Tag: The Lost Colony (Trunked)

717 words

Today, around midnight, I just had this urge to escape reality and jump into my novel. That, so far, has proven to be the most effective way to escape the strange sense of procrastination that keeps me from writing when I can. I stopped caring about sleep and just dove in. Now, I’m 717 words in, and the story is progressing very nicely. Yay!

Also, I decided to change the font from Courier New to Times New Roman.  The idea was that I’d write the novel in the format of the manuscript that I’d actually send out to get published, and the publishers I’ve submitted too all have Courier as the required font.  However, from talking with some of the members of the writing group in last week’s meeting, and also with Locke (the leading editor of The Leading Edge), I figure it’s better to write in Times New Roman.  This is because 1) it’s easier to read, 2) TLE prefers Times New Roman, and 3) some of the writing group members (Xen!) really have a thing against Courier new.  So meh.  It reduces my page count from about 170 to about 130, but I can handle the blow to my ego.

Thank goodness we got an extra hour of sleep this weekend! I can tell you I’ve already spent it!

288 words…

…and I’m so freaking tired that I’m going to bed NOW.

At least I wrote something today!

Um, yeah…only 66 words tonight…

But at least I wrote SOMETHING.  Around 10:30 at night, I went and visited my old roommate Steve who’s a film major.  He was trying to finish a screenplay and get it in before midnight, so I decided to come and write with him in the same room.  So then, got home, took a shower, had a bowl of cereal, called my parents while in the car on the way…and finally sat myself down writing at about 11:15.  And then he sent in the screenplay at 11:45, and we ended up just hanging out and talking about stuff: life, girls, school, work, feelings and emotions, spiritual impressions, marriage, regrets, finances, Israel and the illegal settlements, Yasir Arafat and Black September (ok, I did most of the talking there–but at least I kept it short!  And Steve WAS interested, otherwise I wouldn’t have talked about it!), classes in the coming semester, pirating illegal music, the singularity, the possibility of space travel in the Millenium…basically, all kinds of stuff.  Man, friends are really awesome!

So, I’ve been thinking about the goals that I’ve set.  Back when Aneeka inspired me to actually give this novel idea a shot, she said that I should set goals.  I reviewed that conversation tonight, and was thinking about it.  I’ve got a 500 word per night goal…but I don’t always keep it.  Usually, I can just tag how many words I miss onto the next day, so if I miss one day, I’ll make it up by doing 1,000 the next.  Or 1,500 if I miss two days in a row.  But anything longer than that, and I just end up never making the goal at all.

So, I’ve been thinking that I should approach this writing with two goals: the first is to write 500 words per night, and the second goal is just to sit down each day and at least write something–even if it’s only a sentence or two.  That way, I’m still doing what I’ve been doing, but if I can sit down for even ten minutes, I can at least feel like I’ve accomplished something.  Also, if I can really get into the habit of writing daily, then that alone will probably do a lot to help me move from a hobby writer to a semi-professional one (about as semi as you can get…).  We’ll see.

1,100 words and a very fun Nanowrimo writing party!

I’ve been wanting to organize some more informal get togethers with Quark.  I heard from Gamila that it’s really the informal get togethers that Aneeka threw together back in the day that got the ball rolling with the writing group.  Of course, when I was talking online with Drek about this and venting / bouncing ideas off of him, his response was “doesn’t informal mean that it isn’t planned?” Well…maybe…

So, today was the first day of Nanowrimo, and Drek and his wife Kyla were kind enough to host a sort of “informal” (but planned) writing party.  It was a lot of fun!  We basically all got into the same room and wrote in our stories together–while listening to music, snacking on food, sharing our wordcounts, playing with the cat, etc.  After long days and lots of studies, it was very relaxing and a lot of fun!

I gave Danke and Onlera a ride to Drek’s house, which is pretty far away from campus.  It was really just the five of us, but I think we all had a good time.  Onlera hasn’t really made it out to too many meetings before, but she seemed excited about it now.  And Danke has been showing up to almost every meeting, but hasn’t yet submitted anything.  I think that’s about to change, though.  As writing group leader, I’ve taken it upon myself to help everyone overcome the shyness and lack of self-confidence that seems to prevail among aspiring writers (holy cow!  It is easier to write 50,000 words in a single sitting than it is to convince Aneeka that her novel is not the worst story in existence!  Even with empirical proof!) 😉

I was a little bit surprised that I only got 1,100 words in two hours.  400 of those were from something that I realized I needed to insert in a certain place, in order to give the novel a little bit more direction and build up the tension earlier.  Basically, Ian and Aaron consult with each other on what they should do, after they make it to the capitol city, and they figure out that the coalition rescue fleet will arrive in about nine months, so they decide that their highest priority is to find out what hit them and do what they can to disable it before the fleet arrives and gets hit.  Other than that, just continuing the scene I’m at right now–at the feast where Ian realizes that by local law, he won all of the bandit women as slaves when he killed their husbands in self-defense, and he makes the extremely unusual decision to free them.  More cultural awkwardnesses and misunderstandings!  How fun!

So, basically, the writing party was a TON of fun and I’d love to do it again!  I don’t know if I’ll be able to host parties here at the FLSR, since there really isn’t a space that’s empty and relatively quiet for 2 full hours.  I’ll see what I can do, though.

1,233 words on this hot date with my science fiction novel

I’m past the part that I was hung up on, and now I’m in a good part.  The story is advancing quickly, and it’s really coming together quite naturally. Yay!  I didn’t write yesterday, but I more than made up for it today.

I love it how when you have vague ideas before you sit down and write, they come together in a way that makes sense and can even surprise you by showing an aspect of the story that you hadn’t considered.  It’s like that when you’re writing about the different charactes’ feelings, and then as you consider what the character should be feeling at that time, it leads you to think a little more about how this character relates to the other character, which helps you to flesh out the characterization and the story around them.  It’s great.  That’s why I don’t go into writing fiction with a clear, well laid out plan of what’s going to happen.  I like to let the story itself surprise me.

And so, now that you all know that things are going well, I’m going to sign out.  I REALLY need sleep.  I’m awake as long as I’m moving, but when I sit down, I start to get droopy eyed.  I realized this today as I was driving to a family get together in Salt Lake city.  Fortunately, I have some good ocremix techno to keep me awake.  But now, I’m getting loopy.

Goodnight all!

Yay! 790 words!

This is going to be really short, because it’s very late and I’ve got to sleep (preferably not in church tomorrow).  I picked up the novel tonight and got another 790 words in.  Yay!  So I’m not stuck as bad as I’d thought!  I’ll just have to rewrite that one part at some time.  And I’m at this really good scene, too, where some pivotal things happen!  The first contact / cultural shock continues, with all kinds of misunderstandings and complications that set the stage for what comes next!  Yay!  What fun!  If I weren’t so dang tired, I’d just keep on writing!

Now, I’d better get to bed before Aneeka comes online again and starts chastising me for neglecting my sleep…

I thought this was supposed to be fun…

Well, it is.  At least, the net effect is fun.  But the day to day writing can be kind of…difficult.

I’ve made some progress in the last few days, even though I neglected to write about it here.  Mostly, it’s just been between classes or insanely late at night, so I haven’t had time to write any blog entries.  But I’ll write a quick one tonight.

In the last section that I wrote, I introduced this new character who believes that Ian is some kind of a holy figure and decides to become his disciple.  The feedback I got from the writing group was that the way I introduced Master Elijah from his own POV was very good, so I decided to do basically the same thing.  That is, from a limited 3rd person point of view, give a very brief summary of the character and any aspects of his life story that tie directly into what is actually going on in the action.  The result is a short synopsis of the character’s life that transitions nicely into the action in the particular section, without feeling too info-dumpish.

I tried to do the same thing here, and threw in a couple of ideas about cleavages and tribal friction that we’ve been learning in my Political Systems of the Middle East class.  I want to take a lot of the ideas of stuff that we’re learning in that class and apply it to this fictional society.  I don’t want the culture to exactly parallel Arab culture, but to take enough aspects from it that it gets the same flavor.  Besides, it’s kind of a fun testing ground for experimenting with the ideas that we’re learning in class.  And it’s an excellent class, btw.  I’d highly recommend it, if you’re interested at all in the modern Middle East.  PLSC 357 with Dr. Bowen.

However, I was very disappointed with how this section turned out.  I wrote it in about three chunks over three days, but each time that I sat down to write, I was doing it more to reach the 500 words a day goal than because I felt inspired to do it.  Basically, I sat down and forced myself to write.  And…it wasn’t as fun as it usually is.  The words didn’t flow.  I was falling asleep at the computer in the LRC.  Things didn’t seem to be meshing together properly.  It was WAY too info-dumpish, and I had to make up a lot of the information there on the spot, which made it even more difficult because I had to force myself to start coming up with new ideas.  It hurt a bit, but I came up with a few good ones.  Hopefully I can develop them more and better a little bit later.

Now, I suppose that you can’t just expect writing to be fun all of the time.  It does take work, which can in some ways be unpleasant.  And it’s not practical to just wait to feel inspired all of the time.  At the same time, you really do have to enjoy what you do, and you can’t force inspiration.  Ideas will come and hit you at times when you aren’t expecting them, and you have to be ready to take them and fit them into a framework, otherwise they just slip through your fingers.

So, I suppose that good writing is some kind of a balance between hard work and pure inspiration.  And the direction my story is taking me at this time is hard work.

And I’m willing to go that way–so long as it makes sense to do that.  Tonight, for example, it’s freaking late and I need to get some sleep, so I probably won’t write in my novel tonight.  It just doesn’t make much sense to me to trudge through the required wordcount and come up with some barely cohesive prose and crappy story elements.  It makes much more sense to me to work myself up to being excited about the next part, and then writing 1,000 words of good prose and good story tomorrow.

Of course, the balance to this is that if I keep putting off writing, the ideas that I have will die.  So, I really can’t just do this all the time.  Sometimes, you’ve just got to trudge through it.  But…I don’t know.  I just hope I can keep this story going strong until it finishes.

(btw, this dilemma is why I chose as a teenager that I would not become a professional writer.  I knew enough to know that if writing became my main source of income, I wouldn’t enjoy it anymore.  At the same time…I can’t just expect to reap the fruits when I didn’t nourish the seeds.  So…I don’t know.)

680 words and some updates

680 words tonight.  I did stay up a bit later than I’d wanted to, but meh, I don’t have class until 1:00.  It really didn’t take that long to write–what took up the time was the few games I played, and also the surfing around wikipedia and other random places on the web.  I am sooooo ADHD.  But yeah, the story is still rolling and it shouldn’t be that hard to get at least 500 words in every day.

I’m reading Mistborn my Brandon Sanderson right now for the Quark book club, and it is really good!  It’s been a while since I’ve gotten into a book like this!  The world and the magic system are interesting, the characters drive the story and are also interesting, especially the main character Vin, the conflict is pretty intense and the good guys aren’t involnurable.  Each new chapter makes me want to read the next chapter, and I’m really interested to see how Vin changes and grows, and what happens to her.  Plus, the magic system and other elements of the story have really stoked my imagination.  It’s a good book!  I’m looking forward to discussing it at the Quark reading group meeting this next November!

Speaking of which, November is nanowrimo, and I’m a little bit worried about it.  We haven’t planned out too much for the month as a writing group, it looks like we’re just going to have a few informal writing parties at each others’ apartments, and probably some kind of a party at the end of the month where we share our stories with each other and do other fun stuff.  But really, that’s probably all we need.  It’s going to be crazy–and I’m not even doing nanowrimo this year!

Yay!  My friend Reigheena won a contest for her short story!  Good for her!  I hope things just keep getting better for her.  And man, she’s about to have a baby as well!  Crazy!  Good luck with everything!

I’ve been reading Aneeka’s story in any of my nonexistent free time.  She sent me five chapters but I’ve read only two so far.  I was really impressed with the dialogue, pacing, characters, and setting in her rewrite of the first chapter.  And…I’d say more, except that I know that she reads this blog.  Since she’s pretty sensitive about anyone criticizing it at this point, I figure I’d better not go into much depth here.  Sensitive, as in I sometimes worry she’ll jump in front of a train or something…before she sends me the rest of the story!  My goal is to eventually read the whole thing.  Hopefully, that will be before it’s published, but we’ll see.  We shall see.

We’ve got another writing meeting tomorrow.  We’ve only got four stories this time, so we shouldn’t be rushed at all.  I just hope that it wasn’t a mistake to schedule the next meeting only a couple of days later, on Saturday.  Several of the members seem to favor meeting together more often, and I’m hoping that if we do that, we can lower the number of stories we look at at each meeting and not be so rushed.  But secretly, I’m kind of worried that I’ll lose track of the schedule and miss some of these meetings.  I’m so ADHD, it might just happen…

freaking tired

Yes, I got the minimum in.  Just barely.  I guess you could call it 500 words.  In any case, I’m becoming incoherent, so the time has come to get some sleep.  Man, if I could have a super power it would be the ability to go indefinitely without sleep, and still be perfectly functional!  I suppose my body is trying to tell me something, though.  They’ll probably come up with a study sometime that shows that sleep deprivation robs years off of your life.  Something like that.  But when I think of that, I think of all the bad things that I could be doing, like drugs, alcohol, smoking, etc, and I think “well, this is my pet vice.  And it’s not even all that bad.  Even though it is hurting me.” And then I start to wonder why it is that we all humans seem to have our pet vices, how it’s part of human nature to have at least one irrational stupid thing that we do that hurts us more than anything.  And I ponder that for a little while, until I’m distracted by something else.  But yeah, 500 words tonight.  And I’m probably going to put a story bible together in the not too distant future, so that I can have some good direction.  Occassionally I’ll throw out words and forget them a few pages later, so I need to remember.  We’ll see.  And now I’m getting to where typing is difficult.  So I’ll have to write later.  Except for yesterday, I’ve been doing 500 words per day.  Yay!  Will continue.  But after sleep.  Sleep…

More on worldbuilding: specifically, religion

So, in this novel that I’m writing, I have this quasi-primitive tribal medieval culture that develops on an isolated planet.  An important part of the story is actually creating this culture, figuring it out, how it works and how it doesn’t, etc.  And one of the most important parts of this particular culture is the religion.  The idea that I have is that this culture was basically anarchic and unstable until a religion developed that established some norms, a basic system of justice and morality, an hierarchy, and a value for knowledge.  The problem is: how do you invent a fictional religion?

I was kind of worried about this a week or so ago.  I was getting to the part in the book where the religion starts to influence the characters and the plot, and I still hadn’t figured out some of the basic beliefs of these people.  When I did start to write this religion, it ended up sounding way too…Arab.  And even though this story is influenced by a lot of the stuff that I’m studying in Political Science and MESA (Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic), I DON’T want this novel to be about a bunch of Arabs on another planet.  These people are unique.  Plus, as I’m learning now, the problems in the Middle East are completely different than anything that could possibly develop on this planet.  However, there are some similarities, and some of the conflicts are going to be similar to the ones that we face today.

So, when I saw that I was patterning things too much off of my own ideas of Arab culture and religion, and not enough off of original ideas, I thought that I had to go back and completely draw out the religion in my head–that I needed to come up with all the specific details of it, and that these details had to be sufficiently unique and different from anything else that they would be truly “original.” The result was that I started toying around with some crazy ideas that sounded pretty weird, and since they didn’t tie in directly with where I’m going with the story, I started feeling a little bit embarrassed when I thought of putting them on paper.

So, I wasn’t sure what to do.  Then, the other day I had this gchat with Aneeka, and she let me bounce off some of these ideas off of her.  It was actually very helpful!  She offered some ideas of her own, which got me thinking about directions I could take things.  More than that, it got me excited about the whole subject again.  I think one of the basic reasons you write stories is because of a sense of wonder about the world, or an idea of it.  Without that, it just doesn’t have the same life to it.

But, more important, the more I got to talking with her, the more I realized that it WASN’T important to answer every question–or make the religion completely unique.  Instead, it would actually be BETTER to focus on the basic concepts, like morality, justice, and good vs. evil, that can be found in EVERY religion.  That way, instead of being this strange, weird thing that no-one can relate to, it can be sufficiently unique, and yet have something that people from ANY religion can relate to.  I don’t need to know every detail of this religion, just the basic cosmology, history, and the moral code.  I need to touch on things like the afterlife, accountability, the nature of God, etc, but only lightly.  In fact, it’s better not to try and control it.  The important thing, when you come down to it, is how does this religion affect the way that people see themselves, their world, and the way they live their lives.

Other than that, the writing is generally going well–when I have the time to do it.  Speaking of which, I have two minutes to dash from the HBLL to my Philosophy class.  See ya!