One Thousand And One Parsecs

FREEDOM!!

Well, not quite yet. There’s still exams. But no more classes!!! Yay! I’m so relieved!

It’s been so awesome to have free time again. Unfortunately, these past two days I’ve squandered it quite a bit, and haven’t written a whole lot. I changed that today, though, and wrote about 1,440 words. Still…man, only about a week before my deadline. I’m going to have to work hard to do this…

But I’m totally going to make it! And once I do, it’s going to prove so much! It’s going to be great!

…and now I have to go to bed.

Now that I’m almost finished…

It might sound kind of crazy, but now that I’m almost finished with this novel, I’m starting to figure out what it’s really about…

In two weeks…

Two weeks from this moment I’m going to be in a plane over the Atlantic ocean heading to Cairo. How cool is that?!

Definitely an order of magnitude cooler than writing this paper.

I really don’t want to write this paper

As in I really, really, REALLY don’t want to write it.

The class was good, and the stuff we learned was interesting (and even profoundly compelling at times), but the grading is arbitrary, the class didn’t present itself as a challenge, and I’ve already written one final paper this week. One freaking fantastic final paper that is going to rock my other teacher’s world (or at least break a 90, inshallah)!

But yeah, I’ve got this paper due at 4:30 pm on Monday…and I haven’t written the first word yet (though I’ve written the bibliography and cover page)…and I’ve barely got my thesis argument figured out in my mind…

All I really want to do is write in my novel!

A new story is starting to take shape

And it’s really exciting! I talked about it a little in the last post, but it’s coming together a lot more as I’m thinking about the characters. Let me share what I’ve got so far:

Down to the last stretch

…in more ways than one. School is coming to a close, I’m making my final preparations for the study abroad, and this novel is only one or two chapters from completion (in rough draft form, that is. Very rough draft form). Now that I’m almost finished with this draft of the novel, I’m able to see a number of things I’ve learned about writing from the experience…

Wow…2,500 words

Yeah, that’s quite a bit more than I thought. I started late in the day, in between sessions of conference, and basically just wrote a little bit here and there. Just now, I opened it up to finish up the current chapter, but decided against it since I’m really tired. Then I did the wordcount, and wow…

600 words and I’m going to throw in the towel

I’m just way too tired.

One down, two to go

It’s done. Khullas. Blegh. Now I’ve just got to get it peer reviewed, edit the crap out of it, write a whole ‘nother paper for a whole ‘nother class, and I’m FREEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

This is totally me.

Pravda Vitezi

So I was thinking about my story the other day, and about how the first chapter contains a lot of old sci fi cliches but not a whole lot of the unfamiliar. I was trying to figure out what original concepts I could throw in there and how to make the point of view a lot closer to the viewpoint character (Ian), when I had this great idea…