Quark – Page 7 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

680 words and some updates

680 words tonight. I did stay up a bit later than I’d wanted to, but meh, I don’t have class until 1:00. It really didn’t take that long to write–what took up the time was the few games I played, and also the surfing around wikipedia and other random places on the web. I am sooooo ADHD. But yeah, the story is still rolling and it shouldn’t be that hard to get at least 500 words in every day.

I’m reading Mistborn my Brandon Sanderson right now for the Quark book club, and it is really good! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten into a book like this! The world and the magic system are interesting, the characters drive the story and are also interesting, especially the main character Vin, the conflict is pretty intense and the good guys aren’t involnurable. Each new chapter makes me want to read the next chapter, and I’m really interested to see how Vin changes and grows, and what happens to her. Plus, the magic system and other elements of the story have really stoked my imagination. It’s a good book! I’m looking forward to discussing it at the Quark reading group meeting this next November!

Speaking of which, November is nanowrimo, and I’m a little bit worried about it. We haven’t planned out too much for the month as a writing group, it looks like we’re just going to have a few informal writing parties at each others’ apartments, and probably some kind of a party at the end of the month where we share our stories with each other and do other fun stuff. But really, that’s probably all we need. It’s going to be crazy–and I’m not even doing nanowrimo this year!

Yay! My friend Reigheena won a contest for her short story! Good for her! I hope things just keep getting better for her. And man, she’s about to have a baby as well! Crazy! Good luck with everything!

I’ve been reading Aneeka’s story in any of my nonexistent free time. She sent me five chapters but I’ve read only two so far. I was really impressed with the dialogue, pacing, characters, and setting in her rewrite of the first chapter. And…I’d say more, except that I know that she reads this blog. Since she’s pretty sensitive about anyone criticizing it at this point, I figure I’d better not go into much depth here. Sensitive, as in I sometimes worry she’ll jump in front of a train or something…before she sends me the rest of the story! My goal is to eventually read the whole thing. Hopefully, that will be before it’s published, but we’ll see. We shall see.

We’ve got another writing meeting tomorrow. We’ve only got four stories this time, so we shouldn’t be rushed at all. I just hope that it wasn’t a mistake to schedule the next meeting only a couple of days later, on Saturday. Several of the members seem to favor meeting together more often, and I’m hoping that if we do that, we can lower the number of stories we look at at each meeting and not be so rushed. But secretly, I’m kind of worried that I’ll lose track of the schedule and miss some of these meetings. I’m so ADHD, it might just happen…

I feel an emotional roller coaster about to begin…

You know, I used to get really freaking emotional about my writing. I’d post these notes up all over my room, some of them philosophical, others just giving myself general encouragement, and I’d read, revise, analyze, reanalyze, tear apart, and thrash my own writing. And then I’d get so emotionally wrapped up in it that when I got to about 120 pages I’d decide that the whole thing was crap, take down all the notes, put away the story, and just leave it all behind me. Totally cut it out of my life. And then I’d be depressed for a long time–until I could finally work up the courage to take out the wretched manuscript and look at it again.

Well, those were the old days. That’s what I USED to do. I’m much too grown up and enlightened to revert back to that. After all, it was just teenage angst. I’m past it. I’m capable of looking at my writing rationally and keeping its quality detached from my own view of myself. I can be brave, self-confident, and not get hung up on the little things. I can look at the problems with my writing and fix them without getting upset or depressed. I can take criticism and it won’t be all that painful.

Well, these were the things that I USED to believe. But now, I’m starting to realize that it’s probably all crap.

I’m approaching 120 pages again. My story is at 25,000+ words and I’m definitely committed to it now. More committed, perhaps, than I’ve been to a story since returning from my mission (at least, more committed to a novel-length story since I’ve already finished two short stories). And now that I’m committed, and right in the middle of the story itself, I’m starting to feel the unpredictable emotions coming on.

It’s like I’m on a roller coaster as it slowly gets pulled to the top of that very first drop–the machine is going <click> <clack> and I’m about 200 or 300 feet up in the air. The first drop off is maybe 30 feet away and I’m already starting to feel sick.

I think this realization came today during the writing meeting. It was a very good writing meeting, and I got some good and much needed feedback on my story. But I really started to feel kind of anxious as I heard people analyzing my story. I’ve felt that a little bit before, but I’ve always been able to put it aside. This time, it felt a lot stronger, and came when I wasn’t expecting it–even when people were giving my praise.

Last Winter, when Aneeka was still around, I remember the expression she would have on her face as I would give her feedback and criticism on her writing. She’d get really tense and almost a little bit scared, like an animal backed up into a corner or like a prisoner watching the torturer approach carrying some kind of unpleasant looking tool in his hand. It seemed very strange to me at the time, but I think I started to feel like that today.

And also, I think that it’s getting easier and easier to doubt my story. I’m past the honeymoon stage, where the story has just begun, I’ve got all these great ideas in my head and everything is in front of me. Now, I’ve covered some sizeable distance, and I can look back and say “oh, I need this character to be more like this,” or “I really did a poor job of this and it’s going to affect what I want to write in this upcoming scene.”

At the same time, I’m approaching the point where all these crucial questions and concepts about the world I’m writing need to have concrete answers. When I started, I could just generalize and say “well, the universe of my story is kind of like this,” or “this culture has a certain religion, and it’s kind of like this, but I’m sure I’ll work out the details when I get to that point.” Well, I’m at that point now, and I haven’t finished working out the concept. And because I don’t have the answers that I need in the concrete and specific form that I need them, it’s very easy to doubt the story and say “is this idea really any good anyways?”

So, things are starting to get a little bit tough emotionally. I can only expect it to get worse as I go along. If it happens even to the pros, so how can I expect to get away unscathed?

But there is some hope. Plenty of it, in fact. Right after the writing meeting today, I decided to go through and quickly make all the revisions that I felt the story needed (and there were plenty of them, including the embarrassing fact that Jorgen praised me for how villainous I made out this one character to be, when in fact that character was supposed to be one of the good guys!). As I thought about the revisions that I needed to make, I got really worried about them. My story, I felt, was pretty bad, and needed some major work. Well, as soon as I put in my flash drive and pulled up the story, those thoughts of “my story isn’t very good, it needs a lot of work” went away, and I just focused on what was in front of me. I saw a problem, fixed it, worked in some new stuff that made that area a little bit better, then moved on to the next thing. In a couple of hours, I had made all the revisions that had been suggested and really felt satisfied with the changes. I was excited to move on and keep writing. It was great!

So, I guess that once you REALLY commit to a story, you start to experience some pretty intense emotions. But not all of them are going to be bad. My experience so far has been that the more distanced I am from my story, the worse I think that it is, whereas the more I sit down and work on it, the more satisfaction I get. That may change in the future, but for now, it’s enough to keep me going.

Another awesome writing meeting!

So, we had a writing meeting last Tuesday! There were quite a few people there! Gamila, Jakeson, Danke, Travis, Drek, Kaci, Ben (his board name is the same as his real name, believe it or not!), Tom, and Patrick (I think that’s it, but I’m not sure. If I forgot your name, please forgive me!), so altogether there were about ten people! We definitely filled up the small library room, and the discussion was very lively!

We had some excellent stories, and I don’t think there were any stories that were boring or turned everyone off. One story was a little bit edgy, but not unacceptable, and it didn’t cause any schisms or anything. In fact, some of the more conservative members of the group complimented me personally afterwards for how I handled the situation. Quark has been shaken up by some trouble stirrers in the past (you’re welcome for the compliment, Joel), and I’ve been a little bit worried about how to handle controversies in the group on my watch. I’ve been chatting up with Aneeka and Reigheena, two former Quark writing vp’s, on this subject, and I think people from all the different perspectives appreciated how this situation was handled. And really, I did like the story that was submitted. Even though it was edgy for a squeaky clean BYU club, it wasn’t unacceptable at all, and I thought it added to the story rather than weakening it.

A lot of people liked how the meetings went, and found the feedback to be helpful but one of the old timers contacted me on g-chat a couple days later with some possible areas that we need to improve. The areas he suggested had more to do with us as a group than me as a leader, though I’ve definitely got a role to play. Basically, we need to learn some better etiquette, both as writers and as critiquers. His suggestions have spawned off a thread on the Quark forums, so I’ll refer all you quarkies to that for the full discussion on this topic, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Basically, we need to remember three things:

1) Try to avoid tangents (like anime and star trek)

2) If you’re the writer, don’t argue with the feedback you receive

3) Try to adhere to a sense of order in the way we give feedback: let people with comments on page one go first, on page two second, etc.

To that, I’d add a very helpful fourth guideline that Jakeson suggested:

4) If you’re submitting an excerpt from the novel, give a short synopsis at the beginning of the piece, so we know whether the excerpt is from the beginning, middle, or end, and can give relevant criticism.

Gamila also suggested to me on g-chat that writers should also describe what part of the writing process they’re in; whether this is a rough draft, one of the first revisions, or whether the author is trying to polish up a final draft. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I haven’t yet brought it up with the others. I plan on doing that soon.

There have been some suggestions that we break up the group, since it’s becoming so large. In general, though, I think it’s best to wait that out. I had the idea while g-chatting with Drek of splitting the group into a fantasy section and a sci fi section, where we’d meet every Saturday at the same time and place and alternate between the sections. Under this idea, people would still be free to come to every meeting, but we’d lower the submissions-per-meeting to about four and get someone to moderate the fantasy section (since I already have way too much free time as it is).

Of course, this depends on how many people we retain. I think we should keep things as they are for now, then wait and see how many people are still coming regularly in November and December.

It was a good meeting this week, but I was surprised because it really did leave me exhausted. The closest parallel I can think of is when you’re a missionary and you come out of an intense-but-disorganized lesson with an excited investigator who loves to talk. It left me exhausted like that. It was a good meeting, and I hope that in the future we’ll learn to build off of each other and find our “groove.”

Awesome Quark writing meeting!

We had another writing meeting this Saturday, and it went really well! We had quite a few new people! I was pleasantly surprised! I knew we would have a few newcomers, since we got a few submissions from some new people, but I didn’t realize that people would come and bring friends! It was great. Hopefully, many of them will stay with us!

Two of the new people are really into illustration as well as writing. One guy (I think his name was Travis but I’m really horrible with names) told us that he uses autocad to draw out spaceships and dragons for his stories. Pretty cool! It reminds me that the Quark writing vp is also supposed to be involved with the art section, which has pretty much been dead or dormant for the past year or two. I’m not that much into illustrating, so I’ll have to talk with the rest of the Quark leadership to figure out what to do about that. Hopefully, with the right person over it, we could do really well! We’ll see.

We had more submissions than we could handle this time, so I had to put off Evan’s and Ben’s stuff for the next meeting, as well as my own chapter from my story. I wasn’t expecting that, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it. If I put off someone else’s stuff so that I could get some feedback, I was worried that would seem a little self serving, so I decided to just wait for the second chapter to get critiqued. However, I think from now on it’s going to be whatever chapter I’m working on plus the first five stories to come in.

Jakeson and Gamila both submitted stuff that they’ve been working on for a while, and I think they got some good feedback. They’re both agreeable to the new rule that you can only submit the same thing twice. I hope it helps them to move forward on their projects rather than endlessly rehashing the same chapters. That’s the goal of the new rule.

A couple of the new people who submitted didn’t show up. They later told me that they got mixed up about the time, and apologized for missing the meeting. It was fine, we finished a little early, so all was good. One of the stories seemed a little bit risque to me–not so explicit that we couldn’t look at it, but it had a few sexual references that seemed a little awkward. He ended up missing the meeting, but I read his piece. It had some really interesting ideas to it, such as a giant hunter who ends up getting captured by a female giant who doesn’t want to kill him. The sexual tension was hilarious and I liked it. It was just a few references he gave to some scenes in the local tavern that I didn’t like very much. Not just for the sexual innuendos, but because they didn’t seem to help the story at all, BYU standards or not. Of course, that’s all the more reason to discuss it. Maybe we’ll be able to look at it at the next meeting.

What with Joel and this new guy, it looks like we might have a little bit of controversy down the road. And, actually, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I like controversy–otherwise, I wouldn’t be a Poli Sci major. I just hope we can handle it in a way that everyone takes something positive and useful from it. It would be a shame if people ended up getting turned off to the club over it. But I think we’re perfectly capable of expressing ourselves and having an enlightening discussion on the edgier topics.

We decided to start a short story contest for the club: the word limit is 1,000, and the requirement is that the phrase “because I’m awesome” has to appear somewhere in the story. The reading club will be doing the judging (hopefully that’ll help to connect us a little more with the rest of Quark), and the deadline is October 6th. We got the idea from something Jakeson said at the Sept 11th meeting: we were talking about this one scene in John’s story (he’s one of the new guys) where this huntsman bursts in through the window and kills a couple of the bad guys, and Jakeson said that the huntsman should say something like “because I’m awesome,” or something like that. I forget, but it was pretty funny. So, I figured it would be good to do that for our first flash fiction contest. Something light and funny.

Everyone seems to say that Saturdays work better than Tuesdays, so it looks like we’re going to have more of those meetings. However, the day after I scheduled a meeting for October 6th, I realized that that’s the weekend of General conference! So, now the next meeting is rescheduled for Tuesday the 2nd.

1,200 words and another story idea

1,200 words today. After going to a BYU Freedom Society meeting (it’s a new political club), I went to the LRC and just wrote. It’s been so long since my last writing session that I had to read over what I’d written last time, and in doing so I found out that I wanted to rewrite a lot of it. However, I (mostly) resisted the temptation, since I really have to just move forward and leave the rewrite for later. The hardest thing isn’t going to be editing the story; it’s going to be getting it all down, from beginning to end. That’s what I’ve got to focus on.

It was good to write. It’s been too long. However, I’ll bet I could have more time if I just was more efficient with it. Procrastinating homework by playing Street Fighter on my desktop is probably something I could do without. Maybe if I could get into the habit of doing my homework asap every day…

Tonight was the submission deadline for Saturday’s Quark meeting, and I was really surprised that we got so many submissions! About five or six new people are probably going to show up at this next meeting! Apparently, placing the fliers in the dorms was a good idea! I’ve been getting emails that go like this: “hi, I saw the Quark flier in the dorms, I’ve been looking for a writing group since I started coming to BYU and I love writing sci fi / fantasy, so when I heard about your group I got really excited!” In fact, I’ll probably have to not send out the next chapter of my story to this next meeting, just because there are so many submissions! Not including mine we’ve got six, and I’m debating whether or not to send Jakeson’s out, since he said he’d be ok with not sending it out if we’ve got so many other submissions. But I don’t think I should send mine out if I don’t send his out…I don’t know. I would like to get some feedback, but we’ll just have to see how this goes…

Oh, and my cousin should be coming to this next meeting! That would be pretty cool. He’s been writing some really cool stories and poems, such as a conversation between a man waiting in line for the final judgment and the angel St. Peter, where they talk about his life from his point of view (life sucks and God didn’t help me), then the angels’ point of view (you were the one who caused your own problems, not God), and then God’s point of view. It honestly sounds really cool and I’d like to read it sometime. Plus some quantum poetry. Yeah! I hope he can find the time to come to a few of our meetings.

And, on top of all that, I got this really cool idea for a short story as I was walking out of the library. Well, I suppose you could say it’s been bouncing around my head for a little bit longer than that, but it really started to solidify into a story today.

Basically, I thought to myself “what would space combat between single-pilot fighters REALLY be like? Star Wars is pretty cool, but when you really think about it, the real thing (at least, as “real” as spacefighters are) would be completely different. First of all, there would be no sound, since sound can’t travel in a vacuum. Second, the maneuvers would be very different due to the lack of an atmosphere and a zero gravity arena–I imagine they’d fly a lot more like BSG’s Vipers than Xwings. Third, they would probably travel at relativistic speeds, like in Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. I don’t have a particular reason for believing this, other than the notion that the evolution of war in space would probably favor longer range weapons and faster range ships. That, and it would just be cooler.

Joe Haldeman’s space combat scenes, as well as the opening scene in Roger Allen McBride’s The Depths of Time, just really opened me up to a new idea of what space combat could be like. Instead of it being air combat in space, it would involve a lot more physics, more computers, less visualization or reliance on what you can see through a cockpit window, relativistic speeds, high g forces, a lot more danger from relatively small particles (kind of like how a submarine, when it gets hit, gets annihilated), and a ton of other stuff. Basically, something completely different from star wars.

I imagined what one of these fighters would look like, how it would operate, and what would go into this kind of combat. I then started wondering what it would be like to fly one of these things, and then what if, in the course of battle, this guy got thrown out into space at relativistic speeds, and by the time he came back (which to him would only be a few hours) a couple of generations would have passed and the war he’d been fighting was over, replaced with peace! What would that be like?

Basically, that’s when a story really started springing up from this idea. Now, I’m reluctant to start it because I know that I should be finishing stuff instead of starting tons of things and never finishing them. This is an idea for a short story, possibly one I could submit to a few places, and for that reason alone I think it would be good to get started on this. Maybe, like with LZ150207, I could spit out a complete rough draft in one sitting. That is. if I can find the time.

Well, if you’re still reading this incoherent blogfart, all I can say is wow. And thank you. And I hope that I’m not boring you with talking about “me” all the time (though that is one of the basic things that blogging is all about). Now, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…

Awesome Quark Meeting!

So, we had the first meeting of the Quark writing group yesterday, and it went very well! I was a little bit nervous, since I’m definitely a newcomer to this club (I only joined up with it last winter, whereas most of the core members have been around for four or five years!) and not so sure how to lead things. It went very well, though! I think that just about everyone got some really good feedback, and it didn’t seem that anyone’s feelings were hurt, so that’s good!

Gamila and Jakeson were there, now as a married couple (yeah, the writing group’s marriage statistics are so high they’d make most BYU bishops jealous!), Drek, Dragonswriter and Asyr (who I don’t remember meeting last year, so it was good to meet them), and a new guy named John, who heard about the club through Joel (who showed up a little later). He’s an engineering major, so it looks like he’ll know something about physics and how realistic/unrealistic are the elements of sci fi technology in any given piece. I learned from Jakeson not to mention Ceasar in any of the meetings, but on the flipside if any of us need to know anything about the Roman empire, we have a resident expert. I think that we’ve also got quite a few experts on midieval weaponry, judging from the feedback I got last year from my story The Clearest Vision.

I thought that Drek’s piece in particular was very good. It was the first of three parts in a short story he’s writing for a contest deadline this month. Maybe some of the old timers have read it before. It starts out with a backcountry vet and his goth assistant who get a very strange visitor. The visitor drops off a humanoid/canine creature the size of a man, and asks him to operate on it. It’s got this real sense of mystery and some wonderful tension in it. At one point, the strange creature manipulates the vet’s emotions and makes him feel this intense fear. It was pretty cool to read. I’m looking forward to the rest of the story!

Joel also is a part of Inscape now, and he said they’re looking for submissions. They’re not a paying market, but it sounds like a great way to start getting published! I think I’m going to send out my short story The Clearest Vision to them, since it didn’t win anything in the AML short story contest and I don’t see it having much of a broader appeal beyond the realm of Mormon society (although I could try sending it to some Christian publishers, so long as I can find some that don’t outright reject the doctrine of the pre-existence. Muslim publications, maybe? Dunno. I’ll try with the Mormons first and see how it goes).

The feedback I’ve gotten from the boards is that there are several members of the group who can only do Saturday mornings, so it looks like that’s what we’re going to be doing. I’m thinking about alternating between Tuesdays and Saturdays, since that seems to be what we’ve done in the past. I’ll schedule it tonight and send up the email.

We do need new members, so if anyone out there would like to join us or knows someone who would, send me an email! I’ve put up several fliers around campus, and I’ve gotten a couple of emails with some interested people. We’ll see how it goes.

So, things are going well, and I hope that they only get better!