Redemption (third book), potentially.

Of course, if I land a job, that might throw a kink into things–as will traveling overseas. But as with all things, I’ll take those eventualities as they come.

(image shamelessly lifted from this site.)

Looking for alpha readers and planning the next project

Worlds Away from Home 2.1 is going along well. I had a hard time switching from Bringing Stella Home back to this other project, but I’ve got some good momentum going and assuming no major interruptions, should be able to do about 3k words a day for the rest of the week.

Then again, if I get interrupted by work, that might be a good thing…

The second draft is going to be pretty rough, but good enough to start sending out to alpha readers. Anyone want to volunteer? It’s basically a far future love story on a planet with desert-dwelling tribal nomads who drive micronuclear powered dune buggies and centuries-old arcologies under giant continent-sized domes. Earth is an ancient, mythical legend, and roving bands of starfaring nomads stand poised to crush the galactic empire.

I hope to be finished with the second draft by March 1st, and I’d want to get feedback no later than the end of April. If you’ve been one of my alpha readers before, or if we’re friends IRL, let me know if you’re interested.

So earlier today, I was thinking about the project I want to do after WAFH–a sequel to Genesis Earth. I’ve been toying with the idea of releasing GE as an ebook, but I don’t want to do that until I have a sequel in the works. Anyhow, I was thinking of ideas for the title, and out of the blue, it struck me:

EDENFALL.

Kind of plays on the subtle Adam and Eve theme of the first one (and no, Genesis Earth isn’t technically a sci-fi Adam and Eve story…but it kind of evokes one). I like it because it fits well with my ideas for the story, which basically center around shattering the Edenic paradise that Michael and Terra reach at the end of GE.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for this book, and I think they’re reaching a critical mass. Just last month, I came up with a great name for the main female protagonist: Estee. She’s the eldest daughter of Terra and Michael, and kind of takes after her mother’s personality. The male protagonist will be a young soldier from the military force sent out by panicky Earth officials to neutralize any threat on Icaria–which gives the commanders of the expedition a broad mandate to do whatever the hell they want. As you can imagine, conflict ensues.

I know how this story begins, and I know how it’s supposed to end (and thereby set things up for an awesome third book in the trilogy), but I have no idea how to build things up to the crazy twist ending. It’s going to require some serious worldbuilding, and that’s going to take some time. Daydreaming is such hard work, after all.

Anyhow, I should be ready by the time I finish WAFH 2.1. As an experiment, I’m going to write the rough draft entirely in longhand. Am I crazy? Perhaps. But I also want to spend some time in the Utah wilderness for inspiration while I’m writing it, so pen and paper is probably the best medium for that.

So those are my plans. To close, let me link to this awesome cover of “Something About Us” by Daft Punk. Now that’s some sweet theremin action…enjoy!

How do you write a character who is shy?

The writing is a little sporadic these days, but it’s coming along. I’ve broken out of my most recent block, and progress is coming along on WAFH…or at least it was, when I didn’t have a temp job sucking up most of my time during the day.

Still, can’t complain about work–and even though all the job interviews from a couple weeks ago seem to have lead nowhere, I’ve got a few new opportunities opening up that seem promising. More on those later.

One of the more challenging aspects of WAFH is writing the main female protagonist, Mira Najmi. Mira is something of a shy pushover, who gradually learns to stand up for herself and make her own independent decisions.

Because of this, I find it difficult to write from her point of view. When she isn’t letting people walk all over her, she’s either homesick and depressed or following others without making any real decisions for herself. And yet, in order for her growth arc to work, this is the point at which she needs to start out; her gradual change into a strong and independent woman is a major part of the book.

In short, how do I make a shy, self-effacing protagonist sympathetic and interesting while remaining true to her character?

(Before I go further, I should note that Mira does have strengths. She has a caring, nurturing personality, and is sensitive to the needs of others. She often notices the little things that go right over the male protagonist’s head. Besides that, she’s basically a good person, with a pure heart and an aversion to causing hurt or injury. Oh, and she’s stunningly beautiful–though in some ways, that’s more of a handicap than a strength.)

Thus far, my strategy has been to delve into her internal monologue when in her viewpoint and try to make her underlying motivations clear. I suspect it goes beyond that, though. The best thing I can probably do is make her relatable to the audience–to make her shy in ways that make the readers feel like she’s one of them.

But that’s difficult for me, because I’m not a very shy person and I don’t generally relate well with people who are. So how can I get a better understanding of what it’s like? Do you guys have anything that you can share with me that would help me to understand? Any tips or techniques for writing similar characters?

(image taken from http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/lgrove/resign%20splashpage.htm)

New OCR album and my first chiptune

So overclocked remix came out with a new album a few days ago, and it is absolutely fantastic. It’s called THE ANSWER, and it’s a fanmade album of music from the Armored Core series.

For those of you who don’t know, ocremix is an online community of video game music fans. It’s got a database of almost two thousand fanmade remixes of popular game tracks, and all of them are available for free download.

THE ANSWER is ocr’s 21st album project, and in my opinion it is one of the best. It’s full of happy, high-energy techno mixed with guitar and drums, and the quality of production is quite good. While each track is unique, there are enough recurring elements that the album feels very coherent as a whole. In that, it reminds me a bit of Humans + Gears and Summoning of Spirits.

Anyhow, the album is available for free from the project’s webpage. You should definitely check it out, even if you’ve never heard of the Armored Core games. Good stuff– ocremix is definitely starting the year out right!

Speaking of which, remember how I mentioned I wanted to make an album of original chiptune music this year? Well, I found a program for doing just that!

It’s called MilkyTracker, and it’s an open source program based off of FastTracker 2, an old DOS program for writing computer music. The interface is way old school–makes me feel like I’m on my old 386 from the 90s. Ah, those were the good days…

Anyhow, after playing around with it for a while, I wrote an 8-bit style remix of Son of Flynn, the third track on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk. Several excellent chiptune arrangements of songs from the Tron soundtrack have been popping up recently, so I thought I’d get in on the action.

Here it is:

Pretty sweet, huh? You can download the original file here, but unfortunately I don’t know how to convert .xm to .mp3, so unless you have a media player that can read extended module files, all I can say is go fish.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to these past few days. Haven’t gotten a whole lot of writing done, but I’m slowly transitioning back into WAFH and getting excited about it again. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish it before LTUE as I’d hoped, but a February 28th deadline seems reasonable. More on that later, for sure.

What the…?

I sent out two queries this afternoon, about an hour apart from each other. The first was for Genesis Earth, the second for Bringing Stella Home. Both agents responded within the hour. Genesis Earth got a form rejection, and Bringing Stella Home got a request for the full manuscript. Yeah, I was shocked too.

So I was planning to query Bringing Stella Home all over the place in the next few weeks, but with the full out…I’m not exactly sure what to do. I know it’s okay to send out multiple queries, so long as you only send the full ms to one place at a time, but what about querying when the full is already out?

I’m assuming that it’s okay to keep sending out queries, so long as you don’t send a second copy of the full while the first agent is considering it. If someone else requests to see it, I should probably say “so and so is currently considering it, but I’ll let you know once they’ve gotten back to me.” Is that right?

Needless to say, this is very encouraging.

Bringing Stella Home 5.0 is finished!

That’s right; I finished the fifth draft just tonight. 110,000+ words and 550+ pages in three weeks–not bad. Here are the stats:

ms pages: 556
words: 110,000
file size: 264 KB
chapters: 27
start date: 21 Dec 2010
end date: 11 Jan 2011

And the wordle:

The song that best represents my experience with this particular draft would probably be a chip tune remix I discovered recently (as in, yesterday). It’s called “Milk in Veins,” and the only version I have is in .xm (extended module) format. I don’t yet know how to export it to mp3, but here it is:

Raina — Milk in Veins

This draft was mostly just a quick polish, but I did get some useful feedback from some World Fantasy friends; some of Stella’s reactions were off, and Anya’s parts needed better development. I don’t know if it’s publishable as is, but it’s definitely as good as I can make it without a professional editor.

I had a good time with this draft. I feel confident that I’ve got an exceptional story here, and I think I did a good job telling it. At the end of the day, it’s great to have something you can look back on and say “yeah, I accomplished that.”

Now, to send it out into the publishing world and see if it gets any takers. Who knows–maybe this could be my debut novel! Only one way to find out…

Racing along

Ugh, why do I always stay up until 2am? And then I don’t get up until ten. Man, I need a job–either that, or more self discipline.

Just a quick post before I hit the sack. I’m making excellent progress with the revision of Mercenary Savior, regularly hitting between 7k and 8k per day. Most of that is polishing work, which tends to go fast, but I’m also rearranging a few chapters, deleting scenes and putting others in a different order.

One thing that’s surprised me a lot so far is how much I’ve managed to cut. The first draft, which I wrote on MS word, was about 135k–which runs around 145k by open office’s (flawed) word count method. The second draft was about the same, the third a little shorter, and the fourth around 120k by open office’s algorithm. By then, I thought it was as lean as I could get it–but no, that’s not the case. It’s all for the best, though; a 100k word novel isn’t nearly as daunting as a 145k monster, especially in science fiction.

Anyhow, today I got some feedback from C.A. Jacobs, a friend from World Fantasy (which she mailed to me…from HAWAII…), and I’m thinking I ought to change the title of this work. She suggested something like “The Fall of Karduna,” but the book is more about the individual characters than the world, so I’m thinking of something like “Saving Stella,” or even reverting back to “Bringing Stella Home.” Any thoughts?

In unrelated news, a ton of job opportunities have been opening up recently. I interviewed for a position with the BYU Political Science department on Monday, and I’ve got another interview with a local marketing company Friday. My sister also says that her work needs a new cook, so that could be good if the other stuff falls through. And as for phone delivery, I’ve got until the 17th to keep up with that.

So, life is good. Writing-wise, I’m having a very productive revision of one of my better works. Job-wise, a lot of promising options seem to be popping up. Social-wise, I’m doing pretty well, too; Utah is a great place to make new friends.

Oh, and English 318 starts TOMORROW! Holy crap, I am excited!!

gnight

Q4 report, 2010

For those of you who don’t know, I do a report on my blog at the end of each quarter, giving a progress update on my writing. I like to think it helps me keep things professional. Whether or not it does, it’s certainly helpful to look back on how I did.

So anyhow, here’s the word count chart:

The red line represents daily word count, and the blue line is a running total for the previous seven days. The chart includes revisions as well as original material; for revisions, I just do a wordcount of the finished version, whether or not I’ve cut out significant chunks of the text or left it largely as-is. Maybe that skews the picture a bit, but it’s the best I can do with the tools I have.

At the beginning of the quarter, I was working 40+ hours per week at a seasonal job, so the writing was pretty slow, averaging a little less than 15k per week. My main project was the fourth draft of Mercenary Savior, which I was struggling to get ready for World Fantasy.

The job ended October 28th, and I didn’t do any writing during the conference, which is why you see the dip at the end of the month. But I took November off to work entirely on my writing, which is why things took off again rather quickly.

That huge peak in the middle of the quarter is from the fifth draft of Genesis Earth, which I completed in about two weeks. The draft was already pretty well polished, but one of my hard sf friends did a read through and got back with a few major science issues which I needed to rectify. Also, I figured it was in need of a language polish, since I finished the last revision almost a year ago and my writing (I hope) has improved a lot since then.

I was pretty surprised at how quickly it went. The book is definitely as good as I can make it, and any further revisions without professional editorial assistance would be a less effective use of my time.

Things dropped off rather sharply, however, because I spent all of Thanksgiving week either on the road or with family. Ah, how I love road trips…but they sure can throw a kink in the writing schedule. I also had a hard time settling on my next big project, which is why things took a while to take off again after I got back.

After starting a sequel for Mercenary Savior and toying around with a short story idea, I decided to do a major overhaul of Worlds Away from Home. Unlike GE, however, WAFH really, really sucks. It took me two weeks just to read through the rough draft and pick out all the troubled spots, after which I rewrote the outline from the ground up and decided to completely scrap half the book. I started the second draft in mid-December, but it’s taken a while for things to really build steam.

Right as I was starting WAFH 2.0, a couple of other writer friends from World Fantasy got back to me with their comments on Mercenary Savior, and pointed out a few problems that I hadn’t noticed before. I started the revision on December 21st and have been plowing through ever since. That accounts for the huge spike at the end of the quarter–like GE 5.0, the draft has a lot fewer story problems, but does need a few things fixed for consistency, as well as a language polish.

Overall, I wrote or revised through about .25 million words this past quarter–some of which were easier than others. I started a new project (Into the Nebulous Deep), polished one of my manuscripts to the very best of my abilities, and made significant headway on revising and polishing two others. In terms of publications, I had a major article published in Mormon Artist, and a short poem accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Leading Edge.

Not a bad quarter. Now, let’s see if I can find an agent and/or publisher in 2011.

The second to last post of the year

I’ve been figuring out what to say in my Obligatory New Year’s post–resolutions and all that. Before I do that, though, I wanted to give an update on recent goings-on.

First, the writing: I’m making excellent headway in the latest draft of Mercenary Savior, and should be finished by the end of next week. WAFH is coming along too, but at a much slower pace. It’s hard to juggle a good book that only needs a polish with a crappy book that needs a complete overhaul, because the one that needs the most work looks so much worse in comparison. Still, I’m making progress on both.

I just recently noticed, though, that I’ve spent the last two years working almost exclusively on Mercenary Savior. Whenever I took a break to work on something else, it was never more than a month or two before I jumped into another major revision of that project. I worry that that’s going to handicap me, especially as I reach the point of diminishing returns. Mercenary Savior is an awesome novel, and I totally stand by it, but I worry…well, I worry too much. Let’s just leave it at that.

Second: jobs! To my surprise, a number of places have been calling me in for interviews and such. My first pick would most likely be with the BYU Political Science Department, since I already know everyone there and would probably love it. However, a number of other opportunities have been opening up, which means (inshallah) that I’ll probably be employed by the end of next month. Woohoo!

In the mid- to long-term, though, I’m thinking very seriously about teaching abroad. I interviewed today with a program that places people in South Korea, and that could be quite interesting. If I choose to go through with it, I’d probably be shipping out in September, hopefully after completing a TEFL certification program. After working there for a year or two, I could probably land a much more lucrative job in the Gulf, which could be an interesting experience.

Then again, I could stay here in Utah, where I’m much more likely to find a wife…

But you know what? I’m starting to think that that’s a horrible reason to stay here in the bubble. I don’t need to live in Utah to find the right girl (or, as my dad says, for the right girl to find me). She could be anywhere.

And as for all that stuff about the odds being better out here, I’m starting to think that’s a bunch of crap. Yeah, there are a ton of young, available LDS women here in Utah–but there are also a ton of guys, and the competition has like a gazillion advantages on me. I mean, come on, I’m a writer–what have I got on a Marriott School graduate? Even a pizza can feed a family of four…

So maybe I should spend some serious time abroad, even if it does mean fewer dating opportunities. In the meantime, I need to renew my passport and get a job. And who knows what the future ultimately holds? Maybe I’ll stick around. Maybe…