Tag: momentum

Chomping at the bit

It’s 1:30 am where I am, and I just finished reading through the second draft of Bringing Stella Home and all of my first readers’ comments.  I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling right now, but I am so ready to make this story shine!

First of all, the story itself is incredibly powerful, at least to me.  True, the current draft is full of problems (some of them so embarrassing I cringe just to think that I allowed other people to read it) but at its core, there is definitely something poignant and moving.  One of my first readers is on active duty right now in Afghanistan, and it actually inspired him to write a poem.

Of course, a reader can be “moved” in bad ways as well as good, and some of the feedback on the current draft’s problems brought out a side of my friends that I didn’t know even existed (yes, Kindal, I’m talking about you).  Seriously, reading those comments was like getting gutted and filleted with a rusty fishing knife.  If I’d had problems with my self esteem, I probably would have cried.

Oh well.  At least it wasn’t boring. 🙂

But harsh or not, the comments were all useful–surprisingly useful, actually.  In a story this big, it’s easy to miss things (even big things like character motivations), but after reading through all my reader comments, I feel confident that I’ve got a solid outline for the revision.

Some of the suggestions were pretty dang good, too.  Usually, I only adopt about half (or less) of the proscriptive comments my readers give me, but this time, I’ll probably end up taking quite a few more.  I don’t know if it’s because I was an idiot when I wrote the first draft or because my readers were getting into the story a lot more than usual, but the advice this time opened me up to all kinds of new ideas.

I probably can’t say much more without spoiling my own story, and I definitely don’t want to do that.  Let me just finish by saying that I believe this story may be the one that breaks me into publishing.  I hope this doesn’t sound conceited or arrogant, because I don’t mean it that way at all.  I just think that this story has some serious potential, and that if I treat it right, it will end up in print someday.

Inshallah, someday soon!

In the meantime, I’m going to put everything into revising this next draft–that is, everything short of secluding myself in a white room and starving myself (or graduating and not looking for a job, which is a more realistic possibility).  This story is calling to me–it needs to be told.  It needs to be fixed.  It needs to be polished and shared with other readers.

It needs a lot of work.  But now it’s 2:00 pm, and I’d better get to bed.  Another exciting day of photocopying newspaper clippings and compiling spreadsheets of data on press freedom in Turkey awaits me.  Excuse me if I sound too excited.

Major project shift

I’ve got this goal to finish my current work-in-progress, To Search the Starry Sea, by May 1st 2010.  However, the deeper I get into the story, the more I realize how many problems it has–how much it sucks, in other words.

Normally, this wouldn’t keep me from dropping the project or putting it on hold.  It happens with every rough draft (or second or third draft, for that matter); midway through every project, I start to get all angsty and worry that the project sucks, that it’s beyond saving, that I’m wasting my time, etc.

However, this time it’s different for a number of reasons.

First of all, the story itself doesn’t suck. However, it does have a weak beginning and a poor setup, which makes it very difficult to develop the middle section.  With better conflict foreshadowing and character introductions, I could tear right through this section, but without that, I’m floundering more and more.

A couple months ago, I started to realize this, so I started a set of revision notes for the next draft.  My thought was “if I know the story needs changes, rather than going back and changing them, I can just make a note of them and move on.”

However, that approach isn’t working because the unwritten changes aren’t impacting the story as fully and completely as they would if I’d write them out.  If the changes were minor, I could let them go–but when they have to do with something fundamental, like setting up a romantic subplot, or turning a minor character into a major character into a major viewpoint character, I can’ t just make a note of the change and move on–I need to write the thing to see what it changes.

In other words, I need to restart this project from the beginning.  But if I do that while I’m still angsty about it, it’s going to end up like crap.  I’ve got to let it sit for a while.

It’s frustrating, because I really want to finish a straight draft from start to finish.  For both Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, I only finished the rough draft after dropping the project for a while and restarting it at the beginning.  If it works, I guess it works, but it would be nice if the creative process were more linear.  Blegh.

All is not lost, however.  Most of my first readers for Bringing Stella Home have gotten back with their feedback, and it’s been extremely helpful.  I’ve got a clear direction and lots of ideas for where I want to take that story, and now that I’ve spent some time away from it, I can honestly say that it doesn’t suck all that bad.  In fact, after a lot of work, it might actually be decently good.

There are several reasons why it makes sense to work on Bringing Stella Home right now.  For example,

  1. I’m excited about it.  Better to capitalize on that now than wait until after the enthusiasm has died.
  2. I’ve got lots of ideas flowing to me now.  I could try to write them all down for later, but why not try them out now, while they’re still fresh?
  3. I’m sending Genesis Earth out to a bunch of places, and the rejections are starting to come in.  If I can respond to a rejection by sending out a second book in a timely way, I will look much more like a professional, and the agents/editors will take me more seriously.

My goal was to have To Search the Starry Sea done by May 1st.  Let’s see if I can do Bringing Stella Home 3.0 (and yes, the title will change) by that day instead.  And if that proves too difficult, what with graduation, internship, looking for work, and figuring out life, at least I can reach the halfway mark by then.

So that’s my new goal: Finish Bringing Stella Home 3.0 by May 1st, 2010 (or at least be halfway finished). To do that, I’ll have to read through all the comments by the end of this week and have the revision notes all figured out.

Better get started!

Snowmageddon! Hooray!

So for the past week, a series of crazy snowstorms has been pelting the Mid-Atlantic.  President Obama has dubbed it “snowmageddon,” and it’s so bad that all federal government offices have been closed since Friday.  With another storm hitting us tonight, it looks like we’re going to have the whole week off! Yay!!!

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been hanging out around the Barlow Center, watching movies, doing random stuff with my friends here in the program, taking naps in the middle of the day, and writing.  Lots of writing!  It’s awesome–I haven’t had this much free time since Christmas (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…)!

Today I didn’t write quite as much.  I got in about 1.1k words, a decent amount, but if I’d pushed myself I could have finished the current chapter.  Monday went much better, because I sat down and forced myself to write in the morning.  Once those initial hundred or so words were out, the rest came much easier.

On the first day of snowmageddon, when we were snowed in at Valley Forge, I got in over 1,000 words before noon.  It was rough going, though–nothing was flowing, and everything took a lot of effort.  I hate it when that happens–blegh.

But I think it was necessary, because now, the scenes are flying by pretty easy.  Sometimes, when I’m struggling with momentum, I find it helps if I take a day to focus and push myself through it.  Get rid of all distractions, put my butt in the chair, close all internet browsers, and just write, no matter how difficult.

My next novel, To Search the Starry Sea, is going to be a lot of fun.  It starts out almost exactly like Homer’s Odyssey, with the same basic conflict and setup.  Beyond that, however, I have nothing solid planned–I’m just following where the story takes me.  And boy, is it taking me to some crazy places!

For example, one of the first places Katriona (the Telemachus character) goes is a nearby world, ruled by a friend of her father’s.  To liven things up, I decided to have him live on a giant rotating space station, where the inside is covered by forests and jungles–scenery that Katriona has never seen.

This got me wondering, however: how did the jungle get there?  The answer: thousands of years ago, before superluminal space travel, a group of colonists set out for this world, freezing themselves in cryo.  When they got there, they found that a solar flare-up had rendered the planet uninhabitable, so instead they built this massive station, hoping that it would serve as a second ark for humanity.

Instead, a raiding party of space barbarians took them over, enslaved the colonists, and built their palace in the midst of the carefully maintained artificial biosphere.

This opened up a series of new possibilities for subplots, which shapes my protagonists interactions with the people here, which points her in new directions for the main plot–the next few places that she’s going to go.

This is discovery writing at its best.  Even though I have no clue where she’s going to go next, things are unfolding very nicely, and I’m excited to find out!

Stuck in a scene

I’ve been stuck in the same scene the whole week, and I really wish I could get it over with so that I could move on to other stuff.  What that other stuff is, exactly, I don’t know, but I’m eager to find out.

I don’t plan things out much when I write.  Usually, when I do think about where I want the story to go, I think ten or twenty steps down the road, painting in broad strokes where things are going to end up.  It’s like Paul Atreides’ foresight in Dune; time is like an ocean where you see a few isolated events like cresting waves, but you can’t see all the stuff in between.

I’m really annoyed because this scene is so long, but in some ways it has to be long.  I’m introducing some of the major characters, the major story conflict, introducing setting and cultural elements, etc etc.  Most of what I’m writing is crap and will probably be significantly edited,  but I’ve got to at least get it out there first.  But it’s hard to do that when you’re only averaging 500 words a day.

I’m going to take advantage of the holiday tomorrow by finishing this scene, no matter what it takes.  Hopefully that will build some momentum that will carry for the rest of the week.

Also, I sent out Bringing Stella Home 2.1 to a bunch of first readers.   I wasn’t originally going to do it, since it’s pretty bad…but Kindal kept begging me to read it, so I figured what the heck and sent it out to half a dozen other people as well.  It’s probably for the best…though, after reading over some of the more violent scenes, I hope the girls I sent it to don’t think less of me after reading it.  Holy crap, it needs a lot of work.

Anyways, in tribute of MLK day, I’ll end with this awesome tribute to Martin Luther King by U2. Happy MLK day!

Must…build…momentum

Man, nothing throws a kink in your writing life like a major paper.  This semester, I’ve got the mother of all undergraduate papers to write–the CAPSTONE.

Interestingly enough, I’ve been having a lot of fun with mine.  A lot. I’ll spare you the gory details, but basically my capstone is a statistical study of the effects of Israeli politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically whether Israeli political fragmentation leads to increases in the level of conflict.  One of these days, I’ll get around to showing you the tables, because they are fairly compelling.

Well, on Monday, the rough draft was due–the complete rough draft.  Minimum: 20 pages.  Professor Christensen doesn’t care how you get your paper in, though, so long as it’s on his desk when he shows up for work Tuesday morning.  So basically, I locked myself in the SWKT and wrote the last half of the thing in the TA office.  The building closed, but around midnight I finished the thing and slipped it into the dropbox!  Huzzah!

And now that my capstone is complete (at least, the first draft), you have NO IDEA how liberated I feel!  It’s awesome! Like, I actually have free time right now!  It’s been so long, I’ve totally forgotten what that feels like.  Freedom!

And now that I look back on the last three weeks of my writing, all I can say is ouch.

I’ve hardly worked on either of my novels at all these past two weeks.  The 7-day word counts have been steadily dwindling, and last week it actually hit zero.  Yikes!  I don’t think that’s happened since…since finals last semester or something.

Well, I’m going to fix that!  Yesterday, I churned through about 2.5k words in the revision of Genesis Earth, and I plan to keep it up all this week until school starts beating me up again.  That probably won’t be until after Thanksgiving, which gives me just enough time to finish this revision.

Hopefully, this week I’ll be able to do at least 1.5k daily.  It’s going to take hard work to build momentum again, but once I’m up and running, finishing this beast shouldn’t be hard.  Then I can devote more time to finishing the current incarnation of Bringing Stella Home, which should have been finished long ago.

And then, finally…something new!

School is kicking my trash

It’s true.  This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:

wordcounts24sep09

Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently.  If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.

This week was particularly busy.  I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation.  Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.

Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes.  Ugh.

The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers.  The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good.  I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class.  Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.

Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class.  While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea?  And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.

With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm.  Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play.  Every day, I come home exhausted.  And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class.  Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.

Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end.  In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it.  In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do.  I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.

I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that.  In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.

In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project.  Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

🙂

Busy busy AWESOME day

I had an awesome day today.  Totally awesome.  If every day this semester is like this one, I’ll be dead tired before Thanksgiving but so happy it won’t even matter.

It started at 7am.  Woke up, worked out, read a galley from Dragon Moon Press for Leading Edge while working out.  The book wasn’t that bad, either.

Showered, ate breakfast, read 1st Jacob chapter 1 in Arabic.  Great scripture study.  Read “The false gods we worship” by Spencer W. Kimball on the walk up to school.  Powerful.  President Kimball was a Prophet with a capital P.

Met with Dr. Bowen to discuss the TA job she wants to hire me for.  It’s going to be a LOT of fun!  I’ll be doing all kinds of interesting research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and making a sort of game / role play for the students in the class…and getting paid good money to do it.  Fun fun fun.

Classes were awesome.  I love my capstone.  Professor Christensen is a blast.  Talked about spatial voting and why political parties in America tend to be identical.  Made fun of Provo/Orem municipal elections.  Good times.

After classes, met with Professor Kramer to discuss the other TA job I’ll be working.  He was incredibly happy to have me on board.  Out of the hundreds of papers he read for PL SC 201 last year, he still remembered mine.  Holy cow.  I’m shocked.

Proceeded to run through a series of bureaucratic hoops to get all the paperwork filled out for both TA jobs.  I was so giddy about working I didn’t mind the hassle.  Dr. Bowen at one point said “What’s the other job paying you?  Eight something?  Well, we can do better than that!” Man, I’m going to earn so much money this semester.

Went home, cooked up some locally grown corn and spaghetti.  Mmm, corn on the cob!  Delicious.  Talked with my roommate Ben Crowder about all the stuff he’s done since graduating.  Dude, he is a renaissance man, through and through.  Awesome guy.

Leading edge was a total blast.  The editors threw a start-of-semester pizza party, and we had almost a dozen new people show up to read slush.  Plus, Peter was there–he’s always fun.  Talked about spaceballs and Big Bang theory (the movie), how Arrested Development is funnier than The Office, violence in fiction, crazy story ideas, and all kinds of stuff.  Good times.

So then, after finishing my homework, I was sitting in the library when I realized I only had an hour and a half before the library closed.  An hour and  a half, and I had not written a single word in my WIP that day.  In order to keep up with my self-imposed deadline, I needed to write 1.2k words.  1.2k words…in 1.5 hours.

I didn’t really think I could do it, but I decided what the hell and gave it a shot.  Turned off the music, avoided the email and twitter, and just focused on the work.

An hour and a half later, lo and behold! 1.2k words!  And just as I realized that, the HBLL closing music comes on…and it’s Dropkick Murphies!

Let me just say, there is no better way to end an awesome day than with some good outro music.  So let me end this post with tonight’s awesome outro music, courtesy the Harold B. Lee Library.

That’s the news and I AM OUTA HERE!

To write on vacation or not to write?

That is the question.

These last couple of weeks have been very unproductive.  I hate it.  Yeah, there have been reasons–moving apartments, sister’s graduation, coming home, etc.  Worthless excuses–I should have been writing more, and I didn’t.

At the same time, taking a break every now and again is very important.  Sometimes you just have to sit back and recharge your creative batteries–otherwise, you’ll overwork them and they’ll die.  What better way to kill your productivity than that?

I noticed, back at the beginning of the month, that I  needed a break.  I produced about 85k words each month in June and July, and I’ve been sloshing through the middle of Bringing Stella Home 2.0 for some time now.  Consequently, my creative brain seemed to  shut down about two weeks ago (or at least switched to power-saving mode) and I haven’t been writing at a consistent rate since.  Blargh.

So I know I need a vacation.  I’ve needed it for some time.  And now that I’m here in Massachusetts, heading to the cape on Saturday, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries.

Trouble is, if I stop writing altogether, will I lose momentum?  Will it take me another week just to get back into the story?  I’ve already lost so much productivity, it makes me feel disgusted.  I need to be so much further along in this story than I am if I’m going to meet my (self-imposed) deadline.

So, I’m wondering–should I write while I’m on this vacation?

Of course, I’m not going to spend eight hours a day writing full time, the way I have been for most of this summer.  I’m going to relax.  But should I set a modest goal of 1k words a day while I’m there?  I kind of think I should.

Don’t worry, though.  I’m going to take time off for fun as well.  I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a very long time!

As if writing weren’t fun enough already. 🙂

Oh crap

Dang.  I just looked at a calendar for the next two months, and it looks like I’m going to be busy.

I want to get Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home polished and ready before World Fantasy 2009, but it’s going to take a lot of work.  Genesis Earth is almost there, but Bringing Stella Home is going to require a HEAVY rewrite.  I’m in the middle of that now.

I’m currently about 25k words into the rewrite, with between 100k and 110k words to go (I think…could be more).  I want to finish this by the last week of September / first week of October.  That leaves me three working weeks in August (I’m taking off a week for vacation at Cape Cod, though I will probably write a little there as well) and five weeks in September.

But really, once school starts again, I’m not going to have much time available to write.  I’ve got two capstone papers I’ll be writing, a ccouple of poli sci classes to take, and to top it all off, I’ll be taking a 400 level English class where I’ll probably be writing a DIFFERENT novel–holy cow!  September is going to be a CRAZY month!

How the crap am I going to juggle all this?

Well, I figure if I write 4k minimum a day in August, I can get between 60k and 75k of Bringing Stella Home knocked out before school starts.  It’s going to be tough, but it won’t be significantly more than what I’m already writing. Definitely doable.

That way, I’ll only have 35k for September, which comes to a meager 1k  per day.  Considering that this is revision work, which tends to go a bit quicker, I  think I’ll be able to handle it.

But 65k in August…can I do that?

Well, in June, I wrote a grand total of 81k, and in July I wrote 85k.  Most of the stuff in July, too, was revision work that I counted differently, excluding passages that I’d recycled from the previous draft.

Considering this, I think I can do 65k in August, even with a week’s vacation.  I’ll probably even write a bit on the break, maybe 1k/day, just to keep some momentum.  We’ll see.

But, just as an aside…81k?  85k??  That’s more than the novel I worked on my entire freshman year of high school!  And I did that…in just a month?  That’s encouraging!

Maybe I’m finally getting toward the tail end of my million crappy words.  If that’s the case, maybe I’ll finally write my first good word before too long.

🙂

Holy crap! 5,373 words in one day

That’s right–5,373. And I was only going for 4k! How did this hapen?

Well, I was revising a couple of powerful, gripping scenes. The way I’d had them before, they worked okay, but when I followed the suggestions from the writing group, it made them ten times better. By midafternoon, I was hooked in my own book–I just wanted to keep writing.

The funny thing is that I never got hyperfocused while I did it. I would write a paragraph, check email, write a few more sentences, delete them, write a few more, cut to google images to do some research, get distracted, come back, etc. At the same time, it all seemed to pour out, so I must have been doing something right.

If only the rest of the book would go like this. Maybe it can! Bringing Stella Home is a lot more like a thriller than anything else I’ve written, so if there isn’t a hook on every page (or at least something to raise the stakes and keep the reader reading), I’m probably not doing it right. And if I’m hooked while writing it, chances are the reader will be hooked while reading it.

In totally unrelated news, check out this awesome Mega Man remix!