Category: Hameji Cycle

Breaking 1,000

I broke 1,000 words today!  Yay!  That’s my daily wordcount goal from here on out, so it was good to reach it.

Also, the story is coming along nicely.  I can see how my original idea for the scene that was giving me trouble just wasn’t fleshed out enough.  If I’d have gone with it, there would have been less conflict, less development of some key characters (some of whom die soon in the next chapter!  bwahahaha!) and some worldbuilding.

That’s about all for now.  I have a lot more I could blog about…Prop 8, Mongol hordes, history class, schoolwork, craziness…but it’s late and I need to got to bed.  Gnight.

Grr…

Man, I’ve been busy this week.  I have been making progress–750 words isn’t bad, even if it is lower than I’d like–but I haven’t moved past this one scene.  It’s kind of frustrating.

I have the next couple of scenes figured out in my head, and I’m really excited to get to them (they’ve got all kinds of action and explosions and such), but the more I try to get there, the longer and longer the current scene becomes.

It’s not a bad scene.  It’s just…unexpected.  The plan was to quickly show Mira and Tristen entering one of the planetary domes for the first time and their awe at the lush, rolling agricultural land inside.  Instead, it’s morphed into a confrontation with customs and security at the entrance to the dome.

I considered cutting it all out, but as I read over it I realized that it seems to be working.  I sat down tonight, hoping to get past there so I could start tomorrow with the exciting stuff, but now it looks like other characters are getting drawn in.  Grr…

In all reality, though, this is probably a good thing.  The story is starting to take on a life of its own, and the characters are starting to act for themselves instead of having me pull the marionet strings all the way.

At least, that’s what I hope is happening.  I still worry that Tristen is a little too flat.

In the meantime, I saw something interesting on the Publisher’s Lunch email for today.  A minor publisher is offering to give away free books to bloggers who promise to post reviews of the book on their blogs and on Amazon. Free books, eh?

I checked the list of books available to review so far, and it looks like most of them are either non-fiction and/or mainstream Christian, but the concept is very interesting.  If a minor sf/f publisher were to do the same thing, I’d be all over it.

Oh, and this made me laugh today.  I still need to figure out what I’m going to be for Halloween…

Okay, a new direction

I owe a lot to Aneeka.  She is the one who motivated me to write The Phoenix of Nova Terra back in 2007 when I didn’t really think I could finish a novel before the end of the school year.  Like I said in the last post, I’ve hit something of a wall in my writing life recently, and a couple of days ago she was the one who pointed it out to me.  The conversation went something like this:

Empress: lol – okay, okay!
how are your stories going?
me: very slowly
frustrating
mostly just because of personal disorganization
Empress: yeah, that can happen. tired of school? or just a lot of things you want to do?
me: school is pretty easy right now
it’s just hard to get back into writing regularly
I dunno
I’m trying to juggle two projects
Empress: maybe that’s the problem?
it’s hard focusing on two stories at once
(says the girl that does it all the time – the irony!)
but it really is hard to get all focused on two projects at once
me: it probably is
Empress: I flit between projects because I’m not that into them and write because I’ve been inspired (and tend to be inspired on different stories all the time)
when I get into a project though, then it’s best that I leave the rest behind and just focus on that one
get out all that I have and see how far I can go before I get distracted again
me: yeah
I’m trying to be 100% into two projects at the same time
trouble is, I can’t keep the momentum going on both
Empress: yeah. looks like you’re human, after all 😉
me: dangit!
Empress: you should choose one to focus on and then, if inspiration hits for the other one, focus on that one for a bit before turning back to the main project
me: grr
Empress: think of it this way. You could struggle for 6 months trying to work on two projects and arrive halfway done with both
OR you could focus on one project for 6 months, finish it, and then have plenty of energy to finish the next one
me: that’s true I guess
Empress: it’s better than wearing yourself out
then you’ll be left with no project finished
and just a heap of frustrated dreams
me: I guess that’s right
question is, do I revise my old novel or do I go ahead with the new one?
I’m more excited about the new one, but I want to get the old one finished
Empress: how long would the old one take to get finished?
wait…and you’re having problems with them right now, right?
you know, I would think it’s easier to edit two stories then to write two stories at once. maybe you could finish up the new story and then edit both of them at the same time?
me: that’s an idea
Empress: and NaNoWriMo is coming up. you could finish up the first draft by next month and whallah! only have 2 stories to edit 😀
me: ugggggggggggh
I coooooooooould
that’s intense, though
Empress: well, doing two projects at once is intense as well
why not just switch it around and do this kind of intensity instead? 😉

So, after mulling it over for a couple of days, I’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Instead of trying to do two major projects at once, I’m going to put the revision of Phoenix on hold for now and focus all my energy on Hero in Exile.  For November, instead of doing nanowrimo, I’ll try to get 50,000 words deep into this novel instead.  After that, if I do roughly 1,000 words a day, I should be in good shape to finish it before the end of January.  I don’t anticipate this novel going over 120,000 words, and if it tries to, I’ll do my best to reign it in.

So that’s my goal: Finish Hero in Exile before the end of January.  Oh, and write 50,000 words in November.

I’ve noticed that I tend to either be too focused or too distracted.  Trying to balance two projects at the same time has taught me that…well, I can’t do it very well.  But I do know that once I have one project that I can focus on, I can focus on it until it gets done.  That’s what I’m going to do now.

In the meantime, I was chatting with Drek from the writing group, and found out that he could program a way cool widget for my sidebar!  It’s going to be a pair of speedometers that show my daily wordcount and my wordcount over the course of the last seven days.  Oh, and if I’m nice, he might program a widget that displays my writing projects as status bars!  I’m way excited!

Drek recently designed a website for nanowrimo this year.  The idea is that every minute, it displays a new word from his novel.  Something like that.  It’ll be really interesting to see what happens once november starts up.

I can definitely say that the goatee gives Drek programming +2.

A change of direction?

I had a chat with Aneeka yesterday about writing.  She was in London waiting to catch the bus to Scotland at around 4:00 am or so (jealous!), and I was winding down a frustratingly unproductive day.

I told her how I’m trying to divide my attention between two different projects, and she had some interesting things to say.  Basically, she said that if it isn’t working and I’m not getting as much done as I’d like, I should put one project on hold and focus on the other one.

Duh.  Of course that’s the answer.  Trouble is, I’ve been so focused on doing things this way that I haven’t seen it.

So, before this weekend is up, I need to take a step back and figure out just what I’m going to do.  Splitting my attention between two projects really isn’t working at all for me, and if I keep going at this rate I doubt I’ll be half finished with either one by the end of the semester.  Definitely time for an adjustment.

Besides figuring out what I want to do with my writing, I also need to 1) send in my absentee ballot (I’m still somewhat undecided, though Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama has almost cinched it for me); 2) read Homer’s The Odyssey and write a paper comparing Odysseus to Socrates…for Tuesday (this isn’t as bad as it seems though–The Odyssey is a really interesting story and I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far); 3) get cracking on Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, since I’ve got a book report due in a week and a half, and; 4) various other assorted homeworks.  Blegh!

Oh, and I haven’t asked anyone out on a date in the past month.  Haven’t even thought about it, really.  Dang.  How did time start moving so fast?  The semester is more than half over!

At least I got in a thousand words in Hero in Exile today.  That, and I’ve been working through the next few scenes in my mind quite a bit.  I think I know where I want to take it, even though it has nothing to do with what I wrote down in the plot outline.  I’m excited.

And tired.  More tomorrow.

Updates

This week has been pretty good.  Scholastically, I’ve had two (well, three) midterms, a paper, and other assorted homework.  I managed to pull it off surprisingly well, and now I feel like I have a bunch of free time.  Yay!

I still seem to be in a rough spot, though, with my writing.  It’s starting to appear that this “rough spot” is more than a minor bump.  I don’t know what it is exactly–maybe I’ve overextended myself, maybe I’m just not organizing my time efficiently enough (probably it’s a combination of both)–but I feel like I’m not writing as productively as I could.

It’s not a lack of ideas problem.  I’ve got tons of ideas for my stories.  It’s usually a daily thing where I’ll come up with a new idea for the plot of one of my stories, or a cool thing about the setting.  Thinking up this stuff is the easy part–it’s the writing that’s difficult.

In Phoenix, the trouble is that I’m coming to sections where I have to throw out 90% of what I’ve got so far and synthesize the remainder into something more workable.  That is a very daunting thing.  Yesterday, I only did about two pages before calling it quits.  Today I haven’t even worked on it at all.  Blegh.

Because I’ve been paying so much attention to that project, my other project, Hero in Exile, hasn’t got the momentum it needs to carry through the hard stuff.  I spent three hours of my free time today writing that novel, but in all that time I only got through 1,000 words.  That’s progress, true, but it was very slow and painful.  I don’t know why.

Ugh.  This lack of progress is getting to me.  It doesn’t help that the semester is half over by now.

I’m hoping that once I get through the current slow spot in Phoenix, things will pick up.  I was really surprised when I edited this one scene in like half an hour.  The scene worked largely as it was, I just had to polish it up, and in just about half an hour (or maybe an hour, I forget), I’d run through almost ten pages of manuscript.  Not bad.

I just hope the rest of the novel is like that.  Otherwise, I’m just going to have to start cutting stuff out.

In other news, almost all my friends have read The Hero of Ages, but I’m still in the middle of it.  It’s way good, though!  Very dark and depressing at this point, and most of the characters have almost given up, but not entirely.  Nobody ruin this book for me please!

20% through the rewrite

Well, I don’t know exactly what it means, but yesterday I got to page 117 in the revision of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.  Divide that number by the total pages of the current draft, and you get .20blahblahblah.

So, I guess you could say that I’m roughly 20% through with this revision.  In reality, I have no way to tell–I’m expecting the final wordcount to be significantly smaller than what I have right now, so in terms of pages I might be quite a bit further.  Or, the stuff I have to revise might be a lot more difficult than the stuff I’ve worked on so far, so I might be much further behind than 20%.

Whatever.  It’s a statistic.  Am I having fun doing this?  I suppose…though I wish my life were better organized right now.  20% doesn’t mean much when you consider that the semester is half over.  How in the heck am I going to have three polished novels by November 2009?  Sigh.

On a happier note, I took a midterm today and freaking owned it!  HIST 240, Middle East history up to 1800–I got a 98% on the t/f / multiple choice.  YEAH!  The short answer wasn’t that much harder, either.

Also, this Sunday I decided to just sit down and do my work for a change.  Homework was backed up (which is unfortunate–I really do like to keep Sundays open for non-school non-work related activities), but I got all the stuff finished that needed to be done, and dove into both my novels right afterward.  By midnight, I’d written 500 words for Hero in Exile and revised 6+ pages of Phoenix.  Wow!  Both goals, hit right on the head.  I need more days like that.

When I should be doing other things, I’m reading Mistborn 3: Hero of Ages, and it’s really interesting so far (which is to say that the first five chapters are interesting).  I really enjoyed the first Mistborn book, but didn’t enjoy the second one as much.  However, I think that has to do more with the fact that it’s the middle book of a trilogy, and so most of the conflicts were left unresolved.  Also, the opening section took a lot of time to introduce the characters and the world.  The final book dives right into the action and doesn’t take time to describe anything that readers of the first two books wouldn’t already know.

Speaking of Brandon, I read an interesting post on his website that basically tells what writing was like for him before he got published. I’ve heard his how-I-got-published story a few times now, but I’d never heard about any of this stuff before, and I found it really interesting.  Also, it was really interesting to hear about the struggles and uncertainty that comes along with being an unpublished writer, because…that’s where I am right now.  Or rather, I’m right at the start of the trail, so it’s very good to hear about someone else who went through the woods and made it out to the other side.  I want to know what I can expect for the next five to ten years of my life.

Quick updates

Last night I climbed Y mountain with Steve and Warren, old friends from the Capitol house last year, and Steve’s new roommate Dan.  It was awesome!  More on that later.

However, we left around midnight and didn’t get back around five.  I slept for four hours, went to a Quark writing meeting, then did laundry and slept until dinner with my sisters and brother-in-laws.  Ugh.  Disgusting.

I feel so bad because I have so much stuff that I need to do.  Arabic homework.  History test.  MESA test.  MESA paper.   Poli Sci readings.  Humanities study guides.  None of these is really that hard (except the history test–I’m not sure what to expect there), but they are time consuming.  Time that I didn’t make for myself this past week, so it’s starting to crunch up.

Also, I feel really bad because I didn’t hardly write at all this week.  I got stuck on chapter 6 for Phoenix and that really intimidated me.  I guess I just kept putting it off, until finally I just sat down and wrestled with it until it seemed acceptable.  And as for Hero, I haven’t written in that story for nearly a week.

I don’t know what’s wrong.  I don’t even really know what I’ve been doing that’s taken up all this time.  It kind of sucks, to be honest.

Well, this next week is going to be different.  Once I’ve got the tests and papers behind me (which should be by Monday or Tuesday), I’ll have more time to write and do other things.  I just have to sit down and force myself to get it out.  No more excuses.

Sorry if this post is rambling, but that’s kind of the state I’m in.  I’ll write later (probably tomorrow) about the following things:

  • The hike last night to the top of Y mountain (the TOP of the mountain–it was awesome!).
  • Thoughts and frustrations with Hero in Exile, specifically Tristen’s character and the show-don’t-tell philosophy.
  • A really cool idea that came to me Thursday about creating a far future sci fi universe compatible with Mormon cosmology without crossing genre lines from mainstream to LDS sci fi.  This is one really cool idea, and I am excited to share it and get your thoughts on it.

In the meantime, I’m going to just go to sleep now and hope that I can prepare my Sunday school lesson in the morning.  That, and do my Arabic / study for my tests tomorrow.  Ugh.

I really love this story

I should have written this last night, but yesterday I set out at 8:00 to write in Hero in Exile, and two hours / 1,300 words later, I realized that I really like this story.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the romantic, exotic Western view of the Middle East–stunning deserts with their rocky cliffs and enormous sand dunes, desert caravans with their exotic wares, colorful clothing and tents, etc.  Desert Bedouin with long, flowing robes and headscarves, swords and horses, striking fast and then disappearing back into the desert.  I know it’s not entirely true…but I’ve been over there, and it’s not entirely false either.  But in any case, I just really love this kind of stuff, and it really shows in the stories I write.

I mean, both Hero and Phoenix feature relatively primitive tribal desert cultures.  In Phoenix, though, the people have a very low level of technology (bows and arrows), whereas in Hero they have stuff like nuclear powered dune buggies and portable hydroponic gardens.  However, in both stories, the society is very tribal, monotheistic religions with prophets play a very important role, women and men are strictly separated, and everything else is just very…Arab.  Maybe not Arab 100% (because hey, I’m not an Arab myself and even though I’ve lived among Arabs for the past year+ I’m sure I still have some misconceptions about them), but enough so that a Westerner reading one of these stories will basically be like “oh, these are Arabs on another planet.  Cool.”

But last night, as I finished up the first chapter of Hero, I realized that I’ve got a really interesting set of conflicts going on here.  Tristen (the main character) basically crash landed on this world after his family’s ship was attacked in orbit, and he’s been raised by this group of pseudo-Arabs in the desert.  He wants to get back out into space and find out what happened to his biological family, but he has mixed feelings because he’s strongly attached to his adopted family.

Meanwhile, the sheikh of the tribe (Tristen’s adopted father) doesn’t want Tristen to leave because he has no living sons to inherit after him.  He wants to manipulate Tristen to keep him in the camp.  And the way he tries to do it is sooo dirty!  It’s going to screw up Tristen’s emotions and relationships so bad, it’s just going to be so much fun to write.  Because, you see, the sheikh assumes that Tristen, like most adolescent boys, is a slave to his hormones.  The thing is, though, that Tristen has a conscience and a sense of honor that he’s willing to die for.  But when everything starts to go grey, and all the role models Tristen’s ever had turn out to be false, what does he do?

Oh, it’s going to torture him!  And this is just the first section of the book–this is nothing!

The trouble is, if I’m already 7,700 words into this novel and I just finished the first chapter, the completed first draft is going to be WAY long.  As in, maybe 150,000 words if I’m lucky.  I mean, the scope of my novel here borders on epic.  There is so much cool stuff I’ve got planned for this story, and I haven’t even really figured out the ending.

So, if I’m going to write this novel, I’m really going to have to focus.  No more avoidance behavior or procrastination.  Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.

I did that the last two days and really had a lot of fun.  Friday, I wrote 1,300 words in Hero in Exile, and today I revised the first part of chapter 6 in Phoenix of Nova Terra.  Trouble is, I have trouble switching between the two projects.  I can work on one the one day, and the other on another day, but not both on the same day.  Still need to work on that.

So anyways, since I talked about how my understanding (and love for) Arabs and Arab culture has influenced my writing, I’d like to close this post by linking to some my friends’ blogs from the Jordan study abroad this summer:

I hung out with Nikki quite a bit on the Jordan study abroad, and she’s got a pretty cool blog.  She has tons of pictures on her site that you can check out.  Right now she’s in Ecuador blogging about her experiences there, but if you check out the archives you can see some really interesting posts she wrote.

Gini didn’t blog very much while we were in Jordan, but she has an interesting post up right now about her feelings on Americans and the Arab-Israeli conflict.  I’ll just say that I share her frustrations 100% and leave it at that (for now).

Nate’s got an interesting blog about the far off places he visits.  You should check it out; he’s got some interesting stories and perspectives about the places we visited in Jordan.  Plus, he can name 88 countries in five minutes.

Finally, Breanne blogged extensively about Jordan and the Middle East, probably more than me in fact.  Even though her experiences were not always as positive as mine, she describes what things are like over there really well.  Her blog isn’t active anymore (she’s on her mission now), but it’s worth it to check out the archives.

One last thought: I was chatting with an Arab friend of mine from Zarqa today.  She’s a writer like me, and we exchanged stories and gave each other book recommendations while we were over there at the University of Jordan.  I emailed her a copy of Hero in Exile (what I have so far), and it’s going to be really interesting to hear back from her.  She’s probably going to think it’s ridiculous–my dreamy, romantic ideas about Arab culture as a foreigner looking at her culture–so it’s going to be really interesting to get her feedback.

Revising, outlining, and a goals adjustment

The comments on my last post were really interesting, and made me do some thinking today. When I sat down to work on Phoenix today, I decided to look at the broader picture by outlining, in two or three sentences, what is going on in each scene I’ve revised so far.

As I did this, I realized that my chapter breaks are in all the wrong places. Not only are most of the beginning chapters way too short, but the breaks just didn’t feel natural. I decided to rearrange them.

At first, I thought it would be easy, but after an hour of trying to figure it out, I realized that it was a lot harder than I’d thought.

Then, I remembered what Brandon Sanderson taught in English 318: chaptes are like miniature stories in themselves, where each one has a beginning, middle, and ending that leads to the next chapter.

Once I starting thinking of it this way, I was able to organize things in a workable pattern. While the story progresses at a steady pace throughout the book, each chapter is organized around a common theme. The chapter begins with an issue or problem, and ends when that problem either is solved or totally spins out of control.

For example:

Chapter one begins and ends with Ian’s unease about setting his feet on the surface of a planet since he was six years old. His ship, the Avion-45, gets hit by some kind of futuristic EMP and the captain decides to abandon ship. The central issue is Ian’s fear of going planetside–a fear that he doesn’t understand.

Chapter two begins with the crew loading onto the escape pods to make an emergency landing on the planet. There is an accident, and Ian’s pod gets separated from the rest of the crew. Ian, with Melinda and Ben, crash land in a desert. The chapter ends with the bandit attack, with Ben and Melinda wounded and possibly dead. The central problem is that Ian is progressively separated from his peers, and it gets worse right up to the end.

Chapter three introduces Leila, a princess kidnapped by the bandits and abused by their women. They send her out to investigate the battlefield, and she meets up with Ian. She manipulates the situation so that the bandit women think that Ian has rescued her and subjugated them. The main problem is Leila’s subjugation by the bandits, and the chapter ends with her successfully turning the tables on them.

Etc etc.

So then I used this way of thinking to outline the next chapter that I need to revise. As I wrote it out, scene by scene, I realized that the best way to develop the central focus of that chapter was to combine two events into one and reorganize how I did the perspectives. Not only would that shorten the chapter, but it would also make it less choppy and more straightforward. It would also build the suspense a lot better.

So now, even though I know that I have a ton of work to do to rewrite that chapter, I’m stoked to dive into it because I know what I’m doing. If I keep to this method, I think that the second draft will be much stronger than it otherwise would have been.

Oh, and I decided to revise my goals a bit. Here are some daily goals that I think I can actually accomplish:

  • Revise at least six pages of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.
  • Write at least 500 words in Hero in Exile OR write a wikidpad article about some aspect of the story universe.

These are goals that I feel I can actually accomplish on a daily basis. And if I think I can accomplish them, I’m sure I will.

What I really need is to keep my mind in both stories at the same time. That’s the real challenge. But if I want to write professionally, that’s a skill that I’m going to need.

Finally, here’s something cool a friend of mine just showed me. If your Meyers Briggs personality type is INTP (or if you have a significant other whose personality type is INTP), this might interest you. It’s just so hilarious that a bunch of INTPs got together and made a website devoted to their personality type. If any of the sixteen types were to do it, it would definitely be them.

I did it!

Yay!  I finally hit all three of my daily goals in one night!  Six+ pages of revision in Phoenix, 500+ words in Hero, and a contribution to the wikidpad notes on Hero!  It may not sound like too much, but it makes me happy.

And I’m sick.  Blegh.  Since it’s after 1:30 am and I have a class at 8:00 that I absolutely cannot miss, I’m going to bed now.  Hopefully, I will not be a wreck in the morning.  Nothing gets you down like sickness.

But the sickness didn’t get my writing down!  Woo hoo!