Category: Hameji Cycle

Never a good time to write

I’m on vacation now, staying with my uncle in Midland.  The rest of the family will be out here in a couple of days.  In the meantime, I’m visiting with relatives, going Christmas shopping, and trying to finally finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0.

It’s not going to be easy, though, with all the family stuff going on.  I managed 1,221 words yesterday, but most of that was after midnight.  I get the feeling this is going to be pretty common for the rest of the time here.

There’s never a good time to write–but I think that’s the norm.  If I’m not busy with exams or schoolwork, it’s family obligations or traveling.  There is never a steady routine that gives me time to write.

I suppose part of being a writer is learning to write anyway.

So anyways, my goal is to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 before the new year.  I’m about 26k words from the end, so with only 10 days or so to go, that’s going to be almost 3k words per day.  A little steep, but definitely doable.  Also, since this isn’t the polished draft that I’m going to be sending out to publishers, it doesn’t have to be perfect–just good enough for me to make perfect on the next pass.

And now my Dad’s calling me, asking if I’m up and ready to go.  I’ll have to cut this short here, but in the meantime, check this out: explanetary systems forming in the Orion nebula.  Holy crap, this is awesome!  Maybe I should go back to school and become an astronomer.

Must…build…momentum

Man, nothing throws a kink in your writing life like a major paper.  This semester, I’ve got the mother of all undergraduate papers to write–the CAPSTONE.

Interestingly enough, I’ve been having a lot of fun with mine.  A lot. I’ll spare you the gory details, but basically my capstone is a statistical study of the effects of Israeli politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically whether Israeli political fragmentation leads to increases in the level of conflict.  One of these days, I’ll get around to showing you the tables, because they are fairly compelling.

Well, on Monday, the rough draft was due–the complete rough draft.  Minimum: 20 pages.  Professor Christensen doesn’t care how you get your paper in, though, so long as it’s on his desk when he shows up for work Tuesday morning.  So basically, I locked myself in the SWKT and wrote the last half of the thing in the TA office.  The building closed, but around midnight I finished the thing and slipped it into the dropbox!  Huzzah!

And now that my capstone is complete (at least, the first draft), you have NO IDEA how liberated I feel!  It’s awesome! Like, I actually have free time right now!  It’s been so long, I’ve totally forgotten what that feels like.  Freedom!

And now that I look back on the last three weeks of my writing, all I can say is ouch.

I’ve hardly worked on either of my novels at all these past two weeks.  The 7-day word counts have been steadily dwindling, and last week it actually hit zero.  Yikes!  I don’t think that’s happened since…since finals last semester or something.

Well, I’m going to fix that!  Yesterday, I churned through about 2.5k words in the revision of Genesis Earth, and I plan to keep it up all this week until school starts beating me up again.  That probably won’t be until after Thanksgiving, which gives me just enough time to finish this revision.

Hopefully, this week I’ll be able to do at least 1.5k daily.  It’s going to take hard work to build momentum again, but once I’m up and running, finishing this beast shouldn’t be hard.  Then I can devote more time to finishing the current incarnation of Bringing Stella Home, which should have been finished long ago.

And then, finally…something new!

I need a new deadline

Two, actually.  I’ve got two unfinished projects, both of them on the sidebar: Genesis Earth 4.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0, both of which have stalled in recent weeks.

Here’s what I’m thinking: I’m currently swamped with school, and have been for the last several weeks, but after tomorrow, most of the urgent important stuff will be finished, and I’ll have some breathing space until after Thanksgiving break.

That should be enough time to finish Genesis Earth, at least before the end of the break.  It will require some commitment, but that’s what personal deadlines are for, right?  Making a commitment.

As for Bringing Stella Home, it’s been so long since I’ve worked on that beast, I’m not sure what state it’s in.  I do know that I’ll have to do a complete rewrite from the beginning before it’s anywhere near submittable.  However, I’m not going to scrap the current rewrite, because even though it isn’t fixing all the major story issues, it is helping me to put the chapters and scenes in the right order.  Without that, I won’t have a good foundation for the next rewrite–that’s what happened to me on the various revisions of Ashes of the Starry Sea.

So the personal deadline I’m setting for Bringing Stella Home is the end of the year.  I want both projects to be completely finished by then, so I can start 2010 with something completely new.  It’s been way too long since I worked on a new story.

September recap

So, September’s over now.  Where in the heck did all that time go?  In some ways, I can still remember the summer…but in other ways, it’s never been further away.

So, what did I do this past month?  Plenty.  I got a good start on school (14 credits this semester), I quit the writing advisor job and replaced it with two TA jobs, and I turned 25 years old.  Quarter century…and still in school.  I feel like some kind of relic. “An elegant weapon for a more civilized age…”

As far as writing goes, I wrote 41,649 words total, averaging 1,602 words per day (not counting Sundays–counting Sundays, I averaged 1,388).  I passed the 3/4ths mark on Bringing Stella Home 2.0 and started work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Not bad!  I’m surprised I wrote so much; 41k is almost as much as nanowrimo.  However, I can’t help but wonder: how many of those words are good words?

It’s a much more subjective thing to measure, but I do feel that my craft has improved.  Now that I’ve started the rewrite on Genesis Earth, I’m catching a surprising number of sentences and paragraphs that could be much better phrased.  For today, I “wrote” 1,616 words, but only got about 1,000 words further into the story (I measure wordcount with compare documents, totaling all the deletions and additions).  After the last revision–just last July–I felt very satisfied with the draft as I’d written it.  The fact that I’m changing so much on this rewrite shows that I’ve set the bar a lot higher for quality of writing (at least, I hope that’s what it means).

School is still kicking my trash.  I’ve got papers up the wazoo this entire month–3 major ones, two minor ones, and at least one midterm, not to mention all the midterms and papers I’ll be grading.  Oh, and I’m reading about a dozen academic articles per week. Dense articles.  The kind that suck your life out through your eyes.

Because of all that, and because of World Fantasy at the end of the month, I’ve decided to  put Bringing Stella Home on temporary hold until I finish the revision of Genesis Earth. Got to put priorities first, and that’s how it falls.  If the revision takes longer than expected, I may have to change my personal deadline for Bringing Stella Home to Thanksgiving.

But come Thanksgiving, I am definitely starting something new!

Final polish

I mapped out all the major assignments for my capstone class for the next month on my calendar.  Turns out I’ve got a lot more work than I thought I did.  Because of that, I decided to start work on Genesis Earth 4.0 today.

This is the final polish before World Fantasy convention.  Of all the stuff I’ve written, Genesis Earth is the only ms that I feel is ready for me to send to editors/agents.  With this draft, I hope to smooth out the writing, make the text more readable–basically, make this book really shine.  We’ll see if it succeeds.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in some ways, doing this final edit (inasmuch as any edit is “final”).  Previously, whenever I did a revision, I knew that I had time to come back later and fix anything that I just couldn’t get to.  Now, this is where it counts.  The writing has to be perfect.

Imagine how horrible it was to find a grammatical mistake on page one.  I’d forgotten to capitalize the first word of a sentence in the third or fourth paragraph.  Thankfully, it was the only mistake I saw on that page, but it’s enough to make me nervous about those chapters I sent out to the editors from BYU’s Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers.  I know how to write–really, I do!  Please believe me!

So today, every hour of the day was jam packed with classes, work, homework, and obligatory social activities.  I only had two hours to write, and in that time, I only wrote about 500 words for Genesis Earth (though, to be fair, I’m measuring it by comparing documents and only counting the words that changed).  Ouch.  Not sustainable, if I want to finish Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home (I need to change that title) before World Fantasy.  I made up for it by writing for half an hour just now in Stella, but still…

And this is where I hope I don’t mess things up.  Every time I’ve tried to juggle two projects at once, I’ve found it very hard to do so.  It’s something I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to write professionally, but it’s still very hard.  I hope my writing quality doesn’t suffer because of it.

If worst comes to worst, I’ll focus on Genesis Earth until it’s done to my satisfaction.  Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks,  even with school.  But I’m still keeping my goal to finish Stella before World Fantasy.

In unrelated news, in my political philosophy class today, Professor Hancock mentioned Huntington and I said, under my breath, “that guy was so full of crap.” Well, it turns out that Professor Hancock is quite the admirer of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory.  This is going to make class…interesting, to say the least.  After studying this stuff my entire college career, I really do believe that Huntington’s theories are utterly full of crap.

Oh, and I had a great idea for a comic: Plato’s Republic, as a cartoon!  Okay, maybe I’m just a geek, but seriously, if it were done well, it could  be really, REALLY cool.  Really cool.

School is kicking my trash

It’s true.  This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:

wordcounts24sep09

Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently.  If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.

This week was particularly busy.  I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation.  Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.

Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes.  Ugh.

The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers.  The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good.  I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class.  Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.

Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class.  While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea?  And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.

With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm.  Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play.  Every day, I come home exhausted.  And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class.  Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.

Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end.  In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it.  In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do.  I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.

I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that.  In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.

In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project.  Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

🙂

Climax (thank you Ennio Morricone)

Just passed the major climax in the middle of Bringing Stella Home.  In a moment that I hope is as poignant to the reader as it was to me, I…well, let’s just say I’m glad I’m not my main character.

I hit the climax doing a 1,765 word sprint, with this song playing on repeat:

So awesome. I just hope that when I wake up from this daze, my writing doesn’t suck.

Next, gotta finish up the chapter, clean up the mess, give the denouement. After every emotionally poignant climax, I think it’s critical to have a good denouement to give those emotions their proper release and bring everything full circle, bring some proper closure. Best denouement of any story I know: the Throne Room from Star Wars IV:

The denouement for my story will not be nearly so triumphant. But then again, it’s not the final climax–there’s a lot more to come, a lot more pain and suffering for my main character to endure.

I’m 2/3rds of the way through this rewrite now. I hope I’m not being too melodramatic, or that the story sucks. They say it’s not enough to be good–to make it as a writer, you have to be brilliant. Does this story have that potential? Gosh, I hope it does. As it stands, though, it sure needs a lot of work.

But still–it’s been awesome writing it.

Battle scenes are HARD

I’m in the middle of revising a major battle scene right now.  This is supposed to be one of the more important climaxes of the book, adding a lot more tension and emotion as the novel approaches the main climax.

Let me just say, writing a good battle scene is tough.  The first version of this one…yeah, it sucked.  Hardcore sucked.  I’m cutting whole sections at a time–five hundred words, eight hundred words–and completely rewriting them from the ground up.  I’m not sad to see these sections go, either–they were BAD.

I think the most difficult thing is to keep the pacing up without confusing the reader.  For that reason, I reconceptualized most of the action here and made it simpler.  I also repeated several times the main point of tension–basically, will we get out of here before reinforcements come and kick our trash?  I hate it when a fight scene is so confusing that the tension just leaks out.  I don’t want that to happen here.

At the same time, I’m trying to filter everything through the viewpoint character.  Too often, I’ll read an action scene that’s just a blow-by-blow of the physical action.  That gets boring REALLY fast.  Without character, you have no stakes.  I want the stakes to be high from the very onset.

Still, it’s hard.  I don’t know if I’m succeeding yet.  I probably won’t until I distance myself from what I’ve written tonight and take a good, hard look at it.

Since I can’t do that until the third revision, I’m not going to worry about it.  Better to write it out now and move on than to try so hard to get everything perfect that I can’t see the story for the words.

On the plus side, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Star Wars battle music while writing this.  That’s always fun!

Six weeks to World Fantasy

Holy cow!  How is September halfway over?  It seems like school started just a week ago.  Only six and a half weeks before World Fantasy convention in San Jose, and I think I’m going to have to readjust some of my goals.

I’d wanted to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 by the 11th of October, but the way school and work is looking, I probably won’t be able to write 2k words every day in order to meet that goal.  Besides, the story has several major issues that can only be fixed with a major overhaul, so there’s no way this novel is going to be ready for submission in time for the convention.

However, Genesis Earth is looking pretty good.  So far as story issues go, I was very satisfied with the third draft–I think I fixed all the major issues and wrote something that’s pretty close to salable.  Before the convention, I want to go through and make one final revision, one where I polish up the prose and fix the readability issues.  That shouldn’t be too hard–I can probably do that in two to three weeks.

So here’s what I’m going to do in the next six weeks.  I’m going to check out all of Robert Charles Wilson’s books and immerse myself in his prose–not to copy it, but to hopefully boost the quality of my own prose.  The quality of his writing is fantastic, a beautiful mesh of literary prose and thriller pacing and rhythm.  While I’m doing that, I’ll start the 4.0 draft of Genesis Earth and work hard at it, until I’ve polished that work as much as I can.  That’s the work that I’ll try to sell when I’m at World Fantasy.

I’m a little worried, because I submitted the full manuscript to Krista Marino back in June and haven’t heard back.  At the BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference, she said she had a response time of 4 months, but I’m worried I won’t hear back from her before World Fantasy.  Is it appropriate to send a polite note asking her to get back to me before the convention?  I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by sending out simultaneous submissions, and if an editor asks to see my ms, I want to be able to send it to them ASAP.  Then again, I suppose I could just tell them that the full is currently with someone else, and that would demonstrate some professionalism…but I want to be able to send it if/when they ask for it.

Which reminds me: I need to do some HEAVY agent/editor research before this convention.  I want to go to World Fantasy with a list of people to look for, so I know where to go to network, which panels to attend, who to look out for in the hallways and parties.  I want to be very professional about this, and get the most out of those two/three days that I can.

As for Bringing Stella Home, my current WIP, I’m going to do my best to finish it before World Fantasy so that I can start November with something new.  I need to finish that book before I can set it aside and let it percolate in my mind for the next revision.  Besides, it’s been too long since I’ve worked on something completely new.  After October, I’ll need to take a break from all these revisions.

So that’s the plan: Finish Genesis Earth 4.0 and Bringing Stella Home 3.0 before World Fantasy.  Research all the editors and agents to look out for at the convention.  Oh, and hold down 14 credit hours and 2 on-campus jobs at the same time, with some time left over for a dating/social life (INSHALLAH).

Hehe…these next six weeks are going to be packed!