Schoolwork – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

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.

School is kicking my trash

It’s true. This is what my wordcount spreadsheet currently looks like:

Note that the seven day totals are dropping consistently. If I want to finish this novel before World Fantasy, I’m going to have to keep that number above 7,800…not including the work on Genesis Earth 4.0.

Something tells me that’s going to be very hard.

This week was particularly busy. I had a research proposal presentation for my capstone class–that was stressful–plus a writeup of the presentation. Thankfully, the full written proposal isn’t due for a couple of weeks.

Besides that, I’ve been working my two TA jobs and doing a buttload of readings and summaries for my other classes. Ugh.

The cool thing, though, is that when it’s my office hours and the students aren’t coming, I can get paid for reading Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and all those other awesome Greek writers. The Libation Bearers was surprisingly good. I’d like to read The Furies, but I’ve got to read Plato’s Apology in order to keep up with the class. Still, the Apology is good stuff, too.

Reminds me: today, I went kayaking on Utah lake with the wilderness writing class. While I was there, I had this story idea: what if the Greek civilization had developed in Alaska instead of Aegea? And then I realized that it already happened: the Norse.

With school and work consistently kicking my butt, the only time I have to write EVER is between 10pm and 12pm. Every day this week (except for one time, when I drove a girl home), I’ve been in the Harold B Lee library until closing time, when the music starts to play. Every day, I come home exhausted. And then I get up the next day at 7am to get ready for class. Something tells me this isn’t sustainable.

Still, I think the worst times in the semester are at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, you’re still in the summer mentality, so the work beats you up until you get used to it. In the last half, everything gets so insane with exams and term papers that you can barely keep your head above the water no matter what you do. I’m adjusting slowly, but adjusting.

I’ll keep up with the writing as best I can, but Genesis Earth is going to be my top priority when I start that. In the meantime, I’ll just try to finish Bringing Stella Home by plugging away and catching up on the weekends.

In the meantime, I’ve got some great ideas for my next big project. Come November, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

🙂

I look forward to having a 9 to 5 job

I really do.

School is difficult, because you can never really separate yourself from your work at the end of the day. You’ve always got homework to do for the next day, or some project to prepare, some reading to do. There’s never a defined time where it “ends.”

This semester so far has been pretty crazy–not as crazy busy as some semesters, but it’s starting to approach it. I’m taking my capstone class, and it’s fairly rigorous. Today, I’m doing a research proposal presentation, and I just discovered, after looking in the syllabus last night, that a 2 page mock grant proposal is due Wednesday. On my birthday. <groan>.

I’m stressing out a bit about this presentation. Professor Christensen is a real stickler for presentations. Going over 6 minutes will dock your grade 10%+. Looking at the audience for less than 90% of the time will dock your grade about 5% or so. It doesn’t help that I’m going on the last possible day.

Now, I’m probably stressing out more than I need to. I’m just unfamiliar with this format for presentations, and that’s getting to me. The result is that when I sit down to write, I find it very hard to concentrate because my mind is on this other stuff. And since I could be using any writing time to work on my presentation, I usually end up doing that. Unfortunately, because I’m not very familiar with this kind of assignment, I don’t think a lot of that time is particularly productive.

It will be nice to have a job that ENDS at five o’clock and gives me the rest of the day to do what I want, without having to worry about the stuff that happens from nine to five. In some ways, it will probably be more conducive to my writing, even if it does require more time than my classes. It’s very hard to have the mental space for writing when you’re over your head in homework.

Busy busy AWESOME day

I had an awesome day today. Totally awesome. If every day this semester is like this one, I’ll be dead tired before Thanksgiving but so happy it won’t even matter.

It started at 7am. Woke up, worked out, read a galley from Dragon Moon Press for Leading Edge while working out. The book wasn’t that bad, either.

Showered, ate breakfast, read 1st Jacob chapter 1 in Arabic. Great scripture study. Read “The false gods we worship” by Spencer W. Kimball on the walk up to school. Powerful. President Kimball was a Prophet with a capital P.

Met with Dr. Bowen to discuss the TA job she wants to hire me for. It’s going to be a LOT of fun! I’ll be doing all kinds of interesting research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and making a sort of game / role play for the students in the class…and getting paid good money to do it. Fun fun fun.

Classes were awesome. I love my capstone. Professor Christensen is a blast. Talked about spatial voting and why political parties in America tend to be identical. Made fun of Provo/Orem municipal elections. Good times.

After classes, met with Professor Kramer to discuss the other TA job I’ll be working. He was incredibly happy to have me on board. Out of the hundreds of papers he read for PL SC 201 last year, he still remembered mine. Holy cow. I’m shocked.

Proceeded to run through a series of bureaucratic hoops to get all the paperwork filled out for both TA jobs. I was so giddy about working I didn’t mind the hassle. Dr. Bowen at one point said “What’s the other job paying you? Eight something? Well, we can do better than that!” Man, I’m going to earn so much money this semester.

Went home, cooked up some locally grown corn and spaghetti. Mmm, corn on the cob! Delicious. Talked with my roommate Ben Crowder about all the stuff he’s done since graduating. Dude, he is a renaissance man, through and through. Awesome guy.

Leading edge was a total blast. The editors threw a start-of-semester pizza party, and we had almost a dozen new people show up to read slush. Plus, Peter was there–he’s always fun. Talked about spaceballs and Big Bang theory (the movie), how Arrested Development is funnier than The Office, violence in fiction, crazy story ideas, and all kinds of stuff. Good times.

So then, after finishing my homework, I was sitting in the library when I realized I only had an hour and a half before the library closed. An hour and a half, and I had not written a single word in my WIP that day. In order to keep up with my self-imposed deadline, I needed to write 1.2k words. 1.2k words…in 1.5 hours.

I didn’t really think I could do it, but I decided what the hell and gave it a shot. Turned off the music, avoided the email and twitter, and just focused on the work.

An hour and a half later, lo and behold! 1.2k words! And just as I realized that, the HBLL closing music comes on…and it’s Dropkick Murphies!

Let me just say, there is no better way to end an awesome day than with some good outro music. So let me end this post with tonight’s awesome outro music, courtesy the Harold B. Lee Library.

That’s the news and I AM OUTA HERE!

First week drama and other news

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mostly because it’s been a crazy week so far. Gosh, it feels like Saturday already. School’s back in session, and while the homework hasn’t been bad so far (and probably won’t be), I’ve been jumping through hoops just to get this semester figured out.

Long story short, my work schedule has been clashing with my class schedule, especially since I decided I wanted to drop this English class that didn’t look very appealing. But to graduate with an English minor, I must take an English class this semester, and all the ones I want to take conflict with this two hour weekly mandatory in service class. My boss will probably fire me if I can’t make the meeting, but you know what? As much as I love the FHSS Writing Lab, school comes first. If push comes to shove (and I really hope that it doesn’t), I’ll probably just find work elsewhere this semester.

Augh. Everything’s complicated by the fact that you have to use add/drop cards for some dumb reason, so you can’t just rearrange your schedule online. If you drop a class, then realize that you shouldn’t have done it…tough. Blegh.

Making things even more complicated are the looming deadlines. I’ve barely touched the FAFSA (need to get on that), and for Washington Seminar I’ve got a lot of application work to do ASAP.

As usual, though, it’s the little stuff that really gets to me, not the big, earthshaking stuff. In twenty four hours, all this crap will probably be resolved. Twenty four hours ago, I was frantically trying to find an English class, and now I’m signed up for this AWESOME wilderness writing class! I am so looking forward to it!

With all this first week upside downness, you would think my writing has suffered. Well, not so! I put in a solid 3k today, writing in hour-long blocks between classes and from 7pm to 11pm tonight. Very satisfying to get so much done, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Now, I need to get to bed. I’ve decided to keep working out in the mornings, like I did all summer, but the SFH weightroom closes from 8am to 4pm for classes, so I need to get up around 6:30 if I want to work out. G’night!

I’m back!

Wow, I’m back from vacation. Not “back” as in back in Utah, but “back” as in no longer at the cape. We drove home to Western Massachusetts this evening and arrived just a couple hours ago.

Family vacation this year was lots of fun! It was me, mom and pop, and Sarah and Mykle at a local cottage for about a week. We went to Nauset Light Beach, Coast Guard Beach, Race Point Beach, Provincetown, Hyannis, Moby Dick’s restaurant, the Cape Cod Natural History Museum, and, of course, good old Sheep Pond in Brewster (Brew-stah). When we weren’t out and about, we were either watching movies or playing Hearts and Shanghai, the Vasicek family card game of choice.

It was a lot of fun to hang out with the family at Cape Cod, but after a week I’m ready to head back into life as usual. My back is fried, I’ve had enough Shanghai to make me sick (especially considering how CRAZY our family games can get!), and I’m looking forward to no longer smelling like salt water or sun tan lotion.

I’m also looking forward to writing again. I kept up the writing at the cape–about 1k to 2k each day, mostly in the evening–but man, stuff like moving and vacations and travel and having fun tends to throw out your daily routine. I haven’t had one for the last week and a half, and I want to get back to something a little more stable (not to mention productive).

Alas, the summer is just about over. I’ll be flying back to Utah on Tuesday, moving all my stuff into my new apartment on Wednesday (Ben Crowder is going to be my roommate–I think it’s going to be a fun and interesting semester!), helping a friend move her stuff out of storage on Saturday, and doing other get-ready-for-school things on the other days, including filling out the FAFSA, getting parking stickers, books, figuring out what’s going on with my double-major capstone, and blah blah blah other boring annoying stuff.

Gah! Why can’t I just write all day, every day? Looks like those days are over…<sob>.

Someday, inshallah, I’ll make that dream a reality. Someday soon, inshallah!

Running the gauntlet

In the past five days, I have written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words. None of them has been fiction (at least, not explicitly–more BS, if anything).

One monster history term paper, one middling poli sci essay, and two exams requiring 2,000 and 1,000 word essays. Blegh. Like pulling teeth.

The upside is, it’s almost finished! Just got my history exam left, and it shouldn’t be too hard. There is an essay, but the teacher already gave us the two questions from which he’ll pick the one on the test, and a short answer section. The rest is multiple choice. Not too hard, especially because I’ve really enjoyed the class.

The two exams I took today…let’s just say I’m glad it’s behind me. The deeper you get into your major, the more you have to take dumb classes about things you don’t care just to graduate. Blegh.

There is one other exam besides the history one, but I’m not counting it because it’s Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class. His final exams consists of the first three chapters of you novel, plus a query letter and synopsis that he’ll mail out to the editor/agent of your choice (sending out the submission is a required part of the final). I did some research, found an agent, sent out a query email. If I get a response, I’ll send out the chapters to her. If not…I’ll send it out somewhere else. It didn’t seem like she wanted people to send her partials without her requesting it, so I didn’t send that out.

You know, it’s funny how the title of your novel seems a whole lot less clever when you’re finally sending it out to people.

And, as if things weren’t crazy enough, Utah decided to play jokes on us with the weather. We got our worst snowstorm of the year…on April 15th? Holy cow! WTH? (that’s “what the heck,” for all of you non-Utahans)

Here are some shots from my photoblog, before and after (or rather, before and during).

Crazy!

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!!!!

Ugghhhhh…

Man, I am sick. It sucks.

I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel. That sucks too.

When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project. Is this really any go0d? Is the story really holding out? Things slow down a lot, and you lose most of the enthusiasm that carried you through the first half. The daily drudgery of writing becomes harder and harder, and pretty soon you can’t see beyond the chapter you’re presently writing. It’s not a whole lot of fun.

Then, as you get into the final stretch, the ending comes into sight and you start to regain a little bit of the enthusiasm. Your goal isn’t too distant, and you start to see how things wrap up to bring you to that final climax and ending. You find yourself believing in the story again, and excited to see it to the grand finale.

Of course, the actual writing gets harder and harder, exponentially, right up until the last page, but you’ve regained the motivation and you have at least a portion of the drive.

Right now, I’m kind of at the low point. It doesn’t help that school is starting to get busier, too. It certainly doesn’t help to be sick, even if it does give me more time around the house (man, I need to get out…I need to get out…). But I’m almost at the end of the second act–one climactic battle, one huge and tragic development, one major try-fail cycle, and then I’m on the final stretch. I’m currently at 64,250 words, so I should wrap up part two by about 68k and finish up the novel at around 100k. Perhaps a little longer, but I don’t think part three is going to be much longer than part two.

One of the major doubts I have about this novel is that it’s too predictable. All of my readers from English 318 have been making their predictions, and…really, most of them are correct. In fact, they’re correctly predicting stuff that happens WAY later, stuff from part three that I haven’t written yet. If this story doesn’t have any surprises, I worry that it might not be as good.

On the other hand, it has some ideas and concepts that are really drawing in my alpha readers, particularly with the Hameji. Over and over again, that’s the comment I get–they want to find out more about the Hameji. This is something that might help me to carry the book, even if it is a bit predictable: show this barbarian spacefaring culture at their most brutal, make them the key antagonists, and then slowly humanize them until the readers understand exactly why they do what they do, and even come to agree with them. That is pretty fun.

So we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early–9:30 or 10:00. This sickness is just killing me, and I don’t know of anything more effective at curing it than sleep. G’night.