Category: Genesis Earth

Thank you readers

I appreciate my first readers very much, even when it hurts.  Especially when it hurts.

Today I got the comments back from a longtime Quarkie friend on Genesis Earth, and she told me that, in her opinion, the book still needs a lot of work.  However, she made it very clear when (and why) she was bored, when (and why) she was interested, and where (and why) she would stop reading.  Thankfully, she kept reading and gave me useful feedback right up to the end.

My friend’s comments helped me to rethink several weak points  of my novel.  In particular, her anthropology experience helped her to pick up on some racist undertones that I didn’t intend and hadn’t realized were there.  If my story would have appeared in print like that, I would have been flamed up and down the sf community!  Without her feedback, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that.

The feedback did more than point out problems, however; it helped me to rethink these problems and begin to find new, innovative solutions.  Rather than getting me angered or depressed, the criticism stoked my creative engines by getting me to take a step back and rethink my story from the ground up.  Though the feedback was harsh (basically, “I’d throw this book across the room at this point”) it was extremely helpful and got me more enthused than ever to write.

Receiving criticism and advice is a very delicate thing, especially for a budding writer.  If you try to follow every peice of feedback you recieve, your book will inevitably tank.  However, rejecting criticism is also tough because you don’t always know why you’re doing it.  There is a fuzzy grey area between rejecting a comment because it’s not right for your story, and rejecting it because it rubbed your ego in the wrong way.

I don’t ever want to reject critical feedback because it hurts.  After all, it’s not about me at all–it’s about the story.

Criticism is never “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad.” It is only “useful” or “not useful.” To pick out the useful feedback, you always have to listen to–and appreciate–every piece of feedback that you get.  Only after you’ve done this can you can say (in private!) “no, this isn’t right for my work.”

In the meantime, thank everyone who takes the time and effort to read your work and comment on it.  They’ve done you a huge service, and the last thing they deserve is to be attacked by an egocentric, peurile, self-righteous amateur.  Honest criticism, no matter how much it hurts, is the best thing any writer can receive.

On that note, I want to thank all my first readers for helping me with my novel, Genesis Earth!  I genuinely appreciate all of your comments. You’ve helped me to step back and see my work for what it is.  You are helping me to make this novel a stronger, better book, and that means more to me than you know.  So thank you!

Twenty percent, Writers of the Future, and the INTERN

I am now 20% finished with Ashes of the Starry Sea. Huzzah!  The story is definitely picking up steam.

In related news, my seven day totals has peaked higher than it’s been in the last two weeks, up above 17,500 words.  Inshallah, that number will rise to +24,000 befoore the end of the week.

In unrelated news, I’ve decided to recycle my 2009 Mayhew story for the Writers of the Future contest this quarter.  I’ve got until July 1st to get it out, but I have a plan, and I don’t think it will require too much extra work.  That was the thing holding me back (since, really, it’s not a story, it’s just a scene), but now I’ve got something that I think has a chance of working.

It’s funny how reading other people’s manuscripts motivates you to send your own stuff out.  I mean, reading the Leading Edge slushpile, I said to myself “you know, that story you wrote two years ago could probably get a pass.” Lo and behold!  With Writers of the Future, it’s definitely worth a shot.  Definitely.

Oh, and as I skimmed through Genesis Earth 2.0 today, the thought occured to me that I’ve written a kickass story here (pardon the language).  I mean, it’s far from perfect, and it’s not the best book ever written (not by a long shot), but it’s a lot more than a “stuff happens, the end” kind of story.  Maybe I’ll even see it in print someday.  And to think I almost trashed the project a year ago.

As something totally unrelated to personal news at all, check out this awesome new blog:

The straight dope on publishing from publishing’s most fearsome figure—THE INTERN.

Nice tagline!

As I read about the exploits of this publishing intern, I can’t help but think to myself, “hey, that could have been me.” Not quite sure how I feel about that, but I’m really glad to have all this time to write and work on my craft.  I definitely need it.

Bringing Stella Home 1.1 is finished

A few minutes ago, I finished the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home. This is my third completed novel. Huzzah!

It needs a ton of work, too…there’s no way I’m going to let this thing see the light of day, not until I finish the second draft.

In fact, I should probably set down tomorrow and start listing all the plot holes that need to be fixed in the revision, before I forget them all. It feels like there are dozens and dozens of holes. Not a good feeling.

Still, IT’S DONE!!! All that worrying and fretting and gtalk rants at Charlie along the lines of “GAH!! THIS NOVEL SUCKS!!!” have paid off, and I’ve got a draft I can work with! Inshallah, it should be downhill from here.

I remember when I wrote Genesis Earth, how all throughout the process of writing the rough draft, I felt that the work was terrible. And it’s true–the rough draft needed a lot of work. However, I think revising comes easier to me than drafting, and the process of writing the second draft was much, much smoother and more enjoyable than the first one.

So, what I have now is a hunk of rock roughly in the shape of a face. I can’t quite tell if it’s th face of a man, a woman, or a monkey, but it’s a face nonetheless. That’s better than an unworked block of stone, at least. Maybe someday it will be a decent work of art, if my hands don’t slip and I shave the nose off by accident.

I’ll let this draft sit for a few weeks, maybe a month, then pick it up again for the revision. In the meantime, on to other things.

And really, as rough as this draft may be, it feels awesome to finally have it finished. Reality sets in tomorrow, when once again I find myself staring at a blank page.

Bringing Stella Home 1.1

mss pages: 416
words: 118,596
file size: 791 KB
chapters: 21
start date: 6 May 2009
end date: 10 June 2009

Wordle: Bringing Stella Home 1.1

POSTSCRIPT: Hahaha! MS Word just popped up a dialogue box saying “there are too many spelling and grammar errors to underline them all” or something like that! HILARIOUS.

Genesis Earth pitch and other assorted thoughts on writing

Today I got together with Charlie after her work and discussed how to pitch my novel Genesis Earth.  We did it in the following way: I took a few minutes to explain what the book was about, while she wrote down the words that stood out and excited her.  Later, I took the words and worked out a thirty second pitch for it.

It was HARD!  I spent nearly two hours after meeting with her just to write out a stupid four or five sentence blurb!  Selling your work is totally different from producing it.  Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Michael has never set foot on Earth, but it haunts him as much as the legacy of his parents.  So when his parents build the first artificial, traversable wormhole, he sets out with his mission partner, Terra, to explore the Earthlike planet on the other side.  They arrive only to discover an empty, abandoned world and an unresponsive ghost ship advancing towards them.  When Terra’s schizoid tendencies threaten her mental stability, they both must learn to trust each other in order to confront the mysteries of the new universe–and the personal insecurities that keep them from what they truly desire.

I have that down to 29.6 seconds.  I should probably cut it shorter, but as it is it only has about half of the words that Charlie wrote down.  If I cut it any more, I’m afraid it just won’t make sense.

It’s a start, though, and talking with Charlie helped me out tremendously.  I realized that when I’m selling this stuff, I need to focus on the characters.  Sure, all the worldbuilding stuff is interesting, but it’s not what hooks the reader.  If all you’ve got is thirty seconds, don’t cut to the chase–and don’t give a synopsis!  Synopsis =/= pitch!

Charlie was exhausted, so as we talked, she started ranting in a way that can be described as bluntly honest.  Interestingly enough, most of what she said was actually quite helpful, not only for Genesis Earth, but also for my other projects.

The most helpful thing she mentioned was that when you’re writing characters, you often have to pick out their distinctive character traits and consciously overemphasize them.  If you don’t, the reader might not pick up on it and find your characters stale and boring.  While I hate melodrama and try to keep my novels free of it, I also need to keep my characters interesting.  It’s a fine line to walk, but one that you can’t avoid.

She also said that it’s very easy for protagonists to be more boring than the main characters.  I think this is probably because we rely on formulas and cliches when we’re starting out, since that’s much less risky than breaking the rules we don’t yet fully understand.  The protagonist is the character closest to the trope, while the side characters can do what they want without threatening the integrity of the story.  

Charlie said that because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of a boring protagonist, you need to consciously choose the traits that are interesting about that character and work them into the story as much as possible.  I realized, as she said that, that my main protagonist for Hero in Exile is, indeed, a boring character.  I need to pick out the things that make him interesting and consciously work those into his character.

This got me to think about planning.  I’ve found that if I try to outline a novel when I set out to write the rough draft, I end up telling a completely different story.  However, if I try to write a second draft without an outline, I have a hard time keeping things straight and fixing all the stuff I missed while discovery writing the first draft.

(I’m really upset now, because I was going to mention something that I need to foreshadow in the next revision of Genesis Earth, but…I totally forgot what it was!  GAH!!!  That’s what I get for not outlining!)

Charlie then started to rant about some of our writing friends, and how she would never listen to criticism on her writing from someone she considered to be an inferior writer to herself.

That part was…interesting.  While I agree 110% that arguing with criticism is a sign of a poor writer, I don’t think it’s especially useful to rank writers in terms of “good” or “bad.” I would like to believe that I can learn something from everybody, and not just what not to do.  Perhaps that’s optimistic, but I think it’s also practical–I’ve found that a bloated ego can shoot you in the foot six ways to Sunday before you even know what’s going on.  I’ve found that not just through one unfortunate experience, but through several.

Brandon Sanderson said something very interesting in the last email he sent out to his English 318 class: he said that in New York, editors and agents don’t rank manuscripts by “good” and “bad,” they rank them by how much work they think it needs to be publishable.  There is a distinction between the two, just as there’s a distinction between recognizing something that works really well and something that follows the rules.  

That’s about all I have the time for now.  I’ve got to get to bed.  Late night internet == bad idea.

The second wind of inspiration

The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that in order to finish a novel, you have to rediscover something powerful about the story that motivates you to tell it.  The thing that motivates you to start the story is rarely the thing that drives you to finish it.

Around the second half of the novel, I usually find yourself losing steam and groping for inspiration. As I write, the story takes its own shape and morphs into something different than it was when I started. My initial motivating idea becomes obsolete, and I have to find another source of inspiration to drive me to finish.

For Genesis Earth, that thing was a scene in the fourth chapter. Late at night sometime in March 2008, I sat down in the FLSR laundry room to clunk out the 2,000 words required for my English 318 class that week. I don’t know what it was, but everything aligned just right and the words flowed out beautifully onto the page. When I was finished, I looked over what I had written and realized that it wasn’t that bad.  On the contrary, it was unusually good.

A few months later, when I was about halfway through, everything seemed to be going wrong. The characters weren’t working, the conflict was petering out, my writing sucked, and it was all terrible. I was honestly tempted to throw out the whole novel and forget about it.

But then I remembered that scene–the one that was so much better than all of the other stuff that I’d written. I realized that if I threw out the novel, that scene would die with it. I had to finish my story, if for no other reason than to give that scene a place to live. As a result, I pulled through and finished the novel–and I’m glad I did, because that work represents a major landmark in my writing life.

The scary part is that you can never really know what it is that will give you your second wind. If you’re too critical, too judgmental of your own work, or sometimes just too focused, you’ll miss it. To find it, you have to be flexible with your outline, sensitive to new thoughts, emotions, and impressions, and (perhaps most important of all), you just have to have faith in the story you’re trying to tell.

I recently found the inspiration for my second wind with Bringing Stella Home. It’s a scene that I wrote just last week, where a major character dies.  I’d planned it out as a gut-wrenchingly tragic moment, the ultimate low point in the protagonist’s quest.  When I wrote it, however, I realized that it was much more than that: it was a merciful release for the character who died, and (though he doesn’t realize it) a victory of sorts for the protagonist.

That scene affected me in ways that I was not expecting. While the prose itself needs tightening and the scene needs revision, I realized that it has some great potential.  Because of that, I now have a driving desire to see the story finished.

New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip.  I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.  

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious  backstory worked out.  So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting.  It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people.  I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now.  I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format.  Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go.  At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up.  The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days.  I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap.  Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating.  Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh.  It doesn’t matter.  Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud.  If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k.  That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure.  Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June.  3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes.  I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June.  It’s a good target.  It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project.  Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)

It’s finished!

The second draft of my novel is finished! Yay!

I finished up the last scene of the last chapter of Genesis Earth 2.0 this morning, as well as the epilogue, and sent it out to my beta readers.

Would you believe that I’ve got 25 people reading this thing? That’s almost double as many first readers as I had. More than double the number of first readers who got their comments back to me.

Anyways, here is the wordsplash for version 2.0. The second draft clocked in at about 71k words, significantly more than the first draft (which was about 57k). I added a couple of extra scenes, drew out a couple of other scenes and conversations, and didn’t really cut much out.

But yeah! Finished! Now I need to wait for feedback and let it simmer for a little while. Hopefully, it’s sufficiently polished right now to start shopping around with agents and editors; if not, then a month or two from now I’ll do another rewrite to polish it up and make it really shine.

Wordle: Genesis Earth 2.0

EDIT: and now, to shamelessly copy Reigheena and what she does when she finishes one of her novels, I’m going to include a rundown of Genesis Earth 2.0’s stats:

pages: 251
words: 71,481
file size: 479 KB
chapters: 14 & epilogue
start date: 28 mar 09
end date: 5 may 09

Almost done!

Yay!  I’m almost done with Genesis Earth 2.0!  6k words of revision done today, bringing the project up to 95% complete.  Just the final scene of the final chapter, and then the epilogue, and she’s done!

(Well, at least the second draft is done.  She’s probably going to need a lot more work after that, but if I don’t put some distance between myself and this novel for a month or two, I’m not going to be able to see what she needs.  Still, I feel confident that this rewrite is a significant improvement from the first draft.)

The coolest thing about this revision process is that it’s actually been kind of fun.  It has involved a lot of work: hours and hours of grappling with the text to find the right way to say things, research ranging from various psychological disorders to the structure of wormholes to the composition of DNA, and lots and lots of time thinking through various aspects of the story (basically, daydreaming…but hey! it was hard work!).  But even though it was a lot of work, it was fun work and I really enjoyed it.

What’s even cooler is that I’ve got 22 beta readers lined up to read it and give me feedback–boo yah!  Inshallah I’ll be finishing the second draft tomorrow sometime and sending it out to everyone before the end of the day.  

After this project, I’ll be moving on to Bringing Estella Home.  It needs a major rehaul before I can pick it up from where I left off (the rough draft is currently incomplete), but that shouldn’t be too hard.

I put up a status bar for Bringing Estella Home on the sidebar, even though it’s stilll the rough draft.  It’s currently at 60k words, and I set 100k as the base for calculating the percentage complete.  It probably won’t be more than 100k…120k at the very most.  We’ll see how that works out.  

Currently, it’s at 0%, since I’m going to start from the very begining and rewrite it up to where I left off.  I know, everone says that’s not a good idea–and usually it is–but it’s been almost a month since I’ve worked on this project, and I need to get back into it, starting with the beginning.  

Taking a break from it for a while was a good idea, I think, because I realized things just weren’t working.  The time off helped me to step back and see what was wrong, as well as recouperate my energy and enthusiasm for the project.  I made the mistakes of simultaneously outlining too much and too little as I was still writing the rough draft; too much, because I was keeping a map of every scene on a piece of butcher paper, cementing scenes where some of them needed to be cut; too little, because I tried to create a private mercenary outfit without figuring out all the crew roles I needed the various characters to fill.  

But now, none of that is an issue, and I’m ready to get started.  Tomorrow, in fact, if all goes well.  🙂

Breaking a roadblock

About a month ago, I stopped working on my novel Bringing Estella Home because I hit a roadblock.  Basically, I realized at the end of the second part that I had failed to work out all of the secondary characters and their duties and responsibilities in the mercenary group that the protagonist hires.  I had a pilot and a navigator but no engineer, no medical officer, and no difference between the officers and the enlisted men.  When I came up to a battle scene, I realized that most of the characters I’d be killing off were either invisible or nonexistent, and that didn’t help out the dramatic tension very much.

Well, after the last post, it seems that my two most interesting projects (according to my friends) are Bringing Estella Home and The Phoenix of Nova Terra.  Bottom line: as much as I want to avoid it, this is probably one of my most promising projects and I really should revive it.

So today I opened up my outline for the story (I’m not very consisten about keeping outlines while drafting a new novel, but I usually have at least a couple of notes here and there in them), and I diagrammed out the mercenary organization.  I figured out what all the important officer roles are, reassigned/added new characters to fit those roles, figured out how many enlisted men there would be and who would be in charge of them,  and figured out everyone’s responsibilities.  Here is what I’ve got:

 

    * Captain — Commanding officer of the mercenary unit.  Lead missions, accept contracts, look over welfare of the crew, etc.

    * Chief Petty Officer (NCO) — Provide link between officers and grunts, relay commands from the captain to the enlisted men.

    * Astrogator/Pilot — Navigate routes, pilot during combat.

    * Cybernetics and Intelligence Officer — Provide useful intelligence to captain, infiltrate enemy networks, general cybernetic espionage.

    * Chief Engineer — Maintain, repair, and upgrade the ship, keep inventory of ordinance, foodstuffs, and other supplies, maintain shipwide computer network.

    * Chief Medical Officer — Maintain the health of the crew, perform surgeries and medical operations as needed, etc.

    * Wing Commander — Remotely pilot and command fighter drones, monitor enemy movements within the field of operations.

 

So, that’s seven officers, including the NCO (I’m not really a military person, so I’m not sure if you’d count the NCO with the officers or the enlisted men…man, I’m so ignorant when it comes to the military).  On the enlisted side, I’ve got two sergeants commanding two squads of twelve soldiers each.

Did I miss anything?  Please let me know if I did.

I’ve got to admit, the structure of this mercenary unit comes from my own very, very limited understanding of the military, drawn mostly from 1) conversations with my military roommate over the Jordan 2008 study abroad, 2) the Schlock Mercenary webcomic (which is a lot more space opera than military  sf), 3) Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, and 4) Wikipedia.  

You know, I really should join the military before I attempt to write military science fiction (no, really, I’m only half joking–it is a temptation).  But yeah, that’s the best I can come up with…so, really, this is pseudo-military sf, or the best space opera imitation of military sf that I can come up with.

But the cool thing is that as soon as I had everything diagrammed out like this, it all clicked together and the roadblock was gone.  Gone!  A month ago, when I started hitting the rough patch, I really didn’t have a lot of motivation to keep working.  It was broken, I knew it was broken, and I couldn’t really move on until I’d fixed it.  Well, now I know exactly how to fix it, and I really want to get back to this project and do it right.

Except…this is such a dark story.  It’s so tragic.  Just as I started to come along and really like my characters…but it’s better that way.  You’ve got to torture them, cause them pain.  It makes the story much more interesting and engaging, raises the stakes.

But first, I’ve got to finish Genesis Earth.  And go to bed.  Probably not in that order.