New guest post and blurb for Desert Stars

First of all, my latest guest post for the Bringing Stella Home blog tour is up at The Villain’s Worst Nightmare.  In it, I discuss where I got the idea for the Hameji, and how I world-builded (world-built?) their culture from the ground up.  Good stuff; you can find it here, along with another giveaway of Sholpan.

I just submitted a proposal to Kickstarter for Desert Stars.  I hope to raise at least $500 to help pay for editing and cover art, but the experience running the campaign should be useful too.  I’m a little bit nervous, but we’ll see how it goes.

One of the things they asked for was a description of the project, which is funny, because this week’s Writing Excuses was about pitching.  There’s a lot of good stuff in that episode, in case you haven’t heard it yet.  I don’t have a good blurb worked out for Desert Stars just yet, but this is what I came up with:

The short version

A tale of homecoming, intrigue, and romance on the fringes of an interstellar empire that has forgotten its holiest legend: the story of Earth.

The longer version

Jalil Ibn Sathi Al-Najmi wasn’t born in the desert; he fell from the sky when he was just a little boy. Now that he’s grown, he wants nothing more than to find his true home among the stars. But when the tribe that raised him conspires to shame him into a marriage that would keep him at the camp forever, he has to choose between honor, family, and the girl he loves.

Yeah, they both need work.  The short one isn’t short enough, and the long one has absolutely NOTHING about Mira, even though she’s arguably got the stronger character arc.  For those of you who’ve read the novel, what do you think it needs?  And for those of you who haven’t, does it interest you to read more, or not?

In other news, I revised through almost 15k words yesterday.  Man, it’s so nice having time to write again.  I’ll have to polish up my resume and start looking for work again sometime next week, but I’m glad I took the time off to work on Desert Stars.  I’m on track to finish this draft by the end of next week; after that, it shouldn’t need much more than a quick run-through before sending it off for the copy edits.  Needless to say, I’m excited. 🙂

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!

“Who would have thought…”

I would like to address this post to my fellow Mormon readers.

A couple of days ago, I got a discouraging message from some old mission friends of mine.  It said, more or less: “who would have thought that the missionary that taught us the gospel would write such a lurid book?” They were referring to my latest release, Sholpan.

To be honest, it’s been very difficult for me to publish it, because I knew that this sort of thing would happen.  I worry that my friends and family will think that I’ve done something inappropriate, or violated some moral standard, or made myself unworthy in some way.  It’s very difficult to put your writing out there under normal circumstances, much less with complications like these.

However, I would like you to know that I have prayed about this, and that the answer I’ve received is that this is a story worth telling.

Sholpan is about a girl who lives essentially LDS moral standards and falls into what may be the worst situation any of us could imagine for such a girl: slavery in the harem of a powerful warlord who has the power not only to rape her, but to kill her.  By refusing to compromise her values–and risking death to do so–she makes friends in unexpected places and gains a whole lot more power than she ever would have if she’d taken the easy path and compromised.

In other words, it’s a little bit like the story of Esther.  Yes, there are sexual themes, but they aren’t there to be gratuitous or titillating; they’re there to show that even in the face of such horrible immorality, you don’t have to compromise your values.

I know this kind of story isn’t for everyone, which is why I’ve put up warnings in the book descriptions and made it abundantly clear that this book has adult content.  And if you decide you don’t want to read it, I won’t be offended at all.  But please, don’t assume that I’ve gone off the deep end or betrayed my faith, because that’s not the case at all.

It’s a difficult position to be in; I’m sure that Stephanie Meyer’s and Orson Scott Card’s bishops get a lot of mail from fellow Latter-day Saints who feel that they ought to be excommunicated.  But these are the kinds of stories that I feel driven to write: stories that address difficult moral issues and don’t shy away from portraying evil for what it really is.

I appreciate your concern on my behalf, but my faith and spirituality are still quite strong.  You may or may not believe that after reading my books, but please don’t feel like you have to save me.  The best thing you can do is continue to be a positive influence, and let me be a positive influence for you.

“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.

🙂

The interior designer’s approach to story

I recently read a fascinating post on John Brown’s blog with an interesting exercise for analyzing the kinds of stories you most like to read.  By finding out what really turns you on in a story, you can have a much better idea what to write, and how to make your own stories better.

He prefaced the exercise with a story about the interior designer who helped them to decorate their house.  The designer spread out a number of home magazines in front of them, and told them to go through and tear out the pictures that most turned them on.  After doing this, they analyzed the pictures to see what they had in common, and thus discovered how to best decorate their house.

The exercise works much the same way.  First, pick out five books you really like that immediately come to mind.  Mine are:

As many of you know, these are some of my favorite books of all time.  I’ve reread three of them, and I intend to reread the other two at some point.

Next, pick out the elements that these books have in common.  Here’s what I came up with:

1) Set in a different time and place.

Not all these books are science fiction, but the all take place in a world far removed from our own.  Only Spin takes place largely on Earth, but the events of the story transform the world as we know it so much that by the end of the novel, it’s completely different. SPOILER (highlight to see) Besides, at the very end, the two main characters leave Earth by going through the giant portal to another planet, so the novel is arguably about escaping the world as we know it.

2) Stakes that are much more personal than global.

This was interesting, and highlights something I realized when I compared Merchanter’s Luck with Downbelow Station.  In all of these stories, the central driving conflicts are extremely intimate and personal.

To be sure, many of these stories also have an epic backdrop; Mistborn certainly does.  However, I was much more interested in Vin’s growth and development than I was in how the Ska would overthrow the Lord Ruler–in fact, Mistborn is my favorite book in the trilogy for that very reason.

3) Encourages deep introspection.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if you’ve followed this blog for a while, but I love love LOVE stories that make me see the world in a new way.  Thrillers and adventures are all fun and good, but if it doesn’t make me think, I’m usually like “meh” at the end.

4) Female characters who aren’t weak or passive.

This one might be a bit more controversial, but in all of these stories, I’ve noticed that the female characters are pretty strong, even if they aren’t all kick-butt Katniss wannabes (ugh…I hate Katniss).  Even in Legend, which is largely dominated by men, you still have the earl’s daughter, who is one heck of a spirited woman.

5) Life and death conflicts.

This is interesting: in all of these books, the threat of death is immanently real.  Some of them, such as Legend and On My Way to Paradise, are among the most violent books I’ve ever read.  I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about life and death struggles that really draws me.

6) Romantic in a broad sense.

I’m using Tracy Hickman’s definition here, in which romance is all about teaching us to feel and bringing us in touch with our deepest feelings.  That’s the central theme of On My Way to Paradise: learning how to be a man of passion after witnessing some of the worst atrocities of war.

All of these books not only make me feel, they are about the feelings that they inspire.  In other words, the emotional elements of the story are both a part of and deeply embedded in the story’s central theme.

The exercises isn’t complete after this, though.  For the last part, take another five books and analyze them to see how they compare.  My second list includes:

So how does the list stack up?  Let’s see…

  1. Definitely true.  NONE of these stories take place in the world as we know it–and that’s awesome.
  2. A Canticle for Leibowitz might seem like an exception, since it follows the broad rise and fall of human civilization after the nuclear apocalypse.  But the things that really drew me to the story were the more personal elements: the novice who makes the illuminated manuscript of the electrical diagram, for example, or the abbot at the very end who SPOILER tries desperately to convince the single mother not to take her baby to the mercy killing station after the bomb fatally irradiates them.  In any case, it’s telling that A Canticle for Leibowitz made this list, whereas none of Arthur. C. Clarke’s books even came to my mind.
  3. Definitely true.  Even Citizen of the Galaxy, which is more adventure fiction than high concept sf, features a fascinating society of interstellar traders that really made me sit back and think about the way we structure our society.  Heinlein has a really awesome way of doing that with everything he writes.
  4. The only possible exception here might again be Heinlein, who had some very extremist views of women (putting it lightly).  However, if I recall, Citizen of the Galaxy has a female character at the end who helps pull out the main character from his indigent circumstances and helps him to come into his own.  Again, they might not all be kick-butt tramp-stamp vampire slayers, but they certainly aren’t weak.
  5. Less true of The Neverending Story and The Dispossessed, but while the central conflicts might not be about life and death, the threat of death (or a total loss of identity) certainly comes into play.
  6. Definitely true.  Few books have taught me to feel more deeply than The Neverending Story.  An absolutely magnificent piece of literature.

So there you have it.  According to this exercise, I should write books set in another time and place, where strong female characters face life and death decisions that personally impact the people in their lives and make the readers think and feel.  Interestingly enough, that is a PERFECT description of Bringing Stella Home, as well as Desert Stars and Into the Nebulous Deep.

Cool stuff.  Makes me want to write.  So on that note, I think I will.

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

What does it mean to be “published”?

One interesting thing about making the shift from traditional to indie publishing is that it changes your perspective on what it means to be “published,” and not in ways that you might expect.

Before I made the shift, I felt as if I were at the base of a giant mountain, where climbing to the top meant getting published and that was all I could see.  Sure, I knew there was more to it than getting that first book deal, but I figured I’d learn all about that at some point later–and besides, there’d be people along the way to help me.

Once I started indie publishing, though, my paradigm changed completely.  Instead of focusing all my efforts on trying to land that lucky break, I started thinking in ways that were much more concrete and practical, like “how can I build my readership?” “how high (or low) should I price my books?” “how can I improve my ebook formatting?” etc.

All of a sudden, it was as if I were on top of that first mountain, with a whole range of even taller mountains to climb.  And while that’s a very daunting place to be, it’s also quite encouraging, because I can see what lies in front of me and figure out what path I want to take.

One of the side effects of all this is that “getting published” is no longer a big deal to me.  Whenever I see aspiring writers obsess over getting an agent or a book deal, as if that’s the single greatest thing that could ever happen to them and all their hopes and dreams hang on the balance, I have to stop and scratch my head. 

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a big deal to get picked up by a major publisher, and kudos to everyone who is.  It’s just that that is not and shouldn’t be the end of your publishing journey; it’s only the beginning.

For this reason, I really don’t like the words “published” or “author” anymore.  People throw those terms around as if it makes you part of a select elite, one of those godlike beings who lives up in the clouds and periodically descends from On High to grant blessings to all the poor unpublished wastrel folk on the surface.  That’s complete and utter BS, and I never ever ever want to buy into it, not for an instant.

The problem is, so many people still do.  They still think that there’s some kind of a divide between them and Big Name Authors, like peasants in the face of royalty.  They labor endlessly over their manuscripts, terrified that one misplaced comma will forever their chances of fulfilling their hopes and dreams.  And whenever anyone tries to tell them that there’s a better way, that it doesn’t have to be like this, they cling to the old paradigm like battered women who refuse to get help–or worse, like religious zealots who dream of being martyrs for their cause.

It used to be that self-published writers were the ones who constantly obsessed about being “published,” but now, I think it’s the exact opposite.  Sure, there are crazies in both camps, but it seems that the balance of aspiring professionals–the ones who actually treat writing like a business–are turning to independent self-publishing.

The point is, I don’t like to think of myself as an “author,” or as an “indie published” whatever; I like to think of myself as an “indie writer”–or better still, just a “writer.” All the other terms are just too misleading and destructive.

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!

Conquering the mountain

So this last weekend, I decided to solo climb Y Mountain.  For those of you who don’t know, Y Mountain is one of the smaller mountains along the Wasatch range local to the Provo/Orem area.  It’s called Y Mountain because of the enormous letter “Y” painted on its side (yeah, that’s what they do to mountains in this part of the country).

Of course, the only reason I did a solo hike was because I’ve been up this mountain multiple times before and I know the trail.  Plus, it’s kind of a smaller mountain–it’s still over 8,000 feet, but the trail is only about 2 miles long.  I’m a slow hiker, so it took me about three hours to get to the top.

To get to the top, you first have to hike the Y, which is the most boring part.  The trail is literally wide enough for a truck to drive up–that’s how they repaint the Y every few years–and it’s all on the side facing the valley, so all you can really see is city.

After the Y, you go up a much smaller trail that cuts across the face of the mountain south, into Slide Canyon.  At the entrance to the canyon is this really cool rocky outcropping that some people call Lover’s Point–I like to call it the Citadel.  The trail winds up the canyon a ways, passes another really cool overlook, and turns a couple of bends before you reach the canyon head.

This is where things get interesting.  At the head, there’s a small meadow surrounded on all sides by forest.  On the right is a campsite, where the trail forks and heads up to Maple Mountain.  If you stay left, though, the trail eventually takes you to the summit of Y Mountain.

The next half mile or so is pretty strenuous.  The trail goes through an aspen grove, past another meadow, into this freaky dark forest, past another meadow, into another forest…and then you find yourself in this vast meadow, above the trees, surrounded on all sides by mountains.

I have to be honest: when I got to this point, I was absolutely terrified.  The roar of the city was gone (and yes, the city roars–it’s a very distinct sound), the only other people around were a couple of hikers somewhere behind me, whom I hadn’t heard in maybe an hour, and all around was such incredible vastness…it’s hard to explain without actually being there.  I just felt so small and isolated, surrounded by this immensity of nature that didn’t know who or what I was, or even that I was…

It was AWESOME.

By the time I got to the peak, the sun had set and the stars were already coming out.  I only climbed to the false summit–the one with the view of the entire valley–and from there, I could see past Point of the Mountain all the way north to Sandy, with Spanish Fork and Elk Grove to the south, and Utah Lake a giant puddle in between.  It was pretty cool.

But again, the alone-ness of the place really got to me.  It made me wonder: is this how future space explorers will feel, when they’re traveling between stars?  I can’t imagine how much greater is the vastness of space, compared to what I felt.  If so, what kind of an effect with that have on the people who live out there on the fringes of settled space?  How will it affect their culture, their religion, their sense of who they are and what their place is in this infinite universe?

I wish I could say I felt this huge sense of triumph after getting to the top, but honestly all I could think was: “oh crap, now I’ve got to walk all the way down.”  I did it the same way anyone does anything–one step at a time–and thankfully, I made it down without incident.

Passed a young couple up on a date; they were pretty impressed that I hiked by myself, and gave me some water (which was fortunate–I ran out at the summit).  Passed another pair of backpackers who were hoping to camp overnight on the summit, but other than that, I didn’t see anyone else until I got to the Y.

So that was my adventure this weekend, and how I celebrated my 27th birthday.  It was totally worth it.  In a couple of days, I’ll share the photos.