Frustrations – Page 16 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Goal shift for Ashes

These past few weeks, I’ve been killing myself trying to write Ashes of the Starry Sea. I’ve made some good progress, as you can see on the sidebar. Today I broke 200 pages. Not too bad.

However, the pace has just been killing me. 4k words per day is something I can do…but 4k words per day on the same project? It’s burning me out.

What’s more, to keep up the pace, I’ll have to put all my other projects completely on hold for the month of July. That, or write MORE than 4k per day, which would be excruciatingly painful.

So I looked at my calendar tonight and figured that if I pushed back my self-imposed deadline for Ashes to the weekend before school starts, I can cut my daily wordcount in that book in half. 2k per day in Ashes–not bad. That I can do.

What’s more, with the other 2k, I’ll have enough room to work on my other projects, Genesis Earth 3.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0. I’m starting to get really excited for those, very motivated. For Bringing Stella Home, I’m practically chomping at the bit. I want to make that story shine!

Inshallah, juggling two projects at a time will be helpful, not harmful. During the school year, when I was juggling work, school, and writing, it didn’t work. Now, however, with writing the only major obligation, I’m hoping that two projects will help keep my creative mind fresh, if that makes sense. When I get burned out on Ashes at 2pm, I can switch to Genesis Earth and work on something that excites me. When I get burned out on that at 9pm, I’ll be excited about Ashes again. Etc etc.

Besides, if I want to be a professional writer, project juggling is an important skill I’ll need to learn. Inshallah, I’ll get it to work this time.

Wow! If all goes according to plan, I’ll have all three novels finished and polished before school starts at the end of August! July to write Genesis Earth 3.0, August to write Bringing Stella Home 2.0, and both months to finish Ashes of the Stary Sea 2.1. Yeah!

In other news, Charlie finished Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson and reviewed it on her blog. I was also reading Warbreaker, but about 200 pages in found that it just wasn’t working for me. I’ll probably finish it someday, but for now, it’s on hold.

I hate to say anything bad about it, since Brandon has been something of a mentor to me (and his Mistborn books are some of the best fantasy that I’ve read!), but I shared many of Charlie’s complaints with the book.

The biggest thing, however, was the way he fell into long, frequent info dumps about the world. Every time, I felt that it stopped the action and jolted me out of the story, like reading a college textbook. The world was okay, but the way he presented it just didn’t work for me.

That, and the way the characters acted. When Siri got carted off near the beginning to be the wife of the God king, the fact that she hardly showed any fear or anxiety about have sex with the guy just threw me out. She was just like “oh, well,” and was nervous about everything else EXCEPT for the sex part. From then on, I had believability issues with her character.

Finally, let me just say that when I write my steampunk flower novel, I want to make one of the characters a Circassian janissary. I just think it would be really cool to put a Circassian in the book, as either a good guy or a bad guy (or, more likely, a grey-area guy). If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the video below:

Movin’ along

I submitted a story to the Writers of the Future contest today. Basically, I took the scene from Genesis Earth that won the Mayhew Contest this year, slapped just enough of an ending on it to make it feel like a coherent story (inshallah), changed a couple of universe details, and sent it out. Time will tell if anything will come of it.

On Sunday, I home taught this girl who just graduated in astronomy! She told me all about her capstone project, studying the variance in luminosity of a distant star getting its insides sucked out by a black hole / neutron star / something ridiculously cool. We geeked out on stars more than on the scriptures!

Now I need to make friends with someone who works at the BYU observatory and hang out with them at their work. With my next door neighbor the president of the BYU Astronomy club (no joke!) that might be a possibility. And then we can order heavenly pizza and chill out reading The Leading Edge </inside joke>.

Ashes is coming along. Did my 4k today, but it feels…like it isn’t going the way I want it to. I’m at 30% right now, provided the finished draft is under 150k, which might be difficult to pull off. Lots and lots of sludging for the next month–I’m in the middle of the blue collar work of writing. Middles are not my forte, but I think I’ll learn.

Dude, why didn’t I study astronomy in college? I’m sorely tempted to change my major and go through another three years as an undergrad, just so that after I get my masters I can live at a place like this:

Breaking 20k/7day and a new apartment

Today I broke 20k words for the running seven-day total. According to my records, the last time that total was over 20k was Monday, June 8th. Despite the fact that I moved into a new apartment today, I managed to finish with just over 4k for the day.

You should have seem me at the library at 11:39 pm. I was sprinting. “Just let me finish this scene, just let me finish this scene!” Didn’t finish it, but I only have another 500 words left. I’ll use it to help get me back into the zone tomorrow.

Momentum is so important for me as a writer. I can plow through long chapters and difficult scenes if I know I’m making progress. Once I get bogged down for a couple of days, it doesn’t matter how exciting the next scene is; it’s going to be painful. Once I’m up to speed, though, the book practically writes itself.

According to my records, in the 2+ weeks since I started Ashes, I’ve only surpassed 4k on three days. That’s not good. I should at least be hitting 3.5k every day through July in order to finish this beast by August 1st. If my momentum is running steady at 4k, that will be much easier.

I don’t have too many interruptions planned for July–no conferences or major trips. That’s…good and bad. I need to get out of Provo. I can feel it. But…blegh.

Fortunately, I’ll be getting out tomorrow, touring some ghosttowns with Charlie and some of her friends. I’m REALLY looking forward to that, and have been for some time. Man, it’s going to be awesome! I’m going to check out a whole bunch of Western music from the LRC, and we’re going to have a picnic, and it’s going to be great!

In other news, I moved into a new apartment south of campus. It’s pretty nice and spacious, and since I only have one other roommate, I’ve got a private room. His name is Brett, and he’s from Colorado. As of this week, he’s an elementary ed major; even though he could graduate from the Marriott School in April, he realized that that’s not what he wants to do. He’s also engaged, to a girl he met in his freshman ward. They’re both RMs now, which is pretty cool; kind of like my parents, they kept in contact through letters and stuff. She’s in Atlanta now, and they’re getting married in August. He seems like a pretty cool guy; I think we’ll get along.

Church meets at 8:30 am in the JSB. Hehe…unless I bring a snack, I’ll probably end up sleeping through most of the meetings. It’s going to be nice, though, having the rest of the day to do stuff.

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

something

So…I figure it’s been a week and I should probably post something on this blog.

Wow.

Well, work is underway on Ashes of the Starry Sea, and I’m starting to have a love-hate relationship with it. Most writers say you first novel isn’t that good, and you just need to get it out of your system so you can write the real stuff.

Well, this is my first finished novel…but it’s not my first novel attempt. My first novel attempt was in 8th grade, and I am happy to report that it no longer exists. Anywhere. No, seriously, I lost (or destroyed) it after my mission, and I am perfectly happy with that.

My second novel attempt was in ninth grade, and I still have a copy of it, though I haven’t looked at it in a while. Somewhere around page one hundred (single spaced) I realized that the story wasn’t going anywhere, and I got all angsty and depressed about it. Then, midway through tenth grade, I realized that the problems were fixable, and stopped being angsty and depressed.

And then I got bored and moved onto other things.

For the next two years, I started all sorts of projects but never really got anywhere with them. This was when I came up with my “great golden idea” that I wanted to hide from the world until I had the skill to turn it into my masterpiece.

I’ll tell you what the idea was right now: a high school kid learns how to control his dreams and realizes that the dream world is just as “real” as the waking world. An amazonian dream mage named Lachoneus takes him on as his apprentice and he saves the world from demons while struggling to turn his dream-world relationship with his hs crush into a reality in the waking world.

It’s got potential, but if this is the best idea I ever come up with, I’m going to be very disappointed. Fortunately, I kept writing through this phase.

My next project that got past page ten happened my senior year. I created an island fantasy world with a Greek aesthetic and started what I thought was a character study on my sister. If she ever read it, she probably wouldn’t see any similarities between Sareli and herself, but she was kind of distant from all of us in those years.

Then my mission happened. Not much time for writing there, but even so, I had this one idea that was so good that I spent a handful of p-days in my second area writing it out longhand. It was supposed to be this incredbly poignant allegory based around Lehi’s dream. I got about two chapters in it before things got too busy for me.

When I came home, I picked up a story that I’d started before the mission and got pretty far with it…word-wise, at least. The pre-mission version was based on this game I used to play with my Zaks building blocks. When I got back, I renamed it Planet New America and envisioned it as Jesus’ second coming as experienced by American colonists on another planet, under Chinese occupation.

Sound pretty bad? Yeah…about 60k words in I realized it had no plot and put it on the “back burner.” I haven’t picked it up since.

Sophomore year went by, and I wrote a short story and an undeveloped novel that I thought was a short story. Decision LZ150207 was the short story, and it’s getting published!!! in The Leading Edge. I signed the contract yesterday (woot!). The Clearest Vision was the undersized novel, and…it was pretty bad. Cheesy, sentimental, poorly written–but some of the ideas were cool. Too bad it probably isn’t marketable.

Then, in the summer of 2007, I decided I was going to start another novel! This one was going to be…<drumroll please> a Final Fantasy 6 fanfic (huh?!). Thankfully, I had a much more original idea in gestation, and Aneeka convinced me to run with it.

Thus began the rough draft version of Ashes of the Starry Sea, my first finished novel and my current primary project.

So, yeah, they say to throw out your first novel…but I wrote at least five significant partial drafts before I got to Ashes. I think that’s enough to justify my assessment that this story’s going potential. I still worry about it, though…I’m only in chapter 4 and I’m already struggling with the same angsty doubts that don’t usually hit until about halfway through.

The other day, though, I sent out my first three chapters to Charlie, who read them at work and gave me her assessment. I thought that the main character, Ian, was weak and boring, that the first chapter didn’t have enough of a hook, that it took too long to get into the action, etc. To my surprise, this is what she said:

Charlie: “Charlie is the coolest person I know”
say it.
me: charlie is the coolest person I know
Charlie: thank you.
me: because she read my first three chapters
Charlie: I just sent them to you
me: oh, nice
Charlie: 😀
me: they kick my other characters’ trash?
Charlie: yes
me: really?
how so?
Charlie: I like them
I can see their dinstinct characteristics very well
they’re developed subtly and efficiently
me: yeah?
Ian isn’t boring?
Charlie: no
I like him more than michael
me: ???
how?
Charlie: because he has definite character
me: he does?
Charlie: I totally understand how he thinks and his motivations after three chapters
yeah. He’s a passive weenie of a guy, but I like him
me: he’s a passive weenie and he isn’t boring?
Charlie: nope
I like him
me: you like him even though he’s a pansy?
Charlie: yeah
I like him because he’s a pansy
me: really?
huh
I don’t understand
Charlie: I’m sorry?
I like that you don’t have a complacent protagonist
me: Ian isn’t complicated?
sorry for all the questions
I’m just trying to understand
Charlie: no
me: so you like him because you get him
Charlie: that’s part of it, yeah
me: but if he’s weak and doesn’t start being proactive for very long, you’re going to stop liking him
is that right?
Charlie: I am expecting him to grow, yes
me: ah, so it’s the potential for growth that hooks you
Charlie: yeah

Like any first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea has some serious plot issues, against which I’m currently banging my head. However, despite the voices inside and outside of my head, it’s probably got potential. Now I just need to convince myself of that. Hopefully, as the story progresses, the story itself will do the convincing. And you know what? If I shut up and listen to it, it just might do that.

On your mark, get set…

This post will be really quick, since it’s after midnight and I want to get up at seven tomorrow.

I’ve decided to work on The Phoenix of Nova Terra for my next project. Except…I’m renaming it (yet again!) to…

<drumroll, please>

Ashes of the Starry Sea.

I like this title much more than the previous one. I think that just about everyone, when they first start out, comes up with a somewhat cliche title having something to do with a phoenix.

Even though this is the first novel I ever wrote and finished, I think it has a lot of potential. People always say that your first novel is never publishable, but this one wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel (it’s something like my sixth or seventh). Besides, when judging these things, you need to look at the work itself, not on these general rules that everyone always throws around.

The story itself is pretty decent, I think. The main things to improve are 1) the worldbuilding/research aspect, and 2) the nuts and bolts writing. To help out with that, I’ve decided to follow some of David Louis Edelmen’s revision advice and completely transcribe every word of this revision draft in a new word document. Hopefully, that level of focus will help me to improve things on the word, sentence, and paragraph levels.

At the same time, I need a very clear macro-level view of this project–after all, it’s been over a year since I finished the rough draft. To do that, I started a wikidpad file that will become the story bible for the new draft. I’ll use it to do the things I mentioned in my previous post, “Outlining for discovery writers.”

I’ll also spend the next week or so reading the most recent draft from start to finish, figuring out my revision notes. This will be hard, since I stopped ennumerating the chapters towards the beginning, but I’ll figure it out.

Gah, everything is so disorganized for this project! I’ve got revision notes for the 2.0 and 2.1 versions, files scattered everywhere, feedback from a friend of mine from the FLSR that I haven’t even looked at yet…just too much. The draft needs a TON of work, too.

If I can polish this draft to a satisfactory, presentable second draft in the next month, I’ll be happy. That’s prettymuch my goal. 140,000 words in five weeks…let’s go!

The second wind of inspiration

The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that in order to finish a novel, you have to rediscover something powerful about the story that motivates you to tell it. The thing that motivates you to start the story is rarely the thing that drives you to finish it.

Around the second half of the novel, I usually find yourself losing steam and groping for inspiration. As I write, the story takes its own shape and morphs into something different than it was when I started. My initial motivating idea becomes obsolete, and I have to find another source of inspiration to drive me to finish.

For Genesis Earth, that thing was a scene in the fourth chapter. Late at night sometime in March 2008, I sat down in the FLSR laundry room to clunk out the 2,000 words required for my English 318 class that week. I don’t know what it was, but everything aligned just right and the words flowed out beautifully onto the page. When I was finished, I looked over what I had written and realized that it wasn’t that bad. On the contrary, it was unusually good.

A few months later, when I was about halfway through, everything seemed to be going wrong. The characters weren’t working, the conflict was petering out, my writing sucked, and it was all terrible. I was honestly tempted to throw out the whole novel and forget about it.

But then I remembered that scene–the one that was so much better than all of the other stuff that I’d written. I realized that if I threw out the novel, that scene would die with it. I had to finish my story, if for no other reason than to give that scene a place to live. As a result, I pulled through and finished the novel–and I’m glad I did, because that work represents a major landmark in my writing life.

The scary part is that you can never really know what it is that will give you your second wind. If you’re too critical, too judgmental of your own work, or sometimes just too focused, you’ll miss it. To find it, you have to be flexible with your outline, sensitive to new thoughts, emotions, and impressions, and (perhaps most important of all), you just have to have faith in the story you’re trying to tell.

I recently found the inspiration for my second wind with Bringing Stella Home. It’s a scene that I wrote just last week, where a major character dies. I’d planned it out as a gut-wrenchingly tragic moment, the ultimate low point in the protagonist’s quest. When I wrote it, however, I realized that it was much more than that: it was a merciful release for the character who died, and (though he doesn’t realize it) a victory of sorts for the protagonist.

That scene affected me in ways that I was not expecting. While the prose itself needs tightening and the scene needs revision, I realized that it has some great potential. Because of that, I now have a driving desire to see the story finished.

New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip. I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious backstory worked out. So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting. It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people. I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now. I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format. Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go. At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up. The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days. I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap. Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating. Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh. It doesn’t matter. Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud. If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k. That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure. Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June. 3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes. I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June. It’s a good target. It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project. Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)

Ugh. Just ugh.

Man, it was hard to write. So hard, I only just finished, and it’s 1:30 am. Ugh.

The reason it was hard was because the character’s reactions in this scene needed to be totally revamped. That also necessitated a complete shift in the structure of the writing, because the rough draft consisted almost entirely of internal feelings and reflections. Indeed, the rough draft of this scene was about as close to an info dump as I will ever allow myself to come.

Or so I tell myself. The first rewrite tried to keep things internal, just with the new reactions and motivations, but…well, before I knew what I was doing, I was info dumping. Yes. Shame on me, I went and committed one of my greatest pet peeves. And I felt dirty afterwards, too.

Well, guess what happened? I just kept writing, dumping out the info that I , but it kept coming out slower and slower, like wringing the last few drops out of a washcloth. I didn’t know where to end, so I decided to cut it out somewhere in the middle…but then I got to the next scene from this character’s point of view, and realized that I was lacking the right transition to that part of the story.

Everything was falling apart.

So…I couldn’t just cut out all that stuff that I’d vomited onto the page. It was a butt ugly info dump, but I had to get it across somehow. I decided the only way to do it was to add in an extra scene.

Trouble was, for the sake of the flow of the chapter itself, I couldn’t just add all that stuff in another scene. For starters, the nature of the stuff I’d just dumped on the page necessitated two scenes, but I didn’t have another one to bring in to break them apart. I didn’t want to have three scenes all in a row from the same point of view–that would just be clumsy.

Ugh. Just ugh.

So, how to solve it? Take out a chainsaw and perform some delicate surgery. I threw out virtually the entire info dump that I’d spent a good part of my day writing, and made some fundamental changes to the world that I’m writing that totally negated all of that previous stuff (I can do that, you know. One of the perks of being a science fiction / fantasy writer–you can play god with the world you create). Then, with the new changes I’d made to the world, I came up with a totally different scene–one that actually worked–and inserted that after the very brief, almost prologue-ish opening scene of introspection.

And then, when I was working with something a little more concrete, I was back in that wonderful place where character shines through and suspense builds through a functional plot. No more info dumping–I felt so clean, so free of sin. Great.

It still took bloody forever to finish, though. All that wrangling from earlier in the day killed my momentum, so it was an uphill battle the whole way. Ugh.

Looking back, am I satisfied with what I wrote? Honestly, no. But the revisions it need are the kind that can wait until the 2.0 draft, not the kind that are preventing me from finishing the first draft.

Those problems, I’m afraid, are yet to come.

Living in a state of limbo

Graduation was today. I’ve got another year left, but a lot of my friends are moving on. I took my last exam of the semester on Monday, and my contract at the FLSR ends Saturday morning at 10 am.

And I have no idea where I’ll be living for the summer.

There’s a chance I might be going to New York for an internship with Brandon Sanderson’s agent. My friend Steve has been planning to move to New York in June, to try and break into writing for Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, and I thought it would be really cool to live with him while working/interning/whatever in the publishing world there. I asked Brandon if he knew of any openings with editors/agents for a summer intern, and he got back to me with the news that his agent was looking to take one on.

Well, I got in touch with the guys over at JABberwocky literary agency at the beginning of the month, sent them a resume, had a phone interview, and…haven’t heard back yet. They told me they’d get back to me after the London book fair, which was this past weekend, so…I’m still waiting to find out what they say. I think the interview went okay, though I heard from Brandon that they’ve got a lot of other people itching to get this internship. College graduates. With degrees in editing and publishing.

So…I don’t know what’s going to happen. It would be WAY awesome to go to New York City this summer, and really awesome to be an intern in the publishing world. REALLY awesome. I’ve been following the publishing world, especially the sf&f corner of the publishing world, for a couple of years now. It would be great to get in there and see it up close, see how it works, see what kind of career opportunities exist there and meet the people who are involved in all that.

If it doesn’t work out, though, that’s still okay. I’ve got a backup plan. It’s not as awesome, but it still works. If I don’t go to New York, I’ll probably spend spring here in Provo, taking a break from classes and working odd jobs here and there (private English tutor–my boss at the FHSS Writing Lab can set me up with that–Arabic tutor, freelance editing, temp campus jobs during some of the conferences out here, etc). I’d also spend some serious time working on my writing, and attend some of the major local sf&f conventions, such as BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers and CONduit. I might even be able to go home over summer term and attend Worldcon in Montreal.

I’ve got two finished rough drafts right now and two others that are only halfway finished. With a relatively free summer, I could almost certainly have three polished, finished drafts by the time school starts again. Perhaps I could even have them all finished before Worldcon 2009 in August, or finish all four of them before World Fantasy 2009 in October.

It would also be a good chance to see whether I can handle the writing lifestyle. I’ve been writing fairly steadily for the past two or three years, doing between 500 to 1,000 words a day, but it was never the primary thing I was doing. If I have the summer off from all my other obligations, I’ll be able to explore a little bit what it’s like to write full time. It doesn’t exactly translate into something nice and shiny on a resume (not like an internship, at least), but it would give me some valuable and useful personal experience.

Besides that, taking time off would help me to figure out what I want to do post-graduation. I’m aiming to be a professional writer, but I’ll probably graduate from BYU long before I sign my first book deal, so it’s good to have other directions to go. Trouble is, whenever I’m busy with school I never take the time to think existentially about what I’m doing and what I want to do. I’m so focused on the day to day aspect of things that I find it hard to make any long term plans.

Of course, either way is going to help me figure that out. Whether taking time off to work on my writing or working as an intern for a literary agency, I’m going to gain experience that will help me figure out what I want to do after graduation. So I can expect that to happen no matter where I go, I hope.

So…until I get an email / phone call from the guys at JABberwocky, things are up in the air. It’s a little bit nerve wracking, especially with all of the moving out / moving in going on around here. I know I won’t have any trouble getting a spring/summer contract here at BYU, but New York…I have no idea. I’ve got family up there that I can stay with for a few days until I get settled, and there’s the housing list for the New York stake, but man, it’s expensive over there.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up staying here in Provo after all. We’ll see how it goes.

(Image courtesy David Iliff. Published under a CC attribution 3.0 unported license.)