Category: Hameji Cycle

Almost at part 3

Wow, writing this novel is going a lot faster than I had thought. At the same time, though, I sometimes worry that I’m not going fast enough.

I broke the 50k mark this week, and I haven’t even gotten to any of the major climaxes yet. This thing could easily go to 90k words before the end. With only 6 1/2 weeks left in the semester, can I finish it in time?

At the same time, I have NO IDEA what I’m doing this summer. Really. I have a lot of possibilities, but no concrete plans. With the semester coming to a close in a little more than a month and my housing contract with the FLSR coming to an end, that is a little bit unnerving.

Whatever I do, I want to devote some serious time to revising and rewriting these novels, getting them polished. Finding a spring/summer contact isn’t that hard in Provo; the question is whether I can find a job. I also want to go to the Middle East for a while, and if I go home to Massachusetts in August (which I would like to do) another possibility is Worldcon 2009 up in Montreal.

As far as how Bringing Estella Home is coming, it’s coming along very well. I have all of the key climaxes mapped out in my head, and the one that ends part 2 and begins part 3 is only two chapters from where I am now. I don’t normally keep a detailed outline of the whole novel, but I can usually see at least one chapter ahead. Kind of like the faith-promoting story of how a train conductor only has to see as far as his headlights, except that with novel writing, getting derailed is a very real possibility. I know I’ve crashed and burned in my novel attempts before. Fortunately, this one seems to be right on track.

This semester hasn’t been too hard, but last week was somewhat harder than usual. However, it seems like things are starting to calm down into another lull (knock on wood), so I think I can shoot a little higher as to where I want to be at the end of this week (in terms of my novel). I’ve found that I can do about one viewpoint scene per day, one chapter per week. This week, I’m going to shoot for two chapters by Monday. It seems a bit tough, but since I’ve already written the first scene in chapter 9, I think I can do it.

Also, as an experiment, I’m going to try to wake up early and get in a solid hour of writing before I start my day. I found a random website the other day (lost the link, sorry) that showed the routines of several famous, successful writers. Almost all of them woke up early in the morning and did most of their work before noon. Right now, I write almost everything between eleven at night and three in the morning, so I’d like to see if I can change that. I may fail miserably, but what the heck. Now is the time in my life to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Progress!

I’m sludging through the middle of Bringing Estella Home.  I’ve heard people call this the “blue collar work” of writing, all the parts between the beginning chapters and climactic ending chapters.  I believe it.

In particular, I was having some difficulty with chapter 7 last week.  I have, basically, three separate plot threads tied up in four viewpoints.  Sometimes, it can be frustrating to give them all equal time while putting the scenes together in such a way that they contrast and build off of each other.  In particular, it’s difficult to get the chapters right.

I’ve heard that each chapter is supposed to be its own distinct sub-story, with its rising action, a mini-climax, and a falling action of some kind.  I’m fairly confident that I can do this intuitively over one or two viewpoints, but over four viewpoints, with three different plot lines?  It’s tough.  Last time I tried was with my first novel, and when I went back for the rewrite I had to reorder several of the chapters, especially the first three ones.

The way I’m doing it for Bringing Estella Home is picking one of the plot lines to be the main subject, if you will, of the chapter.  I build on the other plot lines as well, but the big climax, the big reveal, comes in the plot line that I’ve designated for that chapter.  Typically, I’ll start each chapter with a viewpoint from the plot line that is central to the rising and falling action of that chapter–or, if I don’t start it with the viewpoint, I start it with the characters talking about the idea that is central to the climax of the chapter.

Originally, I thought that the climax / central aspect of chapter 7 would be the brainwashing / mind-altering procedures that Ben undergoes in becoming a soldier for the Hameji.  I started with James discussing the Hameji with the other mercenaries on the ship and talking about various legends they’ve heard of mind-altering drugs that give the Hameji special powers.  The next scene was Ben forced to take some of those drugs.

However, I really hadn’t figured out Ben’s part of the story at this point.  I knew he’d take the drug, and I knew how it would change him, but I didn’t know what happened next.  As a result, the rest of the chapter just felt like a chore, one that I accomplished over several late nights (probably to the detriment of the quality of the writing :P)

It wasn’t working.  The chapter just didn’t feel like it held together.

Then, I had a genius idea–why not make the last scene of chapter 6 the first scene of chapter 7?  The viewpoint was from Estella, meeting the jealous head wife of the Hameji overlord.  That scene set up the conflict for the next two chapters of Estella’s story–in retrospect, why didn’t I make it an opening scene for that reason alone?

I don’t know.  But it worked out wonderfully well!  Once I shifted the central focus of the story to Estella, EVERYTHING fell into place!  Her conflict at this point really was a lot more interesting than anything else in the chapter.

So now, with chapter 7 under my belt, I am WAY excited for chapter 8!  While I was walking back from school one day, I figured out exactly what needs to happen next in his story, and it is amazing!  Brutal, violent, and torturous, but it is amazing!  And this is the perfect chapter to insert James’s philosophical discussion with Danica, the one that I wrote down nearly a month ago just because I had to get it out!  I’m excited.  Maybe I’ll even finish it before Saturday.

Anyways, it is 2:30 am, and I am way tired.  Time to get some sleep.  Thank goodness my first class doesn’t start until noon! 🙂

update on the novel

Ughh…….

Alright, in the tradition of last year when I would write until 2am every night and then blog on it before going to bed, here is another update on how Bringing Estella Home is going right now.

It’s getting tougher.  I’m right in the middle of it right now, in chapter 7, and I’m not sure whose viewpoint I should do next or how I should be organizing these chapters.  I’ve got four viewpoints, but really there are three separate subplots going on, and I need to give them each equal time while structuring them so that the tension builds from one to the other.  When you don’t know what your chapter is doing in relation to the novel as a whole, it’s difficult.

My readers in English 318 tell me that one of the most interesting things in this story is the culture of the antagonists, the Hameji, and that’s really good because I want it to be interesting.  I’ve created a sort of ruthless, cold-hearted, irrationally violent barbarian culture, and over the course of the rest of the novel I’m going to show exactly WHY they are so violent, what drove them to it, etc.  Sound familiar?  It’s my Mongols in space idea, and it’s coming along very well…

…except that I didn’t have Ben’s part figured out very well.  He’s the one who gets brainwashed and turned into one of their soldiers, given a drug that melds his emotional being with that of a collective–kind of like the borg, but only with feelings and emotions, not with thoughts.  It will be interesting to play with that idea, but this chapter, which was originally supposed to focus more on his experience with that transition, just…didn’t work out as well.  Not a lot of screen time for him, for some odd reason.

So I did a little bit of thinking as I was walking home today.  I thought to myself, “if I were a Hameji commander, how would I train these guys?” And it worked out very well!  I think I know what I need to do now, what Ben’s story is going to be for the next couple of chapters.  That’s very good.

Man, going for a walk can really help you sort things out and figure out what happens next.  Even though I have an mp3 player, I rarely listen to it as I’m walking to and from campus.  Many times I have my best ideas while making the commute.  If/when I become a professional novelist, I’m going to have to set aside time each day for long walks.

Finally, I’m a little worried that I’m falling behind on my deadline.  I wanted to finish this thing by the final exam day, sometime in April, but now that I’m sludging through the middle, I wonder if it might take longer.  I have the climaxes figured out very well, but I’m still a long ways away from them.  I might not finish this novel until the end of May, especially since I’ll have to do some major revisions of the first three chapters to hand it in for the English 318 final.  That won’t give me a lot of time to revise my novels for World Fantasy 2009…

Bah.  There is so much to think about.  Rather than deal with it now, I’m going to go to bed.

Breaking 40k

Broke 40k words today…again.  I looked back while compiling my submission for English 318 and realized that I could cut 1,000 words from the middle of one chapter without losing anything.  So I did it.  And now I’m back to about 40,500 words.

And…I’m delirious.  Stayed up late hanging up with Steve last night.  Combine that with LTUE and no homework, and you have a train wreck in the process of happening.  But that’s ok.  Life is good.

And now I’m going to bed.  But first, this saying I came up with while chatting online with friends between writing a few extra lines in my story:

“To be intoxicated is to be human.”

Night.

Quick update

Just a quick update on what I’ve been up to, since I don’t write often enough on this blog anymore.

The past week was really busy–at least, it seemed to be, because I was constantly doing things. Whether those things were productive or not remains to be seen. However, I’ve broken the 37,000 mark on my novel, and moving along steadily. Things going fairly well there.

Still, I figure I’m about a week behind where I’d like to be in the novel. Still on the first chapter of part II. I had to do a lot of thinking and conceptualizing to figure out what needs to happen next, but I’ve come up with a plotline that I find really satisfying. Now I just need to write the thing. 😛

Life, the Universe, and Everything has been going on these past few days, and it has been AWESOME!!! I don’t know if I can emphasize that enough! Tons of writers, tons of interesting panels, lots of interesting people…it’s been great! I went up to the first panel at 9:00 am (a panel on being LDS and writing SF&F–the challenges, the strengths, etc. Skipped a class to attend it), and honestly I did not leave the Wilk until 8:00 pm. How crazy is that? The only hour I wasn’t at a panel of some kind was 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm. It was tiring, but definitely worth it! I’m so glad I went!

More updates on LTUE later. In fact, I’ve recorded just about every session I’ve been to, and plan on recording the rest, so if there’s enough interest I may post some links to the recordings on my site. I have my own hosting, and I’m fairly sure that my hosting service can handle all the bandwidth and other issues, so if you guys are really interested, I’ll put them up for you to download.

I’m a little bit worried that I’ve been too shy this conference. Since I plan on going to World Fantasy 2009 to sell my novels there, LTUE is good practice for approaching editors and authors and other notable people within the publishing industry. All morning, though, I pretty much kept to myself, kept at bay by sheer awe from all of these awesome people–however, by the afternoon, I figured out that it does absolutely no harm to shake hands with someone in the hallway and compliment them on something they said on a panel you attended.

So that’s the approach I plan on taking tomorrow, more for myself and to get used to talking with these people than to actually try to sell anything of mine. Because really, even with all the famous writers, there aren’t a whole lot of editors or publishers here. A handful, but mostly for YA, and that’s not what I write.

I’m sooooo looking forward to tomorrow! Another long day of SF&F awesomeness!

Worldbuilding

This is what I was doing the other day.  The FLSR (Foreign Language Student Residence) at BYU has chalkboards in the common rooms, and I just discovered that those can be WAY useful for diagramming your story.

On this occasion, I drew out a couple of space battles, according to how they’d play out with the FTL technology I’ve been thinking up and a few other things.  I worked things out logically and figured out a few basic rules of combat–some basic strategies that you can expect people to follow.  I then took what I know about the Hameji, the main antagonists in my novel, and figured out how they would use their special abilities to counter these tactics.

Pretty fun.  Now, when I go back and rewrite the beginning, I can make the opening space battles feel a lot more vivid, immediate, and engaging.

I finished part 1 of my story last week, and now I’m at the beginning of part 2.  I’ve got the novel roughly outlined out in my head, and it’s following fairly closely to the three act structure.  Not exactly, but pretty close.

According to Brandon Sanderson (and several other people), act 2 is the most difficult part of the story.  It’s where  you need to do the “blue collar work” of simply sludging through and writing the thing.  It’s where things get complicated enough that you can get lost if you don’t know how to plot things out.  Considering the fact that I’ve only gotten this far with two other novels I’ve written, I’m expecting this part to be really difficult.

Only 599 words today, and none on Sunday (more because I was feeling sick than anything else).  It really is getting easier to get hung up on a single scene; even if I know where I want to be three or four chapters from now, if the scene right in front of me isn’t working out, it’s almost impossible to move past it and get things to work.

Today I took a big piece of butcher paper from upstairs and drew a diagram of everything I’ve written so far, scene by scene.  That was immensely helpful.  Now I know what this chapter is about, what I need to do to bring it to a natural close and leave a hook for the next few chapters, and how to develop my characters and what they’re doing.

While taking a shower, I figured out what Estella needs to do next, and how to take her story over to the end of act 2 and carry her to act 3.  That’s something of a breakthrough.  I’m excited.

And…it’s late.  I’d better get some sleep.

It’s been a while

Man, it’s been a while since I wrote on this blog.  I guess I’m caught in the semester tailspin or something.

Writing’s going really well, though.  I’m about 100 pages into Bringing Estella Home right now, and even though I’m probably a day or two behind where I’d like to be, I’m generally right on schedule to finish it in April.

I say that tentatively because I’m a discovery writer, so I can’t really predict when I’m going to finish it since it’s probably going to do something crazy and surprise me.  However, I feel reasonably confident that I can finish this thing by late April.

To help out with this, I’ve engaged in a little friendly competition with Aneeka.  She’s finished her 1st draft (‘skeletal’ draft, I guess you could call it) of her next novel, but she’s going to go through and do a major revision.  We’re racing each other to see who’s going to finish first!

Hehehe…I am so going to win this.  After losing our last contest, I’d better make it up this time!

I had a surprisingly satisfying day today.  My classload is really light, but there was one midterm I had to take this week, and I took it this morning.  I spent all yesterday studying, which is why I only wrote about 500 words, but I got a 98 on the scantron section so I think I’m in good shape.  And really, I don’t have any midterms in any of my other classes (hard to believe, but true), so I think the worst of the mid-semester crunch is past me!

Man, it’s nice having almost no school obligations!

I’m starting to think I should stay here in the US this summer.  After all, if I’m trying to get ready for World Fantasy, I should put a lot of work into my stories.  If I do stay here, though, where will I go?  Maybe I could teach  Arabic at one of these summer seminar things.  Maybe I could go to the East Coast doing that.  Maybe I could stay here in Utah.  I don’t know.  It’s so complicated…and meanwhile, the clock  is ticking.

Another confession: part of me wants to go to Iraq to work for a year right after I graduate.  Why?  Well, the money would be nice.  But really, I’d want to do it because of the way that experience would enrich my writing.  Make it a lot more gritty, the conflict that more real.  It might even qualify my to write military sf–who knows?

Don’t worry–I’m not crazy enough to listen to that part of my brain.  At least, not yet. 😛

Always too slow

I’m kind of paranoid the way I plan things out.  I set a grand deadline for the novel I’m writing, then I figure out a general plot (VERY general, without any of the subplots or other stuff), and use that to tell myself where I should be from week to week.  I’ll have the few days ahead of me partitioned out really strictly, with “I want to be at this point in the story by this day,” but only for the week immediately ahead of me.  I need a lot of room for discovery writing.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to be done with “act I” of Bringing Estella Home by the middle of last week.  That didn’t work, because I got hung up in the chapter talking about Estella and her captivity.  Then, I decided to be finished with “Act I” by Sunday…but as of now, I’m two scenes from the end of it.  Blegh.

I tend to think I can write more than I actually do.  Perhaps part of it has to do with just too many distractions.  That’s a self-discipline issue.  Another thing, though, is that I really do tend to burn out after a while.  I can keep writing, but it will be difficult and probably not as good.  My limit is at about 1,500 words per session.

However, another thing is that I do most of my writing late at night.  What if I were to write in the mornings?  Is that even possible?  I could put down 1,500 words in the morning, spend the rest of the day replenishing the well (so to speak), and then write late at night after everything else is done.  That would double my productivity.

It’s an interesting idea.  I’ll try it out.

In the meantime, I am sooooo excited for how this act is going to end.  They say that if you show a gun in Act I, someone’s going to get shot in Act II.  Well…the last scene involves a gun…in the hands of James’s brother.  Oooooh!

I’m so glad I’m not a character in my own novels.  My life would be miserable. 😛

I love writing

Man, I love writing.  I wrote 1,617 words today, and when I wasn’t writing I was thinking about what I was going to write.  I only regret that I waited until about 10:30 pm to start writing; it’s 2:10 am and I still haven’t started my Arabic homework 😛

When I started Hero in Exile, I tried to plan everything out before I started writing.  As a result, writing was a real chore, and to make it more of a creative exercise than merely transcribing what I’d already worked out in my head, I played around a lot with the language and writing style.  It was still a chore, but I think my writing improved quite a lot.  I’ve gotten some really interesting comments back on my writing style for Genesis Earth, some very encouraging comments about the way I played around with the English language.

For this story, Bringing Estella Home, it’s both completely different and more of the same.  I’m going into chapter 4 without any planning or preconceptions, so practically all the world building is on the fly.  It’s wonderful.  This is the chapter where Estella enters the harem and gets assimilated, in a certain way, into Hameji society.  It’s basically her discovery of this new world, and it is so much fun creating it as I go along.  Lots of room for a creative outlet, and yet at the same time, I’m also playing around with the language aspects of the narrative like I did in Hero in Exile and Genesis Earth.  The result, I hope, is good quality creative writing.

Of course, one of the side effects of this process is that it sucks up a ton of my time.  A ton of time, and not just time–since I’ve got internet access here, there is no shortage of distractions to tempt and indulge me.  This is actually quite a serious problem–and yet, if I forced myself to focus, would I really have been more productive?  It’s hard to say, because taking little breaks every once and a while can actually help you think of better ways to phrase things.  Still, I know that I worked a lot slower because of all these distractions; perhaps a little more self-discipline would have really helped me out.

When I move out on my own and make my own writing space, it’s going to be in a secluded corner of my house somewhere, with an old desktop computer that has no internet access, just word processors and perhaps an electronic encyclopedia of some kind.

I’m going to have an overstuffed easy chair pulled up to the desk where the computer is, the kind that I can just lay back in and get absorbed by the sheer comfort of it.  I’m sitting in a chair kind of like that right now, and it is wonderful.

I’m going to have lots and lots of music on this computer, especially trance music because it helps drown out a lot of outside distractions.  This room is going to have a skylight, but it’s also going to have a door with a lock.  There will be no phone in this room, and I’ll probably leave my cell phone outside.

There will, however, be a bookshelf on the wall behind me (at least one, perhaps two), filled with all kinds of books, most of them sci fi paperbacks, but also with a few key books on various interesting and miscellaneous subjects, as well as books with quotes about writing.

Sitting prominently on my desk, between a couple of bookends, I’ll have a few copies of my own books in print, just so that I can look at them and think “wow, that’s my name on those books!  My very own name!  I’m in print!” And, at least for the first few years, it will not get old, no matter how many times I look at them. 🙂

It’s going to be great.  In the meantime, I should do my Arabic homework. 😛

I swear I’m not morbid

Wow, I had a interesting experience writing today. I only got about 650 words in, but I spent almost half an hour just walking around and thinking about it.

The basic premise of Bringing Estella Home (I should probably think of a better title…) is that the young protagonist was forcibly and unexpectedly separated from his older brother and sister when a barbarian war fleet invaded their solar system, and he’s trying to find and rescue them.  The barbarians capture and enslave both the brother and the sister–they send the brother into a very brutal brainwashing program to turn him into one of their empath soldiers, and they turn the sister into a concubine to the head of the fleet.

Well, in the scene I wrote today, the Hameji put Ben (the captured brother) through a mock execution, after putting him through weeks of physical and psychological torture.  The idea is to break him down completely so that they can remake him from the bottom up.  The execution involves putting him in an airlock and “spacing” him.

For some reason, this scene had a really huge impact on me.  It was…very brutal.  Very moving, though I’m not sure if it’s moving in the way that I want it.  It wasn’t senseless–it happens for a reason, to set things up for when he meets back up with his brother–but man, it was very brutal and disturbing.

Now…I swear I’m not a morbid person!  No, really!  My first novel was a happy, adventuresome, optimistic space opera, and I’m sure it won’t be the last one!  And really, I don’t have any pent up anger or goth tendencies or anything–it’s just, this is what I thought should happen in the story right now.  And…wow.  It was a lot more powerful than I’d thought.

This has made me realize that I’m going to need to bring in a humorous character to periodically give relief to all this tension.  I’ve got the novel figured out in my head in a rough three act format.  If all goes well, I should be finishing with act 1 before the end of next week.  At the beginning of act 2, James is going to meet up with a very interesting and quirky band of mercenaries, and that will (inshallah) be a good opportunity to bring in some comic relief.  Not too much, of course–just enough to help the reader get through the really serious, really disturbing parts.

And I know where I want this novel to end.  I don’t know how, but I know the main character’s root motivations and how that inner conflict needs to be resolved.  I actually have it all coming down to a single line of dialogue given from the head mercenary, Danica, to James at the very end of the story.  The denouement shouldn’t take up more than a chapter and an epilogue, which of course I haven’t figured out yet, but the key to everything, the thing compelling me at this point to write this story, is to get the main character (James) to get to that one line of dialogue and come to this realization about himself.

Of course, I won’t tell you what that is, since that would be giving away spoilers. 🙂 But if you want to be an alpha reader, let me know.  The goal is to have this sucker finished before the end of April.  Tough goal, especially now that so many storylines are exploding all over the place, but I think I can do it.