Tag: lack of sleep

First week drama and other news

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mostly because it’s been a crazy week so far.  Gosh, it feels like Saturday already.  School’s back in session, and while the homework hasn’t been bad so far (and probably won’t be), I’ve been jumping through hoops just to get this semester figured out.

Long story short, my work schedule has been clashing with my class schedule, especially since I decided I wanted to drop this English class that didn’t look very appealing.  But to graduate  with an English minor, I must take an English class this semester, and all the ones I want to take conflict with this two hour weekly mandatory in service class.  My boss will probably fire me if I can’t make the meeting, but you know what?  As much as I love the FHSS Writing Lab, school comes first.  If push comes to shove (and I really hope that it doesn’t), I’ll probably just find work elsewhere this semester.

Augh.  Everything’s complicated by the fact that you have to use add/drop cards for some dumb reason, so you can’t just rearrange  your schedule online.  If you drop a class, then realize that you shouldn’t have done it…tough.  Blegh.

Making things even more complicated are the looming deadlines.  I’ve barely touched the FAFSA (need to get on that), and for Washington Seminar I’ve got a lot of application work to do ASAP.

As usual, though, it’s the little stuff that really gets to me, not the big, earthshaking stuff.  In twenty four hours, all this crap will probably be resolved.  Twenty four hours ago, I was frantically trying to find an English class, and now I’m signed up for this AWESOME wilderness writing class!  I am so looking forward to it!

With all this first week upside downness, you would think my writing has suffered.  Well, not so!  I put in a solid 3k today, writing in hour-long blocks between classes and from 7pm to 11pm tonight.  Very satisfying to get so much done, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Now, I need to get to bed.  I’ve decided to keep working out in the mornings, like I did all summer, but the SFH weightroom closes from 8am to 4pm for classes, so I need to get up around 6:30 if I want to work out.  G’night!

Quick update

Haven’t been writing as much in Ashes these past few days. With my new goal, I need to be doing about 2.5k per day in that work, but things have slowed down considerably. I need to rekindle some excitement for this project.

I will finish it–I’ve made the goal, set the deadline, and determined that this will be one of the big three projects to get ready in time for World Fantasy 2009–but I’m working on the hard parts now, the long and tedius middle. The emotional roller coaster has begun, but I’ll hang on and see this out to the end.

It will probably need another extensive rewrite, however, before World Fantasy. Don’t know when I’m going to slip that in.

But even though I only got about 1,838 words of writing in today, I finished reading through Genesis Earth 2.0 today and completed the 3.0 draft revision notes! I’m WAY excited to work on this project! My goal is to complete it within the next two weeks. It will be a very hard, very intensive rewrite, but I’m psyched up and ready to do it!

I love revising. Drafting is when you start from scratch, with nothing but your ideas to work from. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “this is crap, this is crap, THIS IS CRAP AND I SUCK AS A WRITER!” Revising, on the other hand, is when you start with something on the page; something that needs a little (or a lot) of work, but at least you have something besides the story in your head to work with. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “it’s so much better now, it’s so much better now, IT’S SO MUCH BETTER NOW AND I AM AN AWESOME WRITER!” That’s the way it works for me, at least.

So I am very excited to start Genesis Earth 3.0 tomorrow!

In other news, I’m starting a writing group with some serious/semi-serious writer friends here in the Provo area. Gosh, this deserves its own post. More on that later.

In still other news…I totally forgot. Blegh. Need sleep.

Oh, and here’s a cool song I found. I love anime…why didn’t I study Japanese?

Oh, and I remembered what I was going to write about! I talked with an academic advisor today, and I have enough credits to finish up my Poli Sci major and graduate in April by doing an internship in Washington DC or Scotland! More on that later, for sure.

Anyway, the LRC is closing and I have to go to bed. Gnight!

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!

Genesis Earth pitch and other assorted thoughts on writing

Today I got together with Charlie after her work and discussed how to pitch my novel Genesis Earth.  We did it in the following way: I took a few minutes to explain what the book was about, while she wrote down the words that stood out and excited her.  Later, I took the words and worked out a thirty second pitch for it.

It was HARD!  I spent nearly two hours after meeting with her just to write out a stupid four or five sentence blurb!  Selling your work is totally different from producing it.  Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Michael has never set foot on Earth, but it haunts him as much as the legacy of his parents.  So when his parents build the first artificial, traversable wormhole, he sets out with his mission partner, Terra, to explore the Earthlike planet on the other side.  They arrive only to discover an empty, abandoned world and an unresponsive ghost ship advancing towards them.  When Terra’s schizoid tendencies threaten her mental stability, they both must learn to trust each other in order to confront the mysteries of the new universe–and the personal insecurities that keep them from what they truly desire.

I have that down to 29.6 seconds.  I should probably cut it shorter, but as it is it only has about half of the words that Charlie wrote down.  If I cut it any more, I’m afraid it just won’t make sense.

It’s a start, though, and talking with Charlie helped me out tremendously.  I realized that when I’m selling this stuff, I need to focus on the characters.  Sure, all the worldbuilding stuff is interesting, but it’s not what hooks the reader.  If all you’ve got is thirty seconds, don’t cut to the chase–and don’t give a synopsis!  Synopsis =/= pitch!

Charlie was exhausted, so as we talked, she started ranting in a way that can be described as bluntly honest.  Interestingly enough, most of what she said was actually quite helpful, not only for Genesis Earth, but also for my other projects.

The most helpful thing she mentioned was that when you’re writing characters, you often have to pick out their distinctive character traits and consciously overemphasize them.  If you don’t, the reader might not pick up on it and find your characters stale and boring.  While I hate melodrama and try to keep my novels free of it, I also need to keep my characters interesting.  It’s a fine line to walk, but one that you can’t avoid.

She also said that it’s very easy for protagonists to be more boring than the main characters.  I think this is probably because we rely on formulas and cliches when we’re starting out, since that’s much less risky than breaking the rules we don’t yet fully understand.  The protagonist is the character closest to the trope, while the side characters can do what they want without threatening the integrity of the story.  

Charlie said that because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of a boring protagonist, you need to consciously choose the traits that are interesting about that character and work them into the story as much as possible.  I realized, as she said that, that my main protagonist for Hero in Exile is, indeed, a boring character.  I need to pick out the things that make him interesting and consciously work those into his character.

This got me to think about planning.  I’ve found that if I try to outline a novel when I set out to write the rough draft, I end up telling a completely different story.  However, if I try to write a second draft without an outline, I have a hard time keeping things straight and fixing all the stuff I missed while discovery writing the first draft.

(I’m really upset now, because I was going to mention something that I need to foreshadow in the next revision of Genesis Earth, but…I totally forgot what it was!  GAH!!!  That’s what I get for not outlining!)

Charlie then started to rant about some of our writing friends, and how she would never listen to criticism on her writing from someone she considered to be an inferior writer to herself.

That part was…interesting.  While I agree 110% that arguing with criticism is a sign of a poor writer, I don’t think it’s especially useful to rank writers in terms of “good” or “bad.” I would like to believe that I can learn something from everybody, and not just what not to do.  Perhaps that’s optimistic, but I think it’s also practical–I’ve found that a bloated ego can shoot you in the foot six ways to Sunday before you even know what’s going on.  I’ve found that not just through one unfortunate experience, but through several.

Brandon Sanderson said something very interesting in the last email he sent out to his English 318 class: he said that in New York, editors and agents don’t rank manuscripts by “good” and “bad,” they rank them by how much work they think it needs to be publishable.  There is a distinction between the two, just as there’s a distinction between recognizing something that works really well and something that follows the rules.  

That’s about all I have the time for now.  I’ve got to get to bed.  Late night internet == bad idea.

Fine tuning and David Gemmell ROCKS!!!

With Danke’s help, I’ve tweaked the site yet some more: updated the header image, put in the site description under the title, moved the comments link at the bottom of each post (where it really belongs–having it at the top is confusing), etc.  Now, the site is even better than ever!

All this playing around with CSS and the site code is making me wish I had majored in computer science or graphic design–this stuff is kind of fun!  I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a ton of job opportunities for graphic design (though I haven’t really been looking)–maybe this is something I could teach myself and figure it out while on the job?  It sounds like fun, but where to start?

Speaking of which, I need to do something useful with my photoblog.  I’ll bet I could make money off of it, I’m just not sure what the best way to approach it is.  I’m thinking a “tip the artist” button somewhere unobtrusive, a “buy this image” kind of thing, perhaps some kind of a print-on-demand coffee-table book…well, probably the BEST place to start is to drive more traffic to the site.  30 unique visitors per day isn’t all that impressive. =P

In miscellaneous updates, I picked up a book by David Gemmell at the library.  Gemmell writes some amazing heroic fantasy, and I’ve realized that that’s kind of what I’m shooting for with Bringing Stella Home.  I’m reading some other novels, too, but none of them have really grabbed me (in fact, I put a couple of them down just out of disgust and content issues).  

This Gemmell book I picked up, however, is awesome!  Hooked me on the first page, with some fast action, engaging characters, and interesting philosophical reflections.   Unlike the other stuff I’ve been reading, most of which I’ve been reading over the past few weeks, I’ll probably finish this Gemmell book in a few days.  Good stuff!

And…it’s past 2am.  Bah.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that I decided to pick up Hero in Exile and revise it.

 I’ve completely revised my outline (translation: I threw it out wholesale and decided to play it by ear, with a vague idea of the ending instead of a firm plan) and decided to give one of the side characters a viewpoint, since I don’t think the main protagonist has enough of a story to drive the entire novel by himself.  Renamed him from “Tristan” to “Cavin,” and I’ll probably change the title as well.  

The first chapter is still shaky, but meh, it’s good enough for a first draft.  I’ll probably throw it out once I’ve written the ending and start somewhere else.

There are two reasons I decided to pick up this project–three, actually: 1) I enjoy writing in the universe of Bringing Stella Home, and Hero in Exile is where I got most of my setting ideas for that novel; 2) I need practice writing endings, so I didn’t want to leave this as an unfinished project, and; 3) I feel I need a second project to work on when I get exhausted with the first one.  

Hopefully, instead of getting tripped up,  can recharge my creative batteries for the one while working on the other.  At least, that’s the theory; we’ll see how it translates into practice.

4k a day

It’s late, but I really need to write something of my recent thoughts on this blog, so this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness word-vomit sort of post.  But please keep reading, it probably won’t be uninteresting.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog recently, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing recently–specifically, the practicalities of trying to make this my career, getting serious about it, etc.  

In fact, for the past three weeks, it’s been just about the only thing on my mind.  I’ve been listening and re-listening to just about every episode of writing excuses, the LTUE mp3s that I recorded, the old English 318 mp3s from last year, and various other talks and speeches on the subject of writing as a career.

I don’t have the time to really explain all my thoughts on the subject, but to sum it up, I’ve been angsting over it quite a bit.  Will I be able to break into publishing in the relatively near future, or does my writing need years and years more work?  Am I making a mistake to spend my summer just working on my writing?  Am I making a mistake to be pursuing this so vigorously as my primary career path? and a whole lot of irrational angsting besides all that.  You get the picture.

Well, I’ve gotten sick of doing all this thinking and now I think it’s time to just do it.  I heard back last week from the agency in New York–turns out they already have someone, so I won’t be going there for the internship–but that’s actually alright, because it means I can take the summer to really focus on improving my writing.

Of course, if I’m not doing anything else, I need to be treating this like my full time career.  The standard thing I keep hearing, at least from the professionals in the local scene, is that the average per-day wordcount is 4k.  Depending on deadlines and other projects, that may increase, but the average daily wordcount is 4k.  Since I plan on making writing my focus this summer, that’s my goal: 4k a day.

Last week, my wordcount was above 10k, but that’s actually a bit misleading.  I wasn’t writing 10k words of new material each day, I was doing a quick mid-draft revision to add in a few crucial characters and scenes that I didn’t know I needed until I got midway through the book.  It wasn’t even much of a revision;  when I saw places where my writing really needed work, I made a note for later and kept on skimming.  I only stopped to rewrite the sections that needed major changes in order to set things up correctly for later.

As a result, I feel that I’ve lost a degree of momentum.  Now that I’m through all the old stuff, I’m writing entirely new material, and it’s very hard.  I’ve only been skimming the last few chapters and scenes; as a result, when I picked things up this morning, I had difficulty getting into the story again.

I did 3,248 words today–that’s 3.2k words of new material–and by the end, I felt like the momentum was building and I was  starting to get back into the story.  A couple of weeks ago, when I was still angsting uselessly over the whole writing career thing, I kept feeling like this novel I’m writing is just crap.  Now, however, I’m starting to see my faith in it return.

Writing is like that sometimes: the further you are from your story, the worse it seems, while the more you get into the story, the more faith you’re able to have in it.  If you don’t have faith in the story you’re trying to tell, you just won’t be able to write it.

I could say more about what I’ve learned from my experience these past few weeks, but this post is getting long.  To sum it up, that’s my new goal for this summer: 4k a day, as if I’m doing this full time.  

At that rate, I’ll probably finish this novel sometime before the BYU writer’s conference (which I will be attending, at least the afternoon sessions–just registered yesterday).  The personal deadline I set was June 15th, after the conference, but I think I can get it in early.

Okay, enough word vomiting.  Time to get some sleep.

Almost halfway…

I crossed the 30,000 word mark on my revision of Genesis Earth today.  In the old draft, that would be more than halfway through.

However, a lot of that (about 1,700, to be more precise) was adding in new material to fill in some gaps.  It’s not quite halfway done yet.

I think I’m mostly through the rough parts, though.  I’m solidly in the section that I wrote last January, so as long as I can get my character arcs straight and do a better job showing them gradually changing, everything else should go fairly smoothly.

And now I’m going to get to bed.  Even though I don’t have classes and I could sleep in until noon, I should wake up early.  You know, productivity and all that.

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.

Progress!

I’m sludging through the middle of Bringing Estella Home.  I’ve heard people call this the “blue collar work” of writing, all the parts between the beginning chapters and climactic ending chapters.  I believe it.

In particular, I was having some difficulty with chapter 7 last week.  I have, basically, three separate plot threads tied up in four viewpoints.  Sometimes, it can be frustrating to give them all equal time while putting the scenes together in such a way that they contrast and build off of each other.  In particular, it’s difficult to get the chapters right.

I’ve heard that each chapter is supposed to be its own distinct sub-story, with its rising action, a mini-climax, and a falling action of some kind.  I’m fairly confident that I can do this intuitively over one or two viewpoints, but over four viewpoints, with three different plot lines?  It’s tough.  Last time I tried was with my first novel, and when I went back for the rewrite I had to reorder several of the chapters, especially the first three ones.

The way I’m doing it for Bringing Estella Home is picking one of the plot lines to be the main subject, if you will, of the chapter.  I build on the other plot lines as well, but the big climax, the big reveal, comes in the plot line that I’ve designated for that chapter.  Typically, I’ll start each chapter with a viewpoint from the plot line that is central to the rising and falling action of that chapter–or, if I don’t start it with the viewpoint, I start it with the characters talking about the idea that is central to the climax of the chapter.

Originally, I thought that the climax / central aspect of chapter 7 would be the brainwashing / mind-altering procedures that Ben undergoes in becoming a soldier for the Hameji.  I started with James discussing the Hameji with the other mercenaries on the ship and talking about various legends they’ve heard of mind-altering drugs that give the Hameji special powers.  The next scene was Ben forced to take some of those drugs.

However, I really hadn’t figured out Ben’s part of the story at this point.  I knew he’d take the drug, and I knew how it would change him, but I didn’t know what happened next.  As a result, the rest of the chapter just felt like a chore, one that I accomplished over several late nights (probably to the detriment of the quality of the writing :P)

It wasn’t working.  The chapter just didn’t feel like it held together.

Then, I had a genius idea–why not make the last scene of chapter 6 the first scene of chapter 7?  The viewpoint was from Estella, meeting the jealous head wife of the Hameji overlord.  That scene set up the conflict for the next two chapters of Estella’s story–in retrospect, why didn’t I make it an opening scene for that reason alone?

I don’t know.  But it worked out wonderfully well!  Once I shifted the central focus of the story to Estella, EVERYTHING fell into place!  Her conflict at this point really was a lot more interesting than anything else in the chapter.

So now, with chapter 7 under my belt, I am WAY excited for chapter 8!  While I was walking back from school one day, I figured out exactly what needs to happen next in his story, and it is amazing!  Brutal, violent, and torturous, but it is amazing!  And this is the perfect chapter to insert James’s philosophical discussion with Danica, the one that I wrote down nearly a month ago just because I had to get it out!  I’m excited.  Maybe I’ll even finish it before Saturday.

Anyways, it is 2:30 am, and I am way tired.  Time to get some sleep.  Thank goodness my first class doesn’t start until noon! 🙂

update on the novel

Ughh…….

Alright, in the tradition of last year when I would write until 2am every night and then blog on it before going to bed, here is another update on how Bringing Estella Home is going right now.

It’s getting tougher.  I’m right in the middle of it right now, in chapter 7, and I’m not sure whose viewpoint I should do next or how I should be organizing these chapters.  I’ve got four viewpoints, but really there are three separate subplots going on, and I need to give them each equal time while structuring them so that the tension builds from one to the other.  When you don’t know what your chapter is doing in relation to the novel as a whole, it’s difficult.

My readers in English 318 tell me that one of the most interesting things in this story is the culture of the antagonists, the Hameji, and that’s really good because I want it to be interesting.  I’ve created a sort of ruthless, cold-hearted, irrationally violent barbarian culture, and over the course of the rest of the novel I’m going to show exactly WHY they are so violent, what drove them to it, etc.  Sound familiar?  It’s my Mongols in space idea, and it’s coming along very well…

…except that I didn’t have Ben’s part figured out very well.  He’s the one who gets brainwashed and turned into one of their soldiers, given a drug that melds his emotional being with that of a collective–kind of like the borg, but only with feelings and emotions, not with thoughts.  It will be interesting to play with that idea, but this chapter, which was originally supposed to focus more on his experience with that transition, just…didn’t work out as well.  Not a lot of screen time for him, for some odd reason.

So I did a little bit of thinking as I was walking home today.  I thought to myself, “if I were a Hameji commander, how would I train these guys?” And it worked out very well!  I think I know what I need to do now, what Ben’s story is going to be for the next couple of chapters.  That’s very good.

Man, going for a walk can really help you sort things out and figure out what happens next.  Even though I have an mp3 player, I rarely listen to it as I’m walking to and from campus.  Many times I have my best ideas while making the commute.  If/when I become a professional novelist, I’m going to have to set aside time each day for long walks.

Finally, I’m a little worried that I’m falling behind on my deadline.  I wanted to finish this thing by the final exam day, sometime in April, but now that I’m sludging through the middle, I wonder if it might take longer.  I have the climaxes figured out very well, but I’m still a long ways away from them.  I might not finish this novel until the end of May, especially since I’ll have to do some major revisions of the first three chapters to hand it in for the English 318 final.  That won’t give me a lot of time to revise my novels for World Fantasy 2009…

Bah.  There is so much to think about.  Rather than deal with it now, I’m going to go to bed.