Tag: revising

September recap

So, September’s over now.  Where in the heck did all that time go?  In some ways, I can still remember the summer…but in other ways, it’s never been further away.

So, what did I do this past month?  Plenty.  I got a good start on school (14 credits this semester), I quit the writing advisor job and replaced it with two TA jobs, and I turned 25 years old.  Quarter century…and still in school.  I feel like some kind of relic. “An elegant weapon for a more civilized age…”

As far as writing goes, I wrote 41,649 words total, averaging 1,602 words per day (not counting Sundays–counting Sundays, I averaged 1,388).  I passed the 3/4ths mark on Bringing Stella Home 2.0 and started work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Not bad!  I’m surprised I wrote so much; 41k is almost as much as nanowrimo.  However, I can’t help but wonder: how many of those words are good words?

It’s a much more subjective thing to measure, but I do feel that my craft has improved.  Now that I’ve started the rewrite on Genesis Earth, I’m catching a surprising number of sentences and paragraphs that could be much better phrased.  For today, I “wrote” 1,616 words, but only got about 1,000 words further into the story (I measure wordcount with compare documents, totaling all the deletions and additions).  After the last revision–just last July–I felt very satisfied with the draft as I’d written it.  The fact that I’m changing so much on this rewrite shows that I’ve set the bar a lot higher for quality of writing (at least, I hope that’s what it means).

School is still kicking my trash.  I’ve got papers up the wazoo this entire month–3 major ones, two minor ones, and at least one midterm, not to mention all the midterms and papers I’ll be grading.  Oh, and I’m reading about a dozen academic articles per week. Dense articles.  The kind that suck your life out through your eyes.

Because of all that, and because of World Fantasy at the end of the month, I’ve decided to  put Bringing Stella Home on temporary hold until I finish the revision of Genesis Earth. Got to put priorities first, and that’s how it falls.  If the revision takes longer than expected, I may have to change my personal deadline for Bringing Stella Home to Thanksgiving.

But come Thanksgiving, I am definitely starting something new!

Final polish

I mapped out all the major assignments for my capstone class for the next month on my calendar.  Turns out I’ve got a lot more work than I thought I did.  Because of that, I decided to start work on Genesis Earth 4.0 today.

This is the final polish before World Fantasy convention.  Of all the stuff I’ve written, Genesis Earth is the only ms that I feel is ready for me to send to editors/agents.  With this draft, I hope to smooth out the writing, make the text more readable–basically, make this book really shine.  We’ll see if it succeeds.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in some ways, doing this final edit (inasmuch as any edit is “final”).  Previously, whenever I did a revision, I knew that I had time to come back later and fix anything that I just couldn’t get to.  Now, this is where it counts.  The writing has to be perfect.

Imagine how horrible it was to find a grammatical mistake on page one.  I’d forgotten to capitalize the first word of a sentence in the third or fourth paragraph.  Thankfully, it was the only mistake I saw on that page, but it’s enough to make me nervous about those chapters I sent out to the editors from BYU’s Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers.  I know how to write–really, I do!  Please believe me!

So today, every hour of the day was jam packed with classes, work, homework, and obligatory social activities.  I only had two hours to write, and in that time, I only wrote about 500 words for Genesis Earth (though, to be fair, I’m measuring it by comparing documents and only counting the words that changed).  Ouch.  Not sustainable, if I want to finish Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home (I need to change that title) before World Fantasy.  I made up for it by writing for half an hour just now in Stella, but still…

And this is where I hope I don’t mess things up.  Every time I’ve tried to juggle two projects at once, I’ve found it very hard to do so.  It’s something I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to write professionally, but it’s still very hard.  I hope my writing quality doesn’t suffer because of it.

If worst comes to worst, I’ll focus on Genesis Earth until it’s done to my satisfaction.  Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks,  even with school.  But I’m still keeping my goal to finish Stella before World Fantasy.

In unrelated news, in my political philosophy class today, Professor Hancock mentioned Huntington and I said, under my breath, “that guy was so full of crap.” Well, it turns out that Professor Hancock is quite the admirer of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory.  This is going to make class…interesting, to say the least.  After studying this stuff my entire college career, I really do believe that Huntington’s theories are utterly full of crap.

Oh, and I had a great idea for a comic: Plato’s Republic, as a cartoon!  Okay, maybe I’m just a geek, but seriously, if it were done well, it could  be really, REALLY cool.  Really cool.

Battle scenes are HARD

I’m in the middle of revising a major battle scene right now.  This is supposed to be one of the more important climaxes of the book, adding a lot more tension and emotion as the novel approaches the main climax.

Let me just say, writing a good battle scene is tough.  The first version of this one…yeah, it sucked.  Hardcore sucked.  I’m cutting whole sections at a time–five hundred words, eight hundred words–and completely rewriting them from the ground up.  I’m not sad to see these sections go, either–they were BAD.

I think the most difficult thing is to keep the pacing up without confusing the reader.  For that reason, I reconceptualized most of the action here and made it simpler.  I also repeated several times the main point of tension–basically, will we get out of here before reinforcements come and kick our trash?  I hate it when a fight scene is so confusing that the tension just leaks out.  I don’t want that to happen here.

At the same time, I’m trying to filter everything through the viewpoint character.  Too often, I’ll read an action scene that’s just a blow-by-blow of the physical action.  That gets boring REALLY fast.  Without character, you have no stakes.  I want the stakes to be high from the very onset.

Still, it’s hard.  I don’t know if I’m succeeding yet.  I probably won’t until I distance myself from what I’ve written tonight and take a good, hard look at it.

Since I can’t do that until the third revision, I’m not going to worry about it.  Better to write it out now and move on than to try so hard to get everything perfect that I can’t see the story for the words.

On the plus side, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Star Wars battle music while writing this.  That’s always fun!

Summer roundup

Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer.

When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship.  My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in Provo and write full time.

Sanderson’s agent ended up taking on a different intern, which ended up being the best for both of us, since I get the sense that he was looking to mentor someone who would go on to become a professional agent.  Me, I was just looking to network and develop some connections in the publishing world, which I did anyway (at least in the local Utah scene).  Besides, Provo is WAY cheaper than New York!

From the beginning, I treated writing as a full-time job.  I set project deadlines, daily and 7-day wordcount goals, and spent somewhere around 8 hours a day working on my various projects.  I submitted a full to an editor from the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and partials to the other two editors.  I also submitted to the Writers of the Future contest and to the LDS Publisher Christmas story contest (much smaller, but geared toward a niche market).

I started keeping my stats on May 25th, using a spreadsheet to keep track of my daily wordcount for each of my projects, the daily total wordcount, the 7-day cumulative wordcount, and any writing I did for synopses or revision notes.  Since BYU’s summer recess begins in April, I missed the stats  for the first three weeks or so, but I kept consistent records since then until now.

From May 25th to August 31st, I wrote 244,065 words in 8 projects (3 short stories and 5 novel drafts).  I averaged 2,490 words per day.  Adjusting for Sundays (I typically take Sundays off), I averaged 2,906 words per day.

My goals were to write 4k words per day, and to shoot for a constant 7-day total of 24k, but to never let that total dip below 12k words.  In 98 days, the 7-day running total only went below 12k eleven times–on those particular days, I was either traveling, moving out, moving in, or extremely busy with back-to-school chores.  For the two weeks I was on vacation, I still wrote more than 12k words each week.

Interestingly enough, out of the eight fiction projects, only one was a rough draft–a short story that I worked on for two days and never completed.  The vast majority of my writing went into revising novels that I’d already written.

I completed the first draft of Bringing Stella Home in early June (my third complete novel rough draft).  Later, in July, I began the second draft.  I’m currently just over halfway through with the revisions and hope to finish by October 10th.

I started a revision of my first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea, but decided midway through that I was running up against diminishing returns and decided to drop it (I completed the rough draft in April of 2008–it was my first finished novel and the reason I started this blog, waaaaay back in August 2007).

I started a new draft of Hero in Exile, making some drastic revisions, but found it difficult to juggle more than one writing project at a time and put it on the back burner.  I may or may not pick it up again once Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished.

I completed the third draft of Genesis Earth and started to submit it.  I will probably do one language/readability edit before the World Fantasy convention in late October and try to sell it while I’m there.

Overall, the summer was a practice run to see if I could write full time and survive the insanity.  I always feared, as a child, that if writing became my full time job I would come to hate it.  I found, however, that writing full time (8+ hrs/day, 6 days/wk) only made me enjoy it more.  Now that school is back in session, I already wish I had more time and mental space to dedicate to my writing.

I miss the summer, but not because of the lazy days, or the parties, or the vacationing–I miss the opportunity to write full time!  Provided I can find a way to support a family off of this, I can definitely see myself turning this into a career.  In the meantime, I’ll keep honing my craft and start working on getting an agent.

Now, more than ever, I feel that breaking in is more of a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’

🙂 🙂 🙂

Blarg.

I’ve got a bad case of writer’s avoidance.  It’s annoying.

I wrote 1,500 words in Bringing Stella Home today, and about 800 words of outlining.  That might seem like a lot, but when you consider how much free time I had today, it’s really not that much.  Blarg.

I’m all moved in to my new place, with my class and work schedule all worked out, my insurance paid for, groceries in the fridge, books on the shelf (or boxed in the closet–not much book space, considering that Ben’s already taken most of it!), etc etc.  I even went on a date last night–a really awesome one!  So it’s not like I can say “I had chores” and use that as an excuse.

Part of the problem, though, was that I didn’t have this particular section very well planned.  Without having a good macroscopic view of the novel, it’s hard to revise things right.  Fortunately, I took a step back today and planned out the next three chapters or so.  That should keep me going strong for a while.

Whenever I stop procrastinating and just write, I usually dive right into it.  It’s thinking too much about it before I start that really holds me  back.

So, no more thinking–just doing.

Tomorrow is the last Friday before school starts, and the last 100% open day I have before the craziness begins.  Here’s what I plan to do:

  • Cook chili (all from scratch–I’m soaking the beans tonight).
  • Pick up tupperware and a cutting board from DI.
  • Read and critique the stories for writing group.
  • Read required readings for Poli Sci 309R (or,  if not, at least on Saturday).
  • Go to the temple–gotta go to the temple before school starts.
  • Catch up a bit on the blogging backlog (and boy is it LONG).

Hopefully, in between all of that, I can knock off a chapter or two.  My goal: 4k words.  Gotta buckle down!

In related news, I got an amazing compliment from my friend Drek!  We were chatting online, and this is what he said:

Ben: Just remember you have to find a girl BEFORE you become an incredibly famous novelist, or you’ll never know if your wife married you for your money or your looks.

me: ha

ha

ha

no, I”m probably going to be poor and destitute all my life

working a day job

Ben: No way, I predict you’ll be a professional author within five years.

me: thanks

but will it be enough to make a living?

lots of bestselling authors still have day jobs

Ben: Eh, you’ll have more of a day “hobby” just so you can earn some play money.

me: perhaps

Ben: Anyway, see you on Saturday!

Thanks Ben!  I haven’t really thought of it that way (I don’t dare get my hopes up), but that would be awesome if things worked out that way.  That’s the  goal, in any case.  I just hope I can keep my head out of the water after I graduate!

Finally, I’ll leave you with some awesome Celtic music–part of the reason I haven’t been writing!

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!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is finished!

That’s right!  Here are the stats:

ms pages: 269
words: 74,687
file size: 525 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 8 July 2009
end date: 25 July 2009

Wordle: Genesis Earth 3.0

Wow, I finished this rewrite in seventeen days. Seventeen days! Hard to believe it’s only been that long. I hope the quality of this work went up in that time. I still feel like I need to run through and proofread it, make sure that the language flows well and the dialogue isn’t stilted.

In the process of writing this draft, I added or deleted 37,159 words from the previous draft. Going by the wordcount of the previous draft, 51.98% of the text changed.

Now I need to start submitting this book. It’s going to be kind of hard–I’m not sure whether it’s YA or not. On the one hand, the main characters are older teenagers and experience a lot of personal growth over the course of the novel. On the other hand, the (pseudo)science is a little dense, and the prose isn’t…well, it doesn’t read like most of the YA that I’ve read.

Well, I guess the only thing to do is shop it around and see who picks it up. In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into finishing Bringing Stella Home. The 2.0 draft of that novel is going to be AWESOME!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is almost finished!

Yeah!  Only five more scenes to go!

I love revising.  Every time I finish a scene, or a chapter, or a draft, I look back and think “man, this is so much better than it used to be!” Later, maybe, I look at it and say “okay, it still needs work,” but to know that I made something good into something better, that’s satisfaction!

My self-imposed deadline for this draft is this weekend.  I’d like to finish it tomorrow, but if all else fails, I’ll finish it on Sunday.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  I’ve done a lot of work to get this far, averaging about 2,200 words a day.  The ending is a lot trickier to fix than the beginning, since I’m much better at beginnings and middles than at endings (not as much practice), but it’s coming along.

Yesterday, I wrote about 3,500 words in this beast.  It felt so satisfying at the end of the day!  Finishing up another chapter, knowing that I was right on target.

Today, for some reason, I haven’t been able to get into the writing mindset, but that’s not too bad.  I spent some time looking over the last three or four chapters, making spot edits, re-arranging a couple of the chapter breaks to make them more coherent, etc.  Chapter organization is still a challenge for me, especially towards the end of a project.  Hopefully, I’m doing it better in this draft than the last one.

Today is Pioneer Day, a holiday in Utah.  I’m spending the afternoon and evening with family, so I probably won’t do much more writing today.  Maybe another scene sometime tonight, but that’s okay–the way I’ve re-arranged it, the chapter I need to revise for today needs just one more scene to be complete.  I’ve been working hard these past three weeks, and I’m looking forward to having a fun holiday with family.  The break will probably help me to write better, anyway.

So, that’s how things are looking from here.  In the meantime, I’m getting psyched up for my next big project: revising Bringing Stella Home and getting ready to start something completely new in the fall.  Once Genesis Earth is finished, I’ll be able to commit more creative space to those projects.  Looking forward to it!

Uh oh…more projects?

That’s right.  I recently formed a writing group with some friends, and decided to workshop Bringing Stella Home through it.  They went through the first chapter yesterday and tore it apart.  I appreciate the help a TON, but I’m going to have to start making revision to it now, so that subsequent submissions to the writing group won’t have the same issues.

So, that makes three major ongoing projects for me now: the Genesis Earth 3.0 revision draft, the Ashes of the Starry Sea 2.2 draft, and now, Bringing Stella Home 2.0.  It’s going to be very hard to juggle all three, and one of them will probably fall through  the cracks (probably Ashes, to be honest).  However, I’m going to do my best to give them all equal time.  We’ll see if I succeed.

In order to accomplish this, I’m probably going to have to make some changes to my daily routine.  Right now, I work out, eat breakfast, read the Book of Mormon, and arrive on campus ready to write…at about 11:00 am.  And that’s on a good day.  I write until about 2:00 or 3:00 pm, then go home for lunch, take a nap, check the internet, be lazy, etc.  At about 7:00 or 7:30 pm, I head back up to campus and write until about midnight.

So far, it’s been working.  I’ve been averaging 4k words per day pretty regularly these past couple of weeks.  However, if I’m going to work on these projects, I might have to focus and up that wordcount a bit.

Therefore, I’m going to try to cut back on IMing while I’m writing.  Usually, during the day, I’ve got gmail open on my browser and I check it from time to time.  I’ve got a couple of friends with whom I usually keep a running chat for the entire day, which can be maddening when you’re trying to concentrate.

I’ve been thinking about cutting back on the IMing for the last few weeks, but thus far it hasn’t been too much of an issue.  However, if I’m going to buckle down, something’s got to go.  Sorry.

(Of course, it remains to be seen if I keep this resolution.  Internet habits die hard.)

In unrelated news, I cooked the AWESOMEST chili today!  Best chili of my life, and what’s even better, I cooked it in MASSIVE amounts!  Here’s what I put in it:

corn
diced onions
ground beef
kidney beans
pinto beans
black beans
crushed tomatoes
diced jalapenos
plain yoghurt
spices

The secret ingredient was definitely the yoghurt.  Adds a creamy texture, like sour cream without the unhealth stuffy.  Also give it a rich and interesting flavor.

Good stuff!