Genesis Earth Trilogy – Page 20 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Freaking busy

Sorry for not posting; I’ve been ridiculously busy these past few days. As in, I don’t think I can remember ever being this busy. Maybe when I was taking PL SC 310, but then again…that was more stressful than busy.

I’m working two jobs (two awesome TA jobs, by the way), I’m taking 15 credit hours of classes, and I’m applying to 9 or 10 internships in Washington DC for the winter. All of my classes are upper level, including my capstone class, which is pretty intensive.

I read maybe 7 or 8 academic articles a week and about 150 pages of philosophy and other texts. I grade dozens of papers, tests, and quizzes, write papers (anywhere from 6 to 12 pages each), and spend virtually all of my waking life on campus.

It’s insane. On a typical day, I leave my apartment at 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning and only come back for dinner (and maybe an hour of homework). Then it’s back to the library until midnight, when it closes.

I feel like a slave.

Still, even though I haven’t been blogging much, I have been writing consistently, even through the worst of it. Right now, I’m running about 6k to 7k a week, which isn’t as much as I’d like but is surprising, considering everything else.

The only time I really have to write these days is from 10:00 pm to midnight, up at the library. If I’m lucky, I’ll slip in about half an hour in the morning, but most of the writing happens at night.

The thing that gets to me, though, is that I probably won’t have the 4th draft of Genesis Earth finished before World Fantasy. With my crazy workload, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. The first three chapters are finished, but the rest of the ms? Unfortunately, it needs more time.

Blegh. I can’t wait until I’m out of school. Hopefully, things won’t be as insanely busy.

But I’m probably wrong.

Polishing is harder than it looks

It is. This is the final revision of Genesis Earth before I submit this novel everywhere, and it’s tough. I’m changing a lot more than I thought I would, and it’s going a lot slower than any other process so far.

Plus, on my way to Murray for my mission reunion, the service light for my engine flipped on. What the heck? I just had the car serviced a month ago!

At least I know about it now, before I attempt to drive to San Jose for World Fantasy.

Long story short, showed up at 9pm to the reunion just in time to say hi to President and Sister Heywood as they were getting ready to leave. So worth it, though. They’re both getting older, and I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them again. Listened to From Cumorah’s Hill on the way back, and it was awesome. I mean that in a religious way.

I’ve got a research proposal due tomorrow, and I kid you not, I was working on that thing in my sleep last night. All night, while I was dreaming, I was thinking “should I use this author in my paper? How should I tie that in? What controls do I need to use? Will this dataset cover the same years as that dataset?” All. Night. Long.

And then I forgot it all when I woke up!

I did get some time to write, though. Took the netbook up to the laundry room in the FLSR (I still go there–much cheaper than my current apartment) and worked on my novel while waiting for the laundry to finish. Good times–some of my best writing has come out of that laundry room. Award winning writing.

In tangentially related news, I still have not heard back from Writers of the Future. I’m guessing that’s a good thing <crosses fingers>.

September recap

So, September’s over now. Where in the heck did all that time go? In some ways, I can still remember the summer…but in other ways, it’s never been further away.

So, what did I do this past month? Plenty. I got a good start on school (14 credits this semester), I quit the writing advisor job and replaced it with two TA jobs, and I turned 25 years old. Quarter century…and still in school. I feel like some kind of relic. “An elegant weapon for a more civilized age…”

As far as writing goes, I wrote 41,649 words total, averaging 1,602 words per day (not counting Sundays–counting Sundays, I averaged 1,388). I passed the 3/4ths mark on Bringing Stella Home 2.0 and started work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Not bad! I’m surprised I wrote so much; 41k is almost as much as nanowrimo. However, I can’t help but wonder: how many of those words are good words?

It’s a much more subjective thing to measure, but I do feel that my craft has improved. Now that I’ve started the rewrite on Genesis Earth, I’m catching a surprising number of sentences and paragraphs that could be much better phrased. For today, I “wrote” 1,616 words, but only got about 1,000 words further into the story (I measure wordcount with compare documents, totaling all the deletions and additions). After the last revision–just last July–I felt very satisfied with the draft as I’d written it. The fact that I’m changing so much on this rewrite shows that I’ve set the bar a lot higher for quality of writing (at least, I hope that’s what it means).

School is still kicking my trash. I’ve got papers up the wazoo this entire month–3 major ones, two minor ones, and at least one midterm, not to mention all the midterms and papers I’ll be grading. Oh, and I’m reading about a dozen academic articles per week. Dense articles. The kind that suck your life out through your eyes.

Because of all that, and because of World Fantasy at the end of the month, I’ve decided to put Bringing Stella Home on temporary hold until I finish the revision of Genesis Earth. Got to put priorities first, and that’s how it falls. If the revision takes longer than expected, I may have to change my personal deadline for Bringing Stella Home to Thanksgiving.

But come Thanksgiving, I am definitely starting something new!

Final polish

I mapped out all the major assignments for my capstone class for the next month on my calendar. Turns out I’ve got a lot more work than I thought I did. Because of that, I decided to start work on Genesis Earth 4.0 today.

This is the final polish before World Fantasy convention. Of all the stuff I’ve written, Genesis Earth is the only ms that I feel is ready for me to send to editors/agents. With this draft, I hope to smooth out the writing, make the text more readable–basically, make this book really shine. We’ll see if it succeeds.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in some ways, doing this final edit (inasmuch as any edit is “final”). Previously, whenever I did a revision, I knew that I had time to come back later and fix anything that I just couldn’t get to. Now, this is where it counts. The writing has to be perfect.

Imagine how horrible it was to find a grammatical mistake on page one. I’d forgotten to capitalize the first word of a sentence in the third or fourth paragraph. Thankfully, it was the only mistake I saw on that page, but it’s enough to make me nervous about those chapters I sent out to the editors from BYU’s Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers. I know how to write–really, I do! Please believe me!

So today, every hour of the day was jam packed with classes, work, homework, and obligatory social activities. I only had two hours to write, and in that time, I only wrote about 500 words for Genesis Earth (though, to be fair, I’m measuring it by comparing documents and only counting the words that changed). Ouch. Not sustainable, if I want to finish Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home (I need to change that title) before World Fantasy. I made up for it by writing for half an hour just now in Stella, but still…

And this is where I hope I don’t mess things up. Every time I’ve tried to juggle two projects at once, I’ve found it very hard to do so. It’s something I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to write professionally, but it’s still very hard. I hope my writing quality doesn’t suffer because of it.

If worst comes to worst, I’ll focus on Genesis Earth until it’s done to my satisfaction. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, even with school. But I’m still keeping my goal to finish Stella before World Fantasy.

In unrelated news, in my political philosophy class today, Professor Hancock mentioned Huntington and I said, under my breath, “that guy was so full of crap.” Well, it turns out that Professor Hancock is quite the admirer of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory. This is going to make class…interesting, to say the least. After studying this stuff my entire college career, I really do believe that Huntington’s theories are utterly full of crap.

Oh, and I had a great idea for a comic: Plato’s Republic, as a cartoon! Okay, maybe I’m just a geek, but seriously, if it were done well, it could be really, REALLY cool. Really cool.

School is kicking my trash

It’s true. This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:

Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently. If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.

This week was particularly busy. I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation. Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.

Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes. Ugh.

The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers. The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good. I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class. Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.

Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class. While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea? And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.

With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm. Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play. Every day, I come home exhausted. And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class. Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.

Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it. In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do. I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.

I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that. In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.

In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project. Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

🙂

Six weeks to World Fantasy

Holy cow! How is September halfway over? It seems like school started just a week ago. Only six and a half weeks before World Fantasy convention in San Jose, and I think I’m going to have to readjust some of my goals.

I’d wanted to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 by the 11th of October, but the way school and work is looking, I probably won’t be able to write 2k words every day in order to meet that goal. Besides, the story has several major issues that can only be fixed with a major overhaul, so there’s no way this novel is going to be ready for submission in time for the convention.

However, Genesis Earth is looking pretty good. So far as story issues go, I was very satisfied with the third draft–I think I fixed all the major issues and wrote something that’s pretty close to salable. Before the convention, I want to go through and make one final revision, one where I polish up the prose and fix the readability issues. That shouldn’t be too hard–I can probably do that in two to three weeks.

So here’s what I’m going to do in the next six weeks. I’m going to check out all of Robert Charles Wilson’s books and immerse myself in his prose–not to copy it, but to hopefully boost the quality of my own prose. The quality of his writing is fantastic, a beautiful mesh of literary prose and thriller pacing and rhythm. While I’m doing that, I’ll start the 4.0 draft of Genesis Earth and work hard at it, until I’ve polished that work as much as I can. That’s the work that I’ll try to sell when I’m at World Fantasy.

I’m a little worried, because I submitted the full manuscript to Krista Marino back in June and haven’t heard back. At the BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference, she said she had a response time of 4 months, but I’m worried I won’t hear back from her before World Fantasy. Is it appropriate to send a polite note asking her to get back to me before the convention? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by sending out simultaneous submissions, and if an editor asks to see my ms, I want to be able to send it to them ASAP. Then again, I suppose I could just tell them that the full is currently with someone else, and that would demonstrate some professionalism…but I want to be able to send it if/when they ask for it.

Which reminds me: I need to do some HEAVY agent/editor research before this convention. I want to go to World Fantasy with a list of people to look for, so I know where to go to network, which panels to attend, who to look out for in the hallways and parties. I want to be very professional about this, and get the most out of those two/three days that I can.

As for Bringing Stella Home, my current WIP, I’m going to do my best to finish it before World Fantasy so that I can start November with something new. I need to finish that book before I can set it aside and let it percolate in my mind for the next revision. Besides, it’s been too long since I’ve worked on something completely new. After October, I’ll need to take a break from all these revisions.

So that’s the plan: Finish Genesis Earth 4.0 and Bringing Stella Home 3.0 before World Fantasy. Research all the editors and agents to look out for at the convention. Oh, and hold down 14 credit hours and 2 on-campus jobs at the same time, with some time left over for a dating/social life (INSHALLAH).

Hehe…these next six weeks are going to be packed!

Summer roundup

Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer.

When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship. My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in Provo and write full time.

Sanderson’s agent ended up taking on a different intern, which ended up being the best for both of us, since I get the sense that he was looking to mentor someone who would go on to become a professional agent. Me, I was just looking to network and develop some connections in the publishing world, which I did anyway (at least in the local Utah scene). Besides, Provo is WAY cheaper than New York!

From the beginning, I treated writing as a full-time job. I set project deadlines, daily and 7-day wordcount goals, and spent somewhere around 8 hours a day working on my various projects. I submitted a full to an editor from the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and partials to the other two editors. I also submitted to the Writers of the Future contest and to the LDS Publisher Christmas story contest (much smaller, but geared toward a niche market).

I started keeping my stats on May 25th, using a spreadsheet to keep track of my daily wordcount for each of my projects, the daily total wordcount, the 7-day cumulative wordcount, and any writing I did for synopses or revision notes. Since BYU’s summer recess begins in April, I missed the stats for the first three weeks or so, but I kept consistent records since then until now.

From May 25th to August 31st, I wrote 244,065 words in 8 projects (3 short stories and 5 novel drafts). I averaged 2,490 words per day. Adjusting for Sundays (I typically take Sundays off), I averaged 2,906 words per day.

My goals were to write 4k words per day, and to shoot for a constant 7-day total of 24k, but to never let that total dip below 12k words. In 98 days, the 7-day running total only went below 12k eleven times–on those particular days, I was either traveling, moving out, moving in, or extremely busy with back-to-school chores. For the two weeks I was on vacation, I still wrote more than 12k words each week.

Interestingly enough, out of the eight fiction projects, only one was a rough draft–a short story that I worked on for two days and never completed. The vast majority of my writing went into revising novels that I’d already written.

I completed the first draft of Bringing Stella Home in early June (my third complete novel rough draft). Later, in July, I began the second draft. I’m currently just over halfway through with the revisions and hope to finish by October 10th.

I started a revision of my first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea, but decided midway through that I was running up against diminishing returns and decided to drop it (I completed the rough draft in April of 2008–it was my first finished novel and the reason I started this blog, waaaaay back in August 2007).

I started a new draft of Hero in Exile, making some drastic revisions, but found it difficult to juggle more than one writing project at a time and put it on the back burner. I may or may not pick it up again once Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished.

I completed the third draft of Genesis Earth and started to submit it. I will probably do one language/readability edit before the World Fantasy convention in late October and try to sell it while I’m there.

Overall, the summer was a practice run to see if I could write full time and survive the insanity. I always feared, as a child, that if writing became my full time job I would come to hate it. I found, however, that writing full time (8+ hrs/day, 6 days/wk) only made me enjoy it more. Now that school is back in session, I already wish I had more time and mental space to dedicate to my writing.

I miss the summer, but not because of the lazy days, or the parties, or the vacationing–I miss the opportunity to write full time! Provided I can find a way to support a family off of this, I can definitely see myself turning this into a career. In the meantime, I’ll keep honing my craft and start working on getting an agent.

Now, more than ever, I feel that breaking in is more of a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’

🙂 🙂 🙂

Oh crap

Dang. I just looked at a calendar for the next two months, and it looks like I’m going to be busy.

I want to get Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home polished and ready before World Fantasy 2009, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Genesis Earth is almost there, but Bringing Stella Home is going to require a HEAVY rewrite. I’m in the middle of that now.

I’m currently about 25k words into the rewrite, with between 100k and 110k words to go (I think…could be more). I want to finish this by the last week of September / first week of October. That leaves me three working weeks in August (I’m taking off a week for vacation at Cape Cod, though I will probably write a little there as well) and five weeks in September.

But really, once school starts again, I’m not going to have much time available to write. I’ve got two capstone papers I’ll be writing, a ccouple of poli sci classes to take, and to top it all off, I’ll be taking a 400 level English class where I’ll probably be writing a DIFFERENT novel–holy cow! September is going to be a CRAZY month!

How the crap am I going to juggle all this?

Well, I figure if I write 4k minimum a day in August, I can get between 60k and 75k of Bringing Stella Home knocked out before school starts. It’s going to be tough, but it won’t be significantly more than what I’m already writing. Definitely doable.

That way, I’ll only have 35k for September, which comes to a meager 1k per day. Considering that this is revision work, which tends to go a bit quicker, I think I’ll be able to handle it.

But 65k in August…can I do that?

Well, in June, I wrote a grand total of 81k, and in July I wrote 85k. Most of the stuff in July, too, was revision work that I counted differently, excluding passages that I’d recycled from the previous draft.

Considering this, I think I can do 65k in August, even with a week’s vacation. I’ll probably even write a bit on the break, maybe 1k/day, just to keep some momentum. We’ll see.

But, just as an aside…81k? 85k?? That’s more than the novel I worked on my entire freshman year of high school! And I did that…in just a month? That’s encouraging!

Maybe I’m finally getting toward the tail end of my million crappy words. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll finally write my first good word before too long.

🙂

Genesis Earth 3.0 is finished!

That’s right! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 269
words: 74,687
file size: 525 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 8 July 2009
end date: 25 July 2009

Wow, I finished this rewrite in seventeen days. Seventeen days! Hard to believe it’s only been that long. I hope the quality of this work went up in that time. I still feel like I need to run through and proofread it, make sure that the language flows well and the dialogue isn’t stilted.

In the process of writing this draft, I added or deleted 37,159 words from the previous draft. Going by the wordcount of the previous draft, 51.98% of the text changed.

Now I need to start submitting this book. It’s going to be kind of hard–I’m not sure whether it’s YA or not. On the one hand, the main characters are older teenagers and experience a lot of personal growth over the course of the novel. On the other hand, the (pseudo)science is a little dense, and the prose isn’t…well, it doesn’t read like most of the YA that I’ve read.

Well, I guess the only thing to do is shop it around and see who picks it up. In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into finishing Bringing Stella Home. The 2.0 draft of that novel is going to be AWESOME!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is almost finished!

Yeah! Only five more scenes to go!

I love revising. Every time I finish a scene, or a chapter, or a draft, I look back and think “man, this is so much better than it used to be!” Later, maybe, I look at it and say “okay, it still needs work,” but to know that I made something good into something better, that’s satisfaction!

My self-imposed deadline for this draft is this weekend. I’d like to finish it tomorrow, but if all else fails, I’ll finish it on Sunday. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve done a lot of work to get this far, averaging about 2,200 words a day. The ending is a lot trickier to fix than the beginning, since I’m much better at beginnings and middles than at endings (not as much practice), but it’s coming along.

Yesterday, I wrote about 3,500 words in this beast. It felt so satisfying at the end of the day! Finishing up another chapter, knowing that I was right on target.

Today, for some reason, I haven’t been able to get into the writing mindset, but that’s not too bad. I spent some time looking over the last three or four chapters, making spot edits, re-arranging a couple of the chapter breaks to make them more coherent, etc. Chapter organization is still a challenge for me, especially towards the end of a project. Hopefully, I’m doing it better in this draft than the last one.

Today is Pioneer Day, a holiday in Utah. I’m spending the afternoon and evening with family, so I probably won’t do much more writing today. Maybe another scene sometime tonight, but that’s okay–the way I’ve re-arranged it, the chapter I need to revise for today needs just one more scene to be complete. I’ve been working hard these past three weeks, and I’m looking forward to having a fun holiday with family. The break will probably help me to write better, anyway.

So, that’s how things are looking from here. In the meantime, I’m getting psyched up for my next big project: revising Bringing Stella Home and getting ready to start something completely new in the fall. Once Genesis Earth is finished, I’ll be able to commit more creative space to those projects. Looking forward to it!