Category: Hameji Cycle

Busy busy AWESOME day

I had an awesome day today.  Totally awesome.  If every day this semester is like this one, I’ll be dead tired before Thanksgiving but so happy it won’t even matter.

It started at 7am.  Woke up, worked out, read a galley from Dragon Moon Press for Leading Edge while working out.  The book wasn’t that bad, either.

Showered, ate breakfast, read 1st Jacob chapter 1 in Arabic.  Great scripture study.  Read “The false gods we worship” by Spencer W. Kimball on the walk up to school.  Powerful.  President Kimball was a Prophet with a capital P.

Met with Dr. Bowen to discuss the TA job she wants to hire me for.  It’s going to be a LOT of fun!  I’ll be doing all kinds of interesting research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and making a sort of game / role play for the students in the class…and getting paid good money to do it.  Fun fun fun.

Classes were awesome.  I love my capstone.  Professor Christensen is a blast.  Talked about spatial voting and why political parties in America tend to be identical.  Made fun of Provo/Orem municipal elections.  Good times.

After classes, met with Professor Kramer to discuss the other TA job I’ll be working.  He was incredibly happy to have me on board.  Out of the hundreds of papers he read for PL SC 201 last year, he still remembered mine.  Holy cow.  I’m shocked.

Proceeded to run through a series of bureaucratic hoops to get all the paperwork filled out for both TA jobs.  I was so giddy about working I didn’t mind the hassle.  Dr. Bowen at one point said “What’s the other job paying you?  Eight something?  Well, we can do better than that!” Man, I’m going to earn so much money this semester.

Went home, cooked up some locally grown corn and spaghetti.  Mmm, corn on the cob!  Delicious.  Talked with my roommate Ben Crowder about all the stuff he’s done since graduating.  Dude, he is a renaissance man, through and through.  Awesome guy.

Leading edge was a total blast.  The editors threw a start-of-semester pizza party, and we had almost a dozen new people show up to read slush.  Plus, Peter was there–he’s always fun.  Talked about spaceballs and Big Bang theory (the movie), how Arrested Development is funnier than The Office, violence in fiction, crazy story ideas, and all kinds of stuff.  Good times.

So then, after finishing my homework, I was sitting in the library when I realized I only had an hour and a half before the library closed.  An hour and  a half, and I had not written a single word in my WIP that day.  In order to keep up with my self-imposed deadline, I needed to write 1.2k words.  1.2k words…in 1.5 hours.

I didn’t really think I could do it, but I decided what the hell and gave it a shot.  Turned off the music, avoided the email and twitter, and just focused on the work.

An hour and a half later, lo and behold! 1.2k words!  And just as I realized that, the HBLL closing music comes on…and it’s Dropkick Murphies!

Let me just say, there is no better way to end an awesome day than with some good outro music.  So let me end this post with tonight’s awesome outro music, courtesy the Harold B. Lee Library.

That’s the news and I AM OUTA HERE!

Summer roundup

Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer.

When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship.  My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in Provo and write full time.

Sanderson’s agent ended up taking on a different intern, which ended up being the best for both of us, since I get the sense that he was looking to mentor someone who would go on to become a professional agent.  Me, I was just looking to network and develop some connections in the publishing world, which I did anyway (at least in the local Utah scene).  Besides, Provo is WAY cheaper than New York!

From the beginning, I treated writing as a full-time job.  I set project deadlines, daily and 7-day wordcount goals, and spent somewhere around 8 hours a day working on my various projects.  I submitted a full to an editor from the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and partials to the other two editors.  I also submitted to the Writers of the Future contest and to the LDS Publisher Christmas story contest (much smaller, but geared toward a niche market).

I started keeping my stats on May 25th, using a spreadsheet to keep track of my daily wordcount for each of my projects, the daily total wordcount, the 7-day cumulative wordcount, and any writing I did for synopses or revision notes.  Since BYU’s summer recess begins in April, I missed the stats  for the first three weeks or so, but I kept consistent records since then until now.

From May 25th to August 31st, I wrote 244,065 words in 8 projects (3 short stories and 5 novel drafts).  I averaged 2,490 words per day.  Adjusting for Sundays (I typically take Sundays off), I averaged 2,906 words per day.

My goals were to write 4k words per day, and to shoot for a constant 7-day total of 24k, but to never let that total dip below 12k words.  In 98 days, the 7-day running total only went below 12k eleven times–on those particular days, I was either traveling, moving out, moving in, or extremely busy with back-to-school chores.  For the two weeks I was on vacation, I still wrote more than 12k words each week.

Interestingly enough, out of the eight fiction projects, only one was a rough draft–a short story that I worked on for two days and never completed.  The vast majority of my writing went into revising novels that I’d already written.

I completed the first draft of Bringing Stella Home in early June (my third complete novel rough draft).  Later, in July, I began the second draft.  I’m currently just over halfway through with the revisions and hope to finish by October 10th.

I started a revision of my first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea, but decided midway through that I was running up against diminishing returns and decided to drop it (I completed the rough draft in April of 2008–it was my first finished novel and the reason I started this blog, waaaaay back in August 2007).

I started a new draft of Hero in Exile, making some drastic revisions, but found it difficult to juggle more than one writing project at a time and put it on the back burner.  I may or may not pick it up again once Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished.

I completed the third draft of Genesis Earth and started to submit it.  I will probably do one language/readability edit before the World Fantasy convention in late October and try to sell it while I’m there.

Overall, the summer was a practice run to see if I could write full time and survive the insanity.  I always feared, as a child, that if writing became my full time job I would come to hate it.  I found, however, that writing full time (8+ hrs/day, 6 days/wk) only made me enjoy it more.  Now that school is back in session, I already wish I had more time and mental space to dedicate to my writing.

I miss the summer, but not because of the lazy days, or the parties, or the vacationing–I miss the opportunity to write full time!  Provided I can find a way to support a family off of this, I can definitely see myself turning this into a career.  In the meantime, I’ll keep honing my craft and start working on getting an agent.

Now, more than ever, I feel that breaking in is more of a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’

🙂 🙂 🙂

First week drama and other news

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mostly because it’s been a crazy week so far.  Gosh, it feels like Saturday already.  School’s back in session, and while the homework hasn’t been bad so far (and probably won’t be), I’ve been jumping through hoops just to get this semester figured out.

Long story short, my work schedule has been clashing with my class schedule, especially since I decided I wanted to drop this English class that didn’t look very appealing.  But to graduate  with an English minor, I must take an English class this semester, and all the ones I want to take conflict with this two hour weekly mandatory in service class.  My boss will probably fire me if I can’t make the meeting, but you know what?  As much as I love the FHSS Writing Lab, school comes first.  If push comes to shove (and I really hope that it doesn’t), I’ll probably just find work elsewhere this semester.

Augh.  Everything’s complicated by the fact that you have to use add/drop cards for some dumb reason, so you can’t just rearrange  your schedule online.  If you drop a class, then realize that you shouldn’t have done it…tough.  Blegh.

Making things even more complicated are the looming deadlines.  I’ve barely touched the FAFSA (need to get on that), and for Washington Seminar I’ve got a lot of application work to do ASAP.

As usual, though, it’s the little stuff that really gets to me, not the big, earthshaking stuff.  In twenty four hours, all this crap will probably be resolved.  Twenty four hours ago, I was frantically trying to find an English class, and now I’m signed up for this AWESOME wilderness writing class!  I am so looking forward to it!

With all this first week upside downness, you would think my writing has suffered.  Well, not so!  I put in a solid 3k today, writing in hour-long blocks between classes and from 7pm to 11pm tonight.  Very satisfying to get so much done, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Now, I need to get to bed.  I’ve decided to keep working out in the mornings, like I did all summer, but the SFH weightroom closes from 8am to 4pm for classes, so I need to get up around 6:30 if I want to work out.  G’night!

Blarg.

I’ve got a bad case of writer’s avoidance.  It’s annoying.

I wrote 1,500 words in Bringing Stella Home today, and about 800 words of outlining.  That might seem like a lot, but when you consider how much free time I had today, it’s really not that much.  Blarg.

I’m all moved in to my new place, with my class and work schedule all worked out, my insurance paid for, groceries in the fridge, books on the shelf (or boxed in the closet–not much book space, considering that Ben’s already taken most of it!), etc etc.  I even went on a date last night–a really awesome one!  So it’s not like I can say “I had chores” and use that as an excuse.

Part of the problem, though, was that I didn’t have this particular section very well planned.  Without having a good macroscopic view of the novel, it’s hard to revise things right.  Fortunately, I took a step back today and planned out the next three chapters or so.  That should keep me going strong for a while.

Whenever I stop procrastinating and just write, I usually dive right into it.  It’s thinking too much about it before I start that really holds me  back.

So, no more thinking–just doing.

Tomorrow is the last Friday before school starts, and the last 100% open day I have before the craziness begins.  Here’s what I plan to do:

  • Cook chili (all from scratch–I’m soaking the beans tonight).
  • Pick up tupperware and a cutting board from DI.
  • Read and critique the stories for writing group.
  • Read required readings for Poli Sci 309R (or,  if not, at least on Saturday).
  • Go to the temple–gotta go to the temple before school starts.
  • Catch up a bit on the blogging backlog (and boy is it LONG).

Hopefully, in between all of that, I can knock off a chapter or two.  My goal: 4k words.  Gotta buckle down!

In related news, I got an amazing compliment from my friend Drek!  We were chatting online, and this is what he said:

Ben: Just remember you have to find a girl BEFORE you become an incredibly famous novelist, or you’ll never know if your wife married you for your money or your looks.

me: ha

ha

ha

no, I”m probably going to be poor and destitute all my life

working a day job

Ben: No way, I predict you’ll be a professional author within five years.

me: thanks

but will it be enough to make a living?

lots of bestselling authors still have day jobs

Ben: Eh, you’ll have more of a day “hobby” just so you can earn some play money.

me: perhaps

Ben: Anyway, see you on Saturday!

Thanks Ben!  I haven’t really thought of it that way (I don’t dare get my hopes up), but that would be awesome if things worked out that way.  That’s the  goal, in any case.  I just hope I can keep my head out of the water after I graduate!

Finally, I’ll leave you with some awesome Celtic music–part of the reason I haven’t been writing!

To write on vacation or not to write?

That is the question.

These last couple of weeks have been very unproductive.  I hate it.  Yeah, there have been reasons–moving apartments, sister’s graduation, coming home, etc.  Worthless excuses–I should have been writing more, and I didn’t.

At the same time, taking a break every now and again is very important.  Sometimes you just have to sit back and recharge your creative batteries–otherwise, you’ll overwork them and they’ll die.  What better way to kill your productivity than that?

I noticed, back at the beginning of the month, that I  needed a break.  I produced about 85k words each month in June and July, and I’ve been sloshing through the middle of Bringing Stella Home 2.0 for some time now.  Consequently, my creative brain seemed to  shut down about two weeks ago (or at least switched to power-saving mode) and I haven’t been writing at a consistent rate since.  Blargh.

So I know I need a vacation.  I’ve needed it for some time.  And now that I’m here in Massachusetts, heading to the cape on Saturday, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries.

Trouble is, if I stop writing altogether, will I lose momentum?  Will it take me another week just to get back into the story?  I’ve already lost so much productivity, it makes me feel disgusted.  I need to be so much further along in this story than I am if I’m going to meet my (self-imposed) deadline.

So, I’m wondering–should I write while I’m on this vacation?

Of course, I’m not going to spend eight hours a day writing full time, the way I have been for most of this summer.  I’m going to relax.  But should I set a modest goal of 1k words a day while I’m there?  I kind of think I should.

Don’t worry, though.  I’m going to take time off for fun as well.  I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a very long time!

As if writing weren’t fun enough already. 🙂

Oh crap

Dang.  I just looked at a calendar for the next two months, and it looks like I’m going to be busy.

I want to get Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home polished and ready before World Fantasy 2009, but it’s going to take a lot of work.  Genesis Earth is almost there, but Bringing Stella Home is going to require a HEAVY rewrite.  I’m in the middle of that now.

I’m currently about 25k words into the rewrite, with between 100k and 110k words to go (I think…could be more).  I want to finish this by the last week of September / first week of October.  That leaves me three working weeks in August (I’m taking off a week for vacation at Cape Cod, though I will probably write a little there as well) and five weeks in September.

But really, once school starts again, I’m not going to have much time available to write.  I’ve got two capstone papers I’ll be writing, a ccouple of poli sci classes to take, and to top it all off, I’ll be taking a 400 level English class where I’ll probably be writing a DIFFERENT novel–holy cow!  September is going to be a CRAZY month!

How the crap am I going to juggle all this?

Well, I figure if I write 4k minimum a day in August, I can get between 60k and 75k of Bringing Stella Home knocked out before school starts.  It’s going to be tough, but it won’t be significantly more than what I’m already writing. Definitely doable.

That way, I’ll only have 35k for September, which comes to a meager 1k  per day.  Considering that this is revision work, which tends to go a bit quicker, I  think I’ll be able to handle it.

But 65k in August…can I do that?

Well, in June, I wrote a grand total of 81k, and in July I wrote 85k.  Most of the stuff in July, too, was revision work that I counted differently, excluding passages that I’d recycled from the previous draft.

Considering this, I think I can do 65k in August, even with a week’s vacation.  I’ll probably even write a bit on the break, maybe 1k/day, just to keep some momentum.  We’ll see.

But, just as an aside…81k?  85k??  That’s more than the novel I worked on my entire freshman year of high school!  And I did that…in just a month?  That’s encouraging!

Maybe I’m finally getting toward the tail end of my million crappy words.  If that’s the case, maybe I’ll finally write my first good word before too long.

🙂

Holy crap! 5,373 words in one day

That’s right–5,373. And I was only going for 4k! How did this hapen?

Well, I was revising a couple of powerful, gripping scenes. The way I’d had them before, they worked okay, but when I followed the suggestions from the writing group, it made them ten times better. By midafternoon, I was hooked in my own book–I just wanted to keep writing.

The funny thing is that I never got hyperfocused while I did it. I would write a paragraph, check email, write a few more sentences, delete them, write a few more, cut to google images to do some research, get distracted, come back, etc. At the same time, it all seemed to pour out, so I must have been doing something right.

If only the rest of the book would go like this. Maybe it can! Bringing Stella Home is a lot more like a thriller than anything else I’ve written, so if there isn’t a hook on every page (or at least something to raise the stakes and keep the reader reading), I’m probably not doing it right. And if I’m hooked while writing it, chances are the reader will be hooked while reading it.

In totally unrelated news, check out this awesome Mega Man remix!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is finished!

That’s right!  Here are the stats:

ms pages: 269
words: 74,687
file size: 525 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 8 July 2009
end date: 25 July 2009

Wordle: Genesis Earth 3.0

Wow, I finished this rewrite in seventeen days. Seventeen days! Hard to believe it’s only been that long. I hope the quality of this work went up in that time. I still feel like I need to run through and proofread it, make sure that the language flows well and the dialogue isn’t stilted.

In the process of writing this draft, I added or deleted 37,159 words from the previous draft. Going by the wordcount of the previous draft, 51.98% of the text changed.

Now I need to start submitting this book. It’s going to be kind of hard–I’m not sure whether it’s YA or not. On the one hand, the main characters are older teenagers and experience a lot of personal growth over the course of the novel. On the other hand, the (pseudo)science is a little dense, and the prose isn’t…well, it doesn’t read like most of the YA that I’ve read.

Well, I guess the only thing to do is shop it around and see who picks it up. In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into finishing Bringing Stella Home. The 2.0 draft of that novel is going to be AWESOME!

Refocusing

If you’re a regular of this blog, you may have noticed that I took off the statusbar for Ashes of the Starry Sea 2.2.  I’ve decided to discontinue that project for the foreseeable future, while I work on Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home.

It’s not that I think that Ashes doesn’t have potential, or that I can’t rewrite it.  It’s just that I don’t want something good to keep me from doing my best.

Ashes, in its first incarnation, was very much a practice novel.  It has potential, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get it publishable.  In the meantime, I’ve got two other novels that are much better–much more workable.  I don’t want them to be any worse because I’ve diverted too much attention toward something else.

When I wrote Ashes two years ago, I cringed at the thought that this was going to be just a practice novel.  It was my magnum opus, the best thing I’d ever written!  Well, since then, I’ve written a lot of other stuff that is much better.  I’m able to let this baby sit on the back burner while I polish the better stuff.

(baby…back burner…okay, disturbing image)

In unrelated news, I had an AWESOME story idea today at Leading Edge!

Ever read the Illiad or the Odyssey? Didn’t you think that the Greek gods were just so petty, with their stupid feuds and their dumb wagers?  Did it disturb you how they toyed around with humanity, ruining people’s lives just for sport?

Well, imagine this: an ancient Greek Van Helsing who slays gods instead of vampires!

Yeah, man!  That’s gotta make for some interesting story material right there!  The godslayer…the man who dares to challenge fate and takes up arms against the forces of the universe, slaying the immortals, overpowering the omnipotent, and outwitting the omniscient.  Sounds like…like Richard Dawkins meets Sparticus. =P

Anyway, that’s the idea.  What’s your take on it?

Uh oh…more projects?

That’s right.  I recently formed a writing group with some friends, and decided to workshop Bringing Stella Home through it.  They went through the first chapter yesterday and tore it apart.  I appreciate the help a TON, but I’m going to have to start making revision to it now, so that subsequent submissions to the writing group won’t have the same issues.

So, that makes three major ongoing projects for me now: the Genesis Earth 3.0 revision draft, the Ashes of the Starry Sea 2.2 draft, and now, Bringing Stella Home 2.0.  It’s going to be very hard to juggle all three, and one of them will probably fall through  the cracks (probably Ashes, to be honest).  However, I’m going to do my best to give them all equal time.  We’ll see if I succeed.

In order to accomplish this, I’m probably going to have to make some changes to my daily routine.  Right now, I work out, eat breakfast, read the Book of Mormon, and arrive on campus ready to write…at about 11:00 am.  And that’s on a good day.  I write until about 2:00 or 3:00 pm, then go home for lunch, take a nap, check the internet, be lazy, etc.  At about 7:00 or 7:30 pm, I head back up to campus and write until about midnight.

So far, it’s been working.  I’ve been averaging 4k words per day pretty regularly these past couple of weeks.  However, if I’m going to work on these projects, I might have to focus and up that wordcount a bit.

Therefore, I’m going to try to cut back on IMing while I’m writing.  Usually, during the day, I’ve got gmail open on my browser and I check it from time to time.  I’ve got a couple of friends with whom I usually keep a running chat for the entire day, which can be maddening when you’re trying to concentrate.

I’ve been thinking about cutting back on the IMing for the last few weeks, but thus far it hasn’t been too much of an issue.  However, if I’m going to buckle down, something’s got to go.  Sorry.

(Of course, it remains to be seen if I keep this resolution.  Internet habits die hard.)

In unrelated news, I cooked the AWESOMEST chili today!  Best chili of my life, and what’s even better, I cooked it in MASSIVE amounts!  Here’s what I put in it:

corn
diced onions
ground beef
kidney beans
pinto beans
black beans
crushed tomatoes
diced jalapenos
plain yoghurt
spices

The secret ingredient was definitely the yoghurt.  Adds a creamy texture, like sour cream without the unhealth stuffy.  Also give it a rich and interesting flavor.

Good stuff!