One Thousand And One Parsecs

It’s up!

If you look off to the sidebar on your right, you might notice the two incredibly awesome meters off to the side. Aren’t they freaking awesome?? Drek programmed those and helped me install them on my website! They show my writing progress for the last day and the last seven days. The number on the meter is the raw wordcount, and the meter gives some indication as to how well I’m doing…or not doing.

Man, this is so cool! Thanks, Drek! It makes me want to sit down and just write.

Unfortunately…I won’t be doing that tonight. Not in my novel anyways. I’ve got a paper due tomorrow at 8:00 am, and it’s a lot tougher than I thought it was going to be. It’s only three pages, but in three pages I’ve got to use all kinds of quotes from The Odyssey and Socrates’s Apology. Plus, I’ve got to attach a rough draft with the final draft in order to show progress. Unfortunately, I didn’t start writing this until tonight…

So, if I don’t pull an all nighter, I’ll be taking a quick nap before heading up to campus at an ungodly hour to print out this crazy thing. No rest for the weary. And I was so good about doing all my homework today, too. Didn’t hardly do anything else. 🙁

Ah, some days are like that. Now I’ve got to pound out a “rough draft” (fortunately, it can suck) before I register for Winter 2009 classes in, oh 40 minutes. In the meantime, admire the lovely new wordcount meters on my sidebar. I swear, before the end of the week, those meters will be cranked up where they need to be…

Okay, a new direction

I owe a lot to Aneeka. She is the one who motivated me to write The Phoenix of Nova Terra back in 2007 when I didn’t really think I could finish a novel before the end of the school year. Like I said in the last post, I’ve hit something of a wall in my writing life recently, and a couple of days ago she was the one who pointed it out to me. The conversation went something like this:

Empress: lol – okay, okay!
how are your stories going?
me: very slowly
frustrating
mostly just because of personal disorganization
Empress: yeah, that can happen. tired of school? or just a lot of things you want to do?
me: school is pretty easy right now
it’s just hard to get back into writing regularly
I dunno
I’m trying to juggle two projects
Empress: maybe that’s the problem?
it’s hard focusing on two stories at once
(says the girl that does it all the time – the irony!)
but it really is hard to get all focused on two projects at once
me: it probably is
Empress: I flit between projects because I’m not that into them and write because I’ve been inspired (and tend to be inspired on different stories all the time)
when I get into a project though, then it’s best that I leave the rest behind and just focus on that one
get out all that I have and see how far I can go before I get distracted again
me: yeah
I’m trying to be 100% into two projects at the same time
trouble is, I can’t keep the momentum going on both
Empress: yeah. looks like you’re human, after all 😉
me: dangit!
Empress: you should choose one to focus on and then, if inspiration hits for the other one, focus on that one for a bit before turning back to the main project
me: grr
Empress: think of it this way. You could struggle for 6 months trying to work on two projects and arrive halfway done with both
OR you could focus on one project for 6 months, finish it, and then have plenty of energy to finish the next one
me: that’s true I guess
Empress: it’s better than wearing yourself out
then you’ll be left with no project finished
and just a heap of frustrated dreams
me: I guess that’s right
question is, do I revise my old novel or do I go ahead with the new one?
I’m more excited about the new one, but I want to get the old one finished
Empress: how long would the old one take to get finished?
wait…and you’re having problems with them right now, right?
you know, I would think it’s easier to edit two stories then to write two stories at once. maybe you could finish up the new story and then edit both of them at the same time?
me: that’s an idea
Empress: and NaNoWriMo is coming up. you could finish up the first draft by next month and whallah! only have 2 stories to edit 😀
me: ugggggggggggh
I coooooooooould
that’s intense, though
Empress: well, doing two projects at once is intense as well
why not just switch it around and do this kind of intensity instead? 😉

So, after mulling it over for a couple of days, I’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Instead of trying to do two major projects at once, I’m going to put the revision of Phoenix on hold for now and focus all my energy on Hero in Exile. For November, instead of doing nanowrimo, I’ll try to get 50,000 words deep into this novel instead. After that, if I do roughly 1,000 words a day, I should be in good shape to finish it before the end of January. I don’t anticipate this novel going over 120,000 words, and if it tries to, I’ll do my best to reign it in.

So that’s my goal: Finish Hero in Exile before the end of January. Oh, and write 50,000 words in November.

I’ve noticed that I tend to either be too focused or too distracted. Trying to balance two projects at the same time has taught me that…well, I can’t do it very well. But I do know that once I have one project that I can focus on, I can focus on it until it gets done. That’s what I’m going to do now.

In the meantime, I was chatting with Drek from the writing group, and found out that he could program a way cool widget for my sidebar! It’s going to be a pair of speedometers that show my daily wordcount and my wordcount over the course of the last seven days. Oh, and if I’m nice, he might program a widget that displays my writing projects as status bars! I’m way excited!

Drek recently designed a website for nanowrimo this year. The idea is that every minute, it displays a new word from his novel. Something like that. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens once november starts up.

I can definitely say that the goatee gives Drek programming +2.

A change of direction?

I had a chat with Aneeka yesterday about writing. She was in London waiting to catch the bus to Scotland at around 4:00 am or so (jealous!), and I was winding down a frustratingly unproductive day.

I told her how I’m trying to divide my attention between two different projects, and she had some interesting things to say. Basically, she said that if it isn’t working and I’m not getting as much done as I’d like, I should put one project on hold and focus on the other one.

Duh. Of course that’s the answer. Trouble is, I’ve been so focused on doing things this way that I haven’t seen it.

So, before this weekend is up, I need to take a step back and figure out just what I’m going to do. Splitting my attention between two projects really isn’t working at all for me, and if I keep going at this rate I doubt I’ll be half finished with either one by the end of the semester. Definitely time for an adjustment.

Besides figuring out what I want to do with my writing, I also need to 1) send in my absentee ballot (I’m still somewhat undecided, though Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama has almost cinched it for me); 2) read Homer’s The Odyssey and write a paper comparing Odysseus to Socrates…for Tuesday (this isn’t as bad as it seems though–The Odyssey is a really interesting story and I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far); 3) get cracking on Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, since I’ve got a book report due in a week and a half, and; 4) various other assorted homeworks. Blegh!

Oh, and I haven’t asked anyone out on a date in the past month. Haven’t even thought about it, really. Dang. How did time start moving so fast? The semester is more than half over!

At least I got in a thousand words in Hero in Exile today. That, and I’ve been working through the next few scenes in my mind quite a bit. I think I know where I want to take it, even though it has nothing to do with what I wrote down in the plot outline. I’m excited.

And tired. More tomorrow.

Speciation of the sexes–what the crap is this?

Ok, I just had a crazy idea come to me like five minutes ago, and since I’m here at my computer, I’m going to write it down.

You know how we sometimes say that men and women are practically members of two different species? Well, what would an alien race look like if that were actually the case? What if the males of the species looked so indistinguishably different from the females that, to a human observer, they were two distinct different species?

Of course, this is a question that has been asked many times before. Just now, though, I had a really weird idea that might lead to a new take on the question: what if the males got pregnant with the males of the species, and the females with the females?

The males would have short lifespans and reproduce very frequently, with very large litters. They would only have to have sexual contact once to get pregnant. The females, on the other hand, would have very long lifespans and bear only one offspring at a time, with a very long gestation period. They would have to have sexual contact multiple times, possibly from multiple partners, in order to acquire the genetic material to reproduce.

But wait? In this reproductive cycle, who’s the “male” and who’s the “female?” Couldn’t it be the other way around? Or really, can our human concepts of gender even describe this species–or rather, these two species?

What would a society of these beings look like? What kinds of gender roles would arise from this kind of a life cycle? What kind of philosophy would arise from it? What kind of society?

I haven’t written a lot of science fiction with alien species, but this idea is cool enough that I just might have to do it sometime. What’s your take on this idea?

Updates

This week has been pretty good. Scholastically, I’ve had two (well, three) midterms, a paper, and other assorted homework. I managed to pull it off surprisingly well, and now I feel like I have a bunch of free time. Yay!

I still seem to be in a rough spot, though, with my writing. It’s starting to appear that this “rough spot” is more than a minor bump. I don’t know what it is exactly–maybe I’ve overextended myself, maybe I’m just not organizing my time efficiently enough (probably it’s a combination of both)–but I feel like I’m not writing as productively as I could.

It’s not a lack of ideas problem. I’ve got tons of ideas for my stories. It’s usually a daily thing where I’ll come up with a new idea for the plot of one of my stories, or a cool thing about the setting. Thinking up this stuff is the easy part–it’s the writing that’s difficult.

In Phoenix, the trouble is that I’m coming to sections where I have to throw out 90% of what I’ve got so far and synthesize the remainder into something more workable. That is a very daunting thing. Yesterday, I only did about two pages before calling it quits. Today I haven’t even worked on it at all. Blegh.

Because I’ve been paying so much attention to that project, my other project, Hero in Exile, hasn’t got the momentum it needs to carry through the hard stuff. I spent three hours of my free time today writing that novel, but in all that time I only got through 1,000 words. That’s progress, true, but it was very slow and painful. I don’t know why.

Ugh. This lack of progress is getting to me. It doesn’t help that the semester is half over by now.

I’m hoping that once I get through the current slow spot in Phoenix, things will pick up. I was really surprised when I edited this one scene in like half an hour. The scene worked largely as it was, I just had to polish it up, and in just about half an hour (or maybe an hour, I forget), I’d run through almost ten pages of manuscript. Not bad.

I just hope the rest of the novel is like that. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to start cutting stuff out.

In other news, almost all my friends have read The Hero of Ages, but I’m still in the middle of it. It’s way good, though! Very dark and depressing at this point, and most of the characters have almost given up, but not entirely. Nobody ruin this book for me please!

20% through the rewrite

Well, I don’t know exactly what it means, but yesterday I got to page 117 in the revision of The Phoenix of Nova Terra. Divide that number by the total pages of the current draft, and you get .20blahblahblah.

So, I guess you could say that I’m roughly 20% through with this revision. In reality, I have no way to tell–I’m expecting the final wordcount to be significantly smaller than what I have right now, so in terms of pages I might be quite a bit further. Or, the stuff I have to revise might be a lot more difficult than the stuff I’ve worked on so far, so I might be much further behind than 20%.

Whatever. It’s a statistic. Am I having fun doing this? I suppose…though I wish my life were better organized right now. 20% doesn’t mean much when you consider that the semester is half over. How in the heck am I going to have three polished novels by November 2009? Sigh.

On a happier note, I took a midterm today and freaking owned it! HIST 240, Middle East history up to 1800–I got a 98% on the t/f / multiple choice. YEAH! The short answer wasn’t that much harder, either.

Also, this Sunday I decided to just sit down and do my work for a change. Homework was backed up (which is unfortunate–I really do like to keep Sundays open for non-school non-work related activities), but I got all the stuff finished that needed to be done, and dove into both my novels right afterward. By midnight, I’d written 500 words for Hero in Exile and revised 6+ pages of Phoenix. Wow! Both goals, hit right on the head. I need more days like that.

When I should be doing other things, I’m reading Mistborn 3: Hero of Ages, and it’s really interesting so far (which is to say that the first five chapters are interesting). I really enjoyed the first Mistborn book, but didn’t enjoy the second one as much. However, I think that has to do more with the fact that it’s the middle book of a trilogy, and so most of the conflicts were left unresolved. Also, the opening section took a lot of time to introduce the characters and the world. The final book dives right into the action and doesn’t take time to describe anything that readers of the first two books wouldn’t already know.

Speaking of Brandon, I read an interesting post on his website that basically tells what writing was like for him before he got published. I’ve heard his how-I-got-published story a few times now, but I’d never heard about any of this stuff before, and I found it really interesting. Also, it was really interesting to hear about the struggles and uncertainty that comes along with being an unpublished writer, because…that’s where I am right now. Or rather, I’m right at the start of the trail, so it’s very good to hear about someone else who went through the woods and made it out to the other side. I want to know what I can expect for the next five to ten years of my life.

Quick updates

Last night I climbed Y mountain with Steve and Warren, old friends from the Capitol house last year, and Steve’s new roommate Dan. It was awesome! More on that later.

However, we left around midnight and didn’t get back around five. I slept for four hours, went to a Quark writing meeting, then did laundry and slept until dinner with my sisters and brother-in-laws. Ugh. Disgusting.

I feel so bad because I have so much stuff that I need to do. Arabic homework. History test. MESA test. MESA paper. Poli Sci readings. Humanities study guides. None of these is really that hard (except the history test–I’m not sure what to expect there), but they are time consuming. Time that I didn’t make for myself this past week, so it’s starting to crunch up.

Also, I feel really bad because I didn’t hardly write at all this week. I got stuck on chapter 6 for Phoenix and that really intimidated me. I guess I just kept putting it off, until finally I just sat down and wrestled with it until it seemed acceptable. And as for Hero, I haven’t written in that story for nearly a week.

I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t even really know what I’ve been doing that’s taken up all this time. It kind of sucks, to be honest.

Well, this next week is going to be different. Once I’ve got the tests and papers behind me (which should be by Monday or Tuesday), I’ll have more time to write and do other things. I just have to sit down and force myself to get it out. No more excuses.

Sorry if this post is rambling, but that’s kind of the state I’m in. I’ll write later (probably tomorrow) about the following things:

The hike last night to the top of Y mountain (the TOP of the mountain–it was awesome!).
Thoughts and frustrations with Hero in Exile, specifically Tristen’s character and the show-don’t-tell philosophy.
A really cool idea that came to me Thursday about creating a far future sci fi universe compatible with Mormon cosmology without crossing genre lines from mainstream to LDS sci fi. This is one really cool idea, and I am excited to share it and get your thoughts on it.

In the meantime, I’m going to just go to sleep now and hope that I can prepare my Sunday school lesson in the morning. That, and do my Arabic / study for my tests tomorrow. Ugh.

He remembered me!

Ok, so it’s 1:40 am right now and I have to be up at 7:00, so this is going to be short.

Yesterday was the release party for Brandon Sanderson’s newest book, Hero of Ages. I had to go to work from three to four, but while walking through the bookstore on my way there, I saw a handful of cosplaying fans sitting merrily in a short line (maybe five or ten people) in front of the table covered in Brandon’s books. I thought to myself, Ok, I don’t have to worry too much about the line being that long when I get off at 4:00.

Well, I arrived, and the line had already snaked its way around a couple of bookshelves. That was ok, though. I expected a wait. Sat down in my spot and read a little from Tales from the Thousand and One Nights.

Fantasy fans can be really interesting, quirky people. There was this girl in line just a few spaces ahead of me who talked the whole time about just about anything fantasy related. It was really funny and entertaining. The conversation in that part of the line was really interesting and engaging, even for those of us who were just listening in. One of the people behind me mentioned later, “you can tell she’ll be a writer because of the way she talks.”

The guy behind me struck up a conversation by asking what I was reading (I had also pulled out the Qur’an to get some reading in for my history class), and I found out that he’d come all the way from his work in Salt Lake to get the book. That was surprising, considering that he hadn’t even read Mistborn 1 yet.

Neither had the guy right in front of me. He was an energetic freshman who pulled out his computer and wrote in his fantasy novel for a while. I gave him the Quark writing group email (quarkwritinggroup@gmail.com, if you happen to be an interested BYU student) and we spent a good long time talking about various sci fi and fantasy books that we had read.

Brandon showed up, and the line started moving. It was pretty slow, but that was ok because we’d all prettymuch broken the ice and were chatting it up the whole way there. I saw a bunch of random people I knew, which was really fun. “Fantasy brings us together!”

So then, I got there at the desk where Brandon was signing the books. He looked a little stressed up there, but he also seemed to be having a good time. I wanted to know if he’d recognize me from his class last year–after all, he’s a busy man, especially now with Mistborn 3, Alcatraz 3, and the final Wheel of Time book.

But he did! He saw my name on the sticky note and said “Joe! How’s it going?” We chatted for a bit, and he asked how my novel was coming along! I said it was coming along well, that it had been rejected once and he was like “yeah, of course that’s going to happen,” so I said I was working on it, as well as a new one, and that I was looking forward to his class in the winter.

He signed my book “For Joe–keep writing!” I was number 79. Took a picture with him, and now it’s my Facebook profile picture. It’ll be up there for a while!

Hero of Ages release party tomorrow!

Tomorrow at 5:30 pm is the Mistborn release party at the BYU Bookstore! I am so excited!

Brandon Sanderson is a great fantasy writer, an awesome teacher of creative writing at BYU, and a really friendly, approachable, good person. I had loads of fun in the English 318 class he teaches (definitely my favorite class of the semester) and he was kind enough to take the time and come speak to the Quark writing group on how to become a published author.

I also read Mistborn: The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension last year, and was greatly impressed with both of them. In particular, I think that Mistborn is one of the best fantasy books that I’ve read. Vin’s transformation and personal growth throughout the book completely fascinated me, and it rang as true as anything else I’ve read. Also, I enjoyed the fact that the good guys did not always win; in fact they failed a lot more than I expected them to, and the ways they had to adjust their plans with each failure kept me engaged and interested in the story with every page. There were enough genuine twists that I was only able to predict the ending and climaxes about half of the time. Eventually I stopped trying and just enjoyed the book–and I definitely enjoyed it!

When I picked up The Well of Ascension and started reading it, I remarked to Brandon that I didn’t realize how much I had missed his characters until I picked up the sequel. I wonder if that’s how I’ll feel once I start reading Hero of Ages? I definitely will. The thing I most want to see is how Vin and Eland end up, what kind of peace is brought to the empire and how it comes about, what happens to Sazed (he was my favorite minor character)–but mostly I just want to see how Vin grows into a person with a full, healthy life. The magic system and dark lord and setting and other characters are all really well done, but the thing that I’m most invested in as a reader is Vin and her character arc.

So I got a sub for work tomorrow, which means that I’ll be in line at about 4:00 pm. The signing starts at 5:30, so I’ll probably be one of the first people in line. It really helps an author when you buy their book in the first week after it’s released, because those are the numbers that publishers and critics put the most stock on, so I figured I’d help Brandon out and come to the release party. There’s even a fairly good chance I’ll get one of the first fifty numbered editions–those are supposed to be super valuable or something.

But really, the thing I care the most about is finishing the series. The release party and everything else is going to be fun, but reading a good book–a genuinely good book–that’s the best thing of all!

Wrestling with my novel

Grrr…writing was so hard today.

It probably didn’t help that I was operating on only four hours of sleep, or recovering from a sickness, or constantly allowing myself to be distracted, but for some combination of these and other reasons, it was just really hard to write today.

I usually love revising. I think it comes naturally to me, in some ways. However, I’m well past the beginning of Phoenix and just starting to get to the part where I got muddled the first time I wrote it

Last year, I started to stall and sputter at this point because I had followed several of my initial ideas from the beginning to their preliminary conclusions and had to start adding new ideas to enrich the main story. I still didn’t know the ending, so I was basically throwing all sorts of ideas in at random and waiting for the magical reaction to happen.

That reaction did happen, but it didn’t really take off until around page 300. By that point, I’d thrown in enough random story elements that I had the start of a causal chain that would carry the story to an ending that excited me. I let things take off and rode the story to its conclusion, having a wonderful adventure right up to the last page.

Trouble is, now I have to clean up the mess I left behind–all those other random elements I threw in that never really mixed well with the others. Loose and frayed ends that I need to cut out or tie back in. At the same time, I need to isolate and strengthen the elements that ended up being important. That involves restructuring sections within chapters as well as paragraphs within sections, and it is bloody annoying.

It’s more than cutting and strengthening existing narrative. It’s cutting and pasting from multiple places, reorganizing it, and then throwing it all out and totally rewriting it in a way that actually works. It is so difficult, I’m probably going to get it wrong and have to rewrite the whole novel again to get it right.

(If I hadn’t taken a step back a few days ago and started outlining each section and chapter from a more macro view, I wouldn’t know what I need to do to fix this story. I’d see the problems and know that they exist, but I wouldn’t know how to restructure things so that the novel works together as a whole. So thanks, Reigheena, for helping me to step back and look at the wider picture.)

The most frustrating thing about this process, by far, is the choppiness.

When you have a blank page in front of you and you’re forging ahead with the first draft, it’s difficult but fairly linear. Everything flows out in a relatively streamlined progression. When you’re fixing the relatively minor details, it’s deliciously linear because you’re going going from paragraph to paragraph.

But when you’re revising the novel on a more macro level, overhauling the major story elements, you have to look at the story as a whole, transforming stuff on page 120 and introducing it in its new form on page 90, or adding new stuff between pages 80 and 100 to make the stuff before and after flow more smoothly from one to the other. You get a whole section full of dialogue and you realize it’s not working, because you’ve developed your character deeper than you had at this point in the original draft, and so you end up throwing out and rewriting everything.

Because the process is so choppy, I find it really easy to be distracted. I’ll have the exact sentence in my mind that I want to say, but the urge to get just a few moments of relief will be so strong that I’ll switch over and check my email, or check Facebook chat, or check my blog aggregator, or play a game for a little while, etc etc. So then, when I get back to work, it takes time to readjust, and that sentence that I had will be buried under half a dozen other ideas, so then I have to dig it out. Grrrr…

I’m tired, it’s late, I’ve had a miserable time wrestling with this novel today, and I’m going to bed. But before I do, I want to link to this highly interesting and well written blog post I saw on A Motley Vision, a Mormon arts and culture blog. The blogger tells the story of how she picked a controversial LDS fiction novel by Virginia Sorenson for her ward’s book club. Both her reactions and her friends’ reactions to the novel were really interesting, especially because they were so different. The ensuing discussion on the blog is really interesting because it’s all about the pros and cons of controversial, edgy LDS fiction, both to the readers as well as to the LDS publishing industry and LDS society in general. At least, I found it interesting. You can check it out and see for yourself.

I am so going to be in bed twenty seconds after I finish this sentence! Gnight!