deadlines – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Sorry, no Trope Tuesday (again)

Yeah, sorry, no Trope Tuesday this week. Third week missed in a row! Not so good. Thing is, I’m really focused on finishing Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII) right now, with a self-imposed deadline of May 31st. I figure that’s more important, and I really don’t want to break my momentum.

I’ve been vacillating a lot about this project. Sometimes, I think it’s halfway decent, perhaps even good. Other times, I wonder how the @#$! I came to be trapped in this story and why I’m wasting the best years of my life writing this crap. The other Star Wanderers stories are selling decently well, but this one is so shite that it’s bound to kill the series and why am I writing this why why WHY???

And then I get the chains back on my inner editor and drag him down to the dungeon, where I keep him on a strict diet of bread crusts and rotten cheese. No wonder he hates me.

I know those trope posts are a popular feature around here, so I’ll get back on top of them once this project is finished (which WILL be this week! It WILL!!) In the meantime, if you’re looking for a trope fix, you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s latest Feminist Frequency video. She does an awesome job deconstructing feminist video game tropes, in a much more meticulous and thoughtful manner than I have ever achieved here:

Part of me wants her to take my own stories and analyze them for feminist tropes. The other part shudders in abject horror at what she might possibly find.

Whoops, looks like the inner editor just got loose again. Better go hang out on the KBoards until I’ve got him back in the dungeon.

Later!

Summer recap and new goals

So back in June I made a to do list of things I wanted to accomplish this summer. I’ve only got a week left before I go overseas again, and I’m happy to say I’m on track to finish most of them. A couple of them (such as doing a blog tour and submitting aggressively to book bloggers) I decided weren’t worth my time, and dropped them, but these are the major things I’ve accomplished:

Release print-on-demand editions of Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars through CreateSpace.
Redo cover art for Bringing Stella Home.
Redo blurb/description for all titles.
Put proper copyright page in all titles.
Publish all titles on Kobo Writing Life.
Find a better way to build an ebook and reformat all titles.
Finish the second draft of Stars of Blood and Glory.
Finish and publish parts I and II of Star Wanderers.

The only major thing I haven’t accomplished is figuring out how to sell ebooks directly from my website. I figure I can set that up later, though, when I’ve got a large enough readership to justify it. If it’s all online, I can probably do it from anywhere.

While I was vacationing with my family on Cape Cod, I had a chance to step back and take a long look at what I’m doing with my life, which helped me to set some new goals and get a renewed sense of direction. I stopped tracking my daily writing word counts in July, which threw off my productivity a lot more than I thought it would. After setting some long-term goals, though, I think I can find a better way to structure my writing.

In ten years (2022), I want to…

have 25+ published novels.
earn a solid middle-class income through my writing.
be married and have kids.
own a house.
live in the United States.

My lifetime goal is to publish 100+ novels, which is actually a lot more doable than it sounds. It means writing a minimum of two novels a year, though, so I’m going to have to follow Heinlein’s rules a lot closer than I have been in the past. That’s the trouble with keeping a daily word count: it made me look a lot more productive when I was in revisions, so I spent more time doing that than writing new work.

In three years (2015), I want to…

have at least 10 published novels.
make enough with my writing not to need another job.
be married or engaged.
have lived for at least three months in 3+ countries (not including USA).

I want to settle back down in the States eventually, but before that I want to get around and see the world a bit. The absolute coolest thing would be to marry another world traveler and make enough on the writing to have a bunch of adventures together. I’m not sure if I’ll find her in Georgia, but I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open.

As for short-term goals, I’m still trying to work them out. Here’s what I have so far:

Quarterly Goals:

Start at least 2 new projects.
Finish at least 2 first drafts.
Publish at least 2 titles (print and ebook counts as two).

I think this is enough to stretch me while still being doable. By my count, in the first quarter of this year I did 2-2-1, in the second quarter I did 2-2-0, and in the current quarter, I’m at 2-0-5 so far. Of course, this includes all the Star Wanderers novelettes and novellas, which I hope to expand in the future.

I’m not going to count revisions as progress, except as part of the publishing stage. Some stuff needs a lot of revision, other stuff, not so much. What I really want to do is train myself to produce high quality work on the first or second write-through. Of course, I’ll still use test readers to gauge my work before publishing anything.

Monthly Goals:

Finish at least 2 projects (first draft or revision).
Write at least 15k words of new material.

I can write a lot more than 15k words in a month, of course, but I figure this is a good starting point. The key is that this is for new material. When I looked back at my word counts, I found that months of revision would go by before I actually worked on something new. I want to change that, but I still need to allow for longer projects that might require several weeks of revision (while emphasizing the need to produce new material, of course).

Weekly/Daily Goals:

Keep all project deadlines.
Start each day with writing.

I’ve found that if I don’t start off each day with writing, I keep putting it off until I’ve spent more time and energy angsting about it than actually doing it. For a short period of time this summer, I put my butt in the chair and my hands on the keyboard first thing after waking up (even before getting dressed). It was amazing how much of a difference that made.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure what other goals to set. I want to plan things out on a project to project basis, but beyond that I haven’t yet figured out what kind of a daily structure I need to build.

It’s probably a good idea to keep things flexible at this point, though, since I have no idea what my schedule is going to be like once I’m in Georgia. I do know a little bit about my next placement–more on that later–but for the first half of September, I’m going to be all over the place. Ani, Tusheti, Kars, Akhaltsikhe, Tbilisi, Baghdati, and Istanbul–it’s going to be crazy!

For this next week, my goal is to finish the revisions for Star Wanderers: Sacrifice (Part III) and send that out to my beta readers. I’ve been struggling with it all month, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of where I need to go with it. I’m going to finish chapter 3 tomorrow, then rewrite chapters 4 and 5 from scratch.

After that…another Caucasian adventure! 🙂

News, a correction, and an awesome AvB remix

Today I was supposed to finish the second draft of Sholpan, but I moved apartments this weekend, so everything got thrown completely out of whack. I’m all moved into my new place now (with some awesome Quarkie roommates), but Sholpan is going to have to wait until Monday.

Fortunately, I’ve only got a couple of new scenes to write, then touch up the rest to make sure it fits the novella storyline. I got in touch with my copy editor, and he should be able to have them for me by mid-September. If all goes well, I’ll send it out to a couple of my first readers to give it a pass, make the fixes, and then send it out to Josh and have it up about a month from now.

I’ve gotten some amazing responses for “Memoirs of a Snowflake” in the past week, and it’s gotten almost 2,000 downloads on Amazon so far. Not bad! However, while rereading it, I noticed an error: in the author’s note, I said that I wrote the story in December of 2008, when really it was 2007. I must have been thinking “winter of 2008” when I wrote it the first time. In any case, I’ve made the corrections, so it should be up on Amazon in 24 hours, and all the other sites before the end of the month (since I distribute to them through Smashwords).

Also, another piece of encouraging news: the boss at the temp job I’ve been working the past few months wants to hire me! If that works out, I should have steady work at least through into 2012. I’m hoping they’ll let me work part time, since that would help me juggle the writing career a lot better, but this is their busy season so I might have to work 40+ hour weeks for a while. Still, it’s better than starving.

Which reminds me: my first royalty check from Amazon comes in next month, and to celebrate, I’m going to crack open that bottle of Martinelli’s from Charlie and throw a small party. More on that later.

Finally, I found this the other day while trawling youtube for good trance tunes. It’s a remix of “Are We Human?” by the Killers, done by Armin Van Buuren. Everything Armin touches seems to turn to gold, and this is no exception. Check it out!

New projects and other stuff

So I started the sequel to Mercenary Savior today; I figure I can take a couple months off to finish the rough draft, then leave it in the trunk until the first one sells.

The working title of this one is Into the Nebulous Deep, which captures the main premise quite nicely (though let me know if it doesn’t jive with you). It takes place five years after the events of Mercenary Savior. James is a lieutenant in the Colony’s civil defense forces, and has made a name for himself as an ace gunboat commander.

The basic premise is that the Colony is falling into economic ruin and must therefore make a mass exodus in order to survive. Their only real option is to flee into the Good Hope Nebula, where FTL drives don’t work and the Hameji can’t follow them.

Deep in the nebula are newly born stars with planets and proto-planets, and they hope to re-establish themselves there. Of course, nothing happens quite that smoothly, and James is going to find himself putting out fires most of the time.

While all that is going on, however, I hope to put him in the middle of a love triangle. I have the ending of it planned out, and it can ONLY happen this way in a science fiction novel. Oh man, the twist is going to be way interesting–and incredibly hard to pull off well. I’m up for a challenge, though, and I can already tell this one is going to be fun.

For some reason, things worked out so that I started this novel on November 1st. Because of that, I suppose I’m doing it for a nanowrimo–since hey, the rough draft is probably going to be between 120k to 140k words long, and I want to finish it before January. Sounds tough, but I’ve got the money saved up to take off a few weeks and work on my writing, so that’s what I plan to do.

In loosely related news, I hope to start running soon. My brother in law ran a marathon this year, and he’s going to help me get set up. Basically, I need to get in shape for the wilderness job I hope to train for in January, and also because hey, I need to take better care of my body. Besides, I’ve found that exercising boosts my writing tremendously, which is something I definitely need. Exercise = win/win/win.

The most pressing thing on my mind now, however, is the article I need to write about the history of “the class that wouldn’t die.” I’m working on a very tight deadline, and absolutely must produce. I wish I hadn’t been so flaky with the previous deadlines, but it is a volunteer magazine and I have had other pressing things taking up my time. Not any more–I’ll get it done right away.

In the meantime, I’m tired and must get some sleep. I wish I could function like one of Stephanie Myer’s vampires, but reality is a harsh and unforgiving mistress. One of these days, though, I’ll be free of her–just you wait!

Must…build…momentum

Man, nothing throws a kink in your writing life like a major paper. This semester, I’ve got the mother of all undergraduate papers to write–the CAPSTONE.

Interestingly enough, I’ve been having a lot of fun with mine. A lot. I’ll spare you the gory details, but basically my capstone is a statistical study of the effects of Israeli politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically whether Israeli political fragmentation leads to increases in the level of conflict. One of these days, I’ll get around to showing you the tables, because they are fairly compelling.

Well, on Monday, the rough draft was due–the complete rough draft. Minimum: 20 pages. Professor Christensen doesn’t care how you get your paper in, though, so long as it’s on his desk when he shows up for work Tuesday morning. So basically, I locked myself in the SWKT and wrote the last half of the thing in the TA office. The building closed, but around midnight I finished the thing and slipped it into the dropbox! Huzzah!

And now that my capstone is complete (at least, the first draft), you have NO IDEA how liberated I feel! It’s awesome! Like, I actually have free time right now! It’s been so long, I’ve totally forgotten what that feels like. Freedom!

And now that I look back on the last three weeks of my writing, all I can say is ouch.

I’ve hardly worked on either of my novels at all these past two weeks. The 7-day word counts have been steadily dwindling, and last week it actually hit zero. Yikes! I don’t think that’s happened since…since finals last semester or something.

Well, I’m going to fix that! Yesterday, I churned through about 2.5k words in the revision of Genesis Earth, and I plan to keep it up all this week until school starts beating me up again. That probably won’t be until after Thanksgiving, which gives me just enough time to finish this revision.

Hopefully, this week I’ll be able to do at least 1.5k daily. It’s going to take hard work to build momentum again, but once I’m up and running, finishing this beast shouldn’t be hard. Then I can devote more time to finishing the current incarnation of Bringing Stella Home, which should have been finished long ago.

And then, finally…something new!

I need a new deadline

Two, actually. I’ve got two unfinished projects, both of them on the sidebar: Genesis Earth 4.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0, both of which have stalled in recent weeks.

Here’s what I’m thinking: I’m currently swamped with school, and have been for the last several weeks, but after tomorrow, most of the urgent important stuff will be finished, and I’ll have some breathing space until after Thanksgiving break.

That should be enough time to finish Genesis Earth, at least before the end of the break. It will require some commitment, but that’s what personal deadlines are for, right? Making a commitment.

As for Bringing Stella Home, it’s been so long since I’ve worked on that beast, I’m not sure what state it’s in. I do know that I’ll have to do a complete rewrite from the beginning before it’s anywhere near submittable. However, I’m not going to scrap the current rewrite, because even though it isn’t fixing all the major story issues, it is helping me to put the chapters and scenes in the right order. Without that, I won’t have a good foundation for the next rewrite–that’s what happened to me on the various revisions of Ashes of the Starry Sea.

So the personal deadline I’m setting for Bringing Stella Home is the end of the year. I want both projects to be completely finished by then, so I can start 2010 with something completely new. It’s been way too long since I worked on a new story.

School is kicking my trash

It’s true. This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:

Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently. If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.

This week was particularly busy. I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation. Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.

Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes. Ugh.

The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers. The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good. I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class. Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.

Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class. While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea? And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.

With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm. Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play. Every day, I come home exhausted. And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class. Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.

Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it. In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do. I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.

I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that. In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.

In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project. Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

🙂

To write on vacation or not to write?

That is the question.

These last couple of weeks have been very unproductive. I hate it. Yeah, there have been reasons–moving apartments, sister’s graduation, coming home, etc. Worthless excuses–I should have been writing more, and I didn’t.

At the same time, taking a break every now and again is very important. Sometimes you just have to sit back and recharge your creative batteries–otherwise, you’ll overwork them and they’ll die. What better way to kill your productivity than that?

I noticed, back at the beginning of the month, that I needed a break. I produced about 85k words each month in June and July, and I’ve been sloshing through the middle of Bringing Stella Home 2.0 for some time now. Consequently, my creative brain seemed to shut down about two weeks ago (or at least switched to power-saving mode) and I haven’t been writing at a consistent rate since. Blargh.

So I know I need a vacation. I’ve needed it for some time. And now that I’m here in Massachusetts, heading to the cape on Saturday, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries.

Trouble is, if I stop writing altogether, will I lose momentum? Will it take me another week just to get back into the story? I’ve already lost so much productivity, it makes me feel disgusted. I need to be so much further along in this story than I am if I’m going to meet my (self-imposed) deadline.

So, I’m wondering–should I write while I’m on this vacation?

Of course, I’m not going to spend eight hours a day writing full time, the way I have been for most of this summer. I’m going to relax. But should I set a modest goal of 1k words a day while I’m there? I kind of think I should.

Don’t worry, though. I’m going to take time off for fun as well. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a very long time!

As if writing weren’t fun enough already. 🙂

Quick update

Haven’t been writing as much in Ashes these past few days. With my new goal, I need to be doing about 2.5k per day in that work, but things have slowed down considerably. I need to rekindle some excitement for this project.

I will finish it–I’ve made the goal, set the deadline, and determined that this will be one of the big three projects to get ready in time for World Fantasy 2009–but I’m working on the hard parts now, the long and tedius middle. The emotional roller coaster has begun, but I’ll hang on and see this out to the end.

It will probably need another extensive rewrite, however, before World Fantasy. Don’t know when I’m going to slip that in.

But even though I only got about 1,838 words of writing in today, I finished reading through Genesis Earth 2.0 today and completed the 3.0 draft revision notes! I’m WAY excited to work on this project! My goal is to complete it within the next two weeks. It will be a very hard, very intensive rewrite, but I’m psyched up and ready to do it!

I love revising. Drafting is when you start from scratch, with nothing but your ideas to work from. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “this is crap, this is crap, THIS IS CRAP AND I SUCK AS A WRITER!” Revising, on the other hand, is when you start with something on the page; something that needs a little (or a lot) of work, but at least you have something besides the story in your head to work with. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “it’s so much better now, it’s so much better now, IT’S SO MUCH BETTER NOW AND I AM AN AWESOME WRITER!” That’s the way it works for me, at least.

So I am very excited to start Genesis Earth 3.0 tomorrow!

In other news, I’m starting a writing group with some serious/semi-serious writer friends here in the Provo area. Gosh, this deserves its own post. More on that later.

In still other news…I totally forgot. Blegh. Need sleep.

Oh, and here’s a cool song I found. I love anime…why didn’t I study Japanese?

Oh, and I remembered what I was going to write about! I talked with an academic advisor today, and I have enough credits to finish up my Poli Sci major and graduate in April by doing an internship in Washington DC or Scotland! More on that later, for sure.

Anyway, the LRC is closing and I have to go to bed. Gnight!

Dragging behind a bit

My writing slowed down significantly during the Writing and Illustratin for Young Readers conference a week ago, and it hasn’t really picked up at all since then. For my seven day totals, I’ve only been averaging between 17k and 14k–that means, on average, I’m doing about half what I want to be doing. Blah.

While I haven’t been writing a whole lot, however, I have been doing a lot of outlining. It looks like I’m going to be throwing out a ton of scenes, putting other scenes in different chapters, and adding whole new scenes in places where I previously didn’t have any. Yikes.

In other words, I’m in the process of completely reconceptualizing the structure of this novel–taking a few steps back and looking at the entire project as a whole. It’s taking up a heck of a lot of time right now, but hopefully it will help the rewriting process to be more successful. After all, if I try to stumble through without a clear idea of what I want this story to be, it’s just going to be a waste of time.

But if I’m going to finish this draft before August 1st, I need to pick up the pace. If this draft runs up to 150k as expected (and at the current rate, it could easily go over), I need to do just under 22k per week. That means, if I do anything less than 3k per day over the next six weeks, I’m going to fall behind this deadline.

The deadline is entirely arbitrary and artificial, but still, I want to keep it. Keeping deadlines is a writing skill I want to train myself to do, and I think it will help me out tremendously down the road.

So the goal this week is to pick up the pace again and get the seven day totals back up to 24k by next Sunday. It’s going to be something of a psychological struggle to get the momentum up again, but it’s something I know I can do. Inshallah.

In the meantime, I’ve been putting together some awesome ideas for a steampunk novel. Things are starting to gel for my next big project, and I’m getting REALLY excited. I still have an enormous amount of research to do before I can begin (like, tons of research), so I won’t get started just yet, but man! The ideas in my head are hot, I can feel it!

I know I’m speaking in vagaries…but to make up for it, I’ll leave you with a link to this wicked awesome steampunk picture I found the other day. Seriously–how cool would it be to be this guy??

Steampunk Airship Pilot by ~homarusrex on deviant ART