rough drafts – Page 5 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Second Quarter 2010 report

As you may or may not know, I keep a spreadsheet of my daily word counts. Nerdy, I know, but you’d be surprised how helpful it can be with keeping goals and staying motivated. As part of that, I’ve decided to do a quarterly report here on my blog. Here’s my report for April 2010 through June 2010:

The red line shows my daily word count, and the blue line shows a running 7-day total.

At the beginning of April, I was somewhere in the middle of writing Mercenary Savior 3.0. I was also in the middle of a long and strenuous debacle with BYU’s Washington Seminar. Long story short, I got kicked out under disputed circumstances.

Anyway, that explains the sharp dip in the first couple of weeks. I returned to my parents’ house in Massachusetts on April 6th and spent a week there before moving out to Utah; that explains the short lived bump from April 6 to April 12.

So three weeks before graduation, I came back to Utah with no job, no apartment, no transportation besides my own feet–nothing. Fortunately, some friends helped me out, and for the rest of April and most of May I at least had transportation (bike) and a roof over my head.

Without a job, I had lots of writing time, and I used it well, as you can see. The sharp dip at the end of April corresponds with graduation, when all the family was over and I was spending most of my time with them.

Things dropped off the second half of May, though, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was writing fatigue? I was coming up on the end of Mercenary Savior, and as I remember, the revision was fairly tough. Also, I was stressed out about not having a job, and spent much of my free time looking for work. I found my current part-time job at the end of May, and had a few spikes, but my output never totally recovered.

As an experiment, I took a week off from writing after finishing Mercenary Savior on the first of June. I thought that this would help me recharge my creative batteries and get off with Worlds Away from Home on a good start. Instead, I found that taking the time off made it harder to get back into creative writing mode, and so I struggled for the first week or two to really get that project off the ground.

Lately, I’ve been trying to bump up my output above 10k per week, without much success. For some reason, I seem to have fallen in a rut where I can’t write more than 2k per day. 2k is good, but it’s not the level where I want to be. I want to finish Worlds Away from Home in the first couple weeks of August, so that I’ll have plenty of time to polish Mercenary Savior for World Fantasy in November.

I think that part of the problem lies in the nature of the work. Mercenary Savior was all straight up revision, with very little new content. Worlds Away from Home, however, involves a ton of new content. Yes, I’ve got all that stuff I wrote back in the fall of 2008, but I’ve also added a new viewpoint character and significantly changed the basic storyline. Only about half of the old stuff is recyclable, and I’ll run out of it in 100 pages, roughly at the midway point of the novel.

After revising for so long, it’s hard to get used to writing a first draft. I’m not sure how to describe it, except that it takes a lot more mental energy–a LOT more. Plus, there’s always the nagging voices that tell you what you’re writing is crap–and when you’re writing your rough draft, the voices are usually right! Tuning them out is starting to be a challenge.

Overall, though, I’m very optimistic. My main goal is to produce one solid, polished novel a year, and I’m still on schedule to accomplish that. Mercenary Savior requires AT LEAST another revision before it’ll be good enough to send out to editors and agents, but I’ve got half a year to do that. As for 2011, I’ll almost certainly have the first or second draft of Worlds Away from Home before January 1st. Things are going well.

And on that note, I think I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Night.

Writer’s block? Tallyho!

Just a quick post before I go to bed.

Health problems suck when all you’ve got is catastrophic insurance. I started breaking out in this weird rash last week, and I went into the clinic today. It was seventy five dollars well spent, but…man, seventy five dollars?

So between taking the bus all over the Provo/Orem area to get to and from the clinic, picking up the antibiotics from Macy’s, and cooking treats for institute, I didn’t get much writing done. At the same time, though, I feel like I should have gotten a lot more writing done–that really, I was just putting it off with all the other chores.

“Writer’s block” is this generic phrase used to describe a number of writing related maladies–kind of like “consumption” back in the 1800s, I guess. Right now, I’m suffering from a particularly unusual strain: I’ve got some decent plot and character ideas, I know what I want to write, but I just can’t seem to bring myself down to write it. Not consistently, anyways. This past week, I’ve only been hitting 1.4k words per day, when I need to be doing 2.5k in order to make my 15 August deadline.

The irregularity of my schedule certainly isn’t helping, but I think it goes deeper than that. I’m currently treading new territory, going places where the first draft never went, and I can’t help but feel that the stuff I’ve written prior to this point is just crap. That’s what’s so debilitating–the recognition of all the mistakes I’ve made thus far. Some of them are relatively major–level twos, at the very least.

Well, just like the best proscription for the flu is to get rest and drink lots of water (and pop lots of antibiotics when that doesn’t work), the best proscription for writer’s block is to sit down and write! So that’s what I plan to do. Tallyho!

…except, not right now. It’s 1:00 am and I’m fighting some kind of bacterial infection. Gotta sleep, but then…tallyho!

(oh, and in totally unrelated news, an agent requested to see the full manuscript for Genesis Earth! Must not get hopes up…must not get hopes up…too late. Tallyho!)

Beginnings and title woes

Today, I came off my writing break and started my next novel. The makings of the first scene have been kicking around in my head for the past couple of days, but today I actually sat down and started it. I’m not sure how strong of a beginning it is, but at least it’s a start.

I would have started yesterday, but I had a horrible time trying to format the file. No matter how many times and ways I tried to fix the pagination in openoffice, whenever I reopened the file, it came out wrong. Finally, I switched the file from .doc to .odt, and that did the trick.

Turns out, that may be for the best. Because of the proliferation of Microsoft Word, everyone seems to use .doc or .docx, but there are several good reasons why ODF (Open Document Format) is better. In fact, several international governments have made it a matter of public policy to make the switch. After all the headaches .doc files have given me in openoffice, I certainly have. We’ll see how that goes.

As for the novel, it really, really needs a new title. The old one, Hero in Exile, just doesn’t work for me. It’s too…cliche, in a generic, meaningless way. Blegh.

And thus begins another search for a good title. Do you have any ideas? The story is about a boy raised by desert nomads in search of his true origins, whose world completely falls apart when he falls in love with a girl who wants him to stay. I suppose it’s kind of a cross between The Jungle Book and Great Expectations…in spaaace!

Mainly, though, it’s about an upright, noble-hearted boy trying to come to terms with the moral corruption and decay of the world around him. When he finds that corruption inside himself, it almost destroys him, but before the end…no, better not give it away.

I don’t know–I just know it needs a better title. Any ideas?

Oh, and before I go to bed, you might find this interesting. It’s an original arrangement of one of the most memorable songs from the Xenogears soundtrack. It even has lyrics, written in the language of one of the races of the game.

Wow–talk about a super fan! I wonder if any of my stories will ever inspire something as amazingly creative as this? If so, it would be pretty cool–pretty dang cool.

Anyways, night.

When taking a break is not enough

So these past few days, I’ve been taking an unofficial break from writing. After I finished Mercenary Savior 3.0, I didn’t feel that the time was quite right to start my next project. Plus, I figured that after working so hard, I kind of deserved a break.

It’s been kind of weird, though. In some ways, it’s kind of relaxing not to be writing every day, but in other ways, it’s unsettling. I don’t feel like I’m recharging the well–I just feel like I’m being lazy. Writing is hard work, but it’s satisfying work, and I miss that sense of satisfaction.

I hope to get it back soon, though. I’ve got a rough outline and a ton of ideas for my next project, and I kind of know where I want to start. The trouble is, I still feel that something is missing, and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe the best way to overcome that is to blog about my ideas and see what happens.

So for this next project, I want to recycle the story and characters from Hero in Exile, which I left unfinished back in winter of 2009 (right around the time when I finished Genesis Earth). It takes place on Gaia Nova, a planet that is half desert/wilderness, half densely settled urban arcologies. The main character is a boy named Jalil who became separated from his parents when their ship was destroyed in orbit; they threw him into an escape pod with his mother’s ID pendant, and he crashed into the desert. A local tribe of Bedouin-type nomads took him in and raised him, but he’s always wanted to get back to his biological family and find out who he really is.

Things get complicated, though, because the sheikh of the tribe has no sons, and therefore wants to marry Jalil off to one of his daughters in order to keep the tribal holdings in the family. He’s so desperate that he orders one of his daughters, Mira, to seduce Jalil by any means necessary. Since chastity and virginity are highly valued within the tribal society, Mira feels very uncomfortable about doing this. She has feelings for Jalil and would like to marry him, but not in that way. At the same time, however, she doesn’t want to disobey her father.

The story starts right around the time when Jalil sets out in quest to find his biological family and learn of his true origins. He decides that the best way to do this is to go on a pilgrimage to the Temple of a Thousand Suns, deep in the urban arcology side of the planet. The sheikh of the tribe sends Mira with him, under the pretense that she’s making the pilgrimage. The real reason she’s going, however, is to catch him in a moment of weakness and seduce him, thus forcing him through the stain on her honor to marry her and return to the tribe.

Jalil, however, is completely oblivious of all this. He is totally naive to the ways of the world, and believes very strongly in honor, virtue, and other high moral ideals. As he and Mira leave the desert and descend into the morally corrupt world of the arcologies, however, Jalil finds himself becoming more and more disillusioned. He and Mira become closer and closer physically, yet further apart in the ways that really matter because of the poison of deception and manipulation that has come into their relationship. Eventually, they both find themselves forced to make some defining decisions, just as everything they’ve known and believed is shattered and destroyed.

That’s the general idea, at least. I suppose you could call it a romance where the main obstacle to them getting together is the intense pressure on them to have sex. It’s probably been done before, but hopefully my sci fi take on the idea will make things interesting.

I still feel like I have a lot of prewriting work to do, though. I want to make Mira and Jalil both viewpoint characters, and to do that I need to have their backstories and motivations worked out very well. With Jalil, I think I’m ready to start, but I’m not so sure about Mira.

Anyways, that’s where things stand. Do you like the idea? Don’t like it? See something interesting that I haven’t seen? Let me know–please let me know.

Oh, and I need a new title. Hero in Exile is way too cheesy.

Old story notebook, part 3

Alright, it’s time to finish up with the old story notebook I discovered a couple of weeks ago. These ideas were written down back in 2007, when I was writing the first draft of Ashes of the Starry Sea. Without further ado:

In the future, people live in arcologies, and wars are fought outside by robots. It will be a new system of feudalism: arcologies are like castles or walled towns, and people won’t die in the wars, just change sides.

I’m not sure I knew very much about feudalism as an economic system back then, but the basic idea, I think, was that life would be localized in the arcologies and nationalism as a unifying principle would die out.

In the Middle Ages, warfare was basically a contest between nobles, and though it certainly disrupted the lives of the peasants, they didn’t really care which side they were on because it didn’t make a difference. Napoleon revolutionized the world because he galvanized the peasants through the new concept of nationalism and made them actually care about the outcome of the wars.

An AI falls in love with a CS major, but the CS major loves a real girl.

The Little Mermaid, with a modern twist. And the mermaid AI commits suicide by uploading herself to a trashy old computer that’s on the verge of crashing. The final scene shows the wrecked computer somewhere in rural China, being scrapped for the metal parts in a vat of toxic chemicals. Awesome.

A character who’s an android and sees the world in terms of numbers.

The story should revolve around the question: if math is a language, how do you say “I love you” in numbers?

An election where people can scientifically predict best and worst case scenarios, based on each candidate’s qualities and the world situation.

Political science may not be a hard science, but it is awesome for science fiction.

Voter preferences are normally distributed around a common mean, but parties choose opposing points of view because of an information shortfall about the nature of that mean. What if the information problem were solved?

We would have exactly two parties that are identical in every meaningful way…wait a minute…

Someone discovers a language that is intuitive in all humans and overcomes many barriers of language in describing the world.

Linguistics is good for sf&f, too.

What if galaxies themselves were sentient?

Sounds like something out of a Robert Charles Wilson novel. I love it!

A space colony that, due to information technology, is a pure democracy.

I’m using this idea right now in Mercenary Savior. When I first started planning the novel, I wanted to do a story about the Mongols in space, but I knew it would need more than that, so I thought “what if one of the places they invaded was this pure democracy?” As soon as I combined the two ideas, BAM! I had a story.

An advanced society without public education or health care.

Uggggh, don’t even want to go there. Not until Obama’s out of office.

The Mormon pioneer exodus in space.

I tried to use this idea with Hero in Exile, but for some reason it didn’t work. It was as if the story wanted to go in a completely different direction. Oh well–you win some, you lose some. Besides, it’s not a total loss; it’s always possible to recycle.

A kingdom that will be cursed if ruled by anyone other than a direct heir. What if the direct heir is a child?

An attempt to brainstorm some fantasy.

Robot prostitutes–one who has no feeling or emotion, but develops artificial intelligence. This is what will fuel the development of androids.

Sad, but true.

A spaceship so massive that it generates tides when it enters orbit.

Sounds like something out of Arthur C. Clarke.

A tomagachi becomes sentient and uploads itself to the internet. OR…an AI disguises itself as a tomagachi.

Tomagachis! Whatever happened to them? They were so trendy…for like six months in the 90s.

What if our most deeply held beliefs had the power, under the right circumstances, to turn into monsters–real, literal, fantastic beings of awesome power?

Now there’s an idea with some interesting potential. We could build battle arenas and watch our beliefs duke it out, literally. Which ones would win?

A society that values myths more than facts.

I’m sure that societies like this have actually existed–or may still exist today.

American suicide bombers.

Hey! It could happen.

Ghosts on a spaceship.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide…

A culture where kissing (or any other public display of romantic affection) initiates marriage.

Now THIS I would like to see, or maybe even use someday. It could be interesting.

And that concludes the old story notebook, bringing us to the end of 2008 when I finished Ashes of the Starry Sea and left for the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad.

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!

Snowmageddon! Hooray!

So for the past week, a series of crazy snowstorms has been pelting the Mid-Atlantic. President Obama has dubbed it “snowmageddon,” and it’s so bad that all federal government offices have been closed since Friday. With another storm hitting us tonight, it looks like we’re going to have the whole week off! Yay!!!

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been hanging out around the Barlow Center, watching movies, doing random stuff with my friends here in the program, taking naps in the middle of the day, and writing. Lots of writing! It’s awesome–I haven’t had this much free time since Christmas (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…)!

Today I didn’t write quite as much. I got in about 1.1k words, a decent amount, but if I’d pushed myself I could have finished the current chapter. Monday went much better, because I sat down and forced myself to write in the morning. Once those initial hundred or so words were out, the rest came much easier.

On the first day of snowmageddon, when we were snowed in at Valley Forge, I got in over 1,000 words before noon. It was rough going, though–nothing was flowing, and everything took a lot of effort. I hate it when that happens–blegh.

But I think it was necessary, because now, the scenes are flying by pretty easy. Sometimes, when I’m struggling with momentum, I find it helps if I take a day to focus and push myself through it. Get rid of all distractions, put my butt in the chair, close all internet browsers, and just write, no matter how difficult.

My next novel, To Search the Starry Sea, is going to be a lot of fun. It starts out almost exactly like Homer’s Odyssey, with the same basic conflict and setup. Beyond that, however, I have nothing solid planned–I’m just following where the story takes me. And boy, is it taking me to some crazy places!

For example, one of the first places Katriona (the Telemachus character) goes is a nearby world, ruled by a friend of her father’s. To liven things up, I decided to have him live on a giant rotating space station, where the inside is covered by forests and jungles–scenery that Katriona has never seen.

This got me wondering, however: how did the jungle get there? The answer: thousands of years ago, before superluminal space travel, a group of colonists set out for this world, freezing themselves in cryo. When they got there, they found that a solar flare-up had rendered the planet uninhabitable, so instead they built this massive station, hoping that it would serve as a second ark for humanity.

Instead, a raiding party of space barbarians took them over, enslaved the colonists, and built their palace in the midst of the carefully maintained artificial biosphere.

This opened up a series of new possibilities for subplots, which shapes my protagonists interactions with the people here, which points her in new directions for the main plot–the next few places that she’s going to go.

This is discovery writing at its best. Even though I have no clue where she’s going to go next, things are unfolding very nicely, and I’m excited to find out!

Stuck in a scene

I’ve been stuck in the same scene the whole week, and I really wish I could get it over with so that I could move on to other stuff. What that other stuff is, exactly, I don’t know, but I’m eager to find out.

I don’t plan things out much when I write. Usually, when I do think about where I want the story to go, I think ten or twenty steps down the road, painting in broad strokes where things are going to end up. It’s like Paul Atreides’ foresight in Dune; time is like an ocean where you see a few isolated events like cresting waves, but you can’t see all the stuff in between.

I’m really annoyed because this scene is so long, but in some ways it has to be long. I’m introducing some of the major characters, the major story conflict, introducing setting and cultural elements, etc etc. Most of what I’m writing is crap and will probably be significantly edited, but I’ve got to at least get it out there first. But it’s hard to do that when you’re only averaging 500 words a day.

I’m going to take advantage of the holiday tomorrow by finishing this scene, no matter what it takes. Hopefully that will build some momentum that will carry for the rest of the week.

Also, I sent out Bringing Stella Home 2.1 to a bunch of first readers. I wasn’t originally going to do it, since it’s pretty bad…but Kindal kept begging me to read it, so I figured what the heck and sent it out to half a dozen other people as well. It’s probably for the best…though, after reading over some of the more violent scenes, I hope the girls I sent it to don’t think less of me after reading it. Holy crap, it needs a lot of work.

Anyways, in tribute of MLK day, I’ll end with this awesome tribute to Martin Luther King by U2. Happy MLK day!