Genesis Earth Trilogy – Page 22 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

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.

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.

Miscellaneous news updates

I’m so bad at writing catchy titles for my blog posts. CORRECTION: I can come up with catchy, sexy, exciting titles for my blog posts, it’s just that the first one that comes to mind is always dull and uninteresting. Well, too bad. To quote my mother: “suffer!”

Item One: State of the summer plans

Real quick: still haven’t heard back from the guys at JABberwocky. I’m starting to think their either really disorganized (not out of the realm of possibility), or they’ve picked someone for the internship and it’s not much of a priority for them to get back to me. I’ll email them tomorrow or Friday and ask what’s going on; probably I’ll stay in Provo, at least for spring. But you know what? I’m actually okay with that.

Lately, I’ve been staying at my sister’s apartment, hanging out with her and her husband, and spending most of the day at the HBLL writing (and chatting with Charlie, who seems to be perpetually bored at her nine-to-five job). Should I end up staying in Provo, I don’t think that’s going to change much. I might work a couple part-time and/or temp jobs, and definitely attend a few cons and writers’ conferences, but that’s about it.

Oh, and maybe go on a random road trip every once and a while. Fun! 🙂

Item Two: State of Genesis Earth

The rewrite is coming along very well! I’m over 80% finished now and I think it’s getting better. Incrementally, certainly, and there remains a lot of room for improvement, but at least it’s headed in the right direction.

I’ll probably write a different blog post on this, but I got Brandon’s comments back on the first three chapters (I submitted those for the final) and his comments were…interesting. Helpful, certainly, but a lot more negative than I thought they would be. Basically, he got really confused in chapter 2, and that ruined it for him. I’ve got to completely overhaul a couple of those scenes to make sure they’re clear. Fortunately, he really liked chapter 1, so if I can fix chapter 2 in the same way I fixed chapter 1, I think I’ll be in business.

Item Three: Other projects

With all this free time, now that school’s out, I think I should take on another writing project. Back in the fall, I tried to do this and utterly failed at it, but now that I’ve got the time I think I can manage. The question is, which project should I choose to work on first?

Option 1: Bringing Estella Home

Summary: When their home system is conquered by the ruthless Hameji barbarian warfleet, James leaves his home and sets out to rescue his older brother and sister, who have been captured and enslaved. Little does he know, his brother is being turned into a Hameji killing machine and his sister has become one of the Hameji overlord’s personal concubines.

This is the most recent project. It’s about half finished, but it needs some major revision work before I can comfortably continue where I left off. It’s got a lot of action, but it’s also pretty dark and tragic. Not a happy space opera, that’s for sure.

Option 2: Hero in Exile

Summary: Tristen (lamest name ever–I’m totally going to change his name if/when I pick up this project again) fell from the sky in an escape pod when he was only eight years old and was raised in the desert of Nova Gaia by a clan of desert tribesmen. When he sets out with Mira, the chieftain’s daughter, for the legendary Temple of a Thousand Suns to ask the keepers of the Holy Archives of the Earth of Legend about his true parentage, he has no idea of the disparity, depravity, and danger he will meet in the world outside the small, isolated community of local tribesmen–or of the corruption and intrigue within.

I started this one in the fall, planned it out extensively, and then, halfway through…realizing I was writing a completely different story. If I pick up this project, I have virtually no idea where I’ll end up with it. However, it’s a fun space opera with a lot of action and a fair amount of romance (unlike Bringing Estella Home which has virtually zero romance. No, slaves and concubines don’t count).

Option 3: The Phoenix of Nova Terra

Summary: When Ian finds himself stranded on a distant planet, the only thing he wants is to meet up with the rest of his crew and go home. Little does he know, the native humans already venerate him as their chosen savior and their king has selected his daughter to be his wife. When his journey takes deep into the forbidden lands, from which no-one has ever returned alive, Ian begins to uncover the secrets of this long-lost world, and the alien artifacts that will forever alter the paradigm of galactic human civilization–for its good or its destruction.

Gosh, how do you write a paragraph summary for a 168,000 word epic? This is the first complete rough draft of a novel that I’ve written, and it is HUGE. It spans dozens of worlds, six separate civilizations (including one alien and one AI), seven or eight viewpoint characters, and a friggin boatload of internal and external conflicts. INSANE. What’s more, it requires a lot of work–the rough draft was REALLY bad. But you know what? It might be kind of fun to try out. It’s definitely a very fun, very positive story, with lots of intrigue and lots of romance.

So, the question is: which one should I pick up first? Which ones should I work on this summer? I’ll probably only be able to do two, plus Genesis Earth; which ones should I choose?

Item Four: Looking for Beta readers

This last item is pretty brief: I’m about to finish up with the Genesis Earth rewrite, and I need some beta readers to help out with it. I’ve already got about a dozen people or so, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some more. I’m looking for as much criticism and feedback as you can give me–anything helpful, including specific problems as well as your broader, overall impressions.

Who wants to help out that can read this story by the end of May? I really appreciate it! Email me or post a comment if you want in (but please don’t ask to read it unless I already know you from real life).

Aaaaand…this post is almost 1,100 words long. Yikes! See y’all around!

(images courtesy Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers)

Happy progress

Now that school is out and I don’t have any pressing obligations to keep me busy, I’m making some excellent progress on my writing. Really good progress, actually. I revised about five thousand words today, which, according to openoffice’s wordcounting algorithm, puts me at 73% finished.

Wow. At that rate, I could be finished with the 2.0 revision of Genesis Earth by the end of the week. I could finish the 3.0 version before the second weekend in May and get it out to all my beta readers by then.

Today, I went up to campus in the morning and had a liesurely, enjoyable day. I set up camp at an LRC computer and just wrote for six hours, with about a forty five minute lunch break in between. No other worries, no other obligations, pressing appointments, places to be…it was great.

I finished reading through Genesis Earth 1.0 a couple of days ago, and there was this conversation between my two main characters that really stood out to me. They’re both on foot, headed towards a village of primitive, native peoples on a distant planet. Terra turns to Michael, the viewpoint character, and asks him, point blank, “are you happy?”

It’s not like the main character is depressed or anything, it’s just that, up to this point, he hasn’t really taken the time to think about himself, to think about why he does what he does. Most of what he does, he does it for other people, or for some grand cause, or for something outside of himself. He does that so much, in fact, that he doesn’t ever really notice whether he’s happy at what he’s doing, or satisfied, or fulfilled. Terra’s question forces him to think about where he is, what he’s doing, and evaluate whether his work, his cause, his chosen mission really does give him happiness.

Well, I asked myself that question as I was hanging out in the LRC, and I’ve got to say it makes me really happy to just write. To immerse my mind in the story or project at hand and have that be my primary concern. I was very happy today, just working on my own writing, at my own pace, and not having anything or anyone screaming at me to do anything else.

We’ll see how that changes over the next few days and weeks. It will be an interesting summer if I end up in Provo, working on my writing and hitting up some of the cons out here. It’ll definitely know if I can be truly happy and fulfilled with this writing lifestyle.

Almost halfway…

I crossed the 30,000 word mark on my revision of Genesis Earth today. In the old draft, that would be more than halfway through.

However, a lot of that (about 1,700, to be more precise) was adding in new material to fill in some gaps. It’s not quite halfway done yet.

I think I’m mostly through the rough parts, though. I’m solidly in the section that I wrote last January, so as long as I can get my character arcs straight and do a better job showing them gradually changing, everything else should go fairly smoothly.

And now I’m going to get to bed. Even though I don’t have classes and I could sleep in until noon, I should wake up early. You know, productivity and all that.

Revision, revision, revision

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the other chapters.

The thing about revising is that if you change something fundamental about the character / setting / plot early on, it changes everything that happens later, meaning that you have even more revisions to make. It’s like ripples on a pond, or switching tracks at a railroad junction hundreds of miles before your destination. Right now, a lot of the changes I decided to make earlier are making much larger changes necessary later on. That’s one reason why this chapter took so long to revise.

Another reason is because I felt I’d told it wrong the first time. A lot of my alpha readers said that my novel was weakest on conflict; they didn’t feel that it had enough conflict to carry them through the longer parts in the middle. I realized, when I reread it, that the conflict was mostly there, it just wasn’t emphasized properly.

A lot of these revisions had to do with connecting the events better, starting late and exiting early, creating more of a build up to the climax. They also involved changing the order in which I explained certain things–it created more tension to bring up certain things earlier, before the action. Tension and release.

I think I failed to do all that in the rough draft because I’m more of what Sanderson calls a “discovery writer.” The middle sections are always the hardest for me, because I have to figure things out as I go along. I’ve tried planning everything out from the beginning, but when I did that, the story that came out was completely different than what I’d planned.

Trouble is, if I’m discovering my story as I’m going along, the middle sections are going to be much more choppy and rough. I can write a pretty good beginning, and I think I can pull off a decent ending, but the stuff in the middle is just all over the place, every time I write.

Fortunately, I think the revision process is going well. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s producing results. I think chapter 6 works much better now, though it could probably use a little more tweaking just to fit it into the context of the story as a whole. Better finish the 2.0 revision before I do that, though.

For a while, I thought that with school out and all this free time on my hands before I really go anywhere, I could finish the 2.0 revision before the end of the week. Now, I’m thinking it will probably take more time. I could probably be about 75% done by the end of the week, though. Even with all these deep revisions, I’m plugging along at a healthy pace. And honestly, this is the kind of work I enjoy. It’s a challenge, but not an unpleasant one at all.

Running the gauntlet

In the past five days, I have written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words. None of them has been fiction (at least, not explicitly–more BS, if anything).

One monster history term paper, one middling poli sci essay, and two exams requiring 2,000 and 1,000 word essays. Blegh. Like pulling teeth.

The upside is, it’s almost finished! Just got my history exam left, and it shouldn’t be too hard. There is an essay, but the teacher already gave us the two questions from which he’ll pick the one on the test, and a short answer section. The rest is multiple choice. Not too hard, especially because I’ve really enjoyed the class.

The two exams I took today…let’s just say I’m glad it’s behind me. The deeper you get into your major, the more you have to take dumb classes about things you don’t care just to graduate. Blegh.

There is one other exam besides the history one, but I’m not counting it because it’s Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class. His final exams consists of the first three chapters of you novel, plus a query letter and synopsis that he’ll mail out to the editor/agent of your choice (sending out the submission is a required part of the final). I did some research, found an agent, sent out a query email. If I get a response, I’ll send out the chapters to her. If not…I’ll send it out somewhere else. It didn’t seem like she wanted people to send her partials without her requesting it, so I didn’t send that out.

You know, it’s funny how the title of your novel seems a whole lot less clever when you’re finally sending it out to people.

And, as if things weren’t crazy enough, Utah decided to play jokes on us with the weather. We got our worst snowstorm of the year…on April 15th? Holy cow! WTH? (that’s “what the heck,” for all of you non-Utahans)

Here are some shots from my photoblog, before and after (or rather, before and during).

Crazy!