College Life – Page 5 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

I am SO ready to wash the dust of this semester from my feet

Ugh. I feel like this has been my worst semester yet. Not in terms of grades, or in terms of social life, or even in terms of workload, but just…in terms of my classes. Classes, and just school in general.

Here’s what I’ve figured out. My best, most enjoyable classes are the ones that really push me, and the most miserable classes are ALWAYS the ones that are too easy. If it doesn’t help me to learn and grow, if it doesn’t change my perspective, if it doesn’t open new doors of knowledge to me, I hate it. All the rote things that we do for grades–tests, papers, homework, attendance quizzes, extra credit assignments, all that stuff–if it’s all for the grade’s sake, I just go crazy. I can’t stand it. And if it’s all about memorizing data and spitting it back like a machine, I feel like I’m going to lose it.

Well, that’s the way I’ve basically felt all semester. To make it worse, all of my classes overlapped to the point where it started to feel like I was listening to exactly the same lecture over and over again. When that happens, what little there is about the subject that is interesting just seems to dissipate.

I can work really hard when I have the motivation. When I’m doing something that I love, I can really accomplish some amazing things. But when I don’t have the motivation…it’s almost impossible to bring myself to sit down and do it.

That’s basically been the story of this semester: trudging through day after day of work, pushing myself to do things that I didn’t really want to do. I suppose I did a good job of it…but it was very draining. It took almost as much work just to force myself to sit down and focus as it did to actually do the work. As a result, even though the workload wasn’t particularly hard or particularly exhausting, I never felt that I had the time to do what I wanted to do.

I suppose it would be immature to say “I’m not going to do what I don’t want to do,” but at the same time, life is too short not to get out and have fun. If you’re doing what you love, you can have fun and work hard at the same time. Like this Earth, I don’t have an inexhaustible supply of energy. I need to find and develop renewable resources–the things I love to do, the things that engage my imagination and passions and really energize me–and build my life on those. I wouldn’t even care living poor, so long as all my needs were supplied. I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and utterly burned out.

Interestingly enough, because of this crappy semester, I am more motivated than ever to break into publishing and get paid full time for writing novels. My plans haven’t changed yet, but now I want, more than ever, to actually make a living doing this stuff. Most of my inhibitions now are gone, it’s just…well, that first step. It’s pretty hard, and I don’t want to build up my expectations too much only to find myself out of school, without a job, and without money to pay the rent. Especially not in this recession.

But I do want to become a full time writer now–at least, more than before. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but if I’ve dedicated this much of my life to it, why shouldn’t I shoot for it? I don’t know. We’ll see.

…

This week has been rough. Last day of classes is tomorrow (today), next week is finals.

I’m going to take as many finals as possible on Monday, just to get them over with. Scholastically, it has been a somewhat disappointing semester, though I don’t think my grades have suffered much. I just want it to be over.

As a result, I’m not writing much. Or blogging much. Or sleeping much. But I will be back soon.

Section one complete

Yes! I finished section 1 of my novel Hero in Exile today (the rough draft, at least). The main character, Tristen, just had everything he thought he knew pulled right out from under him, and now he’s on his way “home” to a world he knows nothing about. New characters, new problems, change of scenery, and fresh new cultures and peoples to explore. One potential love interest down, another one about to come out of nowhere. Space barbarians and pirates threaten, and down on his mother’s homeworld, a religiously motivated genocide is about to begin. How incredibly exciting.

The really cool thing was that I read over all the stuff I’ve written in the past month that was really frustrating me. All of the edgy stuff that I was afraid I wasn’t pulling off right, and all of the twisted romantic climaxes that I was sure I’d done wrong. I resisted the urge to revise them, and when I was through reading them, I realized that there’s really something there. I could make this work. I might not be able to do it by the rewrite, but there is something compelling in there.

I’m also very happy with the overall structure of this section. It has a clear start, middle, and end, and all the major elements are clearly connected. Themes and events weave in and out of each other and affect the characters’ choices. It all leads up to a gloriously twisted climax that fulfills the promises of the structure while leaving the reader unfulfilled and wanting to read on.

At least, that’s how I see it now. Maybe I’m too close to the story to be a fair judge of its overall structure. In fact, I almost certainly am. Even if it hasn’t taken this structure on the page, however, it has taken structure in my mind. That is something.

When I started writing this novel, I only had a vague idea where I wanted to go. In fact, in the freewrite plot overview that I spat out back in Jordan, half of the events in this section didn’t happen, and the rest happened out of order. Prewriting was helpful, but ultimately the story took shape in my mind as I wrote it out. That everything eventually ended up tying back to the previous elements (at least in my mind) is very, very encouraging.

So, in short, I can say that this vacation was very much a success. I got through some of the most difficult parts in my novel, got over some severe obstacles holding me back, pushed BOTH of the wordcount meters deep into the red, rebuilt my enthusiasm of the story, and finished at exactly the spot where I wanted to end. I’m finally starting to get things right.

🙂

Unstuck

Happy Thanksgiving! Holy cow, I ate a lot. Had dinner with the McQueens, my sister’s husband’s grandparents, and all the inlaws. My sister-in-law can cook a mean chocolate pie. Holy cow. Delicious.

So, when I wasn’t eating or groggily digesting over at my in-laws’ house, I was writing. It was pretty tough, to be honest. Even though yesterday I got through the climax of the chapter that was hanging me up, I still felt really stuck today. It took me more time than I’d expected to finish the chapter, and I didn’t know how to start the next one.

I was really frustrated the whole day. There was nothing to do, and nowhere really to go. I took a break and walked down to campus in the middle of the afternoon, but it was dreary outside and all the buildings were closed. There was barely a car on the road, and even though it was good to get out and go for a walk, I didn’t come back with any good ideas for how to start things out.

To be honest, I contemplated putting this project on the back burner and working on something else for the next two months. My novel Genesis Earth is halfway done, and I could probably finish it by the end of January if I put this other novel away and focused all my energy on it. I’ve recently gotten excited about that story again.

But that would be an admission of defeat. I didn’t know if I needed to do that yet. I do have a lot of really good ideas for Hero in Exile–the trouble is, they all take place about a hundred pages from where I am right now! I should probably write them down before I finally get there and realize that I’ve forgotten them all.

I figured that things are hard just because I’ve been so distant from the story these past few weeks. I decided I needed to start the chapter out with some action–or, if not action, at least with some dramatic momentum–and figured the best way to do that was to have my two main characters kiss in the first scene. I was going to do that somewhere in the chapter, but I figured it would be better to start things out with it rather than gradually build up. After all, that’s not the climax–the climax is much more twisted and painful than that.

But then, before I could start, I had to figure out just how, exactly, these two characters would end up in that kind of a situation. I mean, it was hard for me to work through their motivations in my mind. I’ve been building up the tension for the last few chapters, but it all felt so distant, and it was hard to remember exactly how these characters are supposed to be feeling.

It was really frustrating. I had this kissing scene all figured out in my mind a few weeks ago, but I’d forgotten it all. As I kept mulling through my characters’ motivations, I got more and more frustrated. After all, things have changed so much from my original idea. Are these even the right characters to pull my story through to the end?

I started wondering if I’d made a mistake by starting the story when I did–whether all my ideas had truly come together to the point where they were ready to begin. Back about a month before I started, I thought I was ready–but now? I don’t know. It’s very frustrating and discouraging.

After all, maybe I bit off too much with this novel. My first novel, The Phoenix of Nova Terra, was more of a straight up adventure story. There were some deeper ideas and ethical dilemmas in it, but I felt like I had to slog through those parts. They didn’t work out as good as I’d hoped–the main focus was the adventure, the suspense. With Hero in Exile, I want to focus a lot more on deeper questions–like, what is honor? What is heroism? How do you keep your honor in a dishonorable world? Do you have to prove your heroism through some grand, daring act, or does true heroism manifest itself in other ways? These were some of my original questions, but now…I don’t know how it’s turning out.

As a side, note, that’s where I was going with my question a few weeks ago about depicting immorality as immoral without watering it down–how do you get your characters to deal with these challenging issues without driving away readers? It’s tough, and my main frustration has been that the scenes just don’t seem to be well executed–I’m afraid that they fall flat. I could be wrong, I could be overexaggerating, I could be trying to write a perfect first draft, and I could be doing all three of these at the same time, but it’s been really frustrating.

Oh well. At least I know I’m pushing myself.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I guess you could say that I had something like it today. I knew where I wanted to go, and I knew what I wanted to happen, I just didn’t know how to get there. So then, after checking email and facebook some twenty million times, I opened up my outline and decided to work on that. Ten minutes later, I remembered how I’d envisioned this scene, and I set down and finally started the next chapter.

Romance is kind of hard for me to write, not only because of my lack of experience, but because it’s hard not to fall into cliches when you’re describing things. Because of that, it took me a few hours to slog through the end of the opening scene–but I did it! And now, I’m excited about this story again! I know where we are, what we’re doing, and exactly where we’re going over the next few scenes. It’s great! I’m FINALLY unstuck!

So now, I just have to keep up at a good pace before I forget everything again. Shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of this vacation, but the next two weeks are going to be a tough sprint to the end of the semester. Still, it won’t be impossible. And after, I’ve got more than two weeks of winter break–with the netbook I went ahead and ordered a couple of days ago! Hooray! I can hardly wait!

Lord of the Rings marathon

Yeah! My last class this week ended at 3:00 on Monday, so I decided to borrow the Lord of the Rings movies from my brother-in-law and throw a marathon! Instead of watching them all in one day (which would probably have been really disgusting), we watched one each night, Monday thru Wednesday.

It was way fun! It’s been so long since I’ve immersed myself in this epic fantasy world. So classic! I can see how so many different fantasy stories have spun off of the genius of this man. And the films–they’re different from the books, in some ways, but still AMAZINGLY good. Especially the battle scenes!

So after finishing Return of the King tonight, here are some of my thoughts:

I wonder if it’s a requirement of epic fantasy to have some dark evil overlord as the main antagonist? Is it possible to have a world where evil exists, but it can’t be nailed down to just one person? For some reason, I can’t think of a fantasy series whose villain isn’t entirely evil. What if nobody is entirely evil, but the fact that they just can’t get along is the evil? Sci fi tends to blur the lines a lot more like that–why not fantasy?

Regardless of that, every fantasy needs epic battle scenes. There were so many awesome battles in Lord of the Rings–Helm’s Deep, the fields of Pellenor, various battles for Osgiliath, the battle at the gates of Mordor, etc etc. It made me think back to the battles in Mistborn, or the battles in the Chronicles of Prydain, or even the Chronicles of Narnia. Heck, you can even trace it all the way back to the Iliad. Every good fantasy needs some epic battles–not just the fighting and all that, but the before and after: the rallying of the troops, the “we must save our homeland” and “save the women and children,” and afterwards the mourning for the dead, various rites of burial, etc.

Man, all this Lord of the Rings goodness is making me want to write a fantasy story! That will probably wait until after November of next year, but I can start dreaming it up and figuring it out right now.

I’m still here…

I know I haven’t written much on this blog in recent days, but I’m still here, and still writing. I’m in a little bit of a slump, with some doubts about this story and whether I’m pulling off what I’m attempting to do…more on that in another post.

Tomorrow is the only day of school I have all week! Hooray! I still have to do my Arabic homework, but meh–it’s not too hard. I’m really REALLY looking forward to this break.

Also, I’m thinking about getting a laptop. Not a big clunky one, like my last one–I have a desktop, and that one suits most of my needs for the time being. Really, I just need something small and ultra-portable for my writing and internet usage. After chatting with some of my friends and looking around, I think I’ve found one–an eee pc that seems to do everything I want it to do for a mere $350 or so.

The only thing that worries me is that the keyboard will be too small for me to get used to. For that reason, I’m going to check it out at one of the local computer retailers here before I buy it. One of my friends from the Jordan study abroad had one, and he said that it was not very good for typing. I don’t know…for $350 and such a conveniently small size, I might be able to get used to it. Maybe.

playing catchup

Holy cow! I feel like I haven’t been blogging or writing hardly at all in the past week. Last year, I was so enthusiastic about the writing–and I still am, it’s just that school has freaking blindsided me. I had a 10 page history paper to write for today, and it threw off my schedule big time.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving break is almost upon us, and that means FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, you’d better believe it! I’ll be here in Utah for the break, probably having Thanksgiving dinner with my sisters and their husbands’ families. In the meantime, though…FREEDOM!!!!!!! Ah, how sweet! I am so looking forward to it!

So, to help me catch up with the writing, here’s what I plan to do, starting tomorrow. Every day, I’ll wake up early (I hate sleeping in anyways) and start off the day with some writing.

If I can get in just 500 words each morning, that will be awesome. I always put off writing until the end of the day, after I’m already tired from running around juggling fifty different things at once. By that time, I don’t want to write–I want to veg out on a computer game. As a result, it’s been hard to keep a schedule–something I absolutely must do if I’m going to be anything more than a hobby writer.

If I start each day with writing, that will help me in a couple of ways. Not only will I tackle the day’s wordcount before I’m too tired to do anything except rot in my unproductive disgustingness, but I’ll be thinking about the story a lot more throughout the day. That will help me to keep the story moving.

Right now, I feel like I’m still in the first third of the story, not even halfway through with the thing. I really, really want to finish this before the end of January–if I don’t do that, it’s going to be really difficult to have three polished novels by World Fantasy 2009. So, that means that before the end of the month, I need to get Tristen off of the planet and into the Mormons-in-space society that I have envisioned.

Except, I really don’t have it envisioned yet–nothing concrete, anyways. Augh! So much to do!

So this whole break, I’m going to try and hit 4,000 words every day. If I can’t do that, at least I can do 2,000. And before school starts again, I want Tristen to be off of this planet and into the next section of the book.

Oh, and I’m going to blog more. There’s so much that I want to discuss here that I just haven’t been able to post for lack of time (as well as general disorganization and disgusting unproductiveness). So, more updates during the break.

I’m playing catchup. Let’s hope that the vacation is awesomely productive as well as refreshingly liberating.

I’m being responsible (for once)

I’ve got this history paper due on Thursday. It’s the big research paper for the semester, and it counts for a large portion of the final grade. Because the deadline is coming up, it’s really pressing on my mind right now.

Earlier in the semester, we had smaller assignments related to the paper–for example, we had to get our preliminary bibliography together, write a preliminary outline, etc. I…pretty much did the bare minimum on all of those. Yeah. Didn’t do so well.

So for this final paper, I decided to finish it early, so that I could bring it in to the FHSS Writing Lab where I work and have one of my coworkers help me with it. That means, of course, that I can’t wait until the night it’s due to write it (which is pretty much how I’ve done every other paper of my college career). I need to be responsible and get it done early.

I woke up today thinking “crap, I’ve got a paper I’ve got to write.” I decided that I’d sit down and write the whole d*** thing today after dinner. I had the urge to play Genghis Khan II, but I resisted it and went to the library. I worked really hard–I only spent about 25% to 35% of my time there chatting with friends and engaging in avoidance activity. It was tough.

I started out hating the paper, but once I had a thesis and an outline, I started to really get into it. History is kind of like storytelling, and I like storytelling. When I figured out how to insert footnotes on Word 2007, I started to get the urge to just insert a ton of them everywhere because it’s so cool. Gamila was chatting with me, and when she mentioned something from her Latin class, I said “hey, you could be the Franks and I could be the Saracens–after all, Saladin’s given name was Yusuf!” (my paper is on the crusades–can you tell?)

The coolest thing was that when I came back to the apartment, I just felt so FREEEEEEEE! I mean, yeah, the paper is still due on Thursday, and yeah, there is still a ton of work that I have to do for it, but it’s half done, and the rest is easy! I’m even starting to really enjoy this subject. I can’t wait to tell the story of Reynauld de Chatillon and all the things he did to piss off Saladin! That guy was so smug, sitting in his castle in Kerak. He even defied the orders of the king in Jerusalem to break the truce between the Franks and the Saracens! If it wasn’t for that, perhaps the Battle of Hattin would never have happened–perhaps the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have survived. Who knows?

So, yeah, I was responsible tonight…and dangit! It’s 1:45 am and I haven’t written at all for today! I would crank out a couple hundred words before going to bed, but I’ve got to get up at freaking 7am…holy cow, it’s going to kill me.

But yeah, I’m just really happy to have that burden at least partially lifted from me. Being responsible can have its perks–I should try it more often.

The week is OVER!!!

I am so happy. Yeah, I’ve got a current events paper I’ve got to write for MESA 201…but I can do that in like twenty minutes. Especially since the paper itself is not due, just the stuff that has to be peer critiqued. And really MESA 201 is like a flashback to high school, so it’s really not that hard.

As for Arabic homework…I’m trying hard not to think about it…was trying…dangit!

This is the main issue I had with this past week. Every time I thought I was free, some assignment or deadline that I’d forgotten would pop up and smack me across the head. Today, it was the Poli Sci 201 midterm (take home, open book). There was no other time except today (when it was due) that I could take it, so I ended up clocking out at work and doing it then. Freaking test probably cost me $30 to $40.

But this blog isn’t supposed to be about my frustrations with school, it’s supposed to be about my frustrations with writing. And other life stuff. So I’ll write about something else.

I’ve started to think about what I want to do after I get my bachelor’s degree(s?). Which is to say, I’m completely clueless at this point, but I’m trying to get a feel for my options. Yesterday there was an information session for the Masters of Public Policy program at BYU, and it looks interesting. I would like to go to grad school, and it looks like this program would take me in a direction I’d be interested in following.

Basically, the program prepares you to work as a policy/research analyst, which seems like an interesting skill set I could take to a non-profit / NGO / lobby group / think tank, which is a career path (or set of paths) that I find intriguing. I’ll bet I could find some real satisfaction putting my mind to work for a social cause that I really believe in.

But is this really what I want to do with my life? Do I want to spend 90% of my time working behind a computer at a desk, crunching statistics? And what about Arabic? How would I be able to use that? These are questions that need answering.

As for writing, the plan at this point is to do it on the side if/until it becomes lucrative enough for me to support myself and my family. In other words, for the next five-ten-fifteen years / forever, I’m going to be a mild-mannered man in a conventional (at least partially) career by day, and a super-power world-saving writer by night. Writing, at this point, is a given, a constant–I know what I’m doing as far as my writing career. I just don’t know if/when I’m going to make it my primary, so I have to make other plans like grad school / career path / whatever.

I guess that’s one thing I find reassuring about all of this: writing leaves me a means of escape from being pegged down in a boring career for the rest of my life. And my pursuit of a career feeds my writing by giving me new and exciting ideas and perspectives to bring into my writing. I’m glad I’m not studying English.

And…that’s about it for tonight. Holy cow I’m tired!

A slow spot

This last week has been somewhat frustrating. Started it off well, with good progress in my story, but early on in the week, all kinds of assignments started piling onto me–stuff that I should have seen coming, but have been putting off ’til the last minute (as usual). It didn’t help that I just discovered Genghis Khan II, a really awesome old DOS game. :p

So, between juggling homework, struggling not to get addicted to this new game, and dealing with exhaustion in general, it’s been a pretty slow week.

The upside, though, is that I’ve had lots of time to think about the universe of Hero in Exile. I’ve got some REALLY awesome ideas for the world, stuff that’s inspired by Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and the rise of the Mongol Empire. History 240 is one of my favorite classes this semester–it gives me so many good story ideas!

As a result, I can hardly wait to get to the really good parts of my novel. I just wish I didn’t have so much school to worry about. Grr…

There is a lot that I want to blog about, but I need to get my sleep tonight. Take home test due tomorrow for PLSC 201, and I want to get it finished before work at 10 am (yeah right…).