revising – Page 8 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Newsvomit

Alright, before I collapse from exhaustion and call it a night, here’s what’s up.

Today, I wrote more than 3k words in the revision of Bringing Stella Home (I’m going to change that title soon–I’ve got a new working title, but I don’t know what I think about it). The whole time, though, it felt as if I was pulling teeth. I was constantly distracted with one thing or another, and didn’t feel productive at all. Blegh.

Tomorrow, all that momentum I built up today will probably start to kick in. Unfortunately, I’ve got so much other crap to do instead. I’m flying out to Utah early Wednesday morning, so I’ve got to pack, do laundry, get a father’s blessing, finish as much schoolwork from Washington Seminar as possible (aka finish the portfolio)…the list keeps going. It’s going to be a hectic day.

Anyways. In unrelated news, Duke beat Butler by a measly two points. The game was so epic even my parents watched it. Somewhere in an alternate universe, Butler made the half-point shot as the clock ran out. I’m thinking life must be a lot more exciting in that alternate universe.

In news unrelated to the unrelated news, I found something awesome on the internets last night: the end theme from Jurassic Park for the game gear!!

Ah, the memories. The beautiful, 16-bit memories.

In other, somewhat related news (related to the writing, that is), I have a new working title for my novel: Mercenary Savior. What do you think? I kind of like it, but it feels like something is missing–something like Mercenary Savior to a ______, or Mercenary Savior in a _____ universe. I dunno.

My dear, trusted alpha readers, what do you think?

Quarterly report

So I figure that since I want to write professionally, it would be a good idea to keep track of my writing and do quarterly updates on my blog. Here’s the first one for this year:

The red line shows my daily writing word count, the blue line a running seven day total. The graph starts January 1st and goes to March 31st.

For the first part of January, the seven day total was high for a week because I’d just finished Bringing Stella Home 2.0. It dropped down way low for a while because I was busy moving into the Barlow center, starting my internship, and starting a new novel at the same time. Combining all three of those things at the same time made for very little progress, until about the middle part of the month.

Things progressed at a moderate rate (about 1k words per day) from the middle of January until snowmageddon, which hit us in the second week of February. I got a lot of writing done while snowed in, and my work in progress at the time, To Search the Starry Sea 1.0, got a lot of momentum behind it.

That momentum started to taper off, as I realized that the story I was writing was different than the story I had in my head. I swear, this happens EVERY time I try to write a novel. I tried to stick with the story in my head, but the gap got wider and wider until I realized the story just wasn’t working.

At the end of February, I decided to put it on the back burner and let my ideas simmer for a while. I’ll probably pick it up again at some point in the future, but not in the short term–I need to put it away for a while. I’m sure I’ll finish it someday, though.

So then, in the beginning of March, I went through all the comments I’d received on Bringing Stella Home. The HUGE spike you see right around the middle of the month represents all the revision notes I put together for the 3.0 draft. I read through the entire manuscript in about a week and a half, made a detailed scene by scene outline, and figured out my strategy for the revision.

Things dropped off again pretty sharply the last couple weeks of March because that was right around when I was fired from my internship. That was one hell of a stressful week. They picked up pretty quick after that, though, because 1) I had a lot more free time, and 2) I’m REALLY excited about this project.

Looking ahead, I think if I push myself, I can finish Bringing Stella Home 3.0 by the end of April. It will be difficult because I’ll be looking for an apartment and a job at the same time, but after next week I won’t have to worry about schoolwork anymore (potentially for the rest of my life…whoa). Definitely, I’ll have it done in time for CONduit 2010.

One thing I need to work on a lot more is submitting. I’ve got a list of agents to submit Genesis Earth to, I just haven’t got around to sending it to them all. The responses I’ve received have been generally encouraging: all rejections, but about half form rejections, half personalized in some way. I do think this book will find it’s way in print, though it may not be my first to be published.

Even though Bringing Stella Home will probably need at least one more major revision before the full manuscript is ready to be sent out to editors/agents, I can probably polish the first three chapters enough to shop it around sometime in May. I’m not sure if that’s what I’ll do, but it’s an option. It depends on whether I jump right in to the 4.0 revision after finishing the current draft, which I probably won’t do; better to let it sit for a while.

Instead, I think I’ll jump right in to finishing that novel I started in late 2008, Hero in Exile. The title will have to change (as always), but I’ve got a lot of fresh ideas for it, plus the enthusiasm to pull it off. In many ways, Hero in Exile is a non-linear sequel to Bringing Stella Home, so if I get a deal with the one, I can always pitch the other as the next in the series. That’s a huge plus–and a major reason why I’ll be enthusiastic about the project, since the two novels build off of each other.

Anyway, that’s what things are looking like from here. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I’ll read a couple of friends’ novels (I haven’t forgotten about you, Jakeson and Drek!), graduate, get an apartment, get a job (inshallah), write an article for Mormon Artist, go to a con or two, and maybe even get a girlfriend and/or figure out what to do with my life.

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,

I’m excited about it. Better to capitalize on that now than wait until after the enthusiasm has died.
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?
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!

New city, new life, new writing project

This is going to be a quick post (very quick), since it’s 1:00 am and I am TIRED. FYI, it might not be edited all that much. What the heck–it’s my blog anyway.

So today I left home to move into the Barlow Center for the Washington Seminar! Took the train (Dad had an accident a block from the station–yikes! A minor one, but still…); left around 6:30 am and arrived at 1:30 pm. Took the metro to the Barlow Center, unpacked, walked up to the office for my internship (it’s only a 15 minute walk!), then made new friends and hit up the city!

It’s going to be a good semester.

I’ll probably start a separate blog for all the stuff that I’m doing in Washington DC. It might be a little while before I get it all set up, but I’ll probably run it roughly the same way as my Jordan 2008 study abroad blog. Still thinking about that.

But, more importantly (at least as concerns the stuff I write about on this blog), I started a new novel today! After much deliberation, I settled on the title To Search the Starry Sea. It’s a space opera science fiction novel that rough parallels The Odyssey, at least in the first part.

The main character is a girl named (at least for now) Katrione. She lives with her mother on the family estate, a medium sized moon orbiting a gas giant planet far from civilized society. Her father was lord of the estate, but he went off to war a long time ago and hasn’t returned.

The novel starts when a woman starship captain piloting the ship Minerva arrives with some limited news of Katrione’s father’s survival, and gives her the encouragement she needs to be more aggressive and proactive about rescuing her father, even if it means crossing some gender-based boundaries in the starfaring society.

I’m totally discovering this story as I write it. I got stuck on the second paragraph, wondering what sort of things Katrione would be doing before the Minerva arrives–what she does in her spare time–and when the answer came to me (reading a novel), it opened up about a dozen interesting story possibilities. Things just flowed…at least until I realized I need to come up with more character names. Blech.

Also, after working so hard to polish and revise Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, it is very difficult to get over the fact that this draft doesn’t need to be immaculate. I’m writing down sentences and paragraphs and thinking “this is SO telly,” but I can’t do any better at this point because I don’t know the story.

The important thing at this point is not to perfect the craft but to perfect the story, and that’s a HUGE transition from everything I’ve been doing the last 6 months. I just need to tell myself that until I believe it.

Anyway, I am definitely excited for this story. VERY excited! And excited about Washington DC–it is going to be a very, very interesting semester. And hopefully fun as well!

Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished!

Just in time for the new year, too! I finished it at approximately 11:25 pm on New Year’s eve 2010. Here’s the breakdown:

ms pages: 491
words: 136,095
file size: 1,869 KB
chapters: 30
start date: 14 July 2009
end date: 31 December 2009

And the wordle image:

I’m glad to have it finished. It’s got tons of issues with it–way too many for me to show it to an agent/editor–but I think this draft is significantly better than the first one. In particular, I’ve worked on improving the chapter structure: making sure that each chapter has consistent rising action, a central focus, a climax that develops the main story in some way, and compelling transitions that propel the reader into the next chapter. I don’t do any of that very well in first drafts.

So now that the second draft is finished, time to lay it aside for a while and work on something else. After a few months, I’ll be in a better position to pick it up and fix the major issues.

In the meantime, on to something new–in more ways than one!

Happy new year!

Genesis Earth 4.0 is complete!

And it’s about time. I started this back in September, thinking I could easily get it done before World Fantasy 2009. More than a month after the convention, and five days after the last self-imposed deadline, it’s done!

Alright, here are the stats:

ms pages: 270
words: 73,009
file size: 492 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 28 September 2009
end date: 4 December 2009

When I finished, I was listening to “To far away times” from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. It fit the mood perfectly–absolutely perfectly. The epilogue might be a little cheesy (if you were one of my alpha/beta readers, you’ll know why–thanks, Gini!), but in a good way, I think. Anyways, here’s the track:

It took me forever to finish this draft, but that’s what happens when you’re swamped with school, I guess. If this were the summer and I had nothing else on my plate, I probably could have finished it in 17 days (or less) like the 3.0 draft.

For a more detailed breakdown, here is a graph of my daily wordcount for the project:

Overall, though, I’m very satisfied with my work. I’m sure that if/when it gets picked up by a publisher, they will have a multitude of editorial critiques and suggestions, but I can honestly say this draft is as neat and polished as I can make it.

It’s time to send it out!

An existential time of year

School has been kicking my trash this semester. Maybe it’s senioritis or something, but I feel like I’m doing half the work I did as a junior and still, all I can do is put out fires.

I was hoping to be finished with Genesis Earth 4.0 by now, but it’s looking like that won’t happen until the end of this week. If I really push myself, I could probably get it done tomorrow…in fact, I may just do that. Schoolwork can wait–this is what I want to do with my life.

Around this time of year, my thoughts tend to become morose and existential. Maybe it’s the lack of sunlight, or the end-of-semester crunch, but I always wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing, what the point of it is, where I’m headed in my life–that kind of stuff. For some reason, I get the feeling that my life is empty in some way.

It’s not overwhelming, fortunately. I don’t have depression or anything like that. Just…a sense of discontentment. Maybe it has to do with finals. I don’t know.

But I do know that it sucks to be pulled in so many different directions all the time. Classes, work, writing, classes; finals, papers, papers and finals to grade, writing, more papers and finals. It sucks. I can’t wait until graduation!

(talk about famous last words o.O )

In any case, Genesis Earth is just about finished. I’m finding that the closer I get to the end, the more I find that needs to be revised. I’ll probably have to insert a new scene in the second to last chapter, just to tie them closer together. For some reason, the last chapter feels too…short. And disconnected. Dammit.

And then, sometime between now and my personal exodus from Provo, I need to look up places to submit this thing. I haven’t even begun to do that. Crap. Since this is the most polished draft of anything I’ve done up to this point, I’m going to be pretty hard core about submitting.

And then, somehow, I need to finish the second draft for Bringing Stella Home before New Years. Holy crap, that novel is so full of holes. I’m not going to even begin to be able patch them until the third draft, whenever that happens. Inshallah, I can get that done over Christmas break…inshallah.

And then, something entirely new! But it’s past 1am, so I’m not going to elaborate. I’ve got some cool ideas, though–some crazy cool ideas. Stay tuned.

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!

Polishing is harder than it looks

It is. This is the final revision of Genesis Earth before I submit this novel everywhere, and it’s tough. I’m changing a lot more than I thought I would, and it’s going a lot slower than any other process so far.

Plus, on my way to Murray for my mission reunion, the service light for my engine flipped on. What the heck? I just had the car serviced a month ago!

At least I know about it now, before I attempt to drive to San Jose for World Fantasy.

Long story short, showed up at 9pm to the reunion just in time to say hi to President and Sister Heywood as they were getting ready to leave. So worth it, though. They’re both getting older, and I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them again. Listened to From Cumorah’s Hill on the way back, and it was awesome. I mean that in a religious way.

I’ve got a research proposal due tomorrow, and I kid you not, I was working on that thing in my sleep last night. All night, while I was dreaming, I was thinking “should I use this author in my paper? How should I tie that in? What controls do I need to use? Will this dataset cover the same years as that dataset?” All. Night. Long.

And then I forgot it all when I woke up!

I did get some time to write, though. Took the netbook up to the laundry room in the FLSR (I still go there–much cheaper than my current apartment) and worked on my novel while waiting for the laundry to finish. Good times–some of my best writing has come out of that laundry room. Award winning writing.

In tangentially related news, I still have not heard back from Writers of the Future. I’m guessing that’s a good thing <crosses fingers>.