lack of sleep – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Quick update

So I missed a couple of blog posts last week, and I don’t currently have any more lined up in the queue. I know I said I’d try to blog daily from now on, and I intend to work up to that, but I’ve got to get other things in order first. Here’s what I’ve got going on:

Wedding stuff
Tax stuff
Writing Edenfall
Revisions for Edenfall
Copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth
Metadata, formatting, and publishing Gunslinger to Earth
Writing a short story for March
Catching up on emails (there’s a lot of them)

It’s not that the workload is overwhelming, it’s just that there’s a lot of moving parts. Also, the daily routine has fallen apart and I need to build it back up again. This tends to happen periodically, so I’m not too worried, but it is frustrating and it does mean that balls are going to get dropped.

First things first: finish the copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth and get that up for preorder, preferably by the end of the week. Taxes also need to be done ASAP. The wedding stuff is mostly being handled by other people, but I need to be available, so that’s an ongoing thing. But if I can tackle those big ones, then the rest should fall into place hopefully.

Also, sleep. Can’t function without it. Caffeine is not a long-term substitute.

I’m not gonna lie, there’s a part of me that wants to shut out everything else and just do family history all day. Then there’s making family history, AKA spending time with Future Mrs. Vasicek. But she’s got school and work, so there’s a hard limit to that.

Then there’s reading. So much reading to do. Books are piling up everywhere.

Anyways, that’s enough for now. I’ll post as often as I can, but it’s going to be touch and go for a while, at least until everything else is in some semblance of order.

Quick update from Massachusetts

Hey guys, this is just going to be a quick update since it’s midnight here on the east coast and I’m pretty tired from the three-day train ride. Sleeping on the train is like skipping stones, where all you’re really doing is seeing how far you can go before you crash (and I’m due for a crash). So anyways, here goes.

First, I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done on the train, partially because of the sleep issue but mostly because I started reading STRAY by Andrea K. Höst and holy crap, I could not put it down. Seriously. It got to the point where the only thing I wanted to do was read this book, which was fortunate because riding the train, there’s not much else to do anyway. So I finished it in a little over 24 hours, which means you can expect to see a review here soon, either before or after I get back from vacation (probably before, because I plan to read the next couple books in the series at the beach and on the ride back).

Second, I’ve decided to spend the next week or so working exclusively on Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII), while the feedback is still fresh and my enthusiasm is still strong. Also, after burning through the first chapter in the last couple days, I think I can get this done pretty fast. After that, I’ll send it out to a couple of other first readers, probably make another pass, then figure things out from there. If all goes well, it should be out by mid-September-ish.

Third, I’m thinking about releasing print editions of the Star Wanderers series. At first, I thought I’d limit the print editions to the omnibuses (omnibi?), but now I think it would be cool to do little pocket-sized editions of each novella. What do you guys think? If there’s demand, I’ll try to put them out a little sooner, hopefully before Christmas. And since they’re small, I can probably price them lower, like around $6 to $7 or so (and of course, Amazon will discount them).

Third point one, before I do that I need to release a print version of Stars of Blood and Glory. Which shouldn’t be too difficult, since I’ve already typeset about half of it. Mostly I’ve just been lazy and/or busy with other stuff, but now that I check CreateSpace it seems that people are actually buying my print books, hmm. Better get on top of that.

Fourth … actually, there is no fourth. I guess I should say I’m on vacation, which means doing what I usually do except from Cape Cod, spending my non-writing time doing fun things with family. But since I’m home, I plan to go through my high-school / middle-school papers and hunt down my first novel attempt, if for no other reason than to destroy it. I may keep a page or two as a curiosity/souvenir, but that abomination really needs to die.

And that’s about it. The stone has begun to sink, and I really need to hit the sack.

Struggling not to settle

I’m in the middle of my first revision pass through Heart of the Nebula, direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and…I don’t know exactly how to put this, but the story seems to be simultaneously smoother and more shallow. Plot-wise, everything works great; character-wise, there just doesn’t seem to be as much depth as my other work.

I remember finishing the first draft in May, and being surprised at how well structured it was. Each of the three major plot points happened after exactly five chapters, and each of the chapters was almost perfectly balanced–a far cry from my previous work. I had a few stops and starts in the first part, but everything after the first hundred pages was smooth as gravy. What’s more, I’m finding in this revision that not a whole lot needs to change; it works pretty well as-is.

And yet…I can help but feel as if something is missing. The characters just aren’t coming alive the way they did in my previous works. The story isn’t quite as engaging, the climaxes quite as gut-wrenching as I would like. It feels like a good story, but not a great story.

Here’s the thing: my previous stories were all broken in this phase. Desert Stars was so broken I had to write another novel to figure out how to finish it–and even then, the second half of the book went entirely in the wrong direction and had to be thrown out. Bringing Stella Home had a solid storyline, but Stella’s character was completely broken and had to be rebuilt from the bottom up. And Genesis Earth had half a dozen false starts, and at least as many chapters that had to be thrown out because they did nothing to advance the plot.

But Heart of the Nebula isn’t exactly broken, it’s just…not at the level I would like. And I worry that because it isn’t broken, I won’t feel as compelled to make it better. I worked hard on the others, and learned a lot of lessons which helped me to write this book, but even if I’ve hit my stride and this is the result, it feels too much like settling. I can do better.

None of this probably makes any sense if you haven’t read the manuscript, but I hope it doesn’t sound too much like whining. Even if these are problems, these are good problems and I’m happy to have them. When I share this with my first readers, they will probably have all sorts of insights that will make me smack my forehead and make everything awesome again.

I guess my point is that I don’t want to settle, even though this draft will probably not be as good as I’d like it to be. I’ll fix all the known problems, then send it out to my first readers and trust them to help me find the unknown problems.

In the meantime, I should probably start something new. I have a ton of great ideas for the fantasy novel, and bouncing them off of friends has really helped me to figure out what else the story needs. After I finish reading American Gods, I’ll stock up on some fantasy to get into the right mindset, starting with David Gemmell (incidently, at dinner group tonight, I literally squeed while talking about David Gemmell. It was simultaneously embarrassing and really awesome).

Enough of this. Time for sleep.

Star Wanderers 0.2 is finished!

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

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

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

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

Have a good night!

Still alive

This post is just to let you know that I’m still alive, that I haven’t gone anywhere, and that I’m still writing.

I’ve been a little disorganized recently, with job obligations (this is my last week), a TEFL course to finish, and other stuff…can’t quite remember what other stuff, but I’m sure there was something.

Anyhow.

Point is, things have been upside down recently, but I plan on posting more frequently once I fall back into a routine. Here’s what I hope to blog about:

Blog awards: I recently got tagged by two of my blogging friends, so I’ll be passing those on.
My solo hike up Y Mountain last Saturday. Expect to see this soon, with some pictures.
Thoughts on dreams and dream interpretation. I had a really interesting experience with this recently.
Update on Star Wanderers; I hope to finish draft 2 in a couple days and send it out to alpha readers.
“Does it ever bother you to do bad things to your characters?” A question I got recently, which is a blog post just begging to be written.

Also, I’m putting together a blog tour right now for Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan, so if you’d like to have me on as a guest blogger, feel free to shoot me an email at joseph dot vasicek at gmail dot com.

In the meantime, this might interest you: I wrote a poem Sunday based on a first line I got from work. My coworkers were talking about dating, saying how they were going through a drought, and I replied with “my life is a drought, and my soul is a desert.” Great first line, huh? 🙂 If you want to read the poem, you can find it on my deviant art page here.

Other than that, there’s not much else to say. My daily routine is all shot to @#$! right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a freelancer; you’re productive for a while, until projects and schedules change, then you go through a period of chaos until you fall back into a productive routine. All a part of the lifestyle.

And now, in order to promote a more healthy lifestyle, I’m going to go to bed. G’night, interwebs. Be good.

Worldcon 2011: Wednesday

Just a quick update from Renovation before I crash for the night.

We left Provo pretty early–about 6:30, actually–and met up with Eric in Eagle Mountain. The drive to Reno was pretty long, but we had some awesome geeky conversations along the way. My favorite: how to successfully conduct an alien invasion.

So we rolled into town around 4:30, dropped our stuff off at the hotel, and hiked down to the convention center to register and wander around aimlessly until finding people we knew. At least, that’s what I did, and even though it’s a big con (about 4k to 5k people) it didn’t take long to run into a bunch of writing friends from Utah. The cool part: they had cornered Moshe Feder and were having a delightful conversation with him. Awesome guy, Moshe Feder. Very gracious and fun to talk with.

After that, I went with the gang to Tachyon Press’s panel. It was pretty good; a little dry, but still interesting. Kristy is really hoping to land an editing job with one of these companies, so she was more into it than I was, though I did ask a few questions about epublishing. I asked Moshe too, and my general vibe is that people in the traditional system are still in a “wait and see” mode.

So then we all went to IHOP, which was fun; it was good to catch up a bit, as well as relax and enjoy some good food. I went back to the con alone and browsed the freebie tables a bit, but there didn’t seem to be too much happening other than parties for the various committees trying to get their city voted for next year’s Worldcon. However, there seem to be a lot of movies showing in the late evening hours here (something I haven’t seen at a con before), so in the future I’ll have to try that out too. In any case, it was a pretty relaxing and uneventful evening.

Tomorrow is PACKED, though, and by packed I mean there’s waaay too much stuff going on for me to hit it all. But out of all those, the one panel that I absolutely WILL attend is “Making It As a Writer” with Dean Wesley Smith, among others. That one looks fascinating.

Other than that, I don’t have much to say. The convention is just getting started, so there’s not a whole lot to report…yet. I’ll keep you posted as the good stuff happens. In the meantime, sleeeeeep.

Quick update

Just an update before I go to bed (and hopefully don’t sleep in like this morning).

My writing’s tapered off a bit this past month, partially because I’ve got a lot on my plate (Worldcon, online TEFL course, moving apartments, working full time, etc), but also because I’m between projects and not totally absorbed in any one.

I’m hoping to finish Sholpan by the end of the week, but that isn’t going to require more than 8k words total. At the same time, I’m finding it hard to keep myself engaged with that project. Today, for example, I rebelled a bit and worked on the next Gaia Nova book instead, which doesn’t yet have a title. Had a blast, but only managed about 800 words.

My writing productivity took a huge dip in the end of July as I got Bringing Stella Home ready to publish, dropping down to between 500 and 1,000 words per day. I probably won’t be able to raise that significantly until after Worldcon, and even then, I’ll have to juggle a full-time job for probably another month or two (but hey, a job’s a job; I’m not complaining).

Thing is, I really, really, REALLY want to work on this untitled project–so much that I’m treating it as procrastination when I have other stuff to write. I’m also worried that if I leave off on that project for too long, I’ll lose sight of it. That’s why I’m juggling it with Sholpan right now, but I think I can handle it, especially since Sholpan should be finished in just a week or two.

I also got an email from a fan (a fan!) asking about Edenfall. Right now, I don’t have any concrete plans, but I’m hoping to finish the first draft sometime in October/November (after polishing Desert Stars), and have it ready for publication sometime in 2012. If enough people ask about it, though, I may bump it up in the queue; it all depends.

Other than that, I had a great idea yesterday for a blog series. It came while I was thinking about my dreams for the future, and the thought came that I should blog about them But I don’t want it to be just about me; I want to share my thinking about the future and how I’ve come to develop my goals and plans, so that my many friends who are in similar circumstances can glean something useful.

I’ll probably start that in a day or two. But now…sleep.

Back in Mass

Mass = Massachusetts = “back east,” for all you unwashed Utahans!

My sister’s wedding is this weekend, so I’m back at my parents’ place helping them get everything set up. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow, but I’ve got my netbook and will probably get a couple good hours of writing in.

I managed to write a bit on the plane today, but not as much as I was hoping. My goal is still to finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 by May 14th; I’ve got about 15k-20k left to go, and since I’m taking the next few weeks off to work on writing projects, I shouldn’t have any problems meeting that deadline.

Yesterday, I took the unedited manuscript of Genesis Earth and formatted it nice and pretty so my friend Laura could read it on her Kindle, and…man, it looks like a real book! There’s something about seeing your work in the actual form that people are going to read it in that is just…well, for lack of a better word, magical. It’s definitely motivated me to get GE up quickly, as well as Journey to Jordan. More on that in the next few days and weeks to come.

It’s getting late out here and I’d better get some sleep, but before I do, I want to put a plug in for my new favorite webcomic, The Zombie Hunters. Ross Wolfe, Quark’s renowned zombie expert, introduced me to the comic a couple months ago, and I have been totally hooked ever since.

The comic is set in our world after the zombie apocalypse, where a band of five thousand survivors struggles to rebuild civilization on an island that was previously the site of a major research campus. The zombie plague has a dormant phase, where the infected can live normal lives, but turn into zombies when they die.

The infected live in segregated barracks as second class citizens, but teams of them regularly venture out into the wastelands to salvage supplies from the zombie-infested ruins. The comic basically centers around one of these teams of zombie hunters; their struggles and challenges, their relationships with each other, and their hopes and dreams for the future.

The storytelling is fantastic, the characters are engaging and real, the post-apocalyptic setting dark, gritty, and yet totally immersive and frighteningly believable–man, it’s just awesome. And the longer it runs, the better it gets! I can’t wait to find out how Charlie the half-life fits in with his ability to communicate with the zombies, or to get the full backstory with Jenny and Milo. And I love the banter between Jenny and Sammie, her alcoholic sociopath best friend.

Right now, though, the main storyline is on hold while the author works through some business problems, but the short story is absolutely fantastic. I love her fantastic use of point of view–how she gets into the little boy’s head and shows the apocalypse unfold from his perspective. And the kid’s grisly end…man, zombies are even freakier when you never see their faces! I wouldn’t be surprised if I have nightmares tonight about it–I have in the past. Crazy awesome zombie nightmares, heh.

As a side note, may I point out what may quite possibly be the perfect weapon for the zombie apocalypse, the AA-12 shotgun. All it needs is a bayonet and like a bajillion clips of ammo. A must-have for any zombie contingency plan.

But yeah, let me just say I am in awe of The Zombie Hunters. Awesome, awesome story–every time it updates, I get immersed again in the post-apocalyptic world, and it is amazing. If I ever end up writing a zombie apocalypse story (which will probably involve starships and space travel in some fashion), I would be tickled if it’s even half as good as this excellent webcomic.

Goals for May

The last two weeks have pretty much decimated my writing routine. Between family stuff and a 40 hour per week temp job, I’ve pretty much fallen behind on everything.

However, the good news is that with the money from the temp job, I can afford to take a month off to work exclusively on writing projects. Here’s what I plan to accomplish, in order of importance:

Finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1.
Finish the online TEFL class.
Publish Journey to Jordan on the Kindle.
Finish >50% of Worlds Away from Home 3.0.
Prepare Genesis Earth for publication.
Release the short stories on Nook, Smashwords.
Switch to Linux.

A hefty bill, especially considering that my youngest sister’s wedding is next weekend. However, I think I can definitely do it. I’ve got about 18k words left in ITND, and with the feedback from my first readers, I’ve got tons of ideas for WAFH. That project is going to be fun.

Journey to Jordan shouldn’t be too hard, either. I found a good WYSIWYG html editor and played around with some test files today until I figured out how to make it work. Now, I just need to play around with an actual Kindle to see how small I need to make the interior illustrations/photos to make sure they look good. After that, it’s just copy and paste from old blogs, with a little spot editing and some time to write a foreword.

Journey to Jordan is going to be a lot of fun. It’s a travel journal, not a science fiction novel, but my experiences in the Middle East definitely shaped my writing style, and it might be fun for readers of my novels/stories to see where the influences came from. If all goes well, I can have it up by the 14th.

But above all else, my priority is going to be writing. I want to get back into a steady routine, plugging out a good +2.5k words each day until ITND is finished. The deadline for that is the 14th, but I want to have it finished sooner if possible. It’s going to be hard with my sister’s wedding, but I’ll do the best I can.

Of course, this is all assuming that I can take the whole month of May off. However, Pioneer Book called me up on Saturday to set up an interview–they’ve got a position open, and I’m pretty optimistic that they’ll want to hire me.

If that happens, great! I’ll just push some of this stuff back into June and juggle part time work with these writing projects. Full time work is much harder to juggle, but if things don’t work with Pioneer Book, the guys at the temp job want me to come back in June. So either way, I won’t be broke (inshallah).

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the writing pay the bills. That seems more possible to me now than ever before, but it’s still a ways out there. 2015, though–that’s the goal. I want to me making a full time living as a writer by 2015.

But for now, I’d better get some sleep. After all, I want to write +4k words tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Spinning out

Just a quick post before I go to bed…and I really should, because it’s freaking late.

I feel like I’ve been getting more and more busy, yet less and less productive. It’s @%$! frustrating. In the last two weeks, I’ve had numerous job applications and interviews (though not as many interviews as I’d like), tons of complicated paperwork for the EPIK job in Korea I’m hoping to take come September, the only TEFL course I’m taking (in which I feel I am constantly behind), and all sorts of other random crap.

Oh, and then there’s writing. I’ve been averaging only about 1.5k words per day, which is kind of pathetic when you realize that I don’t have regular work.

I wish I could say that I’ve been spending a lot of this extra time socializing, but sadly that isn’t the case. I haven’t gone out on a date in months, and with each passing week I drift further and further from the people in my ward. I’ve been pretty active with Quark, though, so that sort of makes up for things, but not enough.

One of the good things, though, is that I’ve been getting up relatively early all week–and by “relatively,” I mean before 9:00 am. Next week’s goal: go to bed by 1:00, and get up before 8:00. The timestamp on this post can probably tell you how much of a head start I’ve got.

Oh, and I have been exercising regularly. That’s a good thing, I suppose. Haven’t seen many results of that, except perhaps a slightly more active lifestyle, but it’s fun and I’ll keep it up. Running is where I catch up on old podcasts, and I subscribe to quite a few.

I don’t know if this late night rant is useful in any way, except maybe to empathize with what it’s like when you’re busy all the time but never feel like you’re getting enough done. I guess most people feel like that at one point or another, but it’s good to look back and see what you accomplished, like I did here. For all the spinning out, I suppose it wasn’t a total wash. And really, it almost never is.

But yeah, the main thing that makes me angsty is that I never feel that I’m writing enough. I hear from everyone that with the way the publishing world is changing, fast writers have a huge advantage over slow ones. And I know I have the ability to write fast, it’s just that I never really do it consistently.

Fast, in my mind, is 4k words or more per day. I can hit it when I’m on, but that’s fairly rare. Most of the time, I average between 2k and 2.5k, and my personal deadlines reflect that.

At least with ITND, however, I’ve been writing consistently every day…except today, when I took time off to revamp a short story (“From the Ice Incarnate”). But my wordcount graph hasn’t had any huge spikes or valleys, which is good I suppose. The novel is coming along, if slowly, and that’s a good sign.

Anyhow, enough of this rant. Time for bed.