revising – Page 11 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

13,837 words in a day?

Yeah, that’s right. Believe it or not, I barreled through about 13,837 words today. That’s thirteen THOUSAND, not thirteen hundred.

Now, only about a thousand of that was new stuff that I was writing. Most of the rest of it was rearranging scenes that I’d already written, touching them up only a tiny bit. I did merge a couple of scenes, delete or tone down some stuff, etc.

So really, about 90% of my work today was just revision, and not even really hardcore revision at that. I’m still treating this version of my story as a rough draft; I’m not taking the time to polish things up and fix the known minor problems. Really, I’m just running through what I’ve already written to make sure I have what I need to get past the roadblock I hit back in April.

The biggest thing I’m doing right now is rearranging scenes into entirely new chapter arrangements. This seems to be a problem everytime I write a story with multiple viewpoints: I never seem to get the prelude-rising-falling-resolution-cliffhanger action that good chapters have. I write scenes as they come to me, in a progression that seems natural at the time, but once I take a step back, I find that things work better on the macro-level if I complete rearrange which scenes come where in the narrative.

Part of that is that sometimes I just need to write a few paragraphs (or even a few scenes) just for me to figure out what’s going on, plotwise or settingwise. What I’m finding with Bringing Stella Home is that I’m taking scenes from James and Danica’s viewpoints and moving them up a chapter or two, cutting out the filler in the middle.

I’ve got a long way to go before I master the art of good chapter structure. Or perhaps it’s something that I do better when I’m revising, not drafting. After all, I think I’m more of a discovery writer than a firm outliner. Perhaps I write in a sort of puzzled up everywhere kind of way, and then do best when I don’t put all the pieces together until after I’ve vomited them all on the page.

I am getting more excited about this story, though. Taking a step back and looking at things from a more global perspective has really re-energized me. I can see the major turning points, and that helps me to build up for them much better.

I’m only worried that the “midpoint” is going to be somewhere around the 3/5ths mark, not the halfway mark as it should be. One of my goals with this book is to see if I can hold to the three act structure and whether that makes my story any stronger. But, according to the website, the midpoint occurs “approximately” at the halfway point, so I guess I can fudge it.

Also, the midpoint is supposed to be where the main character hits rock bottom. Hee hee hee…oh, he will. He will. Bwahahahaha!!!

In the meantime, you owe it to yourself to listen to this:

New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip. I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious backstory worked out. So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting. It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people. I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now. I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format. Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go. At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up. The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days. I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap. Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating. Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh. It doesn’t matter. Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud. If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k. That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure. Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June. 3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes. I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June. It’s a good target. It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project. Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)

Ugh. Just ugh.

Man, it was hard to write. So hard, I only just finished, and it’s 1:30 am. Ugh.

The reason it was hard was because the character’s reactions in this scene needed to be totally revamped. That also necessitated a complete shift in the structure of the writing, because the rough draft consisted almost entirely of internal feelings and reflections. Indeed, the rough draft of this scene was about as close to an info dump as I will ever allow myself to come.

Or so I tell myself. The first rewrite tried to keep things internal, just with the new reactions and motivations, but…well, before I knew what I was doing, I was info dumping. Yes. Shame on me, I went and committed one of my greatest pet peeves. And I felt dirty afterwards, too.

Well, guess what happened? I just kept writing, dumping out the info that I , but it kept coming out slower and slower, like wringing the last few drops out of a washcloth. I didn’t know where to end, so I decided to cut it out somewhere in the middle…but then I got to the next scene from this character’s point of view, and realized that I was lacking the right transition to that part of the story.

Everything was falling apart.

So…I couldn’t just cut out all that stuff that I’d vomited onto the page. It was a butt ugly info dump, but I had to get it across somehow. I decided the only way to do it was to add in an extra scene.

Trouble was, for the sake of the flow of the chapter itself, I couldn’t just add all that stuff in another scene. For starters, the nature of the stuff I’d just dumped on the page necessitated two scenes, but I didn’t have another one to bring in to break them apart. I didn’t want to have three scenes all in a row from the same point of view–that would just be clumsy.

Ugh. Just ugh.

So, how to solve it? Take out a chainsaw and perform some delicate surgery. I threw out virtually the entire info dump that I’d spent a good part of my day writing, and made some fundamental changes to the world that I’m writing that totally negated all of that previous stuff (I can do that, you know. One of the perks of being a science fiction / fantasy writer–you can play god with the world you create). Then, with the new changes I’d made to the world, I came up with a totally different scene–one that actually worked–and inserted that after the very brief, almost prologue-ish opening scene of introspection.

And then, when I was working with something a little more concrete, I was back in that wonderful place where character shines through and suspense builds through a functional plot. No more info dumping–I felt so clean, so free of sin. Great.

It still took bloody forever to finish, though. All that wrangling from earlier in the day killed my momentum, so it was an uphill battle the whole way. Ugh.

Looking back, am I satisfied with what I wrote? Honestly, no. But the revisions it need are the kind that can wait until the 2.0 draft, not the kind that are preventing me from finishing the first draft.

Those problems, I’m afraid, are yet to come.

It’s finished!

The second draft of my novel is finished! Yay!

I finished up the last scene of the last chapter of Genesis Earth 2.0 this morning, as well as the epilogue, and sent it out to my beta readers.

Would you believe that I’ve got 25 people reading this thing? That’s almost double as many first readers as I had. More than double the number of first readers who got their comments back to me.

Anyways, here is the wordsplash for version 2.0. The second draft clocked in at about 71k words, significantly more than the first draft (which was about 57k). I added a couple of extra scenes, drew out a couple of other scenes and conversations, and didn’t really cut much out.

But yeah! Finished! Now I need to wait for feedback and let it simmer for a little while. Hopefully, it’s sufficiently polished right now to start shopping around with agents and editors; if not, then a month or two from now I’ll do another rewrite to polish it up and make it really shine.

EDIT: and now, to shamelessly copy Reigheena and what she does when she finishes one of her novels, I’m going to include a rundown of Genesis Earth 2.0’s stats:

pages: 251
words: 71,481
file size: 479 KB
chapters: 14 & epilogue
start date: 28 mar 09
end date: 5 may 09

Almost done!

Yay! I’m almost done with Genesis Earth 2.0! 6k words of revision done today, bringing the project up to 95% complete. Just the final scene of the final chapter, and then the epilogue, and she’s done!

(Well, at least the second draft is done. She’s probably going to need a lot more work after that, but if I don’t put some distance between myself and this novel for a month or two, I’m not going to be able to see what she needs. Still, I feel confident that this rewrite is a significant improvement from the first draft.)

The coolest thing about this revision process is that it’s actually been kind of fun. It has involved a lot of work: hours and hours of grappling with the text to find the right way to say things, research ranging from various psychological disorders to the structure of wormholes to the composition of DNA, and lots and lots of time thinking through various aspects of the story (basically, daydreaming…but hey! it was hard work!). But even though it was a lot of work, it was fun work and I really enjoyed it.

What’s even cooler is that I’ve got 22 beta readers lined up to read it and give me feedback–boo yah! Inshallah I’ll be finishing the second draft tomorrow sometime and sending it out to everyone before the end of the day.

After this project, I’ll be moving on to Bringing Estella Home. It needs a major rehaul before I can pick it up from where I left off (the rough draft is currently incomplete), but that shouldn’t be too hard.

I put up a status bar for Bringing Estella Home on the sidebar, even though it’s stilll the rough draft. It’s currently at 60k words, and I set 100k as the base for calculating the percentage complete. It probably won’t be more than 100k…120k at the very most. We’ll see how that works out.

Currently, it’s at 0%, since I’m going to start from the very begining and rewrite it up to where I left off. I know, everone says that’s not a good idea–and usually it is–but it’s been almost a month since I’ve worked on this project, and I need to get back into it, starting with the beginning.

Taking a break from it for a while was a good idea, I think, because I realized things just weren’t working. The time off helped me to step back and see what was wrong, as well as recouperate my energy and enthusiasm for the project. I made the mistakes of simultaneously outlining too much and too little as I was still writing the rough draft; too much, because I was keeping a map of every scene on a piece of butcher paper, cementing scenes where some of them needed to be cut; too little, because I tried to create a private mercenary outfit without figuring out all the crew roles I needed the various characters to fill.

But now, none of that is an issue, and I’m ready to get started. Tomorrow, in fact, if all goes well. 🙂

Miscellaneous news updates

I’m so bad at writing catchy titles for my blog posts. CORRECTION: I can come up with catchy, sexy, exciting titles for my blog posts, it’s just that the first one that comes to mind is always dull and uninteresting. Well, too bad. To quote my mother: “suffer!”

Item One: State of the summer plans

Real quick: still haven’t heard back from the guys at JABberwocky. I’m starting to think their either really disorganized (not out of the realm of possibility), or they’ve picked someone for the internship and it’s not much of a priority for them to get back to me. I’ll email them tomorrow or Friday and ask what’s going on; probably I’ll stay in Provo, at least for spring. But you know what? I’m actually okay with that.

Lately, I’ve been staying at my sister’s apartment, hanging out with her and her husband, and spending most of the day at the HBLL writing (and chatting with Charlie, who seems to be perpetually bored at her nine-to-five job). Should I end up staying in Provo, I don’t think that’s going to change much. I might work a couple part-time and/or temp jobs, and definitely attend a few cons and writers’ conferences, but that’s about it.

Oh, and maybe go on a random road trip every once and a while. Fun! 🙂

Item Two: State of Genesis Earth

The rewrite is coming along very well! I’m over 80% finished now and I think it’s getting better. Incrementally, certainly, and there remains a lot of room for improvement, but at least it’s headed in the right direction.

I’ll probably write a different blog post on this, but I got Brandon’s comments back on the first three chapters (I submitted those for the final) and his comments were…interesting. Helpful, certainly, but a lot more negative than I thought they would be. Basically, he got really confused in chapter 2, and that ruined it for him. I’ve got to completely overhaul a couple of those scenes to make sure they’re clear. Fortunately, he really liked chapter 1, so if I can fix chapter 2 in the same way I fixed chapter 1, I think I’ll be in business.

Item Three: Other projects

With all this free time, now that school’s out, I think I should take on another writing project. Back in the fall, I tried to do this and utterly failed at it, but now that I’ve got the time I think I can manage. The question is, which project should I choose to work on first?

Option 1: Bringing Estella Home

Summary: When their home system is conquered by the ruthless Hameji barbarian warfleet, James leaves his home and sets out to rescue his older brother and sister, who have been captured and enslaved. Little does he know, his brother is being turned into a Hameji killing machine and his sister has become one of the Hameji overlord’s personal concubines.

This is the most recent project. It’s about half finished, but it needs some major revision work before I can comfortably continue where I left off. It’s got a lot of action, but it’s also pretty dark and tragic. Not a happy space opera, that’s for sure.

Option 2: Hero in Exile

Summary: Tristen (lamest name ever–I’m totally going to change his name if/when I pick up this project again) fell from the sky in an escape pod when he was only eight years old and was raised in the desert of Nova Gaia by a clan of desert tribesmen. When he sets out with Mira, the chieftain’s daughter, for the legendary Temple of a Thousand Suns to ask the keepers of the Holy Archives of the Earth of Legend about his true parentage, he has no idea of the disparity, depravity, and danger he will meet in the world outside the small, isolated community of local tribesmen–or of the corruption and intrigue within.

I started this one in the fall, planned it out extensively, and then, halfway through…realizing I was writing a completely different story. If I pick up this project, I have virtually no idea where I’ll end up with it. However, it’s a fun space opera with a lot of action and a fair amount of romance (unlike Bringing Estella Home which has virtually zero romance. No, slaves and concubines don’t count).

Option 3: The Phoenix of Nova Terra

Summary: When Ian finds himself stranded on a distant planet, the only thing he wants is to meet up with the rest of his crew and go home. Little does he know, the native humans already venerate him as their chosen savior and their king has selected his daughter to be his wife. When his journey takes deep into the forbidden lands, from which no-one has ever returned alive, Ian begins to uncover the secrets of this long-lost world, and the alien artifacts that will forever alter the paradigm of galactic human civilization–for its good or its destruction.

Gosh, how do you write a paragraph summary for a 168,000 word epic? This is the first complete rough draft of a novel that I’ve written, and it is HUGE. It spans dozens of worlds, six separate civilizations (including one alien and one AI), seven or eight viewpoint characters, and a friggin boatload of internal and external conflicts. INSANE. What’s more, it requires a lot of work–the rough draft was REALLY bad. But you know what? It might be kind of fun to try out. It’s definitely a very fun, very positive story, with lots of intrigue and lots of romance.

So, the question is: which one should I pick up first? Which ones should I work on this summer? I’ll probably only be able to do two, plus Genesis Earth; which ones should I choose?

Item Four: Looking for Beta readers

This last item is pretty brief: I’m about to finish up with the Genesis Earth rewrite, and I need some beta readers to help out with it. I’ve already got about a dozen people or so, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some more. I’m looking for as much criticism and feedback as you can give me–anything helpful, including specific problems as well as your broader, overall impressions.

Who wants to help out that can read this story by the end of May? I really appreciate it! Email me or post a comment if you want in (but please don’t ask to read it unless I already know you from real life).

Aaaaand…this post is almost 1,100 words long. Yikes! See y’all around!

(images courtesy Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers)

Happy progress

Now that school is out and I don’t have any pressing obligations to keep me busy, I’m making some excellent progress on my writing. Really good progress, actually. I revised about five thousand words today, which, according to openoffice’s wordcounting algorithm, puts me at 73% finished.

Wow. At that rate, I could be finished with the 2.0 revision of Genesis Earth by the end of the week. I could finish the 3.0 version before the second weekend in May and get it out to all my beta readers by then.

Today, I went up to campus in the morning and had a liesurely, enjoyable day. I set up camp at an LRC computer and just wrote for six hours, with about a forty five minute lunch break in between. No other worries, no other obligations, pressing appointments, places to be…it was great.

I finished reading through Genesis Earth 1.0 a couple of days ago, and there was this conversation between my two main characters that really stood out to me. They’re both on foot, headed towards a village of primitive, native peoples on a distant planet. Terra turns to Michael, the viewpoint character, and asks him, point blank, “are you happy?”

It’s not like the main character is depressed or anything, it’s just that, up to this point, he hasn’t really taken the time to think about himself, to think about why he does what he does. Most of what he does, he does it for other people, or for some grand cause, or for something outside of himself. He does that so much, in fact, that he doesn’t ever really notice whether he’s happy at what he’s doing, or satisfied, or fulfilled. Terra’s question forces him to think about where he is, what he’s doing, and evaluate whether his work, his cause, his chosen mission really does give him happiness.

Well, I asked myself that question as I was hanging out in the LRC, and I’ve got to say it makes me really happy to just write. To immerse my mind in the story or project at hand and have that be my primary concern. I was very happy today, just working on my own writing, at my own pace, and not having anything or anyone screaming at me to do anything else.

We’ll see how that changes over the next few days and weeks. It will be an interesting summer if I end up in Provo, working on my writing and hitting up some of the cons out here. It’ll definitely know if I can be truly happy and fulfilled with this writing lifestyle.

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.

Revision, revision, revision

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the other chapters.

The thing about revising is that if you change something fundamental about the character / setting / plot early on, it changes everything that happens later, meaning that you have even more revisions to make. It’s like ripples on a pond, or switching tracks at a railroad junction hundreds of miles before your destination. Right now, a lot of the changes I decided to make earlier are making much larger changes necessary later on. That’s one reason why this chapter took so long to revise.

Another reason is because I felt I’d told it wrong the first time. A lot of my alpha readers said that my novel was weakest on conflict; they didn’t feel that it had enough conflict to carry them through the longer parts in the middle. I realized, when I reread it, that the conflict was mostly there, it just wasn’t emphasized properly.

A lot of these revisions had to do with connecting the events better, starting late and exiting early, creating more of a build up to the climax. They also involved changing the order in which I explained certain things–it created more tension to bring up certain things earlier, before the action. Tension and release.

I think I failed to do all that in the rough draft because I’m more of what Sanderson calls a “discovery writer.” The middle sections are always the hardest for me, because I have to figure things out as I go along. I’ve tried planning everything out from the beginning, but when I did that, the story that came out was completely different than what I’d planned.

Trouble is, if I’m discovering my story as I’m going along, the middle sections are going to be much more choppy and rough. I can write a pretty good beginning, and I think I can pull off a decent ending, but the stuff in the middle is just all over the place, every time I write.

Fortunately, I think the revision process is going well. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s producing results. I think chapter 6 works much better now, though it could probably use a little more tweaking just to fit it into the context of the story as a whole. Better finish the 2.0 revision before I do that, though.

For a while, I thought that with school out and all this free time on my hands before I really go anywhere, I could finish the 2.0 revision before the end of the week. Now, I’m thinking it will probably take more time. I could probably be about 75% done by the end of the week, though. Even with all these deep revisions, I’m plugging along at a healthy pace. And honestly, this is the kind of work I enjoy. It’s a challenge, but not an unpleasant one at all.

Semester endgame

Seven days! Seven days! And then the semester is over! Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, in the course of those seven days, I’ve got three major papers to write. It’s going to suck.

But then it’s over!

Thank goodness. This semester has been pretty crazy–not in terms of work, but in terms of motivation. A lot of the classes I took (especially MESA 350) are basically just repeating the things I already know, which is really boring. When you’re bored, you don’t have much motivation to do the work, and when that happens…well, let’s just say that bad things happen when that happens.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), there’s nothing quite as motivating as last minute panic. The work will get done.

Unfortunately (and this is definitely unfortunately), the end-of-semester crunch will almost certainly take time away from my writing. Just when things were going so well, too. The revision of Genesis Earth is coming along VERY well–I’m not only enjoying it, I think I’m making some excellent fundamental improvements on the story. Of all of the novels I’ve written or worked on, I think this one is the most promising. If I didn’t have any other obligations, I could almost certainly finish this revision in a week–possibly even less. I’d really love to get into it.

Also, the other day I had an idea how to revive Hero in Exile and turn it into a workable story. Hero in Exile is the working title of the novel I started last fall, but after I got 70,000 words into it, I realized that the story I was writing and the story I had in mind were incompatible with each other. I put it all away, recycled some of the basic ideas, and used those for Bringing Estella Home. Well, now that I’ve put Bringing Estella Home on hold (ironically, after getting 70,000 words into it), I just had some really interesting ideas how I could make Hero in Exile work! It would require throwing out my original outline almost completely, but I could use almost everything I wrote previously–basically, tell the story that I was writing instead of the story I thought I was writing.

Except I have to change the name of the main character. “Tristen” just isn’t a good guy’s name–at least not for science fiction.

So now, I’m considering picking up that story and putting Bringing Estella Home on hold for a while. I’m going to be really busy these next couple of weeks, but after all the craziness has settled somewhat it’s going to be a very interesting question. Honestly, I have no idea. It could go either way.

But it’s all academic until the semester is finally over. But dude! SEVEN DAYS!!!! And then…FREEDOM!!!!