finishing – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Desert Stars 4.0 is finished!

And just in time; I start another job tomorrow. So anyhow, here are the stats:

words: 99,000
chapters: 22
ms pages: 465
start date: 3 Oct 2011
end date: 25 Oct 2011

And the word splash:

Can you tell who the main characters are? 🙂

This might sound kind of cheesy, but this book has a very special place in my heart. I started it immediately after the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad program, though it took me until the summer of 2010 to finish it. Even though it’s shorter than Bringing Stella Home, I think it’s much more immersive, with the world itself playing a much larger role as one of the characters.

I’m very satisfied with this draft. I say this with everything I write, but I honestly believe that this is my best work to date. It’s surprising to see just how much my writing has changed between drafts. It seems to be getting better, though, so that’s very encouraging.

I haven’t launched the kickstarter campaign yet, but I hope to do that by the first of next month, so be sure to look out for that. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to share the prologue, to give you an idea of what the story is about. Enjoy!

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Prologue

The boy felt scared, more scared than he had ever yet been in his young life. It was because of the strange noises in the bulkheads and the way the walls and floor shook, but mostly because everyone around him, even his parents, were scared, and he didn’t know why.

The lights in the hallway flickered as he wandered out of his cabin, and the whine of the engine rose higher and higher. It wasn’t especially loud, but didn’t sound right; the boy knew that much at least. On the other side of the ship, a door hissed as it slid open. The boy turned and saw his uncle and three of his cousins come running out of the bridge, eyes wide with fear.

“She’s gonna blow,” shouted his uncle. “Let’s move!”

The boy stood rooted to the spot, his legs frozen in terror. He watched as his cousins ran to the emergency escape chutes–the ones his parents had adamantly told him never to play in–and dove through.

A groaning noise came through the bulkheads–the terrible sound of metal on metal. He closed his eyes and covered his ears with his hands, and the floor itself dropped out from under him. For a frighteningly disorienting moment, gravity vanished, leaving him floating weightless in the corridor. The taste of vomit filled his mouth and he screamed in fright, but without gravity he could only kick his legs uselessly beneath him.

The moment passed, and he fell to the hard tile floor. Tears of terror clouded his vision, and his arms and legs shook so bad he hardly noticed that the floor was shaking. The ship lurched, sending him sprawling on his hands and knees.

Hands grabbed him underneath his arms, lifting him up and carrying him away. He glanced up and recognized the face of his mother, pulling him towards the escape chutes.

“Mommy,” he cried, “I’m scared.”

“I know, dear,” she told him. “Mommy needs you to be extra brave right now.”

The boy nodded. Though his mother tried to sooth him, he could tell that she was just as frightened as he was. That terrified him more than even the loss of gravity.

“Come on!” the boy’s father shouted, further down the corridor. “Any minute now, and–”

The lights flickered again, and an explosion sounded from deep within the bulkheads of the ship. A low hiss sounded behind them, and not from a door opening.

“Oh God,” the boy’s mother cried. “Is that–”

As if in answer, a mighty wind howled throughout the ship, filling the boy’s ears with its roar. It whipped at his hair and tugged at his clothes, sucking him away like a monster from the bottom of a giant drain. Somehow, he knew that in only a few moments, they would all be dead.

Hands grabbed him, lifting him up toward the escape chute. He screamed, but the roar of the wind was so loud he could barely hear his own voice. His mother slipped something around his neck, and suddenly he was falling through the chute, into darkness.

He came to a stop in a snug little space, closed in on all sides like a glove for his body. A holoscreen lay in front of his face, with a pair of flight sticks and a miniature control board. The boy gripped the flight sticks with his hands and stared dumbly at the screen, barely able to process anything that was happening.

A distant puffing noise sounded through the ultra-soft walls, and then he was falling again–only this time, he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He was locked into position, cushioned on all sides and only able to use his hands.

Fighting back panic, he watched as the holoscreen flickered and came to life. It showed an image of space, the stars spinning wildly as noiseless flashes of light burst into being before fading into after-image amid the blackness of space. He squeezed the dual flight sticks and moved them like he was playing a computer game, but it was no use–he couldn’t equalize.

Mommy, the boy cried inwardly. Panic swept over him, and his hands and arms began to shake. He screamed, but in the tightly enclosed space, there was no one to hear him.

The glowing orb of a planet came into view, filling the screen with its brilliant light. The boy squinted as the display adjusted, showing a brown and yellow landscape framed by a curved horizon. It danced with the spinning stars, moving so quickly that everything was a blur.

A red light started blinking in the corner of the screen, and words flashed across the display. The boy didn’t know how to read, but he knew it was something bad. He tried again with the flight sticks, but that only sent him spinning in a new direction.

Without warning, the screen switched off, and the entire capsule filled with thick, pink foam. The boy gasped and tried to shield himself with his hands, but before he could cover his face it hardened around his body, freezing him into position.

The foam covered his mouth and face, but was just porous enough to allow him to breath–in short bursts, however, because his stomach was severely pinched. The spinning grew worse, until he wanted to throw up. As if from a great distance, he heard a muffled roar through the bulkheads. Everything around him grew increasingly warm, until he began to sweat. He tried to open his mouth to cry out, but his jaw was locked too tightly in place–he couldn’t move anything, not even a finger.

Mommy! he mentally screamed. Where are you?

As if in answer, something popped behind him. Inertia threw him forward, but the foam held him in place, so that all he felt was a tremor through his body. Gravity returned, so that he felt as if he were dangling upside down from his feet. Blood rushed to his head, and he swooned, redness clouding his vision.

Then, like a punch to his face, the shock of impact hit him, causing his bones to shudder. He spun even faster than before, but the foam still held him. It felt as if someone had turned him inside out, though–as if his stomach had swollen and turned to mush.

As the spinning gradually came to a stop, tears streamed from the boy’s eyes. The roaring had died down, leaving him encased in near-absolute silence. That frightened him almost more than the noise.

A sharp hiss filled his ears as the foam grew sticky and porous all around him. He thrashed against it, pulling his hands and arms free as it turned into a sticky, foul-smelling soup. Behind him, a hatch opened, and he struggled toward it, spitting to get the nasty taste out of his mouth.

He crawled out and rose to his feet, blinking in the harsh light of a foreign sun. The hot wind bit him as it blew in his face, stinging his face with sand. He raised a hand to his eye and looked around him at the alien landscape.

A lonely, rust-red desert extended in all directions, with nothing but sand and rock and distant craggy peaks to meet his eye. The sky shone a hazy yellow, completely unlike the clean white light of his family’s ship. A new fear passed through the boy–the fear of being alone.

As he stared at the land around him, he reached down to see what his mother had slipped around his neck. It was a pendant with a little black case at the end. He felt it between his fingers and knew somehow that he would never see her again.

Tears clouded his eyes, and he screamed and wailed for someone, anyone–but in the harsh desert waste, there was none to hear him.

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Good stuff. I can hardly wait to get it published!

Q3 Report, 2011

Before I move on to other, more interesting subjects, I want to take a little bit of time to review how my writing went in the past three months. For those of you who may be new, this is something I like to do at the start of each new quarter. Keeps me honest, I guess.

Anyhow, here goes:

This is a graph of my word count totals for the past quarter. The red line shows how many words I wrote each day, while the blue line shows a running seven day total. I include substantive revisions in the totals, but if all I’m doing is proofreading or running through copy edits, I don’t count it.

For the first half of July, I was finishing up the third draft of Desert Stars while working 40 hours per week. I wasn’t writing as much as I’d have liked, but still managed to keep some good momentum.

The HUGE peak at the end of the month represents my first draft of Sholpan, which I finished in only a week. I spent the next week in a weird writerly limbo, not sure what else to work on, then picked it up again and made some substantial changes before sending it to my editor in in mid-August. Then Worldcon happened, and I didn’t get any writing done while I was out at that. Should have, but oh well.

After Worldcon, I had maybe three or four different projects I wanted to do, but since I wanted to do the final draft of Desert Stars in October, I wasn’t sure which project to pick up. After several false starts, I ended up writing the first part of Star Wanderers, which is that hump you see at the beginning of September. The second hump is the second draft; my writing took a dip in between because I didn’t know what else to do with only a couple weeks before October.

Overall, though, my personal word counts were a lot lower than I’d like. Part of that was due to the effort I put into publishing Sholpan (it takes a lot of time and energy to publish something, which can eat into your writing if you aren’t careful); part of it was because the project I was most excited about was Desert Stars, and I had to wait until October to hear back from my first readers; but another major part was that I was trying to balance a 40 hour job on top of everything.

This is the dilemma: I want to build up my writing career to the point where I can support myself on it, but to do that I have to work a day job to make ends meet, which makes it very difficult to work on the writing career. When I was in school, I used to think a 9-5 job would make things easy, since I wouldn’t have any homework or papers to bring home. Now, though, I think school was easier, because I was only in the classroom 15 to 20 hours per week, and could allocate the rest of my time as I saw fit. Working full time is a lot harder, because half of your waking time doesn’t belong to you.

What I’d really like to find is a part time job, maybe 30 hours per week, where I earn just enough to get by but don’t feel drained when the workday is over. A lot of TEFL jobs are only about 20 hours or so per week, so I’m thinking very seriously about doing that. Then again, all the attendant difficulties of adjusting to a new culture might be even more draining than grunt labor.

I guess there’s only one way to find out…

In any case, now that October is here, I’m back to work on Desert Stars, hopefully the final draft before publication. I know I said I’d finish Star Wanderers, but since I’m going to come back to it anyway after I get the feedback from my first readers, I figure it will be better to finish Desert Stars and move on. Also, I can revise a lot faster than I can write new material, so it makes a lot more sense to get the revisions out of the way instead of pushing a rough draft harder than it wants to come.

And after that? Who knows! I’ve so many half-finished novels and projects I want to start, all I can really say is I’d better throw this up on the blog and get back to writing. So on that note

Star Wanderers 0.2 is finished!

That’s right; I just finished the second draft of the beginning of Star Wanderers, the novel that came out of nowhere like a surprise baby. I’m sending it out to my alpha readers now, so I can get some feedback before submitting it to Writers of the Future. If I know you in real life and you want to give it a test read, let me know; it’s only about 15k words long, so it shouldn’t take long to read.

So what’s next? Honestly, I really want to finish Star Wanderers, just to see where it goes. But I also want to get back to Desert Stars, and after that I’ll probably want to write the untitled sequel to both Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home…man, so much to write!

One thing I do feel I need to learn, though, is how to write fast. This might sound crazy, but I’m going to try to finish Star Wanderers in the next two weeks. The fastest I’ve ever been able to finish a novel before is 6 weeks, but with my job ending on Friday, freeing up a large chunk of time, I think I can do this.

I’d write more, but it’s late and I’ve got work at 8:00 am tomorrow, so I’ll leave you with this: it’s the song that became the unofficial theme song for Star Wanderers. If you listen to it with the premise of the story in mind, I think it’ll make sense.

Have a good night!

Part I of Star Wanderers is finished!

That’s right–I was up until about 2 am last night finishing it. Man, time goes by fast sometimes. This is probably just the first part of a much longer novel, but I hit a good stopping point so I’ll probably put it on the back burner for now while I finish Edenfall and do a final polish for Desert Stars.

What I really want to do is submit this first part to Writers of the Future, since it falls just under 15k words. I might be a little biased, but I think it’s got potential. 🙂 It’s going to need some work, though; the story literally sprung out of my head one day, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad, it’s probably missing a couple of scenes and needs some work with the transitions. Also, the tone completely shifts midway, from a happy go lucky space adventure to something much more serious. Not sure what to do about that.

So yeah, I’ll probably set this story aside for a little while so I can come back at it with fresh eyes. It’s not too long, so the revisions should be pretty quick; hopefully, I’ll have it ready to submit to Writers of the Future before January. If it doesn’t make the contest, I’ll shop it around the short markets for a year while I finish the novel-length version. At some point I’ll probably epublish it, but I’m not sure when.

In other news, my short story “Decision LZ1527” just went free on Amazon, so if you want to pick up a copy or tell your friends, go right ahead! It’s right around #200 in the Kindle free category now, but for some reason hasn’t hit any of the lists. Hopefully that’ll change before the ranking drops back down.

“Decision LZ1527” first appeared in the December 2009 issue of Leading Edge, and was my first traditionally published short story. Basically, it’s about a college freshman working up the courage to ask out a girl he likes, as told from the perspective of the little men inside his head. Like Star Wanderers, the story just sprung out of my head one day. It was a ton of fun to write, and I’m glad that so many others seem to enjoy it too.

In other news, I just got back the edits for Sholpan, so I’ll hopefully have that up on Amazon and other eretailers over the weekend. More on that as it happens, but it’s happening soon. I’d also like to put together a blog tour for Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan both, so if you’d like to have me on as a guest blogger, shoot me an email at joseph dot vasicek at gmail dot com. More on that later as well.

And that’s just about it for now. Take care, and I’ll see you around!

Desert Stars 3.0 is finished!

That’s right; after almost exactly two months of writing, the third draft of Desert Stars is now complete!

This is the first draft where I feel that things are truly coming together the way they should be, where the story is transforming into something that not only works, but is actually fairly awesome. I’m probably not the best judge, though, so I’ll have to send it out to another round of first readers to get their reactions to it, but I don’t think this will need more than one more draft before it’s ready to go to a copy editor.

Anyhow, here are the stats:

ms pages: 505
words: 108,468
file size: 246 KB
chapters: 22, prologue & epilogue
start date: 16 May 2011
end date: 18 Jul 2011

And the Wordle:

The most influential song in the writing of this draft comes from an mp3 cd of Arabic music that a friend in Jordan gave me while I was studying over there in 2008. The title is فرحة عمرانة بالدار, which apparently translates to “The Joy of _____ in Casablanca.” I know absolutely nothing else about it, other than it sounds very Arab. Since Desert Stars is essentially about a far-future Arab society, it resonated quite well.

The hardest part of writing this draft was probably at the very end, when my daily routine fell to pieces and I completely lost my stride. This seems to happen a lot whenever I’m trying to finish something, which reflects in my daily word count charts.

But the ending itself was not particularly hard to write; in fact, it was quite fun. A bunch of previous changes came together in a way that just clicked, including some spontaneous ones that I hadn’t planned for at all. As a result, I’m really excited about this draft and hope to get it out as an ebook before Christmas.

One question, for those of you who have read the previous draft: do you think I could justify splitting the story into two separate novels and selling them each at a lower cost? I hate books that end on a cliffhanger, but one of my first readers thought that this might work, and it would certainly give me more stuff to epublish.

Also, if you haven’t read a previous draft and would like to be a first reader, please let me know. I only send my rough work out to people I know in real life, however, so if our only interaction has been online, please don’t ask. I’ll probably start the fourth draft sometime in September, so you’ll have until the end of the summer (and possibly a little more) to finish it.

Next project? Publishing Bringing Stella Home and putting together the spin-off novella Sholpan. Shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks. After that, I think I’ll start the indirect sequel that I mentioned before. In the meantime, on with business as usual.

Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 is finished!

That’s right; my fifth novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, is finished! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 447
words: 101,215
file size: 230 KB
chapters: 20
start date: 7 March 2011
end date: 14 May 2011

And the wordle:

This novel is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and takes place within the same universe as Worlds Away from Home (note to self: find new title for that one). I got the idea for the novel from a conversation with one of my first readers for BSH, who mentioned that James didn’t get a whole lot of closure at the end and still had a lot of maturing to do. Immediately, I saw that there was a story there, and got to work figuring out how to tell it.

This was back in October, and like so many other things, the project quickly started going in about twenty different directions. I was still on something of an sf romance binge, so I decided to throw in a love story, and that quickly turned into a love triangle with a weird sf twist. But then, I started getting interested in the girls’ stories, which led to other subplots, which led to more stuff…and…and…

Actually, for a rough draft, I feel I pulled it off pretty well. I dropped the ball on some aspects of the story (didn’t develop the techno-democracy elements of the Colony hardly at all, and dropped James’s sidekick without giving his character a satisfying arc), and forgot to throw in other stuff until well past midway through (the wolf vs. sheepdog debate–Lars has a rather feisty take on that, which should be interesting), but I think the overall structure is mostly intact. For a rough draft, I’m rather pleased.

Of course, it will need a major triage edit before I can send it out to any first readers. It has problems, I know what they are, and I need to give the draft a major overhaul to get it to the point where feedback would be helpful.

But after ten weeks of working on this thing, I’m ready to move on to something else. Next up: my second revision of Worlds Away from Home. I am sooo stoked to get working on this project–it’s going to be AWESOME!

The song that had the biggest impact on my as I wrote ITND was probably this remix of hot head bop on ocremix. I think the lyrics sum up James’s character pretty well, especially in this book:

Now, onto other exciting things!

Worlds Away from Home 2.1 is finished!

Yep, that’s right! I finished another novel, in this case the second draft of my fourth. It’s not without its flaws, but good enough that I won’t feel humiliated for life by sending it out to my first readers.

Anyhow, here are the stats:

Worlds Away from Home 2.1
ms pages: 450
words: 96,212
file size: 219 KB
chapters: 20 + prologue
start date: 14 Jan 11
end date: 4 Mar 11

And the wordle:

Yeah, there are a few words that appeared a bit too frequently there. At least I know what to cut out in the next draft.

As for the song that best encapsulates the experience of writing it..hmm, I don’t know. The last couple chapters, I was kind of on a Metroid trip, so even though the old NES game has absolutely nothing to do with my story, I suppose I’d have to go with the Metroid title theme:

So yeah, those are the stats. As for my thoughts, here goes:

This draft was tough, but a lot more fun to write than the rough draft. Most of the struggle happened with the outline, which took about three or four weeks to actually come together, which is unusual for me.

I did a complete read through back in the first week of December, putting everything else on hold just to write the revision notes, and ended up following almost none of it. However, it wasn’t a complete loss, because outlining it helped me to cut out a bunch of useless filler and dead-end subplots.

I tend to do a lot of shotgun writing on my rough drafts, which means I spew out all my ideas in every which direction, going off on useless tangents and failing to properly foreshadow the major central conflicts.

However, by writing this way, I often discover things that I never could have foreseen from the outset. So long as I’m careful to outline each successive draft and cut out all the filler crap (even the crap that I love), it usually works out in the end.

This draft is somewhere on the crappier side of rough draft vs. finished, polished product, but it’s definitely better than the first one. If the third draft is this much better than the second, I’m optimistic that I’ll have this thing polished and ready to send out before the end of the year.

But before then, I need the help that only a few dozen pairs of eyes besides my own can give. That, and a few months to sit so that I can come back to it with new eyes.

If I know you IRL and you’re interested in being a first reader, please contact me. I’m especially looking for male readers, since the target audience is probably more male than female, but I’m open to pretty much anyone who enjoys reading science fiction.

So anyways, enough of that. On to the next project!

Genesis Earth 5.0 is finished!

That’s right; the fifth draft of Genesis Earth is complete. It was a quick, easy edit, but there were quite a few problems with the last draft, mostly having to do with the physics and timing/distances.

Anyway, here are the stats:

ms pages: 335
words: 71,500
file size: 164 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 2 Nov 2010
end date: 20 Nov 2010

And the wordle:

I used to describe this novel as a “hard sf romance,” but after this last revision I can see that it’s not hard sf at all–though the science (or pseudo-science) plays an important role, the story really is driven by the characters.

Thanks to some of my recent first readers, I also realize now that Genesis Earth is solidly YA. Based on their recommendations, I lowered the age of the protagonists to sixteen and seventeen, and made some adjustments to the query letter.

I’m not sure what this means for agent hunting, since it seems that many YA agents do YA exclusively, and while this novel is definitely YA, my other ones are much more adult (at least in terms of content and character).

Anyway, the song that was playing when I finished this draft was The Mummer’s Dance by Loreena McKennit, one of the songs from the soundtrack that Charlie put together a couple years ago. I think it’s very appropriate, especially for the last scene with the Icarian natives before the epilogue:

Finally, I thought you guys might want to see the “map” of the Icarian star system that I drew out on the whiteboard on my bedroom wall. Man, you have no idea how much I’ve been geeking out to this in the past few days. It’s a map…of a star system!

Mercenary Savior 4.0 is FINISHED!

…and not a moment too soon. I leave for the Salt Lake airport in eight hours, to try and sell this ugly beast masterpiece at World Fantasy. Let’s hope I can find a few editors/agents who are willing to take a look at the manuscript!

Here are the stats:

Mercenary Savior 4.0

words: 123,045
pages: 620
chapters: 28 + prologue
file size: 288.1 KB
start date: 24 August 2010
end date: 27 October 2010

And the wordsplash:

The most influential song on my writing for this draft would probably be the theme from Terminator 1:

Man, why didn’t I grow up in the Eighties? Oh, wait…

I’d write more, but I have to pack for tomorrow. Good night!

I’m still here!

Man, it’s been forever since I’ve posted something. I’d blog more often, but I think you guys would get bored pretty quick if all I did was tell you how the writing went each day. Don’t be fooled; the writing process isn’t NEARLY as interesting as the stuff we write (unless you’re writing amateur fanfic…just kidding!).

So anyways, life is extremely busy these days. Between my temp job at a warehouse, Leading Edge, Institute, church, Quark, and finishing the revision of Mercenary Savior, I feel incredibly crunched for time. I’ve been pulling about 1k to 3k words per day, but last week was horrendously unproductive and I’ve got to really push hard to finish this beast in time for World Fantasy.

But it’s going to happen–that’s for sure. I’ll finish my job at the end of this week, and with the extra free time I’m sure I’ll be able to finish it in time. I passed the 100k word mark last night, and it looks like this draft is going to be around 120k to 125k. Still a little long for a science fiction novel, but not too long (I hope).

As I get closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I tend to use a shotgun approach in resolving the conflicts in my rough drafts. Instead of following each arc through in a focused, logical manner, the last few chapters of my drafts tend to go all over the place, trying halfheartedly to resolve everything at once.

The bad thing about this is that the last half of the book requires a lot more work to revise. The good part, however, is that I can cut off a ton of fat at the tail end, significantly shortening the final wordcount. It’s good to be able to manipulate that number late in the game.

As far as my plans for November, if I do participate in nanowrimo, it’s going to be with a serious project that I was already planning on doing, not something wild and spontaneous. I don’t think taking the time off to write something I know will never be published is going to help me as a writer.

At the same time, however, it only takes about 1.5k to 2k per day for 30 days to complete nanowrimo, and that’s about the rate that I’m writing right now (a little less, actually). With World Fantasy smack at the end of October, I probably won’t start anything new until November 1st. So even though I’m not taking time off from my serious stuff to do it, I probably will participate in nanowrimo this year.

As far as other stuff going on in November, I am very much looking forward to seeing my sister in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend. Since I don’t know if I can find a job that will give me that week off, and since I’m already in a pretty good financial place with the money from this last job, I think I’ll take most of the month off to focus on my writing, rather than look for full-time work.

However, I have been thinking a lot about becoming a freelance translator. One thing I’ve learned from working in a warehouse (and I’ll blog more about this at the end of the week) is that I hate not using the stuff I learned in college. My original plan when I chose to major in Mideast studies was to use Arabic to find a regular job until the writing took off, and so far I haven’t done that.

Besides, I REALLY want to go back to the Middle East someday. If I can improve my Arabic to the point where I feel I can get along better than the average American student, I might just move over there for a year or two (or five or ten…).

Anyhow, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do (including writing–I want to hit at least 3k today), so that’s all for now. See ya!