640 words today, in two thirty minute chunks.  The first was between classes, and the second was just now, at night.  And I need to get some sleep, so this will be short.

We had an awesome quark meeting yesterday, but I’ll write about it tomorrow, inshallah.  I’ve got so much stuff to do, and to top it off, one of my good Arab friends called tonight wondering where I’ve been, so I’ll probably end up hanging out with him and his roommates and friends until late tomorrow night.  For those of you who don’t know Arab culture, there is an expectation that friends see each other every day.  This is a good friend of mine, and I haven’t seen him in about five days or so.  I want to keep up these Arab friendships and learn this culture.  So, on top of a couple of tests, a hundred plus pages of reading in one class alone, and much more, tomorrow will be VERY busy.

Fortunately, I’ve noticed that setting daily goals has been helping.  Or, in other words, I noticed that when I didn’t do it today, I was a lot more lost and squandered a lot more time than I did the days before when I had been planning.  So, I figure the best way is to go to the library at around eight in the morning and just do homework all day.  It goes fast when you focus on it.  Gotta train myself for nanowrimo, after all.

But as far as the story itself goes, I noticed today that because I haven’t been writing in it very regularly, it was hard to figure out what I wanted to do next.  By the end of the day, I’ve got it figured out, and the momentum is back again, but it’s much easier to write when you’ve got some daily and weekly momentum.  Once I lose the momentum, projects get put off until I forgot what I wanted to do with them, and I’m left with a bunch of half-finished storylines that I have no clue where to go with them.

But momentum is not hard to build.  It requires a little bit of focus, and a lot of time spent just thinking about the story when you don’t have to think about anything–walking to and from classes, driving here and there, walking to the creamery on ninth, etc.  Just thinking about the story does a lot to build momentum again, and renew the excitement.  At least, it does that for me.

I know what I want to do in the next twenty or so pages, and I’m excited to do it!  New characters, new conflicts, solving some of the old ones and creating new ones in the process, and describing the culture of the people indigenous to Nova Salem.  It’s going to be fun to write!  IF I can freaking find the time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Busybusybusybusybusy!!!!  But, I did write a little.  Mostly, though, I was busy today with homework and the writing group.  We had an AWESOME meeting that I’ll write about tomorrow (inshallah), but it left me really drained and tired.  I did take a few useful suggestions, though, and that’s really what I worked on mostly this evening; revising the stuff that I submitted rather than adding new material.  I did, however, advance the story one more paragraph.  WHOOOO HOOO!!!

Holy cow, I’ve got to do better.  But now that Tuesday’s writing meeting is out of the way, and I’ve got about a week and a half until the next one, I think I’ll find the time to advance the story as much as I’d like.  I would have written more tonight, but by the time I’d done enough homework to be functional in my classes tomorrow, it was two AM, and when I tried to write, the only thing that would come is a garbled mess.  Blech.  A foretaste of nanowrimo.  Man, writing fiction when you’re busy full time with school is HARD.

Nope, no progress on the story today. !!!!حرام!!! حرام Shame!!! Shame!!!! And there are like four or five things I’d like to blog on as well. WHY do I never do the important things until 1:00 am?! Shame!!!!

Well, the news that I DO have is that I’ve decided to start organizing my life better. I made a list today of all the things that I have to do, and sorted it according to priority. I learned this pretty good system from my father, where you prioritize everything according to first priority, second, and third, and then within each of those groups, you prioritize according to A, B, and C. I made one list for all the periodic things I need to do, and another for the things that will be finished once I complete them. I plan to pick and choose maybe five or six things each day and write them on a 3×5 notecard that I’ll carry with me. Since I’m learning a language, I have PLENTY of cards.

Hopefully, I can use this to better discipline myself. As an experiment, I tried to do my homework first thing for a couple of days, and it was very surprising how liberating it was. I need to do that more often.

Something is happening to me that I NEVER thought would happen–I’m getting sick and tired of school. I figure this is God’s way of pushing me to graduate, because up until now I’ve loved college so much that I haven’t wanted to leave. God, being all knowing, knows that I’ll never leave this awesome university until I’m pushed to do so. Unfortunately, this only leads to more complications on my end of things. But I’m not complaining–God knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing it for my own good. I only wish I weren’t so stubborn–maybe then, God wouldn’t have to push me so much.

Mahlish. Tomorrow is a new day.

My story is double spaced, in 12 point Courier New, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome to break 100 pages.  What’s surprising to me is that that translates to 77 pages in single spaced 12 point Times New Roman.  I thought that my story was advancing really fast, but now, I’m not quite so sure.  A lot has happened so far, but I’m just getting to the point where Ian really begins to interact with the people of the strange planet–the part where his presence starts to upset the established order and turn society upside down.  Well, if it’s not progressing exactly as fast as I thought it was, at least it’s not progressing too slow.  This is probably a pretty healthy pace.

I was going to do a lot of other stuff tonight, but then I thought about how if you really want to be a writer, or into writing, the only real rule that you MUST keep is that you must write.  So that’s what I decided to do.  And it’s only barely midnight.  Maybe I’ll actually finish some of my homework.  Or maybe I’m too tired…

This really is the point where things start to get more difficult.  The act of writing was a lot more difficult for me now than it was a while ago.  I don’t know exactly why.  The words didn’t seem to flow out exactly the way I wanted them to, so I had to change my sentences a lot as I was writing them.  I’ll probably end up completely changing them again in the rewrite, but it was hard just to put the stuff out.  Writing is a lot of work.

I am really happy, though, that things are progressing well.  I’m just about where I want to be, in terms of the stopping point that I want to arrive at before November (and <gasp> nanowrimo comes upon us!!!).  I’m going to have to put this story on hold for nanowrimo.  I hope that nanowrimo doesn’t kill me–or my grades.

But another good thing is that I’m getting good ideas for what happens in the next few pages as I’m writing.  For example, about a month ago, I had a vague idea of a couple of characters that might be interesting, a possible rivalry between a naive Ian and a jealous prince, and some vague ideas about how the ancestors of the people of this planet pray towards the spaceships that brought them to the planet’s surface, much like how the Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.  As I was writing, those ideas began to take a much more definite form, and I know exactly how I want the main plot to progress (I didn’t necessarily know that a month ago).  Now, as I’m preparing to introduce a couple of the new characters that I’d thought of a month or two ago, they seem to be taking life in my head, as if I know who they are and know exactly how to start telling their stories.  I just want to get to the point now where they start to come in, so I can have them interact with the other characters and make the story more interesting than it already is.

Another good thing happened just yesterday.  I was  at the quark opening social (which was AWESOME!!!  Almost a hundred geeks like me gathered into a tight, confined space, watching sci fi and anime, playing computer games, and talking about Final Fantasy and other rpgs), and one of the new members (Danke) of the writing group asked me about my story.  She was asking specifically about the plot, so there really was no way I could get around telling her all about it (I tried–“it’s about a clash of cultures”–but that wasn’t enough).  To my surprise, after about ten or fifteen minutes of me monologuing about the plot of the story, she was still interested.  This leads me to two conclusions: 1) girls who like sci fi are AWESOME and 2) the story in my head has got some good potential.

Well, it’s only 12:30, but I just laid down for a couple of minutes, and it felt so good that I think I’m going to bed right now.

Yesterday was an extremely busy day! Much more than I was expecting. I probably would have accomplished more with a better plan and more self-discipline, but it was a good day. However, there were a few things I didn’t do–like write.

I think things are still going well, though. The day before, I wrote 1,300 words. I want to get to a certain part of the story before nanowrimo in November, because we’re probably going to do something for that contest as a writing group. Several people have voiced interest, and I would also like to participate.

For those of you who don’t know, “nanowrimo” stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s basically an informal worldwide (despite the name) contest, where the goal is to start and finish a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November. The idea is to focus less on editing and rewriting, and more on actually finishing something.

I would personally like to do this, since I’m so bad about finishing any of my stories. Also, there has been some interest in the club, and I think this could really be an awesome writing group activity as well. It takes place during an extremely hectic time, but I think we can do it–if we really want to.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for the writing group to do it if the leader of the writing group wasn’t doing it as well, so come this November, I’ll probably end up putting aside The Lost Colony for a while and focusing on the nanowrimo project.

I think that my story needs a lot more work than just writing the stuff down. There are some things that I’m going to need to think through a little more carefully. I watched a movie today in my Middle Eastern Geography class, about pastoral nomads in the Zagros mountains. It made me ask some questions about the nomads in my own story. I’m patterning the culture of the people of the lost planet loosely off of Middle Eastern cultures, and I’m getting to the point where questions about this culture are becoming more and more important.

As I watched the movie, I started thinking about the nomads that Ian runs into in the second chapter. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Why are they nomads? What do they produce? Do they have any flocks or herds? If not, what else do they do? Why do they travel with their women and children on their raiding forays? How do they migrate? What are their relations with the villages and kingdoms in the more pastoral lands? World building questions like this.

Fortunately, this is where half the fun is. If I didn’t invent worlds like this in my mind for fun when I don’t have anything else that I have to think about, I probably wouldn’t want to be a writer. It does take a lot of thought, though, and that takes time and effort. Probably I’ll be spending most of my time between classes thinking these things through–you know, when you’re walking from one part of campus to another, and don’t have to think about anything.

But still…one month…and I’ve got a lot of ground to cover! This is where I either start getting serious or where things putter out. But this time, I’m going to be serious!

This isn’t going to be very long, because it’s late at night.  Aneeka was kind enough to read my story, and gave some good pointers.  I was pleasantly surprised that she felt that she could understand and sympathize with the characters.  I was especially surprised that she sympathized with the main character, Ian, because he’s the one who eludes me the most.  He’s basically a quiet yes-man who keeps to himself, an average guy who prefers anonymity.  Definitely the opposite of my personality!  But I might have struck the right note with that.

She also pointed out a couple of flaws in the way I chose to develop two of the characters.  First, when I introduced Melinda before the crash, I introduced her as a very strong woman who had risen quickly in the military ranks.  After the crash, she broke down and displayed a lot of stereotypical feminine weakness.  I had done that in order to put Ian in a position where I could show something of his character, but later decided that he wasn’t like that after all, so I was more than happy to rewrite this scene.

She also pointed out how Leila, in the first scene in which she appears, does some things that are just stupid, which makes it harder for the reader to connect with her.  She’s a very independent young woman, but I had her stand up to her captors in a way that was just asking for abuse.  I wanted to introduce her as a prisoner receiving abuse at the hands of her captors, in order to generate sympathy for her right at the outset.  Having her do something stupid takes away from that, so I decided to have her think out her defiant thoughts without saying them out loud.  It did seem to work better.

So, instead of adding on any words to the story, I quickly ran through it from the beginning to end and made the revisions that made the most sense after chatting with Aneeka.  It took me about an hour, so you couldn’t exactly call it a major rewrite, though you could say that it helped to put me on a better track.

I’m not going to do much revising at this point–I’ve just got to get the darned thing down on paper.  You can’t rewrite what you haven’t yet written.  Just got to move forward.

1,079 words today, but I decided to throw out the last 487, so it balances out to about 500.  The really cool thing was that I wrote all this in the two separate hours I had between classes.  I’ve always thought that I should only write if I have a large amount of time set aside in which I could just focus on it.  This shows me that I can jump right into it and do fairly well!

I need to adjust my goals…basically, this weekly goal thing just doesn’t work for me.  I need a daily goal.  500 words sounds as good as any.  I’ll try it again.

But there are so many other things I should be doing that I never do…the story of my life…at least I’m only taking 15 credits this semester.

Aneeka is reviewing my story right now.  It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about it.  I know she can be pretty thorough, but all I wanted was an initial reaction, so I told her just to read it casually and tell me what she thinks.  She told me that sometimes, if she’s reading a book that has bad characterization or other elements, she’ll chuck the book across the room.  I told her not to throw her computer across the room!

Hopefully it won’t be that bad.  However, I still haven’t really figured out the main character’s character.  That’s probably for the best, though, because I won’t be falling back to stereotypes (like I am with some of the other characters).  It’s very easy to write a character when you have an archetype in mind.  It’s a lot harder when the character’s personality and life experiences just don’t match your own.  I’ve got some figuring out to do, but I won’t let that stop me from progressing forward.

Something happened the other day that worried me about how the story is progressing.  I was hanging out with my sister, and her boyfriend asked me to tell him about the story I’m writing.  A few months ago, I’d be dying to tell people about the story, and I’d go into great detail of the history of the story’s universe, how everything is set up, what ideas I’ve got for it, etc.  Usually, it would bore people to death, so I’ve gotten used to just not telling them about it.  This time, when he was actually asking me to tell him all about it, I told him but it just didn’t seem as exciting or compelling as it did before.  Am I losing my belief in this story?  Or is it just that I’ve got so many other things on my mind that this is getting pushed down the ladder?

Either way, I think the solution is to write more often, and just be immersed in the world that this is taking place.  You see, when I write, my writing surprises me.  I’ll find myself describing things about the world that I hadn’t thought up at all, but it will make perfect sense and fit in fairly well.  It’s pretty cool

So, the new goal is: write every day, at least 500 words.