Genesis Earth

Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

So is trying to hit 3,000 words each day. For the past week, I’ve been doing between 1,500 and 2,500 words every day, but lately it’s just been really hard. I’m on break, and I know that I should have more time for this kind of stuff, but I don’t know.

It has been a while since I’ve worked on this story, and that might be a part of it. I dropped it in the summer and just picked it up again a week ago. That might have something to do with it.

I think it’s more than that, though, and I’m not sure what it is. Instead of savoring the time that I have to write, I dread it and find myself putting it off and finding other things to do. Most of my writing has been coming late at night, at the end of the day. If I really was driven and enthusiastic about writing this novel, I think I’d be doing all my writing earlier on in the day.

Bah. It’s like there’s some law of the universe that the closer you get to the end, the more you think it sucks and the less motivation you have to finish the damn thing. At least, that’s the way it is for me.

But I will finish it before school starts up again. That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish. Even if it ends up being less than 50,000 words, which is quite possible.

Right now, I’m just over 35,000, and right on the cusp of the central climax of the story. At least, that’s the way I’d originally envisioned it–the rest should mostly be winding things down.

The really interesting thing is that now that I’m banging my head against a wall with this story (Genesis Earth), the other one that I was struggling so much with before (Hero in Exile) doesn’t look nearly as bad. I could almost pick it up and work on it again. And the novel I finished last year–the one that I want to workshop in Sanderson’s English 318 class this year (The Phoenix of Nova Terra)? When I wrote the last chapter, I felt like the book was pretty crappy. Now, though, I can’t wait to work on it, I think it has so much potential!

It’s all so weird. All I can hope for is that something publishable will come out of it all.

The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!

A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols. Fascinating stuff! Really epic! Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols. When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?

This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow! This would be so cool as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.

Here’s what I came up with. I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.

First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization. That much is obvious. The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.

The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle. Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.

The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer. Similarly, the Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military. Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high. Basically, every Hameji ship is a warship.

Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.

First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian. That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature. When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise. There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated. What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job. Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.

In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community. But basically, it was rule by strict tradition. With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law. Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe. They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.

Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal. They believe in a ruling class and a following class. Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.

Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born. Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock. Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.

You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive. They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing. Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.

Mongols in space. How cool is that? It’s definitely got potential, I think. I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict. We’ll see which one ends up getting written. It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth and The Phoenix of Nova Terra get written.

2,850 words more than I thought I could write today

Yes, that’s true. I wrote 2,850 words today, and it’s more than I thought I could do.

I’m trying to finish up Genesis Earth, but it’s difficult because I haven’t been with these characters in a long time and I’ve forgotten a lot of their motivations. I look at what I’ve written before and I see all these inconsistencies in the things they say and do. Not that regular human beings are without inconsistencies, but I just worried that these ones were too…inconsistent.

Eventually, I had to come back down on that cardinal rule that you have to allow your first draft to suck. Yes, not everything they say or do really runs together, but I’ll be in a better position to make sense of it once the first draft is done than while it’s still mostly a cloud of ideas in my head.

Today, I just kept on putting off writing, and I started wondering why I was doing it. Was it because my characters aren’t making sense? Was it because I’m finding my own story to be unbearably boring? Am I really cut out to do this for a living when I’m struggling with these things? Those are some disturbing questions.

I took some time to watch The Empire Strikes Back, on the twenty five year old VHS copy my parents taped it on when it came to HBO, with all the wavy lines and fuzzy resolution–the one that captivated me when I was nine years old. It’s such a classic! Space opera at some of its finest! Yeah, there were holes all through the science, and the romance is kind of cheesy at parts, but the script, the overall story, the buildup and the climaxes–so classic! In some ways, I think that Empire is the best movie of the entire series.

It got me thinking, maybe I just need to get interested in my story again. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. Genesis Earth, while still being a primarily character driven story, has a lot more hard science to it than the epic space opera that I tend to write. Maybe I’m more cut out for space opera than the hard stuff.

I got about a thousand words in, watched a movie with my family (it was Elf–reminded me of everything I hate about Christmas and Hollywood, simultaneously), and sat down to blog and go to bed, but I noticed that I’d only done 1,190 words, and decided I’d at least finish the chapter.

I’d no sooner picked up the story than the characters started to take on lives of their own. Yeah, I might not have them figured out before this point, but I can fix that later. Better to focus on what they’re doing right now.

And as I did, things got really interesting. They went from almost killing each other (especially scary, considering that they’re both alone on a small spaceship twenty light years from anyone else) to rolling on the floor together, laughing and giggling and letting loose with all the things they wanted to say back at home but couldn’t because of what everybody else would think. When you’re alone on a spaceship, you’re free from a lot of social norms and pressures.

It goes to show that the way to get out of writer’s block, or writer’s avoidance, is to ignore all the doubts, worries, and negative thoughts in your head and just write. Those doubts and worries are all just illusions anyways. The story is still there, underneath it all. Give yourself to the story and you’ll figure it out.

Genesis Earth is now around 27.7k words. I’m making progress but I want this thing to be a full blown novel, so I’ve got at least 22.3k words to go. That’s roughly 2,000 words a day before school starts. My goal is 3,000 words a day from now to January 5th. That should be enough to tie up all the loose ends and finish it up.

And when that’s done, I can focus on rewriting The Phoenix of Nova Terra! I’m really excited for that!

Freedom!

YES!!! Exams are over! Finished them just a couple of days ago, and now I’m at home back in Massachusetts. Ah, sweet freedom! No school obligations, no stresses for papers or projects or grades or anything! Lots and lots of free time!

…and with that free time, I’m going to undertake something almost ridiculously impossible: finish Genesis Earth 1.0, the novel I started (but never finished) last year for English 318. The one I was going to write over the summer but never really finished. The one that got all caught up in clumsy rewrites and edits even before the rough draft was finished.

But that’s ok, because Jurassic Park just came on on Pandora, which means that I can do it!

Seriously, I think I can do this. If I can ramp up the wordcount to 3k a day and totally immerse myself in this world, I think I can finish it. Plus, I already know where I want this story to go. I’ve already discovered most of the main ideas and I know how I want it to end (at least loosely). Now that this miserable semester is over and I don’t have to worry about it anymore, I can focus on this stuff.

Blah blah blah. Yeah, I think I’ll be able to do it.

I’m at home now: had a very interesting trip out here. I was originally going to go to my cousin’s wedding in Washington D.C. with my parents, then drive back to Mass with them, but two major snowstorms are hitting the East Coast this weekend, and my parents don’t feel comfortable driving nine hours up and back in whiteout conditions. You know, they’re getting older and all, so they don’t have energy for that sort of thing. Honestly, I don’t blame them.

I had thought that I was going to have an exam on Thursday afternoon, so I had Pop book me for a red eye flight that left at midnight Friday morning. There was a connection at JFK, but I cancelled it and bought a train ticket from Penn Station, New York.

So I left Utah at midnight, tried to catch some sleep on the flight (it was really hard…not the least of which because of the TV shows you could watch on the inflight screen, like This American Life! Great radio show, great TV show!), then caught the subway at 6:00 am and rode it to Manhattan.

This is when I realized just how insulated I am in Utah: I stepped onto the subway car, and everyone was black! After living in Provo for so long, that was something of a shock to me, but I got over it before too long.

So I had a four or five hour layover in Manhattan before my train left, and…no, I didn’t do anything really cool. I did walk around a little bit outside, bought breakfast from a street vendor, checked out the Empire State building from where I stood…but didn’t really go anywhere. Boo.

I would like to come back and spend some time in New York City, though. My friend Steve wants to go there after he graduates, and it would be a cool place to spend a few years. I don’t know what I want to do for grad school yet, but I wouldn’t mind living and studying in or near NYC. Plus, that’s where most of the publishing world is, so it would be easier to make contacts and hit up the conventions if I were in this area.

The layover at Penn Station was long and somewhat miserable, but not too much so. Got some breakfast and lunch, napped a bit, and caught the Vermonter up to Springfield.

I love trains! They are so much more comfortable and relaxing than airplanes, even if it does take longer to get from place to place. The chairs were so wide, and reclined back so much! Must more restful than the airplane.

I did a little bit of work on my novel while on the train. Basically, I’m trying to catch myself up to the point where I left off, so that I can pick it up and start writing tomorrow. You’ll notice that all of the wordcount meters are dismally low right now–that’s because of exams and general end of semester craziness, not to mention this huge shift in direction. It won’t be down so low for much longer!

So then, met up with my dad outside of the station, rode home in the blinding whiteout of the storm that’s raging outside right now, enjoyed dinner with my parents, and now I’m getting ready to FINALLY get some sleep. That’s what I’ve been up to all day. It’s a dramatic change of scenery from just a week ago, but I think it will be good. Very good.

Change of plans

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit. I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story. I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later. The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character. From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it. In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on. Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind. A lot harder than Phoenix. With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was. Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding. I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider. The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space. I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next. It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this. But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard. This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel. Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum. With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step. I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back. Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler. I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward. What’s more, I’m excited about it again. When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely. I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas. As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off. I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better. Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins. I think I can do it. Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less. I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words. With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day. I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter! Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it. I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing. I’m excited. I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009. One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes. It basically details where I see the story going from here. I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense. However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time. When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner. Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far. On to Genesis Earth!

Unstuck

Happy Thanksgiving! Holy cow, I ate a lot. Had dinner with the McQueens, my sister’s husband’s grandparents, and all the inlaws. My sister-in-law can cook a mean chocolate pie. Holy cow. Delicious.

So, when I wasn’t eating or groggily digesting over at my in-laws’ house, I was writing. It was pretty tough, to be honest. Even though yesterday I got through the climax of the chapter that was hanging me up, I still felt really stuck today. It took me more time than I’d expected to finish the chapter, and I didn’t know how to start the next one.

I was really frustrated the whole day. There was nothing to do, and nowhere really to go. I took a break and walked down to campus in the middle of the afternoon, but it was dreary outside and all the buildings were closed. There was barely a car on the road, and even though it was good to get out and go for a walk, I didn’t come back with any good ideas for how to start things out.

To be honest, I contemplated putting this project on the back burner and working on something else for the next two months. My novel Genesis Earth is halfway done, and I could probably finish it by the end of January if I put this other novel away and focused all my energy on it. I’ve recently gotten excited about that story again.

But that would be an admission of defeat. I didn’t know if I needed to do that yet. I do have a lot of really good ideas for Hero in Exile–the trouble is, they all take place about a hundred pages from where I am right now! I should probably write them down before I finally get there and realize that I’ve forgotten them all.

I figured that things are hard just because I’ve been so distant from the story these past few weeks. I decided I needed to start the chapter out with some action–or, if not action, at least with some dramatic momentum–and figured the best way to do that was to have my two main characters kiss in the first scene. I was going to do that somewhere in the chapter, but I figured it would be better to start things out with it rather than gradually build up. After all, that’s not the climax–the climax is much more twisted and painful than that.

But then, before I could start, I had to figure out just how, exactly, these two characters would end up in that kind of a situation. I mean, it was hard for me to work through their motivations in my mind. I’ve been building up the tension for the last few chapters, but it all felt so distant, and it was hard to remember exactly how these characters are supposed to be feeling.

It was really frustrating. I had this kissing scene all figured out in my mind a few weeks ago, but I’d forgotten it all. As I kept mulling through my characters’ motivations, I got more and more frustrated. After all, things have changed so much from my original idea. Are these even the right characters to pull my story through to the end?

I started wondering if I’d made a mistake by starting the story when I did–whether all my ideas had truly come together to the point where they were ready to begin. Back about a month before I started, I thought I was ready–but now? I don’t know. It’s very frustrating and discouraging.

After all, maybe I bit off too much with this novel. My first novel, The Phoenix of Nova Terra, was more of a straight up adventure story. There were some deeper ideas and ethical dilemmas in it, but I felt like I had to slog through those parts. They didn’t work out as good as I’d hoped–the main focus was the adventure, the suspense. With Hero in Exile, I want to focus a lot more on deeper questions–like, what is honor? What is heroism? How do you keep your honor in a dishonorable world? Do you have to prove your heroism through some grand, daring act, or does true heroism manifest itself in other ways? These were some of my original questions, but now…I don’t know how it’s turning out.

As a side, note, that’s where I was going with my question a few weeks ago about depicting immorality as immoral without watering it down–how do you get your characters to deal with these challenging issues without driving away readers? It’s tough, and my main frustration has been that the scenes just don’t seem to be well executed–I’m afraid that they fall flat. I could be wrong, I could be overexaggerating, I could be trying to write a perfect first draft, and I could be doing all three of these at the same time, but it’s been really frustrating.

Oh well. At least I know I’m pushing myself.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I guess you could say that I had something like it today. I knew where I wanted to go, and I knew what I wanted to happen, I just didn’t know how to get there. So then, after checking email and facebook some twenty million times, I opened up my outline and decided to work on that. Ten minutes later, I remembered how I’d envisioned this scene, and I set down and finally started the next chapter.

Romance is kind of hard for me to write, not only because of my lack of experience, but because it’s hard not to fall into cliches when you’re describing things. Because of that, it took me a few hours to slog through the end of the opening scene–but I did it! And now, I’m excited about this story again! I know where we are, what we’re doing, and exactly where we’re going over the next few scenes. It’s great! I’m FINALLY unstuck!

So now, I just have to keep up at a good pace before I forget everything again. Shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of this vacation, but the next two weeks are going to be a tough sprint to the end of the semester. Still, it won’t be impossible. And after, I’ve got more than two weeks of winter break–with the netbook I went ahead and ordered a couple of days ago! Hooray! I can hardly wait!

Critical Mass

Stars form when billions of tons of gas, scattered across space in the midst of an impossibly huge nebula, gradually come together through the attractive pull of gravity. Over the course of thousands of years, these gases slowly, almost imperceptibly come together, until they reach a critical mass. When that critical mass is achieved, the ball of gas falls in on itself and ignites a trememndous nuclear reaction, millions of times more powerful than all the nuclear weapons of Earth with more than a trillion times the longevity. Thus a new star is born.

Writing is not that much different; at least, not for me. My mind is like a vast nebula of thoughts, ideas, feelings, impressions, images, and memories. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, these ideas start to congregate. As I work each one out and give it shape and gravity, they slowly start to fall into each other. Some of them have more weight and fall faster, while others drift away. Eventually, these ideas reach a critical mass–and when they do, they rapidly fall into each other and come together, igniting an exciting plotline. A story is born, just screaming at me to be written.

This past week, the ideas for my next story came together and reached that critical mass…

Some thoughts on writing

I noticed something the other day when I went to write in Genesis Earth after a long hiatus. I reread the last few pages I’d written…and reading the story, it seemed a lot different to me than when I was writing it.

The same thing happened to me when I started rereading The Lost Colony. It felt melodramatic, wordy, and at parts really cheesy. Is this the same story that I sat down and wrote just a few months ago? It seems like something completely different.

It’s scary, because it makes me realize that when you write a story, you really DON’T have a lot of control over it…

Summer goals revision

So, it’s getting towards the end of the summer, I’m having a TON of awesome experiences out here in Jordan, I’ve practically abandoned the Quark writing group (for the time being…I’ll be back…), and I’m only 16,000 words into Genesis Earth, which I was hoping to finish before the end of the summer. My daily routine has definitely been flipped upside down since the end of winter semester, and I need to figure out how what I’m going to do with regards to my writing…

So last week I was in Israel/Palestine, traveling with the BYU study abroad group, seeing all the sites and everything, when my flash drive crashed. Real bad. This friend of mine on the trip who’s a data recovery expert downloaded all this software and tried to help, but the drive was not only completely wiped out, it was completely unreadable. Most of my stuff was backed up in various places, but I lost, among other things, my summer journal (NOOOOO!!!!!) and my working copy of The Wormhole Paradigm.

However, this was exactly what I needed to get things moving in the right direction…