Hameji Cycle – Page 43 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

General Conference and weekend progress (or lack thereof)

This weekend was General Conference. I watched most of the sessions from friends’ apartments here in the FLSR. While I enjoyed many of the speakers and caught all four sessions, I have to confess that I slept through a lot more of the talks than I should have. I’ll definitely download the mp3s and listen to them when they come out.

As far as writing goes, this week was a lot slower than I would have liked. Yesterday was packed from the moment I woke up (10:30 am) to when I finally went to sleep, though I did get in a little bit of writing between sessions. Today, I woke up feeling sick, which didn’t help things either.

Despite all this, I’m really happy to say that I made some serious progress in Phoenix. Cut out more than a thousand words and revised nearly twenty pages altogether. Things are right on track for that story, and I’m really enjoying the rewrite.

Hero in Exile, though, is different. I didn’t make nearly the progress that I wanted to on that one. <sigh> looks like I’ll have to wait for the next weekend. That, or start writing in it more consistently.

That’s all for now. In the meantime, check out this amazingly cool picture of a solar prominence from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Or my friend Steve’s blog. Just remember, Steve claimed for the longest time that he would never write his own blog, so don’t believe a word he says. You have it from me.

Making it up on the weekend

Yesterday, as I was writing a small paper (~500 words) for PLSC 201, I realized that I would be FINISHED with classes this week today at three o’clock and I wouldn’t really have to worry about homework. What a delicious breath of freedom!

So today, after I slept through the four hour-and-a-half classes that I have today (no joke–I sat next to Gretchen Belnap in history and she doodled on my notebook!), I thought to myself “you know, I could take all this extra time on the weekend and use it to catch up on my writing.”

I was really stoked until I remembered that General Conference is this weekend. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to Conference–I really enjoy it–it’s just that it’s going to eat up a lot of time, hanging out with friends and family between sessions and all.

But regardless of that, tomorrow is almost totally open! I’ve just got work from ten to three (which, even though it sounds like a lot, really isn’t), a writing meeting at five, and I’ll probably drop in on a mission reunion sometime in the evening just for a little bit. And even though conference is all weekend, I’ll probably have time in the morning and/or between sessions.

So I’m going to take that time to sit down and do some serious writing, especially in Hero in Exile. Does 3,000 words sound like too much to shoot for? I just want to sit down and immerse myself in that story. Phoenix too–maybe I can get through ten or fifteen pages.

Everything else is going really well for me. My classload is really light, which is great because it’s leaving me time for other stuff, like a social life. Work is awesome–I have so much fun going over people’s papers! Even though I sometimes feel like I’m BSing too much, I find it both relaxing and productive at the same time (if that makes sense). Plus, all my coworkers are way cool. My supervisor is way chill and thinks that I’m really amazing for writing novels. It’s just a lot of fun. Plus, I calculated that with my sixteen hour week, I can expect to earn $280 every pay period. SWEET!

Finally, here’s something interesting I was looking at today. It’s a really cool steampunk webcomic called Girl Genius. I heard about it when Brandon Sanderson and his buddies did a podcast with the creators of this comic, and got hooked on it shortly thereafter. It’s got a really complex storyline that I honestly don’t understand yet (I’m slowly making my way through the archives), but each strip is hilarious in itself, and the characters and setting are so interesting that it’s not hard to get swept up by it all. I mean, airships…need I say more? If you like steampunk and/or good quality webcomics, this is definitely worth checking out.

And now, I’m going to finish this post because I should be writing in my stories, not on my blog.

Progress comes slowly

I feel like today was fairly productive. I finished all the homework that’s due tomorrow, put in three hours at the writing lab, went to all my classes, got up early, and now I’m going to bed relatively late, after writing for about two hours.

However, I still wasn’t able to get all the writing done that I’d have liked. Edited another six pages of Phoenix. Didn’t write a wikidpad article for Hero. Didn’t put in another 500 words in that story.

I’ve noticed, though, that I’m starting to think a lot more about my writing, especially after yesterday. While walking around on campus (and during the more boring parts of my classes) I was thinking about what I should do in the next few pages, how I should edit this particular scene–actually putting myself in the scene and trying to visualize it.

In short, the momentum is building. When I got back from working out, I was able to sit down and dive straight into the story. No procrastinating. No avoidance behavior. It was nice.

And then, what felt like five minutes later, I got this pop up message on my screen that the LRC was closing in only one minute and that I was about to be kicked off. Talk about panic! I wasn’t able to eject my disc safely, so when I got back to the FLSR I literally ran to my computer to check if I’d lost the story.

Thank goodness, it was still there, but my roommate Basseem had quite a laugh.

Now I just have to get that momentum going on my other project. If I can freaking find the time. I haven’t even figured out what I’m going to do as far as dating this week–and heck, if I don’t consciously make it a priority, I know that it won’t happen. There are a few girls I’d like to ask out, but no specifics or anything.

Man, I can’t afford avoidance activity or procrastination anymore! There’s just not enough time. But…shoot! That means I have to be constantly putting myself out there! Argh!

I’m sure that all of this is good for me. Probably a little bit more good than I’d like.

In the meantime, I don’t believe in writing boring, useless blog posts anymore, so here is something interesting I found the other day. It’s a customizable podcast for the scriptures. Basically, when you sign up you create a personalized podcast feed for any of the standard works, so that you can download the scriptures one chapter at a time (or two or three) as often as you would like. It’s basically like podiobooks, except for the scriptures.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on over here. It’s 1:30 am, and I have a class that starts in six and a half hours. G’night!

Maybe I spoke too soon…

Yeah, I thought that six pages a day wouldn’t be that hard for the rewrite of The Phoenix of Nova Terra. Well, I might be wrong.

After a really awesome and refreshing Sunday, I sat down around 10:00 pm to work on Phoenix. I thought that I’d spend maybe half an hour or an hour working on that, which would get me excited to work on the other projects. After all, six pages isn’t that much, right?

Well, it’s 2:00 am and I’m signing off, after getting through about nine or ten pages only. Man, it was difficult. Satisfying, but difficult. I didn’t even have time left over to get to Hero in Exile. Dang!

It probably didn’t help that I had facebook open the whole time. I think I spent an hour and a half just chatting with various friends. Even though it was distracting, it was fun. I found out that one of the kids from the Amman branch got his mission call…to San Jose California! Awesome! And chatted with a few other friends who I haven’t talked with in a while. It was fun…but very distracting.

A day has not gone by since the beginning of this semester wherein I have accomplished all of my daily goals. That’s kind of frustrating. I got two out of three today–six pages in Phoenix and an article on the wikidpad for Hero. I hate writing those articles, but they are actually extremely helpful because they make me think about that story. Prewriting sucks, but when you put your ideas down on paper, the exercise makes you see things that follow logically from your story elements, which affect other elements, which come back around to give you good ideas of new things to put in your story. Hero will probably be a much stronger novel than Phoenix because of all this.

But yeah, it’s late. I must sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppp.

Goals update…and it’s freaking late…

Man, I’ve been really bad about my writing goals this month. I set a whole bunch of goals right as school started, and I don’t think a single day has gone by where I’ve kept all of them. Blegh, that’s disgusting.

So today I took some time to rethink things and reevaluate. I figured that I’d have to drop those old goals I’d set, settle for something more practical and less wild and crazy. Something disssapointing like that.

The surprising (and encouraging) thing was that, when I calculated how many days I had to accomplish these things, I saw that they were still very much within my reach.

I mean, in order to finish the rewrite of The Phoenix of Nova Terra on schedule, all I’ve got to do is revise six pages a day. Six pages! That’s virtually nothing! Get me on a roll, and I can do ten to twenty pages easy–and thoroughly enjoy it.

As far as Hero in Exile is concerned, if I write 500 words a day, I’ll be at 100,000 words by March. 100,000 is more than I want to write for this novel–I want to try and keep this one relatively short, in the 50,000 to 100,000 word range. And that’s just at 500 words per day! I’m sure there will be days where I write more–where I’ll be driven to write more.

So now, I’m happy to say that even though this month has been way disorganized, I still think I can do this. I will. I’ll be consistent, put forth my best efforts, and have three polished novels by November 2009 in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And I’ll be there! For sure, I’ll be there.

The problem is that I put off writing until the last thing I do before I go to bed. Then, I run around doing all sorts of night owl type things, until finally 2:00 am comes around, and then it’s just too late to do anything but pass out. ugh. UGH.

But tonight, before running out to hang out with some friends (and then waste time upon coming back), I sat down and forced myself to write. And it worked! I made some good progress in Hero in Exile. It’s just 500 words or so, but I’m starting to think in terms of “what do I need to accomplish in this scene?” rather than “how can I get my 500 words in today?” That’s good. Progress, at least of some kind.

There is other stuff that I need to blog about, but I’ll do it in a later post. Gotta review Dune, gotta write about my new job, I’ve got a letter to the Daily Universe that I want to post up here first…all kinds of stuff.

But for now, I think I’m finished. Time to pass out for the next four or five hours. UUGGGGGHH.

Progress!

Last night I hung out with my friends Steve Dethloff and Lindsay Rowe over at Steve’s new apartment at King Henry. Had a really good time, which unfortunately involved staying up until 2:30 am. The next day I was zombified–even more than usual. I can’t keep this up much longer…need sleep…

So the day pretty much sucked. I can handle tiredness, but not too much of it. By the end of the day, I was just miserable, so I skipped my last class.

The evening was much better, though. Much better. I went out to the Smith Fieldhouse and worked out from 9pm to 10pm, riding the exercise bike while reading Dune. Fantastic book: I’m reading it for the quark book club. Working out in general is also really good because it wakes up your mind and gets your creativity flowing better. At least it does for me.

So then, I decided that enough procrastinating is enough, and if I’m going to ever write any of these novels, it’s butt-in-chair hands-on-keyboard time. Washed up, went to the library, and just sat down and wrote.

It was good! I think I’m gradually starting to get into this new story, Hero in Exile. I only got about 530 words today, but I can feel the momentum picking up. Once I’ve got momentum, things will be much easier.

So that’s what I was up to today as far as writing. Gradually getting back into it. Now, it’s 1:20 am, I’ve got a test in the Humanities testing lab at 9:00, and I really need to sleep.

Ggggggggroggy

Yes I am. No routine and lots of destractions equals late, late nights. I don’t think I’ve gone to bed before 2 am at any time this week, and now I’m suffering for it. Fortunately, though, this is the weekend, so I can recuperate a little.

The only writing goal I’ve marginally been keeping up with is the 500 words/day one. However, I’ve been off to a rocky start with Hero in Exile, and I’ve rewritten the first chapter about three times now. Fortunately, I got a lot of extremely helpful feedback from the quark meeting today, so I think that this latest rewrite is going to be the final one…for this draft at least.

Which reminds me, we had our first Quark writing meeting of the semester today! Yay! I think it went really well: Gamila, Jakeson, Cholisose, Hillary, Marissa, and John all came today, plus a new guy whose name is Steve. Also, I met a couple of people at the social who are interested in coming this year, including FYsenshi and some new guys. We’ll see if membership explodes like it did last year, but if it doesn’t, I’m sure we’ll still have fun.

So, yeah, it’s getting late, and I really, really need to get some sleep this weekend. I’ll probably be writing all day tomorrow when I’m not in church, since I want to finish the short story I mentioned earlier before I ask this girl out on a second date and get an earthshaking rejection. That would definitely freeze my creative juices on this endeavor and I think that it might actually end up somewhat decent–that is, if I can edit out all the superlatives and the melodramatic cheesiness on the rewrite. We’ll see how it goes.

One final thing: just now I saw this really cool site where you can create a word cloud for a website and/or a bunch of text. I copy and pasted the rough draft of The Lost Colony and this is what I got. Check it out!

Three day weekends!

Ok, this is going to be a quick post because it’s late and I CRAVE sleep.

I tried this semester to schedule all my classes on Tuesday and Thursday, and because of that I wasn’t rehired at the BYU bookstore because I didn’t have mornings open TTh. Suck. What’s more, I ended up having to schedule a couple of classes on Monday and Wednesday, so I wasn’t even able to have the awesome MWF free schedule that I wanted in the first place. Double suck. HOWEVER, I DO have Fridays free, and it is heaven! Three day weekends all semester! Woot!

Also, you know what? Every time I get fired and/or lose my job, it ends up being a great blessing–exactly what I needed at the time, even. I lost my job in the MTC cafeteria right before the start of a really killer semester, and I know I would have been horribly overwhelmed if I’d had to work as well as study. And the next semester, when things cooled down, I got the bookstore job, and it was awesome. While it lasted, that is.

But even though I wish I could still be working for the bookstore, I think in the long run it’s going to be a blessing. Today as I was looking on the job boards in the wilk, I saw three openings in the FHSS writing lab. They pay fairly good–about $8.95/hr–and I was surprised to find that I met and/or exceeded all of their qualifications for the job. So I dropped by the lab, picked up an application, and tomorrow I’m going to drop it by and hopefully get interviewed. Inshallah, everything will go well and I’ll soon be getting paid to help students in my college write their papers.

Man, I’m just blessed. Life is beautiful and I love it.

As far as writing goes, I painfully rewrote the first chapter of Hero in Exile and sent it off with the rest of the Quark submissions. Yes, the Quark writing group is starting up again. I hope that this year it will be better than ever! We only got three submissions for our first meeting, but once we get on a roll I think things will really take off. Inshallah, we’ll get plenty of new members this year to keep the club going strong.

The short story I mentioned in my previous post is off to a rocky start, but it’s going fairly well. I’m going to try to finish it in the next week or so–before life shifts again and I lose the perspective that impelled me to write the story in the first place.

And now, SLEEEEEEEP! Why? Because tomorrow is the last day of the BYU Bookstore’s progressive booksale, where everything is 90% off, and I want first dibs! And after that…THREE DAY WEEKEND!!!

Hero in Exile

Today I finally started writing my new novel. Yay! Despite the fact that it was like pulling teeth to get the words on that first page–and I’ll probably end up rewriting it a dozen times or more–it was good to fill up that empty page with something. 800 words, and even if it was hard after so much time not writing, it was good to get it up.

While I was writing, I chatted with a bunch of my friends and asked them what kind of a title I should use for it. The working title was Exodus to the Stars, and that just didn’t feel right. Of course, it was kind of lazy for me to ask everyone else, and they couldn’t do much to help me. It was good to chat with my friends, although maybe I do that a little too much.

The title I ended up settling on was Hero in Exile. It might sound a little bit corny, but I like it at this point–at least more than Exodus to the Stars. And really, even though the title doesn’t objectively matter at this point, it does to me. Maybe it just gives me confidence and drive to be writing a story that has an awesome title. Maybe I just can’t stand lame titles at all. I don’t know.

So, after weeks of playing this opening scene and maybe half a dozen others over and over in my mind, it’s starting to come together. I hope my writing has improved–it’s unnerving to reread The Lost Colony and see just how cheesy the writing is in my first novel–but really, I can’t afford to worry about that now. Just gotta keep pushing forward.

New writing goals

Alright, the first week of school is behind me, I’m probably as settled in as I’m ever going to be, so it’s time I set some personal writing goals for myself this semester. So here goes.

My major goal, at this point, is to have three polished novel drafts in time for World Fantasy 2009 in San Jose, California. So far, I’ve got one complete rough draft, one incomplete rough draft, and a REALLY cool idea for a new novel that is just itching to be written. I’ve got a lot of other stuff, too, but that stuff has been dead and buried for a while, and I’m not sure whether I want to bring it back just yet.

So, if these are indeed the three novels that I want to have ready by next year, here are some goals:

Finish the second draft of The Lost Colony by January 1st, 2009.
Write at least 500 words per day.
Write one article in the wiki outline for the new story each day.

The first one is pretty straightforward. I’ve got to polish The Lost Colony and get it to the point where I feel like I can send it out. It won’t be perfect by any stretch, but polished enough to send it out. With four months to finish the rewrite, hopefully I can put this project in the backseat while I focus most of my energies on the new stuff.

The second goal is also really straightforward. 500 words per day, as I discovered with The Lost Colony, is very reasonable. It’s a good starting place, and if I feel like I’m doing well enough, I can always increase it to 1,000 like I did last year (and successfully kept it, for the most part).

The last goal is something of an experiment for me. My least favorite part of the writing process is probably prewriting–all the outlining, worldbuilding, planning, etc. I tend to do all that stuff in my head, not on paper, and I come up with as much as 60% of it as I go along. That’s just how I tend to write. However, I’ve never really tried the alternative, and I think it would be a really interesting experiment to see what happens if I formally plan things out before I sit down and write it. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe both. Whatever happens, I’ll be sure to let you know.

These goals are all pretty straightforward and practical. That’s not what goals are for, however. They exist to push you. So, in order to push myself, I’m going to give myself a goal that’s just a little bit reckless:

Finish the second draft of the untitled novel by May 1st, 2009.

Wow. This is crazy. I proved this past year that I could write a 168,000 rough draft in nine months. But this? I’d practically have to finish the thing by January/February in order to have time for the rewrite! And yet, if I can churn out at least a decently polished draft of a novel every 3/4’s of a year, that’s impressive. It might just be enough to prove that I can do this successfully full time (gasp!).

They say that you need to produce a novel a year in order to make a living as a writer. Last year, I proved that I could produce a rough draft in a little less than a year, but a solid, polished draft? Didn’t happen.

But maybe, just maybe, I can prove myself with this next novel. Maybe. We’ll see. At the very least, it’s worth the challenge.