About This Blog – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Old About page

Well, now that I’m graduated and can no longer say that I’m a BYU student, it’s time to write a new About page for this blog. Before I do that, though, here’s the old page, in case you want to read it one last time.

About Me

Who am I?

I am an oldest son, an annoying older brother. I have three beautiful sisters and an amazing mother and father, all of whom I love very much.

I am a believing, practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have a deep belief in God and an abiding faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Redeemer. I’m certainly not perfect–far from it!–but I try my best to love, serve, listen, and appreciate the people in my life, friends and otherwise.

I am a senior at Brigham Young University, studying Arabic, political science, the modern Middle East, and English. My academic interests don’t stop there, however. I also love history, astronomy, linguistics, international relations, philosophy, economics, psychology…basically, I love learning.

I love writing, especially science fiction. I fell in love with the genre as a young boy, when I read A Wrinkle in Time and saw Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope. Those works triggered my inner creativity, and I have been writing SF&F continuously ever since. I’ve never been able to stop.

I’m a writer, aspiring to become an author. I’m not relying on talent alone to reach that goal, though. I’ve been working hard on my craft since 2007, trying to get my writing up to a professional level while researching the publishing industry. In that time, I’ve written three unpublished novels and had one short story published with Leading Edge.

I would like nothing more than to be a professional, full-time fiction writer. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way.

Contact

If you would like to contact me for any reason, I can be reached at the following email (despammed): joseph dot vasicek at gmail dot com.

You can also find me on twitter and on facebook.

License and copyright:

All work on this website is published under a Creative Commons license. You are free to share or download anything you see, but you cannot redistribute it for money or alter the content in any way. For more information, please visit the link below:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Calling on readers

I had an awesome idea for a magic system over the Christmas break. But…I’m not sure I want to post it publicly. I know I said in an earlier post that I didn’t believe in hording good ideas…but I don’t know about this one. Not with just anyone.

At the same time, I don’t want to keep this idea locked in my mind. I’ve found that when I share my ideas with my friends, they help me to see it from an angle I haven’t considered. That’s a necessary part of the idea phase, IMO–bouncing ideas off of friends.

So I’m going to try something new: password protected posts. If I’ve got something I only want to share with friends, I’ll put a password field on the post. Email me at onelowerlight at gmail dot com and I’ll send you the password…probably.

It feels kind of weird, keeping people away from reading things on my blog. If you’re a regular reader and someone I know from real life (you know who you are), chances are pretty good (as in: 100%) that I’ll give you the password if you ask. And I’ll trust you not to share it, though if you do, I obviously can’t stop you. I just want to be able to keep the random googlers from having access to everything.

So if you’re a friend of mine and see a password field on one of the posts, don’t think that I’m trying to exclude you! The opposite is true–it means I want your feedback twice as much. So please read and let me know what you think!

New About page

Traffic to this blog has been picking up a bit, and I decided it’s time to change my “about” page. This was the old one:

In some ways, I live a double life. By day, I study Political Science and Arabic at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, but by night I’m an aspiring writer of science fiction and fantasy. And I have NO IDEA where all of this is going to take me.

A lot of people dream of writing and being a writer, but the motivations vary. Some people are just enamoured with vague ideas of the bohemian lifestyle. Other people are looking for fame and the joy of seeing their name on a book. It’s different for me, however. I write simply because I can’t NOT write. I wrote my first story in 5th grade and I haven’t been able to stop since. Stories just flow out of me–it’s a part of who I am. Most of them are fleeting and pretty crappy, but hopefully, somewhere in there is a story that can bring something meaningful to somebody.

And so I write, not with any illusions of the fame, fortunes, and friends it will bring me, but because it’s who I am. And yes, writing is not glamorous. It’s about hard work and consistency. It’s about rejection. It’s about realizing that the story you love so much reads like crap because you have a LONG way to go before your writing is any good. I know that. I’m experiencing it now. And I can tell you that it’s not without reward either.

So join me as I blog about my struggles, frustrations, adventures, and successes as an aspiring writer. Read about the agonizing and exhilarating process of writing a novel. Keep me honest in my writing goals. Check out my book reviews as I try to learn what I can from what’s come in the sci fi / fantasy genres before. Get caught up in my imagination as I share the story ideas that pop into my head. And please, if something strikes you, drop a comment and let me know what you think!

Goals:

Write and submit at least one novel per year.

Finish 1st draft of The Lost Colony by 25 April 2008. ACCOMPLISHED

Write three polished novel drafts before World Fantasy 2009 and attend the conference.

I don’t know if the new one is much better, but you can check it out. Hopefully, it’s enough to give a good, honest impression of this site.

Also, I bit the bullet and finally signed up for twitter! My username is onelowerlight; you can check me out here.

Blog buttons!

So I was reading my friend Gamila’s blog, and she mentioned that she made some blog buttons. Immediately, I thought: “Cool! I should do something like that.”

So, without further ado, I give you…blog buttons!

Post them to your blog! Put them on your sidebar! Attach them to your message board forum signature! Use them as your avatar! Write a spam virus that will…okay, don’t do that. But seriously, if you love me, go crazy nuts and post these EVERYWHERE!

And just in case you don’t know how to put these onto your sidebar, here are some basic html instructions:

Fly, my pretties! FLY!

Fine tuning and David Gemmell ROCKS!!!

With Danke’s help, I’ve tweaked the site yet some more: updated the header image, put in the site description under the title, moved the comments link at the bottom of each post (where it really belongs–having it at the top is confusing), etc. Now, the site is even better than ever!

All this playing around with CSS and the site code is making me wish I had majored in computer science or graphic design–this stuff is kind of fun! I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a ton of job opportunities for graphic design (though I haven’t really been looking)–maybe this is something I could teach myself and figure it out while on the job? It sounds like fun, but where to start?

Speaking of which, I need to do something useful with my photoblog. I’ll bet I could make money off of it, I’m just not sure what the best way to approach it is. I’m thinking a “tip the artist” button somewhere unobtrusive, a “buy this image” kind of thing, perhaps some kind of a print-on-demand coffee-table book…well, probably the BEST place to start is to drive more traffic to the site. 30 unique visitors per day isn’t all that impressive. =P

In miscellaneous updates, I picked up a book by David Gemmell at the library. Gemmell writes some amazing heroic fantasy, and I’ve realized that that’s kind of what I’m shooting for with Bringing Stella Home. I’m reading some other novels, too, but none of them have really grabbed me (in fact, I put a couple of them down just out of disgust and content issues).

This Gemmell book I picked up, however, is awesome! Hooked me on the first page, with some fast action, engaging characters, and interesting philosophical reflections. Unlike the other stuff I’ve been reading, most of which I’ve been reading over the past few weeks, I’ll probably finish this Gemmell book in a few days. Good stuff!

And…it’s past 2am. Bah.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that I decided to pick up Hero in Exile and revise it.

I’ve completely revised my outline (translation: I threw it out wholesale and decided to play it by ear, with a vague idea of the ending instead of a firm plan) and decided to give one of the side characters a viewpoint, since I don’t think the main protagonist has enough of a story to drive the entire novel by himself. Renamed him from “Tristan” to “Cavin,” and I’ll probably change the title as well.

The first chapter is still shaky, but meh, it’s good enough for a first draft. I’ll probably throw it out once I’ve written the ending and start somewhere else.

There are two reasons I decided to pick up this project–three, actually: 1) I enjoy writing in the universe of Bringing Stella Home, and Hero in Exile is where I got most of my setting ideas for that novel; 2) I need practice writing endings, so I didn’t want to leave this as an unfinished project, and; 3) I feel I need a second project to work on when I get exhausted with the first one.

Hopefully, instead of getting tripped up, can recharge my creative batteries for the one while working on the other. At least, that’s the theory; we’ll see how it translates into practice.

CSS magic

Dude! Check out the new header for this blog! Isn’t it the awesomest header image you’ve ever seen?

A few days ago, I got my hands on this cd full of cool arabesque patterns for graphic design. I saved them to my flash drive, figuring I could use them to make a way cool blog header.

Then, earlier tonight, I was chatting with my friend Danke from Quark–she’s the one who helped me with the other header (the font, btw, is from the game Alpha Centauri). She’s a CS major and a whiz with css.

Two hours later…behold!

Danke’s official nickname is now The Sourceress. I’m off to bed–all this magic is addictively tiring, especially at 2am. Once you start down the dark path…

Some site changes

I’ve updated the site a little bit: downloaded the older version of this template, since the newer one has a bug that won’t let me put widgets on the sidebars. It’s back down to one sidebar, but I think that that might simplify things and make it better. I don’t believe in cramming tons of widgets together in haphazard ways, but I would like to have a little more flexibility, so hopefully this will work.

quick question

How do you like the background image for this blog? Does it make the text too hard to read? How was the previous image? I’m looking for some kind of starry background picture that isn’t too overpowering. Do you think that that’s a good idea, or do you think I should come up with a different idea entirely?

Goals for this Blog

Welcome to A Thousand And One Parsecs! This is a blog about my writing projects as an aspiring writer of Science Fiction. At this point, I’m coming out of a lull in my creative writing, but I think that with the start of a new semester at BYU (and my duties as writing VP for Quark, BYU’s Sci Fi / Fantasy club) will break me out of that lull pretty quickly. Besides, it wasn’t much of a lull to begin with. I won a short story contest in the spring, lost one in the summer, and have two short stories that are looking for a place to get published, with a little bit of polishing.

My inspiration for this blog comes from a couple of my friends at Quark, who also have their own blogs about their writing projects. I’ve really enjoyed reading them over the past few weeks and months, and figure that it would be a great way to keep me honest in my writing. Besides, blogging in general is a lot of fun! I have a couple of writing projects, and I hope that this blog will give me a chance to talk about my struggles and get good ideas from everyone who stops long enough to drop a comment or two.

Ever since I knew how to write, I’ve had this urge to sit down and write stories. Even before then, when I was just a little kid, I would constantly make up stories in my head. My writing has always come in stops and spurts, floods and famine. In high school, I started two or three stories and took them all the way out past 100 pages before either getting frustrated or distracted. I have no problems starting a story, but I hardly ever finish them. I was really proud of myself in 2006 for finishing a short story and submitting it to several places to get published. Even though it was rejected everywhere, it was a real first.

Right about now, I’m on the border between being a hobby fiction writer and actually doing something serious about it, but I’m still on the hobby side. Hopefully, though, I can jump to the other side fairly soon. Like most creative people, I am ridiculously busy (I’m taking 18 credits, living in foreign language housing, working a part time job, active with church duties, and taking jujitsu, all in addition to leading the Quark writing group and doing my own personal writing. Oh, and I have three other blogs). However, I know that it’s not an excuse. If I’m ever going to be more than just a hobby fiction writer, I’ll have to start now, since I don’t think I’m ever going to be less busy than I am now.

My goal with this blog is 1) to help me be more engaged in my own writing, 2) to keep my friends updated with my writing, so that they can help me with my goals and struggles, and 3) to start some interesting discussions and share some constructive thoughts about writing with anyone who drops by and stays a while. I’m going to pattern after the blogs of some of my other friends in Quark, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m used to blogging anonymously, but I’ll open up a little bit more here with how things are going in my personal life–at least, those parts that impact my writing. I won’t try to popularize this blog or get it listed all over the internet, but I will try to share some thoughts that are worth reading, rather than ranting about myself all the time. We’ll see how it goes.

So, that’s what I want to do with this blog. Thanks for stopping by, and please, drop a comment or two anytime and let me know what you think!