Tag: BIC HOC

Snowmageddon! Hooray!

So for the past week, a series of crazy snowstorms has been pelting the Mid-Atlantic.  President Obama has dubbed it “snowmageddon,” and it’s so bad that all federal government offices have been closed since Friday.  With another storm hitting us tonight, it looks like we’re going to have the whole week off! Yay!!!

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been hanging out around the Barlow Center, watching movies, doing random stuff with my friends here in the program, taking naps in the middle of the day, and writing.  Lots of writing!  It’s awesome–I haven’t had this much free time since Christmas (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…)!

Today I didn’t write quite as much.  I got in about 1.1k words, a decent amount, but if I’d pushed myself I could have finished the current chapter.  Monday went much better, because I sat down and forced myself to write in the morning.  Once those initial hundred or so words were out, the rest came much easier.

On the first day of snowmageddon, when we were snowed in at Valley Forge, I got in over 1,000 words before noon.  It was rough going, though–nothing was flowing, and everything took a lot of effort.  I hate it when that happens–blegh.

But I think it was necessary, because now, the scenes are flying by pretty easy.  Sometimes, when I’m struggling with momentum, I find it helps if I take a day to focus and push myself through it.  Get rid of all distractions, put my butt in the chair, close all internet browsers, and just write, no matter how difficult.

My next novel, To Search the Starry Sea, is going to be a lot of fun.  It starts out almost exactly like Homer’s Odyssey, with the same basic conflict and setup.  Beyond that, however, I have nothing solid planned–I’m just following where the story takes me.  And boy, is it taking me to some crazy places!

For example, one of the first places Katriona (the Telemachus character) goes is a nearby world, ruled by a friend of her father’s.  To liven things up, I decided to have him live on a giant rotating space station, where the inside is covered by forests and jungles–scenery that Katriona has never seen.

This got me wondering, however: how did the jungle get there?  The answer: thousands of years ago, before superluminal space travel, a group of colonists set out for this world, freezing themselves in cryo.  When they got there, they found that a solar flare-up had rendered the planet uninhabitable, so instead they built this massive station, hoping that it would serve as a second ark for humanity.

Instead, a raiding party of space barbarians took them over, enslaved the colonists, and built their palace in the midst of the carefully maintained artificial biosphere.

This opened up a series of new possibilities for subplots, which shapes my protagonists interactions with the people here, which points her in new directions for the main plot–the next few places that she’s going to go.

This is discovery writing at its best.  Even though I have no clue where she’s going to go next, things are unfolding very nicely, and I’m excited to find out!

Breaking 90k and other mundane excitements

(I almost always have trouble figuring out titles for these blogs posts.  I mean, my writing life isn’t all that exciting–I just write.  Check out my study abroad blog from last year for true (if old) excitement).

I broke 90k words in Bringing Stella Home today.  According to my goal of 120k, that’s the 3/4 mark.  Yay!  I’m happy to say I’m going strong, and will probably “finish” this thing in a couple of weeks.

I say “finish” because it needs a LOT of work.  Oh yeah.  Not even ready for the alpha readers yet.

But I’m excited for the story.  Dave Wolverton at CONduit this past weekend suggested full and complete immersion as a way to write well.  I think that applies here: without school or a job, I basically write all day.

Speaking of which, I haven’t quite gotten up to doing 4k words steadily each day.  Right now, I’m hovering at around 3k, which is twice as much as my daily wordcount during the school year, but not yet up to where I want it to be.

However, getting up to that level is like training your muscles.  Through a number of small, intangible things, I feel that I’m working myself up to the 4k/day level.  

For example, I’ve been opening my word document and plugging out the first few hundred words BEFORE I open a web browser and waste an hour of time checking out my favorite blogs and websites.  That’s progress.

I’ve also started writing more in the time that I set aside to write.  These days, I usually write for a couple hours from 11pm to 2pm, take lunch and do something to recharge my creative batteries, do some more writing in the midafternoon (usually not too much), then take dinner, head out to the library (because the parking gate opens at 7pm) and write until about 11:30pm when the LRC closes.

In each of those three blocks of time, I used to be getting around 800 to 1,200 words done.  Today, from 11am to 1pm I wrote about 1,500.  Progress.

The bar says that I only did about 2,9k today, but that was because a good friend of mine is going active duty in the Air Force and his farewell party was tonight.  Also, Leading Edge took up the 7pm to 9pm slot.  So, without those things, it probably would have been 4k.

However, I’ve noticed something interesting: doing the math, 4k/day equates to just over 120k per month.  120k is a freaking novel!  Taking out Sundays, that’s still over 100k, which is also an acceptable novel length.  

So…if I were really doing 4k/day, would I be writing a rough draft of a novel each month?  Or are most published writers doing less than 4k words of new material each day?  I wouldn’t be surprised–this is not a business you get into because of your glowing math skills.

Regardless, 4k/day is still my goal.  Heck, if I get used to writing that much and find that the practice improve my craft, I might even go up to 6k/day.

Oh, and one more mundane excitement: Charlie got freaked out by a spider today and had me come over to hunt it down.  After sprawling out on her bathroom floor and looking under all the appliances, I didn’t find it–but I did find the hole that it probably escaped through.  I didn’t think it was much of a deal, until I read this post from Miss Snark’s archives.  So…I may start making it a practice to shake out my shoes from now on, especially since my room in my sister’s apartment is slightly buggy.

Fortunately, I usually wear my old pair of Birkenstocks these days.  Awesome footwear.  I quite literally love them to pieces.

4k a day

It’s late, but I really need to write something of my recent thoughts on this blog, so this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness word-vomit sort of post.  But please keep reading, it probably won’t be uninteresting.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog recently, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing recently–specifically, the practicalities of trying to make this my career, getting serious about it, etc.  

In fact, for the past three weeks, it’s been just about the only thing on my mind.  I’ve been listening and re-listening to just about every episode of writing excuses, the LTUE mp3s that I recorded, the old English 318 mp3s from last year, and various other talks and speeches on the subject of writing as a career.

I don’t have the time to really explain all my thoughts on the subject, but to sum it up, I’ve been angsting over it quite a bit.  Will I be able to break into publishing in the relatively near future, or does my writing need years and years more work?  Am I making a mistake to spend my summer just working on my writing?  Am I making a mistake to be pursuing this so vigorously as my primary career path? and a whole lot of irrational angsting besides all that.  You get the picture.

Well, I’ve gotten sick of doing all this thinking and now I think it’s time to just do it.  I heard back last week from the agency in New York–turns out they already have someone, so I won’t be going there for the internship–but that’s actually alright, because it means I can take the summer to really focus on improving my writing.

Of course, if I’m not doing anything else, I need to be treating this like my full time career.  The standard thing I keep hearing, at least from the professionals in the local scene, is that the average per-day wordcount is 4k.  Depending on deadlines and other projects, that may increase, but the average daily wordcount is 4k.  Since I plan on making writing my focus this summer, that’s my goal: 4k a day.

Last week, my wordcount was above 10k, but that’s actually a bit misleading.  I wasn’t writing 10k words of new material each day, I was doing a quick mid-draft revision to add in a few crucial characters and scenes that I didn’t know I needed until I got midway through the book.  It wasn’t even much of a revision;  when I saw places where my writing really needed work, I made a note for later and kept on skimming.  I only stopped to rewrite the sections that needed major changes in order to set things up correctly for later.

As a result, I feel that I’ve lost a degree of momentum.  Now that I’m through all the old stuff, I’m writing entirely new material, and it’s very hard.  I’ve only been skimming the last few chapters and scenes; as a result, when I picked things up this morning, I had difficulty getting into the story again.

I did 3,248 words today–that’s 3.2k words of new material–and by the end, I felt like the momentum was building and I was  starting to get back into the story.  A couple of weeks ago, when I was still angsting uselessly over the whole writing career thing, I kept feeling like this novel I’m writing is just crap.  Now, however, I’m starting to see my faith in it return.

Writing is like that sometimes: the further you are from your story, the worse it seems, while the more you get into the story, the more faith you’re able to have in it.  If you don’t have faith in the story you’re trying to tell, you just won’t be able to write it.

I could say more about what I’ve learned from my experience these past few weeks, but this post is getting long.  To sum it up, that’s my new goal for this summer: 4k a day, as if I’m doing this full time.  

At that rate, I’ll probably finish this novel sometime before the BYU writer’s conference (which I will be attending, at least the afternoon sessions–just registered yesterday).  The personal deadline I set was June 15th, after the conference, but I think I can get it in early.

Okay, enough word vomiting.  Time to get some sleep.

Slow but steady

Okay, quick post before I go to bed.

Things are progressing in this novel, slowly but surely, as you can see from the wordcount.  Unlike past weeks, I’m not pushing myself too hard, mostly because I’ve got a lot of schoolwork right now and if I were to spend much more time on this novel, I would neglect a lot of the more important stuff.  Even though my course load is relatively light this semester, I’m a senior and I’m really not as motivated to do this stuff as I used to be.  I get done what needs to get done, but just barely.

I have been successfully getting up early, however.  And I’ve discovered something very interesting: I’m more productive when I have less free time.  Thursday, I didn’t have class until noon, so when I got on the computer at about 6:30 to write, I opened up the email, opened up facebook…and, by the time I had to leave for class, I had only written about 430 words.  Disgusting.  But today, when I had class at 9:00 am and still had my Arabic homework to do, I got in about 700 words in half an hour.

I still have a lot of self discipline to learn, I guess. 😛  The scary thing is that my idea, up to this point, has been to keep my time open in the summer so that I’ll be able to write.  Err…yeah.  We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments back from my alpha readers on Genesis Earth, and it’s been REALLY fun!  Even the criticism–as long as it’s helpful criticism, I really appreciate it.  This one girl in my ward asked me if she could be an alpha reader, then read the whole thing in only a couple of days.  She had a LOT of positive comments–in fact, almost all of her comments were positive–and she said she really loved it!  So much so, in fact, that she said she was having withdrawals, so I sent her The Phoenix of Nova Terra v1.2.  Hopefully, getting her comments back will give me motivation to pick up that old thing and rework it…goodness knows it needs it.  Needs it bad.

My first two novels, The Phoenix of Nova Terra and Genesis Earth are completely different in some ways, but very similar in others.

<spoiler alert>

They both have an important romantic element, and they both have generally positive endings.  The book I’m writing now is something of a tragedy, at least at it’s core, and there is a completely different dynamic there.  No love stories, no happy resolutions–lots of pain, lots of violence, lots of grappling with difficult issues.

</spoiler alert>

I suppose it’s good to try out a lot of different things early on in your writing career.  That’s what I’m doing.  At the same time, though…I get feedback on the one novel, and I kind of want to work on it instead of the one right in front of me!  And when I think about what I did right in the one I finished, I look at the one I’m currently writing and I think “man, this is crap.” Of course, I keep working on it because I recognize that I ALWAYS think “man, this is crap” at some point before I’m done.  Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, however.

Jason from the FLSR writing group said something interesting about that, however.  He said that writing a draft of a novel is like climbing a mountain: you do it three times.

The first time, you climb it in your mind as you plan it out.  You’re excited and motivated, and busy with all the preparations.

The second time, you actually physically do the work of climbing.  It is long, hard, and frustrating, you get lost a few times, the summit is anticlimactic, and the return is boring.  You can’t wait until you’ve finished and it’s all over.

The third time is when you look back on the experience after you’re safely back down.  No matter how excruciating the climb was, you look back on it fondly and remember all the best parts.  You thrive on the memories and wish that you were back up there, standing on the summit, enjoying the experience.

Right now, I’m on my third climb for Genesis Earth and my second climb for Bringing Estella Home. I can remember how miserable I was when I was still in the middle of Genesis Earth–for a while I seriously thought about throwing the whole thing out and doing something else.  However, now that I’ve been letting it sit for a while, I’m getting really, really excited about it!  I can hardly wait before I can get back and write the second draft.

But that’s not going to happen until I finish Bringing Estella Home.  And, no matter how difficult it gets, I swear I WILL finish this book!  I’m a chapter away from act III, and that’s too deep into the thing to quit and start something else!  This book WILL be finished–if not by April, then by sometime in May!

Slugging it out and summer plans

Ok, last week I wrote almost nothing on this blog, and last night I wrote a quick post before going to bed that didn’t really explain much.  I just got done reading one of Dave Farland’s kick-in-the-pants series of email newsletters and it said, basically, to post every day if you have a blog (unless it cuts into your writing time).  Sounds like a good plan: more, shorter posts instead of fewer, longer posts.  Here goes.

Last week was pretty crazy.  I got everything done by the time it needed to be done…barely…but it was so disorganized and upside down that it really grated on me.  It was one of those weeks where, when Saturday rolls around, you look at the calendar and think “where did all that time go?”

I tried to write every day, in the morning, but it didn’t work out.  At all.  I allowed myself to get distracted, and by the time I was ready to sit down and write, it was time to go to class.  After a couple of days of that, I just stopped getting up altogether.

I wanted to get through the last two chapters of Bringing Estella Home by yesterday, but that TOTALLY didn’t happen.  I’m still in the middle of chapter 9, not even to the major climactic battle that ends the second part.  Bah.  As a result, I’m starting to have doubts that I’m going to actually finish this novel by April.

HOWEVER, on a more positive (and a completely different note), I actually have an idea of what I’m going to do this summer.  I don’t know when or how exactly it hit me, but I have something of an idea, and it’s starting to really grow on me.

Here’s the plan: I spend the spring term here in Provo, retaking a handful of freshman level classes in order to boost my GPA (I got a C- in beginning piano, and a B- in Geo 120…yeah, those could be raised a little).  That’ll give me plenty of time to work on my writing and the opportunity to attend a couple of interesting looking writing conferences out here in Utah, such as BYU Writers for Young Readers and CONduit.

After the spring, I’ll head back East (haha!  ‘back East’!  I’ve been transformed into a Utahan!), spend a couple of days at home, take a train down to New York City and live for a month or two with my old roommate Steve Dethloff, who’s moving to NYC after he graduates.  I’ll try to get a job, possibly doing something writing/editing related, or maybe make some contacts in the publishing world.  Or not.  We’ll see how it goes.  But either way, I’ll have enough time to work on my writing.

Also, if I’m back East in August, I’ll be in a good position to attend Worldcon 2009 in Montreal.  I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to go, but it’s only 4-5 hours from my home.  I could borrow my parents’ car and drive up.  Then, later in August, we’re going to have our family vacation out on Cape Cod, so if I’m back East for summer, I’d definitely be in a good position for that.

Wherever I go, I’ll try to find work, but even if I don’t, I still have enough money left over from the Pell grant that these plans are still viable.  I’m certain I can find work down here in Provo, but I’m not that certain about New York.  Still, if I’m down there for only a month or two, it shouldn’t be too hard.  If I sublet out from Steve, rent should only be about $250-$300 per month.

Trouble is, there isn’t any awesome trip to the Middle East involved in these plans. :'( That’s sad.  But still, if I want to focus on my writing to get ready for World Fantasy and (potentially) Worldcon, it’s probably a better idea to stay in the country.  Going abroad would mean making a lot of difficult cultural and linguistic adjustments, and I’m worried that that would make it difficult to write.  I know that last time I went to Jordan, I didn’t hardly write at all (except in my blog, of course).

So, until I come up with a better plan, that’s what it looks like I’m doing for now.  We’ll see if things change.  And as for my novel, this week I’m totally going to do better.  I got up at 7am this morning and got in a good hour of writing before school.  Momentum is definitely building up again.

Experiment, take two

Ok…the experiment I wrote about last week…yeah, it failed.  Miserably.  Got almost no writing done, and I wasn’t able to get up early hardly ever.

However, I’m going to try it again.  Part of the problem was that I always ended up staying up late, past 1am, even when I intended to get up early, and that just killed me.  Also, whenever I did get up early, I always allowed myself to get distracted by other important things, such as email, homework, etc.  The predictable result?  No productivity.

There were other problems too, however.  It’s the middle of the semester, so the weeks are starting to race by like so much rushing water.  I’m not the only one who feels like the last week was sucked out of my life without my realizing it.  Also, before I started the week, I lost a lot of writing momentum by missing a few of my daily wordcount goals.  I would write 2,000 to 3,000 words one day, the next day, nothing.  Lost momentum can be really crippling.

When you write late at night, you tend to go through this routine of distracting yourself, checking your email, playing a game here and there, chatting with friends, etc, before you finally settle down to start writing.  This is my current routine.  I need to get to the point where I’m able to sit down, open the document, and get started.  Or, if I can’t get to that point, I at least want to minimize the distraction time.

So, this week, I’m trying it again.  I’ll try to get up early, 6am if I can, and get in at least a half hour of writing each day.  We’ll see how it goes.