…and not a moment too soon. I leave for the Salt Lake airport in eight hours, to try and sell this ugly beast masterpiece at World Fantasy. Let’s hope I can find a few editors/agents who are willing to take a look at the manuscript!
Here are the stats:
Mercenary Savior 4.0
words: 123,045 pages: 620 chapters: 28 + prologue file size: 288.1 KB start date: 24 August 2010 end date: 27 October 2010
And the wordsplash:
The most influential song on my writing for this draft would probably be the theme from Terminator 1:
Man, why didn’t I grow up in the Eighties? Oh, wait…
I’d write more, but I have to pack for tomorrow. Good night!
While trolling around the new Facebook questions app, I came across this interesting question. Unable to resist, I spent the next hour crafting my answer.
This is what I wrote:
Gosh, what HAVEN’T I learned from science fiction?
Because of science fiction, I do not fear the alien. I do not feel threatened by people of different places or cultures, but take great interest in learning from them. I look at them and love them, because I can see myself in them.
Because of science fiction, I can look out at the vast expanse of the universe and not despair because of my insignificance. I know my place within it, and can appreciate the wonders and endless possibilities all around me.
Because of science fiction, I can look at the world and know which questions to ask. I can see through the lies that society constantly feeds me, and know how to fight against them.
Because of science fiction, I can look to the future with hope. Having seen the best and the worst of all possible worlds, I know which paths to avoid and which paths to follow. With this knowledge I can inspire my fellow men, because I know that nothing is inevitable.
Because of science fiction, I have a deep and endearing love for the world in which I live. I know better what it means to be human, and knowing this helps me to take no human life for granted. I have a greater capacity to love those around me, and that is the most important thing of all.
Science fiction has enriched my life beyond measure. By constantly stretching the bounds of my imagination, science fiction has led me to more truth than any other literary genre–and not only led me to that truth, but helped me to incorporate it into all that I do. So long as I live, I will always be a reader and a writer of science fiction.
Answering this question reminded me of my interview with Shayne Bell a couple weeks ago. In it, he talked about how rich and vibrant science fiction is as a literary genre, and how it deeply impacted his own life. Listening to him speak, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in the presence of a great man.
I don’t think he’d be comfortable with me posting the full audio of that interview, but many of his comments will appear in the article I’m putting together for the December issue of Mormon Artist. Between working full time and trying to finish the fourth draft of Mercenary Savior in time for World Fantasy, I haven’t had much time to work on it, but it’s going to be awesome.
What have YOU learned from science fiction? How has it enriched your life?
Man, it’s been forever since I’ve posted something. I’d blog more often, but I think you guys would get bored pretty quick if all I did was tell you how the writing went each day. Don’t be fooled; the writing process isn’t NEARLY as interesting as the stuff we write (unless you’re writing amateur fanfic…just kidding!).
So anyways, life is extremely busy these days. Between my temp job at a warehouse, Leading Edge, Institute, church, Quark, and finishing the revision of Mercenary Savior, I feel incredibly crunched for time. I’ve been pulling about 1k to 3k words per day, but last week was horrendously unproductive and I’ve got to really push hard to finish this beast in time for World Fantasy.
But it’s going to happen–that’s for sure. I’ll finish my job at the end of this week, and with the extra free time I’m sure I’ll be able to finish it in time. I passed the 100k word mark last night, and it looks like this draft is going to be around 120k to 125k. Still a little long for a science fiction novel, but not too long (I hope).
As I get closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I tend to use a shotgun approach in resolving the conflicts in my rough drafts. Instead of following each arc through in a focused, logical manner, the last few chapters of my drafts tend to go all over the place, trying halfheartedly to resolve everything at once.
The bad thing about this is that the last half of the book requires a lot more work to revise. The good part, however, is that I can cut off a ton of fat at the tail end, significantly shortening the final wordcount. It’s good to be able to manipulate that number late in the game.
As far as my plans for November, if I do participate in nanowrimo, it’s going to be with a serious project that I was already planning on doing, not something wild and spontaneous. I don’t think taking the time off to write something I know will never be published is going to help me as a writer.
At the same time, however, it only takes about 1.5k to 2k per day for 30 days to complete nanowrimo, and that’s about the rate that I’m writing right now (a little less, actually). With World Fantasy smack at the end of October, I probably won’t start anything new until November 1st. So even though I’m not taking time off from my serious stuff to do it, I probably will participate in nanowrimo this year.
As far as other stuff going on in November, I am very much looking forward to seeing my sister in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend. Since I don’t know if I can find a job that will give me that week off, and since I’m already in a pretty good financial place with the money from this last job, I think I’ll take most of the month off to focus on my writing, rather than look for full-time work.
However, I have been thinking a lot about becoming a freelance translator. One thing I’ve learned from working in a warehouse (and I’ll blog more about this at the end of the week) is that I hate not using the stuff I learned in college. My original plan when I chose to major in Mideast studies was to use Arabic to find a regular job until the writing took off, and so far I haven’t done that.
Besides, I REALLY want to go back to the Middle East someday. If I can improve my Arabic to the point where I feel I can get along better than the average American student, I might just move over there for a year or two (or five or ten…).
Anyhow, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do (including writing–I want to hit at least 3k today), so that’s all for now. See ya!
Went to an awesome Quark writing group activity tonight with Dan Wells. It was great. We critiqued stories, had a Q&A, and then played the Battlestar Galactica game. Good, good times.
The new series of BSG is amazing. It quite literally inspired my first novel: a story set in a universe where a cylon-style humans vs. robots went down three hundred years previous, and the surviving federation contacted a primitive civilization of fellow humans who thought they were the only survivors. And then I threw in a first contact story, just to shake things up.
Anyway, BSG is a surprisingly fun game. It’s kind of like werewolf, in that there’s lots of potential for betrayal and secret combinations. Basically, the players are putting out HUGE fires the whole time (like cylon fleets coming out of nowhere to blast your fleet out of the sky), and you have to work together but you don’t know whom to trust. It follows the BSG story remarkably well, with enough room for unanticipated twists to make it interesting.
The learning curve is incredibly steep, but once you learn it, it’s way fun. We didn’t have enough time to finish the game, but we did pretty well, I think. Dan claims that he betrayed us heartlessly, but the truth is that our interests aligned pretty well for the duration we played. He probably would have betrayed us had we played much longer, but we didn’t make any egregious mistakes…I think…
Anyway, didn’t get much writing in today (just about 500 words over my lunch break), but the fun and networking at the Quark event was worth it, I think. I’m very much looking forward to World Fantasy, though I’ve got a TON of stuff to do first.
One thing I realized tonight was that I’m in a perfect position to do nanowrimo this year. With the Mercenary Savior rewrite coming to a close (hopefully) before the end of October, I currently have no writing projects planned for November.
I was thinking of doing a sequel to Mercenary Savior next, but I don’t want to do that as a nanowrimo–I want to do quality work for that one, and the whole point of nanowrimo is to allow yourself to splurge and write crap. Maybe I’ll randomly throw all of my characters from all of my projects so far into one giant mesh and see what happens. I don’t know.
That’s what’s going on here. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to crash.
Sixty six percent! I’ve officially passed the two thirds mark in the fourth revision for Mercenary Savior–and not a moment too soon. With only a week and a half until World Fantasy 2010, it’s crunch time. I’ll probably quit my temp job a week early in order to devote the last few days of the month to finishing it.
As I’ve been working on Mercenary Savior, though, a fascinating idea for a sequel has been stewing in my head. It was sparked by an online conversation with one of my first readers:
Reader: I was never fully convinced that James felt he had closure Me: I see Reader: but I was satisfied with the thought that he would get it sometime after the story ends
he’s still young, so he’s still maturing
even at the close of the novel Me: yeah
hmm
interesting
It’s true; James does have a lot of room to grow and mature after the events of Mercenary Savior. In that book, his character growth arc (without giving away spoilers) is about him learning to accept change and stop running from adulthood.
Nothing in that arc has much to do with the kind of person James grows up to be, however, or the significant other with whom he comes to share his life. In other words, there’s a whole lot of untapped potential for building James’s character and giving him a romantic interest.
The question that immediately rose to my mind was: what’s the story?
Now when it comes to sequels, I think the best ones take a long, hard look at the first installment and answer the question: therefore, what? Thus, in Star Wars IV, V, and VI (which I believe to be one of the best examples of a trilogy in any medium), the Rebels defeat the first Death Star in episode IV, but find themselves on the run in episode V because the Empire knows the location of their base. Luke uses the force to pull off a last-minute victory in episode IV, but finds in episode V that becoming a true Jedi takes a lot more discipline and self-mastery than he thought.
So I applied that principle to my own work and came up with the following overarching conflict: the Hameji occupation of Karduna is devastating the people of the Colony to the point where they collectively decide to depart en masse and establish a new community somewhere else. It’s a logical conclusion taken from the ending of Mercenary Savior; the people are well enough off to survive, but too poor and oppressed to do much of anything else.
You may not know this, but the first story I wanted to set in this fictional universe was about a group of starfaring pioneers traveling into the heart of a nebula to escape religious persecution and establish a thriving community on the fringes of settled space. That’s right–I basically wanted to set the Mormon pioneer exodus in space.
For various unrelated reasons, that never worked out, but the desire has always been there in the back of my mind. What can I say–I think that pioneers are cool, and stories about colonizing unsettled new lands just fascinate me. I’ll probably write a massive Utah pioneer epic someday.
But anyways, I started playing around with this old idea to see whether I could recycle it. Right now, I think that I can. The idea is that James becomes the leader for one of these emigrant groups, and has to see them safely through to a young planet in the heart of this nebula. They decide to fly into the nebula in order to isolate themselves from the Hameji, since the FTL tech in my universe doesn’t work within a Nebula.
And then something really crazy happened. This scene popped into my head, stronger than any other idea I’d had so far. I imagined that a group of pirates had captured the expedition and refused to let them go unless they gave the pirates three young women to keep as slaves.
Pretty standard conflict, right? But then, I thought: what if three young women of their own free will stepped forward and offered to sacrifice themselves to save the others? What would James do then?
Well, it wasn’t hard to figure that out at all. James would never let them go. He’d fight the pirates, even if it meant risking all the lives of those he’s trying to protect.
This raises some interesting questions of morality. Is it right to risk the lives of everyone in the community when three individuals have already offered to sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole? Is it right to deny someone the opportunity to give their own life to save others? Or is James just being stubborn and reckless?
At a first glance, that’s the way it looks. But then I imagined what James would say to justify himself. After what he learns from the events of Mercenary Savior, James would argue that the community needs to stick together–that in order for the whole to survive, everyone has to know with absolute certainty that no-one will be left behind. Once the leader shows that he’s willing to sign his followers over, how can any of them trust him with their lives? Under such conditions, trust breaks down and the community falls apart.
From that, a whole host of other ideas started gradually coming to mind. How does this event tie into James’s romantic interest? Does it tie in at all? What would the people’s reaction be to this decision? Coming from the background of the Colony, would they want to put the issue to a vote instead? Is it ever right to suspend democracy when facing a crisis, and if so, under what conditions?
So anyway, I won’t tell you what I have in mind, but I have a lot of really interesting ideas. It’s gotten to the point, in fact, that I may just write the sequel after I get back from World Fantasy.
In closing, let me leave with this excellent track from one of ocremix’s latest albums, a rearrangement of Donkey Kong Country 2. Believe it or not, this song could be the main theme of this novel. Listen to it and I think you’ll see why.
This post is going to be super quick because I’m dead tired.
Due to power surges and computer glitches, I had to work overtime today and yesterday at the warehouse, so I really haven’t had time for anything except writing and a little socializing at Leading Edge. However, things are going well. I’ll get the extra hours off on Friday, which means a big chunk of free time to do whatever I want.
I broke 3k words today in Mercenary Savior. It was awesome. I love revision–taking something good and making it really shine. Just hit some major climaxes and killed off a side character, which is always exhilarating if you do it right.
As a footnote to that, I’m reading George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and I just reached the part where he kills off the first major character. What’s more, he was my favorite character in the book so far!!! AAUGGH! Why, Mr. Martin? Why??? Yet I must confess, killing him was necessary to take the story to the next level of awesomeness <grumble>.
I’ve been thinking a lot about killing characters recently, and I figure the best way to do it is to recognize that everyone has to go sometime (in real life if not always in fantasy), and to write accordingly. We tend to ignore our own mortality, when really, there can be so much meaning to it. After all, to die for something is to make the ultimate sacrifice. If you make sure your characters die for a reason–either heroic or tragic (or both)–then I think that’s the key to make it work.
The Book Academy Conference at UVU was great; I’ll do a writeup on that soon, probably over the weekend. I probably won’t post the audio files, but if you want them, just email me and I’ll send you the link.
I’ve been waking up early each day this week, and it’s been great. I’m so much more productive in the morning, writing wise. It’s like a computer: when you first boot up, your desktop is so clean. With only the startup programs running in the background, everything feels uncluttered.
At the end of the day, though, it’s the exact opposite. You’ve got maybe a dozen applications running, and it’s all too easy to get distracted by switching from one to the other. What’s more, you just don’t have the energy to get things done.
The downside (if you can call it that) is that it’s only midnight and already I’m about to collapse. Oh well–guess I’ll just have to go to bed earlier.
In closing, let me leave you with this really weird, slightly disturbing anime clip I found on youtube of a vegetable committing seppuko. I guess it has something to do with the rest of the post, seeing as I went on a tangent about killing characters. Anyhow, this is the friendship among vegetables…
This might be more than a little dorky, but I keep track of how much I write each day in a giant spreadsheet and do a blog post at the end of each quarter summing up how things went. It’s October already, so this is the Q3 report. Here goes:
In July, I was working part time at the call center and donating plasma while looking for work. I look back on it now and it seems that I had a ton of free time, and perhaps that shows in the way my productivity climbed way up in the first part of the month…but then it fell back down and never picked up again.
Part of that might have to do with the difficulty of the story. Around the middle of July, I wrote through my half-finished draft of Worlds Away from Home and started drafting entirely new material. It was my first time composing a new story in over a year, and I found it pretty tough. At one point, I had to bike down the Provo river trail and write on a park bench just to get the creative juices to flow. It was difficult.
The first big dip in the beginning of August came because of my day trip to Saint George to interview Dave Wolverton. That threw a fairly decent kink in my writing routine. The second dip towards the end of August came when I was between projects (Worlds Away from Home and Mercenary Savior).
I’m not sure why I was never able to break 20k words per week, or why most of the time I was writing below 15k. I got a new job in mid-September, but my writing productivity actually increased. It’s frustrating, because I wish every day could be a 4k or 5k day, where everything is flowing and the story is awesome. Blarg.
So anyway, with World Fantasy coming up in just a month (yikes!), my goal is to finish Mercenary Savior before the conference, which means I’ll have to do about 55k words in the next 25 days. That comes to 2.2k per day, but I want to push that up to about 3k if I can. No more Princess Maker or late night Halo!
Towards that end, I’m going to try out an experiment. Starting tonight, I’m going to go to bed before midnight and wake up before 5:00 am in order to get in a couple hours of writing before work. I hate coming home after a long day and thinking “man, I’ve still got to put in today’s writing.”
I’m hoping that this way, I’ll be able to get 1.5k/2k done in the morning, and another 1k or so in the evening. I’m also hoping that this will keep me from wasting too much time, since I usually spend a couple hours past midnight each night procrastinating going to bed. Not a sustainable way to live when you work 8 to 5.
One more thing. I submitted to quite a few places during the last quarter, and while I generally got rejections from everyone, I did get my first request for a full manuscript (technically June 29, but close enough). So things are looking up.
And that’s basically how things have been going these past three months: not too great, but not too bad either. And now, before I bore any more of you to death with this post, I’m going to call it a night. Take care and keep being awesome!
Went to the Book Academy Conference at UVU today. It was fun, with several excellent panels by some local authors. More about that in a later post.
My new mp3 player arrived today: a refurbished iRiver T10. An ancient, nearly obsolete machine, but it’s got a good quality microphone, which all the other brands lack. Besides, if it’s anything like my old iRiver ifp-890, it’s built to last. With 1 GB of storage instead of 128 MB, it’s a step up in the world.
The revision of Mercenary Savior goes well, though it also goes slowly. Only 1.2k words today, when I was hoping to finish this last chapter. I’m right between part II and part III, with the twist ending that…well, I won’t give it away. So far, I’ve managed to add a scene and rearrange several chapters without adding more words than I’ve cut. That’s good–I need this draft to be tight.
I also dropped the money for plane tickets to World Fantasy 2010. They came to about $300, which was cheaper than I was expecting. I’ll be sharing a room in the next hotel over with Eric James Stone for about $50 per night, but there’s room for others if you’re willing to sleep on the floor. Just let me know.
I think I’m going to experiment with my schedule next week and try waking up early to write instead of staying up late. Maybe if I get the writing in first thing, it will help things flow later, and I won’t always feel like I’m playing catch up. We’ll see.
One final thing: I’ll post more about this later, but I have a great idea for a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior kicking around in my head. It would involve James leading the people of the Colony on an exodus into the heart of the Good Hope Nebula, where they would be completely cut off from the outside world–kind of like the pioneers. It would also involve letting James grow up and giving him a romantic interest or two, something that I didn’t really do in the first book.
And before you say it, yes, I know the advice is to not waste time writing a sequel to a book you haven’t sold yet. I think I could make this work, though. Mercenary Savior, while far from perfect, has a lot of potential–perhaps the most potential of anything I’ve written. I’d be surprised if I didn’t eventually find a home for it, and when I do, having a sequel already written can only be a good thing.
Just a quick post before I turn in and try to catch up on the sleep that I didn’t get last night (insomnia sucks).
I’m entering a very difficult part of the revision for Mercenary Savior. I’m a little more than a third of the way through the story (as you can tell from the status bar to your right), which is usually where my writing starts to get iffy.
Up until now, most of the work has to do with revising or rewriting individual scenes. That’s no too difficult; it’s very easy, for me at least, to focus on the page itself and fixing problems on the sentence and paragraph level.
The problem now, though, is that some of the chapters aren’t working as coherent units. Some of them feel slapped together, as if scenes that don’t really have much in common have been thrown in the same chapter merely because I didn’t know where else to put them. That doesn’t make for good chapters.
So now, I need to take a few steps back from the page and look at the forest instead of the trees. I need to figure out which events need to be clustered into which chapters, in order for the scenes to resonate with each other and build up to the climax without bumbling on each others’ toes.
I’m going to try out a few new tools to help with the plotting, most notably Dan Well’s 7 point system. I’ve already worked out the essential plot points for about a dozen of the conflicts in the story; now I just need to see which ones go in which chapter.
I wish I had time to use it now, but dagnabit, it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I have to get up at 7:00 tomorrow. Dang. Well, at least I have work–and it’s good work for an aspiring writer in my position. More on that in a later post.
Man, so much has been happening, but now that I’m working an eight to five job, I never have the time to blog about it. It’s 2am and I’m running on only four hours of sleep from the previous night. Oh well, it’s a weekend. Here goes.
I passed the 50k mark for the rewrite of Mercenary Savior. I’m surprised how much I’m changing the draft. I’m especially finding a lot of slow chapter beginnings and thinly veiled expository lumps–not of scene descriptions so much as worldbuilding. Gotta remember the iceberg concept (to only include about ten percent or less of your worldbuilding in your story’s narrative).
I interviewed a few more people for the article on the “class that wouldn’t die.” Good stuff, all around. I met with Cara O’Sullivan today, and she had a very interesting comment about why there are so many LDS writers of science fiction and fantasy.
In her opinion, Mormon literary culture tends to push the more talented writers into sf&f because of the extreme lack of freedom in other genres of LDS writing. In mainstream and literary LDS fiction, there are so many expectations for the writers: for example, that the story will have a clear message, or that it will contain a certain brand of Mormon sentimentalism, etc. In science fiction and fantasy, OTOH, there’s much more freedom; therefore, LDS writers tend to gravitate that way.
I also had a phone interview for the wilderness job last Thursday. I think it went well, but we’ll find out at the end of the month, I suppose. Questions that caught me off guard include: “how do you define success?” and “how would you respond to something you heard secondhand about an employee from another shift?”
Finally, I recently got hooked on an old abandonware DOS game called Princess Maker 2. It is so freaking awesome. Basically, you are the father of this ten year old girl, and you have to raise her from childhood to adulthood.
There are so many possible ways to do this: build her fighting skills and send her on adventures, build her artistic skills and have her win dancing/painting contests, build her refinement and send her to court to build her social reputation, etc etc. There are over 70 different possible endings, including some really weird and crazy ones!
And yes, I know, it seems strange that I’d go for a game this girly–but dude, you have no idea until you try it out. It’s like being a father, but with magic and knights and dragons and stuff! So totally awesome!
The flipside is that I spent almost the entire day playing this game. Yeah…still got in 2.5k words, but I was hoping to put in somewhere around 6k or 7k. Man, I haven’t been this addicted since Alpha Centauri. Will it last? I don’t think it will, but then again, I don’t know. The bigger question is whether this is a game I can play in moderation (like Star Control II). I certainly hope it is, but I don’t know.
In the meantime, I’ve got five weeks to write 70k words. Lets go!
