Star Wanderers – Page 21 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Coming along nicely

First things first: the latest post for the Bringing Stella Home blog tour is up over at Michael Offut’s blog; you can find it here. Michael asked me to blog about Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class, so I recapped some of my experiences, including the best advice Brandon ever gave me. Go check it out!

The revisions for Desert Stars are coming along nicely. It’s funny; for the past three months, all I’ve wanted to do is work on this novel, but it turns out that taking a long break from it was probably the best thing I could have done. The distance has helped me to take a fresh look at my prose and cut out all the extra trimmings that were just bogging things down. For example:

Draft 3.0

Jalil paused before walking down the narrow aisle of the train, rows of lights tracing a pair of parallel lines down the dark blue carpeted floor. The place felt oddly familiar, and not just because of the similarities with the trains in Aliet Dome. In fact, this one was much smaller and narrower, so that he and Mira practically had to walk sideways just to get down the aisle. The seats all faced forward, too, instead of alternating like they had in Aliet Dome. And the way the interior of the cabin was curved like a pipe, so that the ceiling blended into the walls and floor–it brought back a memory of him staring out a window at a glowing blue horizon, with the sky dark and starless overhead.

Draft 4.0

Jalil paused briefly in the door of the train, staring at the parallel rows of lights running down the dark blue carpet. The place felt oddly familiar, like something out of a dream. Perhaps it was the way he and Mira had to step sideways through the narrow aisle, or perhaps it was the way the walls of the cabin curved naturally into the ceiling and floor. It brought back a memory of him staring out a window at a glowing blue horizon, with the sky dark and starless overhead.

Just from simple stuff like this, I’ve cut almost 5k words so far; I wouldn’t be surprised if I get this baby down to 90k-95k by the end. Even though the story is pretty solid, the distance has helped me to take a fresh look at my prose. And hopefully, my writing has gotten better in the meantime.

So Desert Stars is coming along nicely. I plan to have this draft finished by October 21st, and publish it *hopefully* before Christmas. The main thing holding me back is funds; I’ll probably have to drop around $750 for editing and cover art, with maybe a month to get it put together in ebook form.

So how to come up with $750 before the end of November? One possibility I’ve been toying with is doing a fundraiser like my friend Anthon did for his Danakil expedition. $5 would get a copy of the ebook with special mention in the acknowledgments, $10 would get that plus one or two other ebooks, $25 would get that plus all of my releases over the next 18 months, etc. Or something like that. If you’ve got any good ideas for the upper donation levels, please let me know.

Once Desert Stars 4.0 is finished, I plan on jumping straight into Star Wanderers 0.3. Heck, I’ll probably start that project tomorrow! After that, I’d like to do a companion novella for Desert Stars. That shouldn’t take longer than a month. And don’t wory, I haven’t forgotten about Edenfall; it’s kind of gotten pushed onto the back burner, but I fully intend to finish it at some point. If all goes well, it’ll be up and published before the end of next year. As if that wasn’t enough, the BSH blog tour is making me want to revisit the sequel, Into the Nebulous Deep. I finished that project back in May, so it’s definitely had enough time to stew. And then there’s the New Rigel novel–gah!

Okay, first things first: Desert Stars, then Star Wanderers, and while my first readers are working on that, I’ll write the DS companion novella. Once I’ve gotten back the feedback, I’ll revisit Star Wanderers, submit the first part to Writers of the Future, and then finish the novel. That should keep me busy until Thanksgiving; anything after that, I’ll figure it out as it comes along. Oh, and some point in there, I need to find a new job.

So much to write, so little time in which to write it. Fortunately, things are going very nicely right now; if that holds up, this is going to be a very productive month.

🙂

BSH blog tour and other random updates

Just a few things to get out of the way before returning to other things:

I’ve started the blog tour for Bringing Stella Home, and the first post was on my friend Kindal’s blog; you can find it here. He asked me to blog about music and writing, so I shared some of my thoughts on that, as well as some of the songs that helped me to write Bringing Stella Home. Kindal is an aspiring writer like me, and he’s got a lot of good stuff too, so you should definitely check him out!

Also, as part of the blog tour, I’m giving away free copies of my novella Sholpan at every stop along the way. If you would like to pick one of those up, feel free; the coupon code on Kindal’s blog is good until next Thursday. And for other updates and periodic giveaways, be sure to sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

I plan to keep more of a schedule for this blog tour, with posts going up every Monday and Thursday. This coming Monday is at Mike’s blog, who is a frequent commenter here, and the blog after that is The Villain’s Worst Nightmare, where I’ll discuss the Hameji. Good stuff–I’m looking forward to it!

I’m booked for the next couple of weeks or so, but I’m still looking to expand the tour, so if you would like to have me on either for an interview or a guest post, please let me know! I’d love to come on as a guest blogger, no matter the size of your blog.

Also, for those of you who agreed to be first readers for Star Wanderers part I, I actually have a few changes I’d like to make before sending it out to you, which I’ll probably get done before the end of the month. I’m almost a third of the way through another major revision for Desert Stars, so that’s taking up most of my energy now, but that shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks, and I want to get Star Wanderers ready to submit before the end of the quarter.

My next release, for those of you who are interested, will be a collection of journal entries and blog posts from the 2008 Jordan study abroad. I’ll probably do it under a pen name, just to distinguish it from my science fiction stuff; how does J. Michael Waszik sound? The original Czech spelling of Vasicek is Wasziczek, which is an insanely cool name but impossible for the average person to pronounce. It’s the Z’s–you can’t get enough Z’s in a name, especially an Eastern European name.

In totally unrelated news, I noticed that this blog just surpassed 1,000 comments…and I was the 1000th commenter. So yeah, I guess I owe myself a new car or something (but I’ll probably have to settle for a flashing GIF).

Anyhow, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you around!

“What was your purpose in writing this?”

Yesterday I heard back from one of my first readers for Star Wanderers, and the feedback she gave me was awesome. You know you’ve got a good first reader when their comments make you go “aha!” and you find yourself with a host of new ideas for the story.

Anyway, at one point, she asked me: “what was your purpose in writing this?” To which I answered “I don’t know; I was supposed to be working on something else, and all of a sudden I found that I’d written this story!”

Her eyes widened a little, and she kind of got this look on her face that said: “how could you possibly write something like this and not put a ton of thought into it?” Which struck me as amusing, because she’s an editor who writes on the side, and I’m a writer who edits on the side.

This is the thing about discovery writing: it’s not about how much sweat and tears you put into your work, but how much energy you get out of it. If a project just totally drains you, chances are it’s not going to be as good as something so exciting that you can’t not write it. And once you improve your craft to the point where you’re no longer committing all the stupid new writer mistakes, if you’re having fun, chances are that the readers are going to enjoy it too.

Ah, the joys of spontaneous creativity. Would that it was always this much fun.

🙂

Q3 Report, 2011

Before I move on to other, more interesting subjects, I want to take a little bit of time to review how my writing went in the past three months. For those of you who may be new, this is something I like to do at the start of each new quarter. Keeps me honest, I guess.

Anyhow, here goes:

This is a graph of my word count totals for the past quarter. The red line shows how many words I wrote each day, while the blue line shows a running seven day total. I include substantive revisions in the totals, but if all I’m doing is proofreading or running through copy edits, I don’t count it.

For the first half of July, I was finishing up the third draft of Desert Stars while working 40 hours per week. I wasn’t writing as much as I’d have liked, but still managed to keep some good momentum.

The HUGE peak at the end of the month represents my first draft of Sholpan, which I finished in only a week. I spent the next week in a weird writerly limbo, not sure what else to work on, then picked it up again and made some substantial changes before sending it to my editor in in mid-August. Then Worldcon happened, and I didn’t get any writing done while I was out at that. Should have, but oh well.

After Worldcon, I had maybe three or four different projects I wanted to do, but since I wanted to do the final draft of Desert Stars in October, I wasn’t sure which project to pick up. After several false starts, I ended up writing the first part of Star Wanderers, which is that hump you see at the beginning of September. The second hump is the second draft; my writing took a dip in between because I didn’t know what else to do with only a couple weeks before October.

Overall, though, my personal word counts were a lot lower than I’d like. Part of that was due to the effort I put into publishing Sholpan (it takes a lot of time and energy to publish something, which can eat into your writing if you aren’t careful); part of it was because the project I was most excited about was Desert Stars, and I had to wait until October to hear back from my first readers; but another major part was that I was trying to balance a 40 hour job on top of everything.

This is the dilemma: I want to build up my writing career to the point where I can support myself on it, but to do that I have to work a day job to make ends meet, which makes it very difficult to work on the writing career. When I was in school, I used to think a 9-5 job would make things easy, since I wouldn’t have any homework or papers to bring home. Now, though, I think school was easier, because I was only in the classroom 15 to 20 hours per week, and could allocate the rest of my time as I saw fit. Working full time is a lot harder, because half of your waking time doesn’t belong to you.

What I’d really like to find is a part time job, maybe 30 hours per week, where I earn just enough to get by but don’t feel drained when the workday is over. A lot of TEFL jobs are only about 20 hours or so per week, so I’m thinking very seriously about doing that. Then again, all the attendant difficulties of adjusting to a new culture might be even more draining than grunt labor.

I guess there’s only one way to find out…

In any case, now that October is here, I’m back to work on Desert Stars, hopefully the final draft before publication. I know I said I’d finish Star Wanderers, but since I’m going to come back to it anyway after I get the feedback from my first readers, I figure it will be better to finish Desert Stars and move on. Also, I can revise a lot faster than I can write new material, so it makes a lot more sense to get the revisions out of the way instead of pushing a rough draft harder than it wants to come.

And after that? Who knows! I’ve so many half-finished novels and projects I want to start, all I can really say is I’d better throw this up on the blog and get back to writing. So on that note

Star Wanderers 0.2 is finished!

That’s right; I just finished the second draft of the beginning of Star Wanderers, the novel that came out of nowhere like a surprise baby. I’m sending it out to my alpha readers now, so I can get some feedback before submitting it to Writers of the Future. If I know you in real life and you want to give it a test read, let me know; it’s only about 15k words long, so it shouldn’t take long to read.

So what’s next? Honestly, I really want to finish Star Wanderers, just to see where it goes. But I also want to get back to Desert Stars, and after that I’ll probably want to write the untitled sequel to both Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home…man, so much to write!

One thing I do feel I need to learn, though, is how to write fast. This might sound crazy, but I’m going to try to finish Star Wanderers in the next two weeks. The fastest I’ve ever been able to finish a novel before is 6 weeks, but with my job ending on Friday, freeing up a large chunk of time, I think I can do this.

I’d write more, but it’s late and I’ve got work at 8:00 am tomorrow, so I’ll leave you with this: it’s the song that became the unofficial theme song for Star Wanderers. If you listen to it with the premise of the story in mind, I think it’ll make sense.

Have a good night!

To publish or not to publish?

That’s what I’m wondering about right now with my latest project, Star Wanderers. The full-length novel isn’t complete yet, but the first part forms a self-contained novelette that has been sooo much fun to write.

The story takes place in the Gaia Nova universe, about five hundred Earth years before the events of Bringing Stella Home. The main character is a 20-something boy who, as is customary in the outworlds, left his home to wander the stars, searching for a suitable place to settle down and start a family.

While visiting a remote space station, he unwittingly gets roped into marrying this girl, whose father is trying save her from starvation by sending her away. The problem, though, is that neither the boy nor the girl speak the same language.

So basically, he just wants to drop her off at the next port and be done with it, while she thinks that she’s his wife and is trying to live up to those expectations. Over the course of their voyage, though, they gradually fall in love and become a couple. That’s where the novelette ends, and the second part of the novel begins.

Because I’m a total dork, I looked up all the major tropes in Star Wanderers on tvtropes. Here’s just a few of them:

So yeah, I’m really excited to share this story with people. The only problem is I want to submit it to the Writers of the Future contest, and I’m not sure if they’ll consider it if it’s already self published. The contest guidelines say that all the rights remain with the author, and defines “professional publication” as something with >5,000 sales/downloads, but that doesn’t say whether it’s okay to publish the piece you’re submitting. I’ll probably have to shoot someone an email or something.

In any case, I’ll probably put up the first part of Star Wanderers before I publish the novel. For everyone who’s signed up for the newsletter, I”ll probably give it out as a free ebook. If Writers of the Future is okay with it, I’ll do that in the next month or so; if not, I’ll submit it to the contest first and wait to see what happens.

But either way, I really want to share this story!

Story Notebook #5 (part 2)

For those of you who don’t know (or can’t remember, since it’s been so long), I’ve been doing this ongoing thing where I go through my old story notebooks. Last time, we covered my last semester of classes at BYU; this time, we’ll cover my time in Washington DC, when I was trapped in an internship from hell.

Now, you may be wondering: “why is this guy just giving away his ideas for free?” Well, last week at dinner group, the conversation turned to story ideas, so I pulled out my current story notebook and started going down the list. This quickly turned into a game of “name that tune,” where we managed to show that EVERY SINGLE IDEA had already been done.

And you know what? That’s perfectly okay! There are no original ideas anymore, just new ways of executing them, and maybe a handful of combinations that haven’t yet been tried. The purpose of keeping a story notebook with you at all times isn’t to come up with something new, it’s to keep track of the stuff that really turns you on.

Enough with that. On to the notebook.

In a spacefaring culture, the custom will be for the males to leave the station and depart in search of a wife at another port, either to capture or win over in some way. The women will tend more to running off with the travelers. This preserves genetic diversity.

This is actually something I want to talk about in a longer post. The problem of inbreeding in a space-based society is something that many science fiction authors have wrestled with, from Robert Heinlein to C. J. Cherryh. Their solutions are quite inventive, but while I was in Washington DC working on To Search the Starry Sea (my escapist retreat from a hellish internship), I managed to come up with a few of my own, and used them in Star Wanderers. More on that later.

What if one of the founders was a time traveler, sent on a mission to ensure that the US constitution made it through?

Hehe…in other words: James Madison, Time Traveler. It has a certain ring to it, no?

The human mind is like a congress–so many people at extreme odds, arguing constantly but holding together somehow.

Oh boy. If that were true, the US congress today would be like a paranoid schizophrenic.

A subway haunted by patrons from the past–maybe you will become one when it goes back in time.

Who hasn’t been creeped out by the subway at some point or another? Except the New York subway system is way creepier than the Washington DC Metro–I swear, some of those rats are man-killers.

A magic system where the cost is your unborn children. If you don’t have children within a certain period of time, you die.

Sounds like some of the Arab short stories I’ve read. Families and children are much more important to them than to us in the West.

When the Developed World develops instantaneous transportation devices, it will essentially merge into one super country, while the developing world will be left out. The only sense of distance will be in the developing world, and terrorism will be an issue.

Kind of like Larry Niven meets dependency theory.

A government where the Supreme Court is a super-intelligent robot.

Hopefully this would rid the country of activist judges…or would it??

A character who believes, at his core, that there is no such thing as a genuine surprise, simply a lack of information–and that if we had perfect information, there would be no surprises.

Sounds a lot like the platonic 19th century ideal of a scientist. What with quantum physics and such, there aren’t a whole lot of those left.

There are two kinds of shame: shame from loss of honor, and shame from not following the herd. Don’t mistake the one for the other.

This one isn’t so much a story idea as an observation. I learned a lot in my hellish Washington DC internship, most of which had very little to do with my area of study and everything to do with the less-than-honorable ways in which the world works. And on that note:

____ always felt that the world around him was somehow less than real; an illusion. While staring out the window of the train, he wondered if the window wasn’t just a video screen, like the car windows of old movies–or when looking out at the view of the mountains beyond his house, with the picturesque clouds and too-blue sky, if it wasn’t just an elaborate painting on a wall at the end of the world. In moments like these, ____ longed to peel back the video screens–to break down the pretty painted wall at the end of the world–and see what lay on the other side of reality.

If my hellish internship on K street taught me anything, it taught me that I would rather be a writer than have all the connections or political influence in the world. I got out of Washington DC as fast as I could, and haven’t looked back since.

Part I of Star Wanderers is finished!

That’s right–I was up until about 2 am last night finishing it. Man, time goes by fast sometimes. This is probably just the first part of a much longer novel, but I hit a good stopping point so I’ll probably put it on the back burner for now while I finish Edenfall and do a final polish for Desert Stars.

What I really want to do is submit this first part to Writers of the Future, since it falls just under 15k words. I might be a little biased, but I think it’s got potential. 🙂 It’s going to need some work, though; the story literally sprung out of my head one day, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad, it’s probably missing a couple of scenes and needs some work with the transitions. Also, the tone completely shifts midway, from a happy go lucky space adventure to something much more serious. Not sure what to do about that.

So yeah, I’ll probably set this story aside for a little while so I can come back at it with fresh eyes. It’s not too long, so the revisions should be pretty quick; hopefully, I’ll have it ready to submit to Writers of the Future before January. If it doesn’t make the contest, I’ll shop it around the short markets for a year while I finish the novel-length version. At some point I’ll probably epublish it, but I’m not sure when.

In other news, my short story “Decision LZ1527” just went free on Amazon, so if you want to pick up a copy or tell your friends, go right ahead! It’s right around #200 in the Kindle free category now, but for some reason hasn’t hit any of the lists. Hopefully that’ll change before the ranking drops back down.

“Decision LZ1527” first appeared in the December 2009 issue of Leading Edge, and was my first traditionally published short story. Basically, it’s about a college freshman working up the courage to ask out a girl he likes, as told from the perspective of the little men inside his head. Like Star Wanderers, the story just sprung out of my head one day. It was a ton of fun to write, and I’m glad that so many others seem to enjoy it too.

In other news, I just got back the edits for Sholpan, so I’ll hopefully have that up on Amazon and other eretailers over the weekend. More on that as it happens, but it’s happening soon. I’d also like to put together a blog tour for Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan both, so if you’d like to have me on as a guest blogger, shoot me an email at joseph dot vasicek at gmail dot com. More on that later as well.

And that’s just about it for now. Take care, and I’ll see you around!

Just following my bliss

They say the way you know you’re a writer is if you can’t not write. Well, last week I had the gratification of experiencing that again firsthand.

For all of August, I was more or less betwen projects and not writing a lot of new material. I’d just epublished Bringing Stella Home and was busy getting Sholpan ready for epublication. Then Worldcon happened, and my writing dropped off precipitously. I tried to get back in a groove, but found it difficult to choose between projects, none of which seemed to fit my writing schedule.

And then the creative half of my brain said “screw it” and ran off on an idea that came from practically out of nowhere.

It all started when I was taking a power nap after a long day at work. For some reason, my mind wandered to Jeremiah Johnson, an old Western with an awesome love story.

In the movie, Robert Redford unkowingly insults an indian chief by giving him several captured scalps. The chief must return with a gift of equal or greater value, and so gives Redford his daughter, who doesn’t speak a word of English. At first, things are hilariously awkward, but over time they grow into a beautiful and touching relationship.

Well, as I lay there thinking about the movie, I wondered: what if the same basic storyline were set in space? Instead of a mountain man, the protagonist would be a space explorer / interstellar merchanter. Instead of an indian chief’s daughter, the female protagonist would be the daughter of a station master whose colony is facing severe famine and widespread starvation. When the merchanter boy unwittingly shows up at the doomed colony, the station master coerces him into taking his daughter to save her life. And so, for the next two months, the boy finds himself crammed into a tiny little ship with a girl who doesn’t speak his language. Hilarity ensues.

At first, I thought I’d keep it as a short story, but…yeah, that didn’t last long. The more I run with it, the more ideas keep coming to me–ideas that I haven’t played with in a couple of years. The story is set in the same universe as Gaia Nova and Bringing Stella Home, but about a thousand years earlier, back when things were, shall we say, more primitive. I still don’t know where this story is going to take me, but I can tell it’s going to be a lot of fun.

The best part is that even if I expand this into a full length novel, the first part stands on its own so well that I could probably submit it to Writers of the Future. That never happens! It’s been years since I submitted to the contest; I always wanted to send something, but all I could ever write was novels with long, complex beginnings that couldn’t be cut off at the 17,000 word mark.

Anyhow, the working title of the novel is Star Wanderer (I can’t believe it’s not already taken), and it’s probably going to end up around 80k words or so. I only have a vague idea at this point, but it’s much more intimate and personal than epic in scope, so I don’t expect it to go much longer. I’ll probably finish the first part sometime next week and start looking for some first readers. I’d like to finish the rough draft before I start the Desert Stars revision in October, but we’ll see whether that works out.

As for Edenfall, don’t worry, I’m still working on that project too. One of the advantages of writing longhand is that it’s much easier to pick up and just go; instead of having to stop and think about what needs to happen next, the physical act of writing is slow enough that the ideas come much more organically. I might not finish it before October, but if I can juggle it with Star Wanderer, I can probably juggle it with Desert Stars. In any case, it’ll be good to work on new material and keep my writing sharp while I’m doing the revision. We’ll see how it turns out.

So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last week. I only wish I were doing this full time, so that I could spend all day working on these stories. Soon, inshallah.

Edenfall update

So I haven’t exactly gotten into a good writing routine yet, but Edenfall is coming along pretty well. I’m just about finished with the first chapter, and the dominoes are already starting to fall.

It’s fun to revisit the world of Genesis Earth, but I’m not going to get too bogged down in recapping the events of the first book or setting things up. I hate it when sequels do that. Fortunately, since the majority of this story is going to be from a new character’s point of view (Michael and Terra’s oldest daughter), I don’t really have to do that, except to lampshade some of the worldbuilding.

One thing I need to do is get more in the mood of the first book, which was a lot more introspective and big-picture than my other science fiction. To do that, I found an excellent collection of videos called The Sagan Series. Here is my favorite:

Man, I get shivers every time I watch that. “Sailors on a becalmed sea…”

Another good video is this one from The Piano Guys:

I know it says “Southern Utah,” but you could substitute that for “Icaria” and it wouldn’t be that far off. In particular, the night clip from the bottom of the slot canyon at 2:05 looks like something straight out of Genesis Earth. Throw in some primitive natives, a few giant lizards and various avians and insectoids, and you’re pretty much there.

I’m still adjusting to writing in longhand, but so far I think it’s going to work out well. Because the writing process itself is much slower, it’s much more time intensive but surprisingly easy to jump in and get started. Once I’ve got some momentum going, I think the story will practically write itself.

I do have a confession to make, though. A couple days ago, I had an idea for another science fiction story that was just so awesome I decided to run with it. At first, I thought I could keep it down to a short story, or perhaps a novella at most, but…well, I think it’s going to be a bit longer than that.

Don’t worry: Edenfall is still my primary project, and if juggling them both becomes too difficult (which it probably will), I’ll put this new one on the back burner until Edenfall is finished. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure anyways, a sci-fi romance that draws heavily on tropes from old westerns (Jeremiah Johnson in particular). I have no idea where it’s going to go (well, nothing more than a vague idea about the twist at the end), but that just makes it all the more exciting to write.

So anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to these last few days. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to writing. See you around!