Category: Uncategorized

Awesome Quark writing meeting!

We had another writing meeting this Saturday, and it went really well! We had quite a few new people! I was pleasantly surprised! I knew we would have a few newcomers, since we got a few submissions from some new people, but I didn’t realize that people would come and bring friends! It was great. Hopefully, many of them will stay with us!

Two of the new people are really into illustration as well as writing. One guy (I think his name was Travis but I’m really horrible with names) told us that he uses autocad to draw out spaceships and dragons for his stories. Pretty cool! It reminds me that the Quark writing vp is also supposed to be involved with the art section, which has pretty much been dead or dormant for the past year or two. I’m not that much into illustrating, so I’ll have to talk with the rest of the Quark leadership to figure out what to do about that. Hopefully, with the right person over it, we could do really well! We’ll see.

We had more submissions than we could handle this time, so I had to put off Evan’s and Ben’s stuff for the next meeting, as well as my own chapter from my story. I wasn’t expecting that, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it. If I put off someone else’s stuff so that I could get some feedback, I was worried that would seem a little self serving, so I decided to just wait for the second chapter to get critiqued. However, I think from now on it’s going to be whatever chapter I’m working on plus the first five stories to come in.

Jakeson and Gamila both submitted stuff that they’ve been working on for a while, and I think they got some good feedback. They’re both agreeable to the new rule that you can only submit the same thing twice. I hope it helps them to move forward on their projects rather than endlessly rehashing the same chapters. That’s the goal of the new rule.

A couple of the new people who submitted didn’t show up. They later told me that they got mixed up about the time, and apologized for missing the meeting. It was fine, we finished a little early, so all was good. One of the stories seemed a little bit risque to me–not so explicit that we couldn’t look at it, but it had a few sexual references that seemed a little awkward. He ended up missing the meeting, but I read his piece. It had some really interesting ideas to it, such as a giant hunter who ends up getting captured by a female giant who doesn’t want to kill him. The sexual tension was hilarious and I liked it. It was just a few references he gave to some scenes in the local tavern that I didn’t like very much. Not just for the sexual innuendos, but because they didn’t seem to help the story at all, BYU standards or not. Of course, that’s all the more reason to discuss it. Maybe we’ll be able to look at it at the next meeting.

What with Joel and this new guy, it looks like we might have a little bit of controversy down the road. And, actually, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I like controversy–otherwise, I wouldn’t be a Poli Sci major. I just hope we can handle it in a way that everyone takes something positive and useful from it. It would be a shame if people ended up getting turned off to the club over it. But I think we’re perfectly capable of expressing ourselves and having an enlightening discussion on the edgier topics.

We decided to start a short story contest for the club: the word limit is 1,000, and the requirement is that the phrase “because I’m awesome” has to appear somewhere in the story. The reading club will be doing the judging (hopefully that’ll help to connect us a little more with the rest of Quark), and the deadline is October 6th. We got the idea from something Jakeson said at the Sept 11th meeting: we were talking about this one scene in John’s story (he’s one of the new guys) where this huntsman bursts in through the window and kills a couple of the bad guys, and Jakeson said that the huntsman should say something like “because I’m awesome,” or something like that. I forget, but it was pretty funny. So, I figured it would be good to do that for our first flash fiction contest. Something light and funny.

Everyone seems to say that Saturdays work better than Tuesdays, so it looks like we’re going to have more of those meetings. However, the day after I scheduled a meeting for October 6th, I realized that that’s the weekend of General conference! So, now the next meeting is rescheduled for Tuesday the 2nd.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

I just today finished this wonderful piece of science fiction.  Ursula Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction classic and an excellent piece of writing.  Although it’s pace was much slower than what I’m used to, I enjoyed it very much.

It tells the story of a man named Genly Ai, who is an envoy from the Ekumen, a sort of confederation of planets, to an independent world known as Winter.  His mission is to convince the people of this world to join the Ekumen in alliance.  Because the Ekumen doesn’t want to make mistakes in reaching out to new worlds, he was sent alone and unarmed, the first man from another world to visit this planet.

He finds a very strange race of human beings on this planet.  Apparently, several thousand years ago, the planet was used as a sort of laboratory where experiments were performed on human sexuality.  The result was a colony of people who are neither male nor female, but instead have a periodic sexual cycle, where for one or two days every lunar month, they come into “kemmer” and develop working sexual organs–sometimes male, sometimes female.  After the outside worlds lost interest in the experiment, they left the colony to itself, and over thousands of years of isolation it developed into its own complex civilization.

The planet Winter is in a deep ice age, and everything in the Gethanian’s culture (that’s the name of the people of this world) revolves around both their peculiar reproductive biology and the severe weather in which they live.  Their cities are designed for winters that drop dozens of feet of snow, and their culture is very hospitable and welcoming of strangers.  The people are generally very passive; they never drive their vehicles faster than 10 or 15 miles per hour, people live in the same villages and towns where they were born without really caring much for the outside world, and scientific innovation progresses at a very slow pace.  There are, however, two major countries on this world, and as Genly Ai starts his mission, the leaders of these countries are preparing for war.

It is a tale of a strange, exotic world, with a very deep mystical and religious structure, and many interesting ramifications from the unique biology of its people.  It is also a tale of political intrigue and xenophobia.  The plot is not all that complicated, but there are a couple of interesting twists.  However, towards the beginning, Genly visits a hermitic sect of religious sages who have the ability to foretell the future, and learns how the story will basically end, so you really don’t have to do a lot of guessing.

That ends up to be a good thing, though, because it keeps you from thinking too much about the plot so that you’re free to focus on the beautiful way that LeGuin tells the story.  Her descriptions are wonderful, and paint a very beautiful picture of the world and its culture.  The focus of the book is not so much on the alien technology, or the history of the Ekumen or Winter, or even on Genly as a character, but on the culture of the Gethenians and how Genly interacts with them.  In the end, he comes to feel closer to the alien culture than his own.

The concept of the Gethenian sexual cycle is fascinating, though I don’t necessarily agree with all of LeGuin’s conclusions.  The way she describes it, it’s not obscene at all; in fact, she does a remarkably excellent job discussing sexuality in her work.  Other pieces of Science Fiction tend to use sex and sexuality as a way to thrill or entertain the reader (or, failing that, the writer), and usually it ends up being puerile and shallow.  But LeGuin approaches it entirely from a cultural perspective, to answer “what would a culture of people with this peculiar biological cycle look and feel like?” I found it mostly believable, though I disagreed with the idea that without a constant libido, mankind would not be very aggressive or innovative.  However, that didn’t really take away much from reading her book.

I’d rate this book an eight out of ten.  I loved the journeys that Genly went on, especially towards the end when he and one of the aliens traveled together across the frozen waste to escape to safety.  The descriptions were wonderful and beautiful, and I could feel like I was making the journey myself.  There isn’t a lot of action in this story, but it makes up for it in depth and in the very thorough conceptualization of this wonderfully alien culture.

Cool writing music

Ocremix came out with a new album.  This time, it’s based on the soundtrack for Final Fantasy VII.  Like all of their music, it’s completely free.

The arrangement for the JENOVA theme has got to be one of the best takes on this excellent piece of Nobuo Uematsu’s work that I’ve seen yet.  Soft, but still retaining the tension of the original, with an excellent techno beat.  Just right for zoning out the outside world when you’re trying to write.

Here’s the link to the album’s website: Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream.

Awesome Quark Meeting!

So, we had the first meeting of the Quark writing group yesterday, and it went very well! I was a little bit nervous, since I’m definitely a newcomer to this club (I only joined up with it last winter, whereas most of the core members have been around for four or five years!) and not so sure how to lead things. It went very well, though! I think that just about everyone got some really good feedback, and it didn’t seem that anyone’s feelings were hurt, so that’s good!

Gamila and Jakeson were there, now as a married couple (yeah, the writing group’s marriage statistics are so high they’d make most BYU bishops jealous!), Drek, Dragonswriter and Asyr (who I don’t remember meeting last year, so it was good to meet them), and a new guy named John, who heard about the club through Joel (who showed up a little later). He’s an engineering major, so it looks like he’ll know something about physics and how realistic/unrealistic are the elements of sci fi technology in any given piece. I learned from Jakeson not to mention Ceasar in any of the meetings, but on the flipside if any of us need to know anything about the Roman empire, we have a resident expert. I think that we’ve also got quite a few experts on midieval weaponry, judging from the feedback I got last year from my story The Clearest Vision.

I thought that Drek’s piece in particular was very good. It was the first of three parts in a short story he’s writing for a contest deadline this month. Maybe some of the old timers have read it before. It starts out with a backcountry vet and his goth assistant who get a very strange visitor. The visitor drops off a humanoid/canine creature the size of a man, and asks him to operate on it. It’s got this real sense of mystery and some wonderful tension in it. At one point, the strange creature manipulates the vet’s emotions and makes him feel this intense fear. It was pretty cool to read. I’m looking forward to the rest of the story!

Joel also is a part of Inscape now, and he said they’re looking for submissions. They’re not a paying market, but it sounds like a great way to start getting published! I think I’m going to send out my short story The Clearest Vision to them, since it didn’t win anything in the AML short story contest and I don’t see it having much of a broader appeal beyond the realm of Mormon society (although I could try sending it to some Christian publishers, so long as I can find some that don’t outright reject the doctrine of the pre-existence. Muslim publications, maybe? Dunno. I’ll try with the Mormons first and see how it goes).

The feedback I’ve gotten from the boards is that there are several members of the group who can only do Saturday mornings, so it looks like that’s what we’re going to be doing. I’m thinking about alternating between Tuesdays and Saturdays, since that seems to be what we’ve done in the past. I’ll schedule it tonight and send up the email.

We do need new members, so if anyone out there would like to join us or knows someone who would, send me an email! I’ve put up several fliers around campus, and I’ve gotten a couple of emails with some interested people. We’ll see how it goes.

So, things are going well, and I hope that they only get better!

Writing and the Sabbath

Today was my first Sunday in a new ward, and we had a really good Elder’s quorum lesson on keeping the Sabbath day holy.  This is an area of living the gospel that I really need to improve on, and I need to both stop doing things that aren’t appropriate for the Sabbath and start doing things that are.

My question is this: in your opinion, is it breaking the Sabbath to work on a particular story that you’re writing?

It’s not as spiritual as reading the scriptures or doing service, but it’s not as worldly as watching TV or playing Halo. It is an activity that requires creative thought, and I suppose that it does have the potential to draw you closer to the savior if you can see gospel principles in action in the story you’re telling.  On the other hand, it can really distract if the story is full of bloodshed and craziness.

I’m pretty liberal when it comes to Sabbath day worship, but I think I’ve been a little too loose in the past, and now I need to set up some personal guidelines to help preserve the spirit of the day. That’s why I’d appreciate the feedback.

I know that everyone is going to have different ways of living this commandment, and that’s perfectly fine. What helps one person to keep the Sabbath holy may or may not help another person, and what distracts from one person may or may not distract from another (for example, I think I need to stop browsing my blog subscriptions on Sunday!)

What I really need is some way of thinking about it.  I really don’t know on what terms to consider this; why exactly it would or would not be considered a Sunday appropriate activity.  That’s why I’d like to hear your thoughts.

So…Freaking…Tired

I moved back to Utah today. Got about two hours of sleep before leaving for the airport at 4:30 (I tried, but I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t sleep!), then basically slept, listened to podcasts, and talked with this lady from Tennessee all the way to SLC. Then, busy busy busy busy busy…holy cow! I’m pooped.

But I did get some writing in while I was in the airplane. And, surprise, surprise, it wasn’t on my novel. You see, last night, while I was writing on the novel, I had this idea for a story flash into my mind. It could make for a very good short story. I decided today to run with it.

The idea is this: what if there was a guy who could tell who was and wasn’t going to hell? And if this same person could give people a vision of hell? What would happen? How would individuals and society react to him? Would they accept him or reject him? And what if he wasn’t even a religious guy? Just because he knows about hell doesn’t mean that he knows anything about everything else. He could deduce some presuppositions to the existence of hell, but logic doesn’t translate into faith. What basically would be his story?

I started today by basically brainfarting on the subject. I put it in the first person and just started writing anything that the idea brought to mind. When I realized that I had to describe what hell looked like, it became a little bit tougher (and I’ll probably edit that section a lot), but mostly it just flowed out. However, the stuff that’s flowing out of my mind is DEFINITELY not anywhere close to a finished product. It doesn’t have a whole lot of structure, and where it does, it’s too lengthy. I’ll definitely have to cut it down. But that comes later. I figure it’s better to get it out now.

This is a lot different than Decision LZ150207 that I wrote a while ago. That story basically sprouted from my head fully formed. I’ve since edited the beginning quite a bit, and some of the descriptions, but the basic story hasn’t changed.

Also with Decision LZ150207, I had a great idea that I didn’t act on for a long time. It just sat in my brain and played itself over and over again until its demands to be written were greater than all of the other demands on my time. It was probably some of the least painful writing I’ve done, but that idea had a lot of time to die. It surprised me that it stayed alive.

What I’m wondering is this: if, in a flash of the mind, you get this idea that you think is really good for a story, is it better to focus on that idea right away, to at least start the story before the idea fades and is forgotten, or is it better to wait and not write until something just comes to you?

So…Freaking…Tired…my knee jerk reaction is to say that you should run with what you’ve got. And that’s why work on the novel is going to take the backseat until I figure out if the idea works or not.

So…tired…night!