productivity – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Coming along nicely

First things first: the latest post for the Bringing Stella Home blog tour is up over at Michael Offut’s blog; you can find it here. Michael asked me to blog about Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class, so I recapped some of my experiences, including the best advice Brandon ever gave me. Go check it out!

The revisions for Desert Stars are coming along nicely. It’s funny; for the past three months, all I’ve wanted to do is work on this novel, but it turns out that taking a long break from it was probably the best thing I could have done. The distance has helped me to take a fresh look at my prose and cut out all the extra trimmings that were just bogging things down. For example:

Draft 3.0

Jalil paused before walking down the narrow aisle of the train, rows of lights tracing a pair of parallel lines down the dark blue carpeted floor. The place felt oddly familiar, and not just because of the similarities with the trains in Aliet Dome. In fact, this one was much smaller and narrower, so that he and Mira practically had to walk sideways just to get down the aisle. The seats all faced forward, too, instead of alternating like they had in Aliet Dome. And the way the interior of the cabin was curved like a pipe, so that the ceiling blended into the walls and floor–it brought back a memory of him staring out a window at a glowing blue horizon, with the sky dark and starless overhead.

Draft 4.0

Jalil paused briefly in the door of the train, staring at the parallel rows of lights running down the dark blue carpet. The place felt oddly familiar, like something out of a dream. Perhaps it was the way he and Mira had to step sideways through the narrow aisle, or perhaps it was the way the walls of the cabin curved naturally into the ceiling and floor. It brought back a memory of him staring out a window at a glowing blue horizon, with the sky dark and starless overhead.

Just from simple stuff like this, I’ve cut almost 5k words so far; I wouldn’t be surprised if I get this baby down to 90k-95k by the end. Even though the story is pretty solid, the distance has helped me to take a fresh look at my prose. And hopefully, my writing has gotten better in the meantime.

So Desert Stars is coming along nicely. I plan to have this draft finished by October 21st, and publish it *hopefully* before Christmas. The main thing holding me back is funds; I’ll probably have to drop around $750 for editing and cover art, with maybe a month to get it put together in ebook form.

So how to come up with $750 before the end of November? One possibility I’ve been toying with is doing a fundraiser like my friend Anthon did for his Danakil expedition. $5 would get a copy of the ebook with special mention in the acknowledgments, $10 would get that plus one or two other ebooks, $25 would get that plus all of my releases over the next 18 months, etc. Or something like that. If you’ve got any good ideas for the upper donation levels, please let me know.

Once Desert Stars 4.0 is finished, I plan on jumping straight into Star Wanderers 0.3. Heck, I’ll probably start that project tomorrow! After that, I’d like to do a companion novella for Desert Stars. That shouldn’t take longer than a month. And don’t wory, I haven’t forgotten about Edenfall; it’s kind of gotten pushed onto the back burner, but I fully intend to finish it at some point. If all goes well, it’ll be up and published before the end of next year. As if that wasn’t enough, the BSH blog tour is making me want to revisit the sequel, Into the Nebulous Deep. I finished that project back in May, so it’s definitely had enough time to stew. And then there’s the New Rigel novel–gah!

Okay, first things first: Desert Stars, then Star Wanderers, and while my first readers are working on that, I’ll write the DS companion novella. Once I’ve gotten back the feedback, I’ll revisit Star Wanderers, submit the first part to Writers of the Future, and then finish the novel. That should keep me busy until Thanksgiving; anything after that, I’ll figure it out as it comes along. Oh, and some point in there, I need to find a new job.

So much to write, so little time in which to write it. Fortunately, things are going very nicely right now; if that holds up, this is going to be a very productive month.

🙂

Deceptively unproductive day

Man, where did the day go? I don’t feel like I was lazy, yet I only wrote about 1.2k words for the whole day. And things were going so well the day before…

Well, I guess I was busy, just with a whole lot of other things. Donated plasma (which took all morning), got some groceries, started GMing another round of werewolf on the quark forums, did some more research into ebooks, started the online TEFL course, went to Leading Edge and signed a contract for a poem they’re going to publish–

Oh yeah, check it out! I signed my second publishing contract today–again, with Leading Edge. They’re going t0 publish a short poem I wrote about Gliese 581g, otherwise known as Zarmina’s World.

(which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to blog about NASA’s Kepler mission since forever. It’s an incredible mission which, I believe, will lead to some revolutionary astronomical discoveries–and may even rejuvenate interest in science fiction. But more on that later…)

So yeah. My goal is to finish WAFH before the end of February, which is going to require a lot of work. Two and a half weeks, with LTUE 2011 sucking up one of the weekends…it’s going to be tough.

Numbers-wise, though, it’s still quite doable. I want to keep this draft pretty close to 90k (no more than 100k), and I’m already at 53k words. With sixteen days left in the month, I need to write between 2.3k and 2.9k words per day to make it.

In the meantime, it’s 2 am, and I’d better get some sleep. Waking up late is definitely bad for productivity, and I hate it. If I could train myself to wake up every morning at 5 am like Aneeka, that would be awesome. Actually, I’d probably just complain about how much it sucked to get up early every day, but hey–the grass is always greener…

10k words and going strong

Today I crossed the 10k mark for my newest project, Into the Nebulous Deep. It’s a little bit behind in terms of nanwrimo, but I’m confident it will be on par before the end of the week. I wrote 2.6 words today, and I’m hoping to keep that fairly steady as I move on into the month.

Since I’m between jobs at the moment, I’m hoping to get my daily word counts up to between 4k and 5k and keep it there consistently. Sounds daunting, but I know it’s possible because I did it back in June and July of 2009. If I could enjoy that kind of productivity again, that would be awesome.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a good, hard look at my routine from that time to figure out how I did it. Here are some of the key things that stood out to me:

1) I was waking up each morning in a timely manner.
2) I was exercising regularly.
3) I was splitting my time between two projects (one revision, one drafting).
4) I would leave my apartment and go somewhere else to write.
5) I had a short ritual I’d go through to focus myself on the project.

Of these, I think the most important were 1, 2, and 3. A strong, early start to the day is always helpful, and exercising is not only good for you physically, it boosts your creativity for a short period of time as well. For that reason, I recently bought a pair of good running shoes and started running. Today was the first day, and it felt great!

Three was the most surprising, because whenever I was busy with school, I found it impossible to juggle two projects at once. But out of school, it makes sense: work on the first one until you hit a rough patch, then shift gears and work on the other until you find what you need to pick up the first one again. It helps to exercise two parts of the brain, so juggling between revision and drafting t is probably for the best.

As for going somewhere else, I’m reluctant to do that since my only other computer is a tiny little netbook–but if things get rough, you may start seeing me around the Provo Library more often. I remember over the summer, this one chapter in Worlds Away from Home was just killing me, so I took my netbook to the Provo river trail, sat down on a bench, and muscled my way through it. It surprised me how quickly I punched through it–because if I were at my apartment, I know it would never have gotten done. It was just too tough.

The last one was kind of a quirky little thing for the second draft of Mercenary Savior (I called it Bringing Stella Home back then), but it would be a good idea to do the same with these other projects. For Mercenary Savior, it involved watching the opening credits of Fistful of Dollars. For Into the Nebulous Deep, I’m not sure what the ritual will be, but whatever it is I’ll make it awesome–without spending too much time on it.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on on the writing front. In response to a nibble from an agent, I’m doing a fifth draft of Genesis Earth, but I haven’t gotten past the first chapter (which I posted). Soon, I’d like to be doing about 2k to 2.5k on Nebulous Deep per day, and 2k to 2.5k in the revision of Genesis Earth.

There’s more, but I’m starting to fall asleep at my keyboard, so it’s time to wrap this up and post it. Keep up the writing, nano-ninjas, and good luck!

Why am I so #$%! unproductive?

I don’t know why, but it’s a lot harder for me to write the first draft of something than it is to revise it. Finishing my last novel was much, much harder than any of the projects before it, and my productivity is still suffering because of it.

The root problem, I suppose, is procrastination. While I was writing my last novel, things got really tough towards the end, and I found myself procrastinating much more than I should have. That led me to develop a dangerous habit. Right now, as I move into the fourth revision of Mercenary Savior, I find that I’m still procrastinating even when the work is much easier (and more enjoyable).

Or is that really it? Maybe I wasn’t procrastinating when I was writing my last novel–maybe I was taking frequent breaks to “fill the well.” Except now, those breaks have turned into full-scale procrastination, and I’m finding it very hard to get back on a regular schedule.

I’ve been doing about 1k to 3k words per day this past week, but I feel like I should be doing around 4k or 5k. A lot of the time, I put off even starting until around 5pm, and stay up until late hours of the night when I should be sleeping. It’s not a sustainable schedule, and I know it.

Part of it might have to do with the fact that I’m back at my parents’ house right now, taking a short break before returning to Utah. I guess I should just stop worrying and enjoy my time here–I’m still doing well, overall, and there’s more to life than writing all the time. Still, it’s maddening to feel unproductive. Blarg.

Other than that, things are going great. I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with my dad, as well as relaxing and taking time off from other pursuits. Saw Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and loved them both. Read a couple of good books, too. Life is good.

In unrelated news, my sister is about to have a baby. Everyone in the family is WAY excited. We love you, Kate and Danny!