Frustrations – Page 14 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Never a good time to write

I’m on vacation now, staying with my uncle in Midland. The rest of the family will be out here in a couple of days. In the meantime, I’m visiting with relatives, going Christmas shopping, and trying to finally finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0.

It’s not going to be easy, though, with all the family stuff going on. I managed 1,221 words yesterday, but most of that was after midnight. I get the feeling this is going to be pretty common for the rest of the time here.

There’s never a good time to write–but I think that’s the norm. If I’m not busy with exams or schoolwork, it’s family obligations or traveling. There is never a steady routine that gives me time to write.

I suppose part of being a writer is learning to write anyway.

So anyways, my goal is to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 before the new year. I’m about 26k words from the end, so with only 10 days or so to go, that’s going to be almost 3k words per day. A little steep, but definitely doable. Also, since this isn’t the polished draft that I’m going to be sending out to publishers, it doesn’t have to be perfect–just good enough for me to make perfect on the next pass.

And now my Dad’s calling me, asking if I’m up and ready to go. I’ll have to cut this short here, but in the meantime, check this out: explanetary systems forming in the Orion nebula. Holy crap, this is awesome! Maybe I should go back to school and become an astronomer.

Genesis Earth 4.0 is complete!

And it’s about time. I started this back in September, thinking I could easily get it done before World Fantasy 2009. More than a month after the convention, and five days after the last self-imposed deadline, it’s done!

Alright, here are the stats:

ms pages: 270
words: 73,009
file size: 492 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 28 September 2009
end date: 4 December 2009

When I finished, I was listening to “To far away times” from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. It fit the mood perfectly–absolutely perfectly. The epilogue might be a little cheesy (if you were one of my alpha/beta readers, you’ll know why–thanks, Gini!), but in a good way, I think. Anyways, here’s the track:

It took me forever to finish this draft, but that’s what happens when you’re swamped with school, I guess. If this were the summer and I had nothing else on my plate, I probably could have finished it in 17 days (or less) like the 3.0 draft.

For a more detailed breakdown, here is a graph of my daily wordcount for the project:

Overall, though, I’m very satisfied with my work. I’m sure that if/when it gets picked up by a publisher, they will have a multitude of editorial critiques and suggestions, but I can honestly say this draft is as neat and polished as I can make it.

It’s time to send it out!

An existential time of year

School has been kicking my trash this semester. Maybe it’s senioritis or something, but I feel like I’m doing half the work I did as a junior and still, all I can do is put out fires.

I was hoping to be finished with Genesis Earth 4.0 by now, but it’s looking like that won’t happen until the end of this week. If I really push myself, I could probably get it done tomorrow…in fact, I may just do that. Schoolwork can wait–this is what I want to do with my life.

Around this time of year, my thoughts tend to become morose and existential. Maybe it’s the lack of sunlight, or the end-of-semester crunch, but I always wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing, what the point of it is, where I’m headed in my life–that kind of stuff. For some reason, I get the feeling that my life is empty in some way.

It’s not overwhelming, fortunately. I don’t have depression or anything like that. Just…a sense of discontentment. Maybe it has to do with finals. I don’t know.

But I do know that it sucks to be pulled in so many different directions all the time. Classes, work, writing, classes; finals, papers, papers and finals to grade, writing, more papers and finals. It sucks. I can’t wait until graduation!

(talk about famous last words o.O )

In any case, Genesis Earth is just about finished. I’m finding that the closer I get to the end, the more I find that needs to be revised. I’ll probably have to insert a new scene in the second to last chapter, just to tie them closer together. For some reason, the last chapter feels too…short. And disconnected. Dammit.

And then, sometime between now and my personal exodus from Provo, I need to look up places to submit this thing. I haven’t even begun to do that. Crap. Since this is the most polished draft of anything I’ve done up to this point, I’m going to be pretty hard core about submitting.

And then, somehow, I need to finish the second draft for Bringing Stella Home before New Years. Holy crap, that novel is so full of holes. I’m not going to even begin to be able patch them until the third draft, whenever that happens. Inshallah, I can get that done over Christmas break…inshallah.

And then, something entirely new! But it’s past 1am, so I’m not going to elaborate. I’ve got some cool ideas, though–some crazy cool ideas. Stay tuned.

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!

Convention jitters

World Fantasy starts in less than 72 hours, and I’m getting nervous about it. Really nervous. This is the first big-time science fiction convention I’ve ever been to, and I’m worried that it will be too intimidating, or that I’ll make a fool of myself, or that I won’t put myself out there enough, or…

All the same, I’m expecting to have fun. Lots of fun. 🙂

But between now and 5:00 am Thursday morning (when we take off for California), I have to: 1) grade 20 papers, 2) take a midterm, 3) write two essays, 4) run at least 30 regressions, 5) read 2 poli sci articles, and 6) finish American Babylon and write up a report on the last three chapters.

Yeah. Not fun (except the regressions–what can I say, I’m a nerd).

In unrelated news, I met an interesting girl at Leading Edge last week. She’s at least as much of an sf&f fan as I am, and one of the very, very few girls I’ve met who prefers science fiction over fantasy. Somehow, she convinced me to read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin with her (or maybe I convinced her to read it with me?), but I started it tonight, and it’s really good.

Technically, I’ve got a class for Washington Seminar that I should go to tomorrow…but I can skip it and listen to the mp3 while I’m driving to California. Don’t want to miss Leading Edge this week, for obvious reasons.

Speaking of which, if I don’t go to sleep right now, I’m going to be barely functional for the next two days. Not good. G’night.

Freaking busy

Sorry for not posting; I’ve been ridiculously busy these past few days. As in, I don’t think I can remember ever being this busy. Maybe when I was taking PL SC 310, but then again…that was more stressful than busy.

I’m working two jobs (two awesome TA jobs, by the way), I’m taking 15 credit hours of classes, and I’m applying to 9 or 10 internships in Washington DC for the winter. All of my classes are upper level, including my capstone class, which is pretty intensive.

I read maybe 7 or 8 academic articles a week and about 150 pages of philosophy and other texts. I grade dozens of papers, tests, and quizzes, write papers (anywhere from 6 to 12 pages each), and spend virtually all of my waking life on campus.

It’s insane. On a typical day, I leave my apartment at 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning and only come back for dinner (and maybe an hour of homework). Then it’s back to the library until midnight, when it closes.

I feel like a slave.

Still, even though I haven’t been blogging much, I have been writing consistently, even through the worst of it. Right now, I’m running about 6k to 7k a week, which isn’t as much as I’d like but is surprising, considering everything else.

The only time I really have to write these days is from 10:00 pm to midnight, up at the library. If I’m lucky, I’ll slip in about half an hour in the morning, but most of the writing happens at night.

The thing that gets to me, though, is that I probably won’t have the 4th draft of Genesis Earth finished before World Fantasy. With my crazy workload, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. The first three chapters are finished, but the rest of the ms? Unfortunately, it needs more time.

Blegh. I can’t wait until I’m out of school. Hopefully, things won’t be as insanely busy.

But I’m probably wrong.

WOTF rejection

So a couple days ago, I got a phone call from my Mom. A piece of mail had come in from the Writers of the Future contest.

Yeah, it was a standard form rejection.

Well, everyone puts in their time. I guess this counts toward that. A modified version of this story did well in the Mayhew contest, so I know it’s not utterly bad. But I can see, in retrospect, how it wouldn’t do well with WOTF.

The main body of the piece was a scene I took from the middle of my novel–really, it was more of a scene than a coherent, unified story. I threw on a beginning and an end, to try to fix that problem, but it probably didn’t mesh well with the real meat of it. Which is fine, because it was originally meant as a scene, not a short story.

The thing is, I’m just not much good at short stories. I don’t usually read them, and I don’t generally write them. Novel writing is my craft–every time I try to write a short story, I end up writing a novel. Once and a while, something clicks and a short story pops out (kind of like a Polaroid), but it’s not the usual thing.

So I’m not discouraged by this rejection from submitting to WOTF again, it’s just that it’s going to be kind of sporadic. I have one more short piece that I could submit to the contest right now, but I don’t expect it to go far. Still, it’s better than letting it sit in my hard drive.

In the meantime, I should probably submit that WOTF piece elsewhere, see what happens. That’s probably what I’ll do.

What I really need to do, though, is work on my novel. World Fantasy is coming up!

Hellish week (and I’m still crossing my fingers)

Holy cow, this week was insane. INSANE. Two papers (13 pages and 8 pages respectively) in one week, hours and hours wrestling with Sambanis’s Civil War dataset and Excel (I wish I knew STATA–it’s so much more useful for analyzing ginormous datasets), 33 tests to grade (of which I’ve only graded about 11), peer reviewing two research proposals, about half a dozen dense poli sci articles…

I could continue the list, but I think it would bore you. Suffice it to say that the Homework Alert Level has been on RED since Monday. Not good–and damnably frustrating, since it eats up all my writing time. Unsustainable.

However, by 3pm today, all the major hurdles were finished. Thank goodness! And I not only got some writing in, I finished reading a book. It was a pretty good one–I’ll review it sometime later.

But, in completely unrelated news, I just want to let you know…

The second round of honorable mentions for the Writers of the Future contest has come out. I’m not on the list.

I also have not received a rejection letter…yet.

Polishing is harder than it looks

It is. This is the final revision of Genesis Earth before I submit this novel everywhere, and it’s tough. I’m changing a lot more than I thought I would, and it’s going a lot slower than any other process so far.

Plus, on my way to Murray for my mission reunion, the service light for my engine flipped on. What the heck? I just had the car serviced a month ago!

At least I know about it now, before I attempt to drive to San Jose for World Fantasy.

Long story short, showed up at 9pm to the reunion just in time to say hi to President and Sister Heywood as they were getting ready to leave. So worth it, though. They’re both getting older, and I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them again. Listened to From Cumorah’s Hill on the way back, and it was awesome. I mean that in a religious way.

I’ve got a research proposal due tomorrow, and I kid you not, I was working on that thing in my sleep last night. All night, while I was dreaming, I was thinking “should I use this author in my paper? How should I tie that in? What controls do I need to use? Will this dataset cover the same years as that dataset?” All. Night. Long.

And then I forgot it all when I woke up!

I did get some time to write, though. Took the netbook up to the laundry room in the FLSR (I still go there–much cheaper than my current apartment) and worked on my novel while waiting for the laundry to finish. Good times–some of my best writing has come out of that laundry room. Award winning writing.

In tangentially related news, I still have not heard back from Writers of the Future. I’m guessing that’s a good thing <crosses fingers>.

Final polish

I mapped out all the major assignments for my capstone class for the next month on my calendar. Turns out I’ve got a lot more work than I thought I did. Because of that, I decided to start work on Genesis Earth 4.0 today.

This is the final polish before World Fantasy convention. Of all the stuff I’ve written, Genesis Earth is the only ms that I feel is ready for me to send to editors/agents. With this draft, I hope to smooth out the writing, make the text more readable–basically, make this book really shine. We’ll see if it succeeds.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in some ways, doing this final edit (inasmuch as any edit is “final”). Previously, whenever I did a revision, I knew that I had time to come back later and fix anything that I just couldn’t get to. Now, this is where it counts. The writing has to be perfect.

Imagine how horrible it was to find a grammatical mistake on page one. I’d forgotten to capitalize the first word of a sentence in the third or fourth paragraph. Thankfully, it was the only mistake I saw on that page, but it’s enough to make me nervous about those chapters I sent out to the editors from BYU’s Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers. I know how to write–really, I do! Please believe me!

So today, every hour of the day was jam packed with classes, work, homework, and obligatory social activities. I only had two hours to write, and in that time, I only wrote about 500 words for Genesis Earth (though, to be fair, I’m measuring it by comparing documents and only counting the words that changed). Ouch. Not sustainable, if I want to finish Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home (I need to change that title) before World Fantasy. I made up for it by writing for half an hour just now in Stella, but still…

And this is where I hope I don’t mess things up. Every time I’ve tried to juggle two projects at once, I’ve found it very hard to do so. It’s something I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to write professionally, but it’s still very hard. I hope my writing quality doesn’t suffer because of it.

If worst comes to worst, I’ll focus on Genesis Earth until it’s done to my satisfaction. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, even with school. But I’m still keeping my goal to finish Stella before World Fantasy.

In unrelated news, in my political philosophy class today, Professor Hancock mentioned Huntington and I said, under my breath, “that guy was so full of crap.” Well, it turns out that Professor Hancock is quite the admirer of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory. This is going to make class…interesting, to say the least. After studying this stuff my entire college career, I really do believe that Huntington’s theories are utterly full of crap.

Oh, and I had a great idea for a comic: Plato’s Republic, as a cartoon! Okay, maybe I’m just a geek, but seriously, if it were done well, it could be really, REALLY cool. Really cool.