Tag: Goals and Plans

Experiment, take two

Ok…the experiment I wrote about last week…yeah, it failed.  Miserably.  Got almost no writing done, and I wasn’t able to get up early hardly ever.

However, I’m going to try it again.  Part of the problem was that I always ended up staying up late, past 1am, even when I intended to get up early, and that just killed me.  Also, whenever I did get up early, I always allowed myself to get distracted by other important things, such as email, homework, etc.  The predictable result?  No productivity.

There were other problems too, however.  It’s the middle of the semester, so the weeks are starting to race by like so much rushing water.  I’m not the only one who feels like the last week was sucked out of my life without my realizing it.  Also, before I started the week, I lost a lot of writing momentum by missing a few of my daily wordcount goals.  I would write 2,000 to 3,000 words one day, the next day, nothing.  Lost momentum can be really crippling.

When you write late at night, you tend to go through this routine of distracting yourself, checking your email, playing a game here and there, chatting with friends, etc, before you finally settle down to start writing.  This is my current routine.  I need to get to the point where I’m able to sit down, open the document, and get started.  Or, if I can’t get to that point, I at least want to minimize the distraction time.

So, this week, I’m trying it again.  I’ll try to get up early, 6am if I can, and get in at least a half hour of writing each day.  We’ll see how it goes.

Almost at part 3

Wow, writing this novel is going a lot faster than I had thought. At the same time, though, I sometimes worry that I’m not going fast enough.

I broke the 50k mark this week, and I haven’t even gotten to any of the major climaxes yet. This thing could easily go to 90k words before the end. With only 6 1/2 weeks left in the semester, can I finish it in time?

At the same time, I have NO IDEA what I’m doing this summer. Really. I have a lot of possibilities, but no concrete plans. With the semester coming to a close in a little more than a month and my housing contract with the FLSR coming to an end, that is a little bit unnerving.

Whatever I do, I want to devote some serious time to revising and rewriting these novels, getting them polished. Finding a spring/summer contact isn’t that hard in Provo; the question is whether I can find a job. I also want to go to the Middle East for a while, and if I go home to Massachusetts in August (which I would like to do) another possibility is Worldcon 2009 up in Montreal.

As far as how Bringing Estella Home is coming, it’s coming along very well. I have all of the key climaxes mapped out in my head, and the one that ends part 2 and begins part 3 is only two chapters from where I am now. I don’t normally keep a detailed outline of the whole novel, but I can usually see at least one chapter ahead. Kind of like the faith-promoting story of how a train conductor only has to see as far as his headlights, except that with novel writing, getting derailed is a very real possibility. I know I’ve crashed and burned in my novel attempts before. Fortunately, this one seems to be right on track.

This semester hasn’t been too hard, but last week was somewhat harder than usual. However, it seems like things are starting to calm down into another lull (knock on wood), so I think I can shoot a little higher as to where I want to be at the end of this week (in terms of my novel). I’ve found that I can do about one viewpoint scene per day, one chapter per week. This week, I’m going to shoot for two chapters by Monday. It seems a bit tough, but since I’ve already written the first scene in chapter 9, I think I can do it.

Also, as an experiment, I’m going to try to wake up early and get in a solid hour of writing before I start my day. I found a random website the other day (lost the link, sorry) that showed the routines of several famous, successful writers. Almost all of them woke up early in the morning and did most of their work before noon. Right now, I write almost everything between eleven at night and three in the morning, so I’d like to see if I can change that. I may fail miserably, but what the heck. Now is the time in my life to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I swear I’m not morbid

Wow, I had a interesting experience writing today. I only got about 650 words in, but I spent almost half an hour just walking around and thinking about it.

The basic premise of Bringing Estella Home (I should probably think of a better title…) is that the young protagonist was forcibly and unexpectedly separated from his older brother and sister when a barbarian war fleet invaded their solar system, and he’s trying to find and rescue them.  The barbarians capture and enslave both the brother and the sister–they send the brother into a very brutal brainwashing program to turn him into one of their empath soldiers, and they turn the sister into a concubine to the head of the fleet.

Well, in the scene I wrote today, the Hameji put Ben (the captured brother) through a mock execution, after putting him through weeks of physical and psychological torture.  The idea is to break him down completely so that they can remake him from the bottom up.  The execution involves putting him in an airlock and “spacing” him.

For some reason, this scene had a really huge impact on me.  It was…very brutal.  Very moving, though I’m not sure if it’s moving in the way that I want it.  It wasn’t senseless–it happens for a reason, to set things up for when he meets back up with his brother–but man, it was very brutal and disturbing.

Now…I swear I’m not a morbid person!  No, really!  My first novel was a happy, adventuresome, optimistic space opera, and I’m sure it won’t be the last one!  And really, I don’t have any pent up anger or goth tendencies or anything–it’s just, this is what I thought should happen in the story right now.  And…wow.  It was a lot more powerful than I’d thought.

This has made me realize that I’m going to need to bring in a humorous character to periodically give relief to all this tension.  I’ve got the novel figured out in my head in a rough three act format.  If all goes well, I should be finishing with act 1 before the end of next week.  At the beginning of act 2, James is going to meet up with a very interesting and quirky band of mercenaries, and that will (inshallah) be a good opportunity to bring in some comic relief.  Not too much, of course–just enough to help the reader get through the really serious, really disturbing parts.

And I know where I want this novel to end.  I don’t know how, but I know the main character’s root motivations and how that inner conflict needs to be resolved.  I actually have it all coming down to a single line of dialogue given from the head mercenary, Danica, to James at the very end of the story.  The denouement shouldn’t take up more than a chapter and an epilogue, which of course I haven’t figured out yet, but the key to everything, the thing compelling me at this point to write this story, is to get the main character (James) to get to that one line of dialogue and come to this realization about himself.

Of course, I won’t tell you what that is, since that would be giving away spoilers. 🙂 But if you want to be an alpha reader, let me know.  The goal is to have this sucker finished before the end of April.  Tough goal, especially now that so many storylines are exploding all over the place, but I think I can do it.

Change of plans

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit.  I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story.  I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later.  The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character.  From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it.  In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on.  Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind.  A lot harder than Phoenix.  With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was.  Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding.  I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider.  The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space.  I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next.  It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this.  But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard.  This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel.  Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum.  With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step.  I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back.  Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler.  I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward.  What’s more, I’m excited about it again.  When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely.  I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas.  As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off.  I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better.  Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins.  I think I can do it.  Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less.  I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words.  With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day.  I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter!  Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it.  I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing.  I’m excited.  I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009.  One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes.  It basically details where I see the story going from here.  I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense.  However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time.  When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner.  Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far.  On to Genesis Earth!

playing catchup

Holy cow!  I feel like I haven’t been blogging or writing hardly at all in the past week.  Last year, I was so enthusiastic about the writing–and I still am, it’s just that school has freaking blindsided me.  I had a 10 page history paper to write for today, and it threw off my schedule big time.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving break is almost upon us, and that means FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, you’d better believe it!  I’ll be here in Utah for the break, probably having Thanksgiving dinner with my sisters and their husbands’ families.  In the meantime, though…FREEDOM!!!!!!!  Ah, how sweet!  I am so looking forward to it!

So, to help me catch up with the writing, here’s what I plan to do, starting tomorrow.  Every day, I’ll wake up early (I hate sleeping in anyways) and start off the day with some writing.

If I can get in just 500 words each morning, that will be awesome.  I always put off writing until the end of the day, after I’m already tired from running around juggling fifty different things at once.  By that time, I don’t want to write–I want to veg out on a computer game.  As a result, it’s been hard to keep a schedule–something I absolutely must do if I’m going to be anything more than a hobby writer.

If I start each day with writing, that will help me in a couple of ways.  Not only will I tackle the day’s wordcount before I’m too tired to do anything except rot in my unproductive disgustingness, but I’ll be thinking about the story a lot more throughout the day.  That will help me to keep the story moving.

Right now, I feel like I’m still in the first third of the story, not even halfway through with the thing.  I really, really want to finish this before the end of January–if I don’t do that, it’s going to be really difficult to have three polished novels by World Fantasy 2009.  So, that means that before the end of the month, I need to get Tristen off of the planet and into the Mormons-in-space society that I have envisioned.

Except, I really don’t have it envisioned yet–nothing concrete, anyways.  Augh!  So much to do!

So this whole break, I’m going to try and hit 4,000 words every day.  If I can’t do that, at least I can do 2,000.  And before school starts again, I want Tristen to be off of this planet and into the next section of the book.

Oh, and I’m going to blog more.  There’s so much that I want to discuss here that I just haven’t been able to post for lack of time (as well as general disorganization and disgusting unproductiveness).  So, more updates during the break.

I’m playing catchup.  Let’s hope that the vacation is awesomely productive as well as refreshingly liberating.

Breaking 1,000

I broke 1,000 words today!  Yay!  That’s my daily wordcount goal from here on out, so it was good to reach it.

Also, the story is coming along nicely.  I can see how my original idea for the scene that was giving me trouble just wasn’t fleshed out enough.  If I’d have gone with it, there would have been less conflict, less development of some key characters (some of whom die soon in the next chapter!  bwahahaha!) and some worldbuilding.

That’s about all for now.  I have a lot more I could blog about…Prop 8, Mongol hordes, history class, schoolwork, craziness…but it’s late and I need to got to bed.  Gnight.

Okay, a new direction

I owe a lot to Aneeka.  She is the one who motivated me to write The Phoenix of Nova Terra back in 2007 when I didn’t really think I could finish a novel before the end of the school year.  Like I said in the last post, I’ve hit something of a wall in my writing life recently, and a couple of days ago she was the one who pointed it out to me.  The conversation went something like this:

Empress: lol – okay, okay!
how are your stories going?
me: very slowly
frustrating
mostly just because of personal disorganization
Empress: yeah, that can happen. tired of school? or just a lot of things you want to do?
me: school is pretty easy right now
it’s just hard to get back into writing regularly
I dunno
I’m trying to juggle two projects
Empress: maybe that’s the problem?
it’s hard focusing on two stories at once
(says the girl that does it all the time – the irony!)
but it really is hard to get all focused on two projects at once
me: it probably is
Empress: I flit between projects because I’m not that into them and write because I’ve been inspired (and tend to be inspired on different stories all the time)
when I get into a project though, then it’s best that I leave the rest behind and just focus on that one
get out all that I have and see how far I can go before I get distracted again
me: yeah
I’m trying to be 100% into two projects at the same time
trouble is, I can’t keep the momentum going on both
Empress: yeah. looks like you’re human, after all 😉
me: dangit!
Empress: you should choose one to focus on and then, if inspiration hits for the other one, focus on that one for a bit before turning back to the main project
me: grr
Empress: think of it this way. You could struggle for 6 months trying to work on two projects and arrive halfway done with both
OR you could focus on one project for 6 months, finish it, and then have plenty of energy to finish the next one
me: that’s true I guess
Empress: it’s better than wearing yourself out
then you’ll be left with no project finished
and just a heap of frustrated dreams
me: I guess that’s right
question is, do I revise my old novel or do I go ahead with the new one?
I’m more excited about the new one, but I want to get the old one finished
Empress: how long would the old one take to get finished?
wait…and you’re having problems with them right now, right?
you know, I would think it’s easier to edit two stories then to write two stories at once. maybe you could finish up the new story and then edit both of them at the same time?
me: that’s an idea
Empress: and NaNoWriMo is coming up. you could finish up the first draft by next month and whallah! only have 2 stories to edit 😀
me: ugggggggggggh
I coooooooooould
that’s intense, though
Empress: well, doing two projects at once is intense as well
why not just switch it around and do this kind of intensity instead? 😉

So, after mulling it over for a couple of days, I’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Instead of trying to do two major projects at once, I’m going to put the revision of Phoenix on hold for now and focus all my energy on Hero in Exile.  For November, instead of doing nanowrimo, I’ll try to get 50,000 words deep into this novel instead.  After that, if I do roughly 1,000 words a day, I should be in good shape to finish it before the end of January.  I don’t anticipate this novel going over 120,000 words, and if it tries to, I’ll do my best to reign it in.

So that’s my goal: Finish Hero in Exile before the end of January.  Oh, and write 50,000 words in November.

I’ve noticed that I tend to either be too focused or too distracted.  Trying to balance two projects at the same time has taught me that…well, I can’t do it very well.  But I do know that once I have one project that I can focus on, I can focus on it until it gets done.  That’s what I’m going to do now.

In the meantime, I was chatting with Drek from the writing group, and found out that he could program a way cool widget for my sidebar!  It’s going to be a pair of speedometers that show my daily wordcount and my wordcount over the course of the last seven days.  Oh, and if I’m nice, he might program a widget that displays my writing projects as status bars!  I’m way excited!

Drek recently designed a website for nanowrimo this year.  The idea is that every minute, it displays a new word from his novel.  Something like that.  It’ll be really interesting to see what happens once november starts up.

I can definitely say that the goatee gives Drek programming +2.

A change of direction?

I had a chat with Aneeka yesterday about writing.  She was in London waiting to catch the bus to Scotland at around 4:00 am or so (jealous!), and I was winding down a frustratingly unproductive day.

I told her how I’m trying to divide my attention between two different projects, and she had some interesting things to say.  Basically, she said that if it isn’t working and I’m not getting as much done as I’d like, I should put one project on hold and focus on the other one.

Duh.  Of course that’s the answer.  Trouble is, I’ve been so focused on doing things this way that I haven’t seen it.

So, before this weekend is up, I need to take a step back and figure out just what I’m going to do.  Splitting my attention between two projects really isn’t working at all for me, and if I keep going at this rate I doubt I’ll be half finished with either one by the end of the semester.  Definitely time for an adjustment.

Besides figuring out what I want to do with my writing, I also need to 1) send in my absentee ballot (I’m still somewhat undecided, though Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama has almost cinched it for me); 2) read Homer’s The Odyssey and write a paper comparing Odysseus to Socrates…for Tuesday (this isn’t as bad as it seems though–The Odyssey is a really interesting story and I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far); 3) get cracking on Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, since I’ve got a book report due in a week and a half, and; 4) various other assorted homeworks.  Blegh!

Oh, and I haven’t asked anyone out on a date in the past month.  Haven’t even thought about it, really.  Dang.  How did time start moving so fast?  The semester is more than half over!

At least I got in a thousand words in Hero in Exile today.  That, and I’ve been working through the next few scenes in my mind quite a bit.  I think I know where I want to take it, even though it has nothing to do with what I wrote down in the plot outline.  I’m excited.

And tired.  More tomorrow.

Revising, outlining, and a goals adjustment

The comments on my last post were really interesting, and made me do some thinking today. When I sat down to work on Phoenix today, I decided to look at the broader picture by outlining, in two or three sentences, what is going on in each scene I’ve revised so far.

As I did this, I realized that my chapter breaks are in all the wrong places. Not only are most of the beginning chapters way too short, but the breaks just didn’t feel natural. I decided to rearrange them.

At first, I thought it would be easy, but after an hour of trying to figure it out, I realized that it was a lot harder than I’d thought.

Then, I remembered what Brandon Sanderson taught in English 318: chaptes are like miniature stories in themselves, where each one has a beginning, middle, and ending that leads to the next chapter.

Once I starting thinking of it this way, I was able to organize things in a workable pattern. While the story progresses at a steady pace throughout the book, each chapter is organized around a common theme. The chapter begins with an issue or problem, and ends when that problem either is solved or totally spins out of control.

For example:

Chapter one begins and ends with Ian’s unease about setting his feet on the surface of a planet since he was six years old. His ship, the Avion-45, gets hit by some kind of futuristic EMP and the captain decides to abandon ship. The central issue is Ian’s fear of going planetside–a fear that he doesn’t understand.

Chapter two begins with the crew loading onto the escape pods to make an emergency landing on the planet. There is an accident, and Ian’s pod gets separated from the rest of the crew. Ian, with Melinda and Ben, crash land in a desert. The chapter ends with the bandit attack, with Ben and Melinda wounded and possibly dead. The central problem is that Ian is progressively separated from his peers, and it gets worse right up to the end.

Chapter three introduces Leila, a princess kidnapped by the bandits and abused by their women. They send her out to investigate the battlefield, and she meets up with Ian. She manipulates the situation so that the bandit women think that Ian has rescued her and subjugated them. The main problem is Leila’s subjugation by the bandits, and the chapter ends with her successfully turning the tables on them.

Etc etc.

So then I used this way of thinking to outline the next chapter that I need to revise. As I wrote it out, scene by scene, I realized that the best way to develop the central focus of that chapter was to combine two events into one and reorganize how I did the perspectives. Not only would that shorten the chapter, but it would also make it less choppy and more straightforward. It would also build the suspense a lot better.

So now, even though I know that I have a ton of work to do to rewrite that chapter, I’m stoked to dive into it because I know what I’m doing. If I keep to this method, I think that the second draft will be much stronger than it otherwise would have been.

Oh, and I decided to revise my goals a bit. Here are some daily goals that I think I can actually accomplish:

  • Revise at least six pages of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.
  • Write at least 500 words in Hero in Exile OR write a wikidpad article about some aspect of the story universe.

These are goals that I feel I can actually accomplish on a daily basis. And if I think I can accomplish them, I’m sure I will.

What I really need is to keep my mind in both stories at the same time. That’s the real challenge. But if I want to write professionally, that’s a skill that I’m going to need.

Finally, here’s something cool a friend of mine just showed me. If your Meyers Briggs personality type is INTP (or if you have a significant other whose personality type is INTP), this might interest you. It’s just so hilarious that a bunch of INTPs got together and made a website devoted to their personality type. If any of the sixteen types were to do it, it would definitely be them.

Goals update…and it’s freaking late…

Man, I’ve been really bad about my writing goals this month.  I set a whole bunch of goals right as school started, and I don’t think a single day has gone by where I’ve kept all of them.  Blegh, that’s disgusting.

So today I took some time to rethink things and reevaluate.  I figured that I’d have to drop those old goals I’d set, settle for something more practical and less wild and crazy.  Something disssapointing like that.

The surprising (and encouraging) thing was that, when I calculated how many days I had to accomplish these things, I saw that they were still very much within my reach.

I mean, in order to finish the rewrite of The Phoenix of Nova Terra on schedule, all I’ve got to do is revise six pages a day.  Six pages!  That’s virtually nothing!  Get me on a roll, and I can do ten to twenty pages easy–and thoroughly enjoy it.

As far as Hero in Exile is concerned, if I write 500 words a day, I’ll be at 100,000 words by March.  100,000 is more than I want to write for this novel–I want to try and keep this one relatively short, in the 50,000 to 100,000 word range.  And that’s just at 500 words per day!  I’m sure there will be days where I write more–where I’ll be driven to write more.

So now, I’m happy to say that even though this month has been way disorganized, I still think I can do this.  I will.  I’ll be consistent, put forth my best efforts, and have three polished novels by November 2009 in time for the World Fantasy Convention.  And I’ll be there!  For sure, I’ll be there.

The problem is that I put off writing until the last thing I do before I go to bed.  Then, I run around doing all sorts of night owl type things, until finally 2:00 am comes around, and then it’s just too late to do anything but pass out.  ugh.  UGH.

But tonight, before running out to hang out with some friends (and then waste time upon coming back), I sat down and forced myself to write.  And it worked!  I made some good progress in Hero in Exile.  It’s just 500 words or so, but I’m starting to think in terms of “what do I need to accomplish in this scene?” rather than “how can I get my 500 words in today?”  That’s good.  Progress, at least of some kind.

There is other stuff that I need to blog about, but I’ll do it in a later post.  Gotta review Dune, gotta write about my new job, I’ve got a letter to the Daily Universe that I want to post up here first…all kinds of stuff.

But for now, I think I’m finished.  Time to pass out for the next four or five hours.  UUGGGGGHH.