Tag: Goals and Plans

Writer’s block? Tallyho!

Just a quick post before I go to bed.

Health problems suck when all you’ve got is catastrophic insurance.  I started breaking out in this weird rash last week, and I went into the clinic today.  It was seventy five dollars well spent, but…man, seventy five dollars?

So between taking the bus all over the Provo/Orem area to get to and from the clinic, picking up the antibiotics from Macy’s, and cooking treats for institute, I didn’t get much writing done.  At the same time, though, I feel like I should have gotten a lot more writing done–that really, I was just putting it off with all the other chores.

“Writer’s block” is this generic phrase used to describe a number of writing related maladies–kind of like “consumption” back in the 1800s, I guess.  Right now, I’m suffering from a particularly unusual strain: I’ve got some decent plot and character ideas, I know what I want to write, but I just can’t seem to bring myself down to write it.  Not consistently, anyways.  This past week, I’ve only been hitting 1.4k words per day, when I need to be doing 2.5k in order to make my 15 August deadline.

The irregularity of my schedule certainly isn’t helping, but I think it goes deeper than that.  I’m currently treading new territory, going places where the first draft never went, and I can’t help but feel that the stuff I’ve written prior to this point is just crap.  That’s what’s so debilitating–the recognition of all the mistakes I’ve made thus far.  Some of them are relatively major–level twos, at the very least.

Well, just like the best proscription for the flu is to get rest and drink lots of water (and pop lots of antibiotics when that doesn’t work), the best proscription for writer’s block is to sit down and write! So that’s what I plan to do.  Tallyho!

…except, not right now.  It’s 1:00 am and I’m fighting some kind of bacterial infection.  Gotta sleep, but then…tallyho!

(oh, and in totally unrelated news, an agent requested to see the full manuscript for Genesis Earth! Must not get hopes up…must not get hopes up…too late.  Tallyho!)

Falling behind

Man, CONduit is at the end of this week, and I’ve still got a good 14k words to go in Mercenary Savior. Today, I only wrote 1,300 words.  I have no idea why my productivity has fallen so much, but it’s not good.

It might not be a totally bad thing, though.  I’m having trouble finding a ride up for Friday, so I might end up spending two or three hours on the bus.  If that’s the case, I might have some writing time then.

I read something interesting on Dave Farland’s daily kick (the email newsletter he sends out–it’s free, btw, and very helpful).  Basically, he said that it’s better to wait to submit something until it’s absolutely perfect than to submit something for the sake of submitting it.

This is making me rethink my plan to start submitting Mercenary Savior right after I finish this draft.  It’s much improved, I think, from the first couple of drafts, but it still needs a lot of work.

As I run down my list of revision notes, I keep thinking “dang, I didn’t pull that off as well as I’d hoped” or “that last scene could have been better.” It’s hard, though, to juggle so many changes; you can only do so much work at once.  Mercenary Savior is going to need another revision after this one before it’s polished.

The only thing is…that means I only have one novel to submit to agents/editors.  Is that a bad thing?  Now that I’m in the real world, I’m anxious to launch my writing career, but at the same time I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot.

I suppose the first thing to do is to finish this beast.  Ugh.

When life gets in the way

Just a quick post before I go to bed.  Things are coming along well with the revision of Mercenary Savior–I fully expect to be finished by next week (hopefully by Tuesday).

That said, these past couple of days have been very unproductive, and it’s been very frustrating.  I feel as if tons of little things have been getting in the way.

Work is from 3:00 to 6:00, which can be nice but breaks the day in half, and donating plasma always seems to suck up a ton of time.  Besides that, I’ve been applying for work, and THAT certainly takes up quite a bit of  time mental space.

The main problem, though, is the urge to procrastinate.  These little things wouldn’t pop up all the time if I 1) were unusually excited about this book, or 2) had the iron discipline to buckle down and just do it.   I’m working on both of those, but in the meantime, it’s frustrating.

Still, I am producing.  I wrote about 1.5k words yesterday, and 2.3k today.  Nowhere near the 4k+/day I was hoping to write, but not bad.  Things are progressing.

Part of it may be the fact that my only computer right now is a netbook.  Netbooks are nice for traveling (I carry mine literally everywhere), but they aren’t great as primary machines.  Also, they tend to break down faster than regular laptops.  Mine’s probably got another year left, but the wear and tear is starting to show.

To remedy that, I’m thinking very seriously of building my own computer.  Tomorrow, BYU is having a surplus sale, and I’m hoping to pick out a decent LCD monitor or two, plus a keyboard and mouse.  I’ve picked out all the other parts online (I’ll blog about that later), but I’ll probably hold off until the  end of the month to buy them all.  I want to prove to myself that I can make more money in a month than I spend.

I know that a new computer won’t solve my writing problems, but it will be really cool, and it is something that I need–if not this very second, then at least before my netbook breaks down.  Plus, I’m hoping to learn a lot from the experience of building it from parts.

Other than that, things are good.  I will definitely finish Mercenary Savior by next week before CONduit, and the revision is significantly better than the old draft.  Before long, inshallah, I’ll have another  manuscript to float around with editors/agents.

Book Festival and other updates

So last Friday, there was a book fair at the Provo Library.  I only heard about it the night before from Facebook, but there were almost twenty authors on the guest list, so I figured it would be a good place to go to meet other writers.  I wasn’t mistaken!

I biked up to the library just as Brandon Sanderson was walking in.  We chatted for a while, caught up on stuff since the last time I took his class.  I almost got to walk into the author’s only lounge with him, but one of the staff stopped me.  One of these days, though…one of these days!

I also ran into Dan Wells, who remembered me from World Fantasy and gave me a very nice compliment: he said I was very good at approaching people, especially at conventions.  Talked about the different cons this year; according to Dan,  Dragoncon is going to be huge this year, since Worldcon is in Australia and World Fantasy is in Ohio.  I have a friend in Atlanta–I’ll have to look into attending that.

Brandon Sanderson, Clint Johnson, Mette Ivie Harrison, and J. Scott Savage did a panel on writing fantasy.  Fortunately, I had my mp3 player on me and was able to record it.  If you would like to listen to it, you can find it here:

Fantasy Panel, Provo Children’s Book Festival (15 May 2010)

Clint had some interesting advice for me after the panel; he asked about the books I’ve written and said I should submit them to YA agents/editors as well as mainstream adult agents/editors.  Apparently, Genesis Earth and Mercenary Savior could work as YA, since 1) they’re about (relatively) young protagonists having coming-of-age experiences and learning how they want to live their lives, and 2) they don’t have the sense of nostalgia that adults often have when they think about their childhood.

So that was the Provo Children’s Book Festival.  Let me just say, this is one of the reasons why I love Utah: the writing scene for fantasy/sf/YA is HUGE.  Tons of writers, tons of readers, local writing events all the time–it’s great.

In other updates, I got a personalized rejection from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show! It was a pretty long one, too.  The assistant editor said the writing was pretty good, but it felt too much like a novel.  Hehe…confession, it was part of a novel.  But that’s awesome that he thought the writing was good!

Besides that, he gave a lot of suggestions as to formatting, referring me to this site for detailed ms instructions.  I didn’t think most editors would mind Times New Roman, but if it’s an issue even for a few of them, I should probably just switch to Courier–no editor is going to fault me for using Courier.

Besides all that, I’m well on my way to finishing Mercenary Savior 3.0 before CONduit.  My goal right now is to finish it next Tuesday and spend Wednesday and Thursday sending it out.  After CONduit, I plan on starting Hero in Exile (except the name will change), and I have a TON of great ideas for it.  Funny how sometimes in order to finish a book, you need to write another one first.

Untitled

Man, I don’t write for this blog as much as I should.

Life is going well.  I just recently got a part time job doing telephone surveys; hopefully, it will help tide things over until I can get something better.  Between that and donating plasma, I should be able to pay the bills for the next couple of months.

I’ve also been writing quite a bit, hitting between 2k and 4k words per day.  At this rate, Mercenary Savior 3.0 should be finished by the end of next week.  That’s good, because I’m excited to start submitting it.  I’ve already got Genesis Earth making the rounds, but the sooner I can get another project out there, the better.

For my next project after , I want to recycle Hero in Exile (ugh, it needs a new title) and turn that into a complete novel.  I have a lot of ideas for it, but it will require some research, which may delay the actual start date.

For example, the main character (who I’m going to rename) has this major conflict where he’s trying to go home.  As a young boy, his parents put him in an escape pod that crash landed on the planet, where he was raised by the locals.  As the writer, I’m going to need to know about adoptions, know a handful o f adoption stories to pattern things off of, and maybe read a couple of essays  on the meaning of “home.”

As another example, one of the major themes I want to get across is the struggle to maintain personal moral integrity in a morally corrupt world.  I probably won’t have to look too far for that–being Mormon has given me lots of opportunities for research there–but I need to do a lot more to be aware of that particular conflict.  When you’re slogging away, it’s very easy to focus too much on plot and no enough on the rest.

Probably the biggest preparation is going to be working through the character motivations, and that inevitably means building a background, since motivations grow out of the character’s history and background.  But that’s going to involve a fair degree of pre-writing, which I may or may not be able to do before I start page one.

And that’s another scene; I’ve got to completely revamp the beginning.  What I have now involves the main character staring out over the desert just before a sandstorm.  Picturesque, but essentially navel gazing with little real character development.  Instead, I want to show him thinking or doing something that reveals the central, most important aspect of his character, the way Brandon Sanderson did it in Elantris.

So anyways, lots of work to look forward to, in terms of writing that is.  Other kinds of work…well, it’s good to have a sense of security.  Even though I’ve been producing a lot, I’m sure I could have been producing more (upwards of 6k or 8k per day) if I’d had that sense of security provided.

Anyways, there is more that I could say, but I’m going to go to bed because it’s freaking 2:22 AM.  Night.

Graduation!

So last week, I graduated from college!  That’s right: college is OVER!  No more papers, no more homework, no more tests or quizzes or theses or final projects…at least until I decide I miss it all and go back to grad school.

It was a big week, not only because of the ceremonies, but because of all the family that came down for the event.  It was great to see all my sisters, baby Jane, a bunch of my cousins who came down for our Italian barbeque (salad, lasagna, and garlic bread on the porch), and everyone else who came.

The ceremonies were interesting too.  Elder Christofferson gave the commencement speech, and I was very pleased that he referenced Hugh Nibley.  Man, if Nibley were still alive (or maybe if he could come back from the dead), it would be absolutely awesome if he could give the commencement address, but Elder Christofferson was pretty good too.

The convocation Friday was very long, but fortunately I snuck a novel in: Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin.  Made some decent headway in it, too.  There was a very interesting talk, though.  One of the retiring faculty told a story from when she was a student in a wilderness class.

As they were making their way down a river canyon and came to the end of the bank, she thought to herself “it will be alright if I can just keep my boots dry.” As the water became deeper, that changed to “it will be alright if I can keep my pack dry.” Eventually, however, they had to swim, and everything got wet.  Still, they made a fire, dried everything out, and had a good time.

The story was meant to illustrate that life in the real world is like that.  When you start out, you worry about a lot of things, but when you look back after many years have passed, those small setbacks don’t seem like anything to worry too much about.

Well, that’s where I am right now: unemployed, looking for a plan for the next five years.  My plan A is still to break into publishing, but I’m going to need a secondary career or day job to  get by in the short to medium term.  I have no idea what that entails,  but at least I’m graduating debt free, with money in the bank.  That helps.

Two years ago, I was terrified of graduating and setting out into the “real world.” A year ago, I realized I had grown out of college life and needed to move on.  Now, I have no idea what I’m doing, but life is an adventure and I’m confident things will work out for the best.

Pluggin’ away

Wrote 2,889 words today, bringing the running 7-day total to just under 15,000 words.  If I can keep this up for a month without lagging, I should be able to finish Mercenary Savior 3.0 in time for CONduit.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a job.  A friend of mine who’s in Egypt right now told me about this interesting online freelance contractor, which looks like a promising source of cash in the short term.  Sent in my application, inshallah will hear back soon.  Payment is via paypal on a work for hire basis, with most writers / copy editors averaging $20-$25 per hour, so could be useful.  No benefits, but what the heck.

In between writing and applying with the online writing place, I submitted Genesis Earth to a couple new places, and sent From the Ice Incarnate to IGMS.  I don’t have many short stories, but I really need to send out the few I do have to more markets.  Maybe I can pull out the first couple chapters of some of my novels and call them short stories and/or novellas.  Wouldn’t hurt.

Graduation is coming up in less than 100 hours.  My parents arrived in town about an hour ago, and the rest of the family should be coming shortly.  It will be really good to see them–I’m looking forward to it.

That’s about it for now.  I’ve got some other thoughts on jobs, dating, future plans, settling down, an article I’m writing for Mormon Artist, and the computer I want to build once I’ve got a job, but I’ll write about that later.  Goodnight.

So much happening, so little getting done

…in terms of writing, that is.  I got a lot  of little and not-so-little things done today, but didn’t spend much time writing.  Only got about 855 words, when I need to be averaging 2.5k per day in order to finish Mercenary Savior before CONduit.

The weirdest part is that I have so much free time.  No school, no work–no pressing obligations or deadlines.  You’d think I’d be writing 4k a day, just like last summer.

Instead, I’ve been so consumed with getting an apartment, getting a job, getting basic transportation–basically, figuring out a plan for my immediate future–that I’ve lost any momentum I might have had a week ago.  Writing isn’t just about time; it’s about mental space as well.

It’s frustrating.  I feel so distant from Mercenary Savior that it’s hard not to procrastinate, especially now that I’m stuck on one of James’s scenes that needs a complete overhaul.  I wonder whether these revisions are making the novel any better–I need to deal with this outside stress and get back into the story.

Fortunately, things are working out that I’ll probably be able to do that.  I found a cheap bike on craigslist that will hopefully solve my immediate transportation needs, and I’ve got a semi-workable plan as far as employment goes.

The plan that currently seems most attractive is to get a full or 3/4ths part time job at BYU (those come with benefits) before the end of the summer.  Yes, there is still a hiring freeze, but it could lift very soon, and when it does, there will be tons of positions to fill.  It’s not like I’m going to hold out for that, but I’m certainly hopeful.  I felt very good about it when I visited D-70 ASB for information.

Anyways, the key with the writing is to cut the distractions and just slug through it for a few days, until the momentum comes back.  In the absence of school or work, it will be difficult to impose structure on my days, but that problem will solve itself if I can balance job-seeking with writing.

Exactly one month ago, I started the revision for Mercenary Savior.  I’ve got 40 days before the self-imposed deadline, and I’m only 25% finished.  Fortunately, without any school obligations to occupy my time, I should be able to do it.  2.5k per day, that’s the goal.  Once I’ve got some momentum going again, it should be pretty straightforward.

In the meantime, check out this awesome, awesome song from This American Life and rage against the robber barons of the Great Recession:

Bet Against The American Dream from Planet Money on Vimeo.

Quark has a new writing VP

That’s right; her board name is Jimmy and she’s basically doing it the same way I did it–by jumping in the deep end first.  Joined quark last semester, went to a few writing meetings, and pow!  Writing VP.

Anyways, we had some interesting conversations after the last writing group meeting of the semester.  Basically, I think I convinced her to set daily writing goals the same way Aneeka convinced me.  She also decided to start a writing blog, so if you get a chance, you should check it out!  It’s called Dragons, Dirt & Bones, after the quote by G. K. Chesterton:

Fairytales are more than true–not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The funny thing is that we met each other two years ago and both totally forgot about it.  She was a high school junior visiting BYU, and came to Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class.  She remembers bookstore guy…and one of the writers whom the others in the writing group mercilessly ripped on.  Guess who that was?

In unrelated news, I am no longer homeless but am currently unemployed.  Dropped off a business card at Pioneer Book, though–told them I could help if they need extra work for the move.  Who knows, maybe that will lead to something.

I will probably end up getting a generic summer job, then upgrade to something more semi-permanent (and resume friendly) by August.  I’ll probably stay in Utah, using my writing and editing skills in some capacity.  I’d like to work as a grant writer for BYU, but they’re still under a hiring freeze.  Once that lifts, though, there are going to be a ton of job openings.

My primary plan is still to make my living as a published author, and I’m very optimistic about that working out.  Before the end of next week, I want to have Genesis Earth sent out to at least five new places.  My goal for Mercenary Savior is to finish draft 3.0 by CONduit at the end of May, but I will probably polish the first three chapters and start sending it out before then.

In the meantime, the real world awaits.  Scary, I know, but at least I’m graduating debt free, with a roof over my head, friends and family close by, and lots of exciting possibilities for the future.  I think things will turn out well.

Quarterly report

So I figure that since I want to write professionally, it would be a good idea to keep track of my writing and do quarterly updates on my blog.  Here’s the first one for this year:

The red line shows my daily writing word count, the blue line a running seven day total.  The graph starts January 1st and goes to March 31st.

For the first part of January, the seven day total was high for a week because I’d just finished Bringing Stella Home 2.0. It dropped down way low for a while because I was busy moving into the Barlow center, starting my internship, and starting a new novel at the same time.  Combining all three of those things at the same time made for very little progress, until about the middle part of the month.

Things progressed at a moderate rate (about 1k words per day) from the middle of January until snowmageddon, which hit us in the second week of February.  I got a lot of writing done while snowed in, and my work in progress at the time, To Search the Starry Sea 1.0, got a lot of momentum behind it.

That momentum started to taper off, as I realized that the story I was writing was different than the story I had in my head.  I swear, this happens EVERY time I try to write a novel.  I tried to stick with the story in my head, but the gap got wider and wider until I realized the story just wasn’t working.

At the end of February, I decided to put it on the back burner and let my ideas simmer for a while.  I’ll probably pick it up again at some point in the future, but not in the short term–I need to put it away for a while.  I’m sure I’ll finish it someday, though.

So then, in the beginning of March, I went through all the comments I’d received on Bringing Stella Home.  The HUGE spike you see right around the middle of the month represents all the revision notes I put together for the 3.0 draft.  I read through the entire manuscript in about a week and a half, made a detailed scene by scene outline, and figured out my strategy for the revision.

Things dropped off again pretty sharply the last couple weeks of March because that was right around when I was fired from my internship.  That was one hell of a stressful week.  They picked up pretty quick after that, though, because 1) I had a lot more free time, and 2) I’m REALLY excited about this project.

Looking ahead, I think if I push myself, I can finish Bringing Stella Home 3.0 by the end of April.  It will be difficult because I’ll be looking for an apartment and a job at the same time, but after next week I won’t have to worry about schoolwork anymore (potentially for the rest of my life…whoa).  Definitely, I’ll have it done in time for CONduit 2010.

One thing I need to work on a lot more is submitting.  I’ve got a list of agents to submit Genesis Earth to, I just haven’t got around to sending it to them all.  The responses I’ve received have been generally encouraging: all rejections, but about half form rejections, half personalized in some way.  I do think this book will find it’s way in print, though it may not be my first to be published.

Even though Bringing Stella Home will probably need at least one more major revision before the full manuscript is ready to be sent out to editors/agents, I can probably polish the first three chapters enough to shop it around sometime in May.  I’m not sure if that’s what I’ll do, but it’s an option.  It depends on whether I jump right in to the 4.0 revision after finishing the current draft, which I probably won’t do; better to let it sit for a while.

Instead, I think I’ll jump right in to finishing that novel I started in late 2008, Hero in Exile.  The title will have to change (as always), but I’ve got a lot of fresh ideas for it, plus the enthusiasm to pull it off.  In many ways, Hero in Exile is a non-linear sequel to Bringing Stella Home, so if I get a deal with the one, I can always pitch the other as the next in the series.  That’s a huge plus–and a major reason why I’ll be enthusiastic about the project, since the two novels build off of each other.

Anyway, that’s what things are looking like from here.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I’ll read a couple of friends’ novels (I haven’t forgotten about you, Jakeson and Drek!), graduate, get an apartment, get a job (inshallah), write an article for Mormon Artist, go to a con or two, and maybe even get a girlfriend and/or figure out what to do with my life.