Tag: The Lost Colony (Trunked)

Man, this whole week I never got around to writing!  I seemed to be stuck on this one scene, too–when I would write, I’d write a little bit more of the scene, but never enough to finish it.  So, yesterday, I decided to just sit down and WRITE.  And it was good!

But…you see, I have a whole bunch of Arab friends.  And, if you understand at least a little bit about Arab culture, you know that the way they see friendships is a little bit different than here in America.  Specifically, with demands on your time.  Last week, one of my good Arab friends thought that something was going wrong in our friendship because it had been five days since I saw him.  That’s actually a little unusual, I hear–in Arab countries, they’ll think something’s wrong if they don’t see you every DAY.

Not that I really mind it all that much.  I’ve been hanging out with my Arab friends just about every day for the past week, and it’s been fun.  It’s also been fairly good for my Arabic.  It’s just that writing isn’t something you can really do while hanging out with friends.

In fact, writing is pretty solitary.  You can get together with a bunch of people in the same room, but if you’re really writing, you’re probably not going to be talking very much with those friends.  Really, writing is something that requires you to shut yourself up in an imaginary world.  Not a very social activity.

So, yesterday, I had just gotten back from an awesome jujitsu practice, and I was ready to take a shower and finally WRITE, when my roommate gives me a call and asks me to give him a ride from this party on 700 North up to Glenwood where Malik and Huthifa live. And then I started to wonder…am I going to actually get a chance to write tonight?

It didn’t really annoy me that much to break away and give him a ride, but it was a little annoying that he expected me to do it.  But I guess that’s the difference between our culture and theirs.  He probably couldn’t understand why I’d want to spend a Friday night by myself.   Also, yesterday was the last day of Ramadan (which makes today Eid!  Eid Sayeed!  Kul 3m wintum bakheer!), so he was in a party mood.  In fact, if I don’t hang out with my Arab friends at some point today, they’ll probably think that something is wrong with me.

Well, I gave him and Basseem a ride, and visited with Malik for about ten minutes or so, but then they started to watch a movie, and I excused myself.  I guess you could say I had a date with my novel.  Three hours later, I was 1500 words into my story, past the scene that had been hanging me up the whole week, and very very happy.  But…I’d told my friends that I’d come back in an hour.  I called my roommate, and he said that they were going over to Denny’s.  I contemplated coming, but it was 3am, so I ended up calling him back and apologizing that I couldn’t come.  You see, I wanted to actually be alive on Saturday (when I left the apartment at 11am, my roommate was still asleep).

So, now, I don’t only have to juggle schoolwork, but I have to juggle all my Arab friends.  Not that I don’t mind hanging out with them.  It’s just that sometimes I want some time to write.  How to balance all this out and not offend my new friends?  I don’t know.  I’ll tell them that I’m writing a novel, and hopefully they’ll understand.

Yeah, I know it’s not a lot.  I was going to write more, but I’ve been falling asleep while typing this.  Although, I must admit, it’s funny to read what I’ve half written in my sleep.

This week was crazy.  Next week probably won’t be quite as bad.  I’ve got a test I need to take tomorrow, and another one on Monday.  Plus a paper on Monday.  I don’t think it will be too hard, though, and if I don’t wait until 1am (like tonight) to completely finish all of my homework, I think I’ll be good.

I was going to write a couple thousand words, but everything in the world (including my own procrastination) is conspiring against me.  Wah!!!

It’s true.  Unfortunately, the universe is conspiring against me.  The homework alert level has been raised to orange and a half.  Fortunately, it should die down by the weekend.

I’m still sticking by the 500 words per day goal that I had before.  I just decided to modify it so that if I write more than 500 words on a particular day, it will count for missed words from the day before.  I’ve noticed that when I sit down to write 500 words, I usually write 1,000.  Since, with papers and tests throwing things out of whack, I can’t always make 500 words each individual day, at least I can write 500 words FOR every day.  I’ll probably have some time to catch up on Wednesday.

I put in about a thousand words.  I’m at a point in the story right now where a lot of stuff starts happening.  There are about three or four new characters that I want to introduce, and I have all these great ideas about how to do it, about who they really are, what ideas really move them, what they really believe and stand for, what they will struggle with, and how they’re going to play into the story, but I’ve been stuck at this one scene for the whole week–not because I don’t know how to write it, but because I haven’t had the time to just sit down and finish it.  It’s the scene where Leila finally gets back, and she talks with her father the King about Ian and Aaron and what happened in the desert.  It’s basically the kingdom’s first contact experience with the “aliens”–the rest of humanity.  There are going to be a lot of first contact experiences in this story.

So, the problem is basically that I’ve got a TON of ideas, I know where I want the story to go, I keep running the story through my head over and over during my free time…but I never have the time to write it.  It doesn’t help that I write really long blog entries, either. 🙂 Or have tons and tons of homework.  It’s honestly a huge incentive to learn how to use my time efficiently.  I think by the end of this semester, I’ll be doing my homework first thing after my classes (GASP!!!! I’ve NEVER done that before!) and setting more goals and stuff.

One thing, though: since I’ve got so many ideas for this story, I don’t think I”ll be doing nanowrimo.  I just don’t want to pull myself out of this universe and stop working on my ideas for this story.  It would be too big of a break in what I’m doing right now.  I will, however, be doing a lot of writing during November! We’ll probably be having some Quark get togethers for nanowrimo participants, and it’ll be a good opportunity to get some writing in.

I’ve been thinking in the last couple of days (it hurts, but I’ve found that it generally pays off well).  Specifically, about the culture of this world that I’m creating for my novel.

It takes place in the far future, after a 300-or-so year war with hostile AI.  Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, with the Cylons.  But really, the story has nothing to do with that war.  It has to do with what happens after the war is over.

Just so you know, world building is one of the things I love to do when I write.  I don’t get as into it as some epic fantasy writers, with inventing new languages and naming every landform on the face of their world, but I really do get into it.  I think that sci fi world building differs from fantasy world building in that sci fi focuses more on how some sort of technology, historical event, or other thing would alter basic humanity as we generally know it, whereas fantasy tends to be about building a world from the ground up.  Sometimes I have a hard time getting into fantasy for that reason–I’m more interested in what it is that’s causing the fictional reality than in the fictional reality itself.  And it can also be annoying to have to remember more than a couple dozen proper names full of multiple apostrophes.

<spoiler alert> So, in this world, just as the war was starting out, a group of refugees (like in BSG) got stranded from the rest of humanity, and fled out into unexplored space.  They ended up landing on this planet that had just been discovered and explored a few years earlier by a group of scientists.  The planet was uninhabited, but in all ways it was able to support unassisted human life.  Basically, it was like a second earth, with its own biosphere, seasons, and everything else.  This is significant because all of the hundred or so other planets that humans have colonized up until this point have basically needed to be terraformed before they could be inhabited by large numbers of people.

The refugees land on the planet and set up a sort of EMP field in orbit that basically fries a certain type of futuristic computer circuitry when it enters the field.  This is to defend the refugee colony from the hostile AI, which they believe has completely wiped out humanity by this time.  They land in the fertile areas of the continent, near the ocean and river deltas, but almost as soon as they touch down they find remnants of an ancient civilization (is it human? is it alien? how did it get there? bwahaha!) and are violently chased off of the land into a desert by these strange robotic things that shoot anything that comes near the ancient ruins.

So now, completely deprived of everything and poor and starving on a strange planet, the society is in turmoil, loses its history, its technology, most of its accumulated knowledge from the outside world, and exists in a state of starving chaos on the edge of a desert.  After about a generation or two, it reaches a tenuous equilibrium, with the development of some basic agriculture and a rudimentary economy, but the political system is very authoritarian and the rule of law is thrown out when it’s convenient.  Social justice is a distant dream of only the most optimistic, and there really is no moral code that everyone abides by.  The strong do what they wish, with the weak at their mercy.

After a couple of generations, a new prophet comes out of the wilderness with a revolutionary religion.  It spreads quickly until it becomes universal throughout the community.  This revolution teaches the principles of social justice, establishes a new theology and cosmology, exhorts its adherents to live a moral lifestyle, and creates a new culture that, in many ways, washes away the negative effects of the years of chaos in the generations before.  It establishes a stable social order in which the civilization can finally start to grow and progress.

Of course, it doesn’t come without negative consequences, since over the next couple of generations religious schisms divide the people, political entities seek to use the religious framework to justify their attempts to conquer each other, and a few short religious wars cause limited trauma and destruction.  However, generally speaking, the religion does a tremendous job of bringing about civilization in the midst of barbarous chaos.  From this, a unique and exotic culture develops over the next hundred years in isolation from the rest of humanity.

The novel begins as the main character, Ian Steffek, finds himself suddenly thrown out of the world he has known and into this strange and exotic culture.  As the remnants of humanity on the other planets slowly start to rebuild after the terrible war, they come increasingly into contact with this unique and–in many ways–alien culture, and a clash of cultures starts to develop, with the main character caught in the middle. <end spoiler alert>

Basically, I need to create a tribal/medieval culture for this civilization on the lost planet.  And, since I’m studying Arabic and the Middle East, and because I want to use this novel as a way of sorting out my thoughts on contemporary issues like the allegedly inevitable clash of civilizations and the many terrible conflicts that are causing so much pain and suffering in that troubled region of the world.  Apparently, I’ve been doing a fairly good job, because many of the comments at the last writing meeting went along the lines of “I really like how you’ve written about Arab culture here.”

But the thing is, is it really such a good idea to base a fictional culture so much off of a real culture?

Of course, my response is that I really don’t know very much at all about Arab culture–REAL Arab culture–and so the stuff in my novel is going to be different.  But is it different enough?  If people look at this book and say “basically they land on a planet full of Arabs,” is that a good thing or a bad thing?  I tend to believe I should think of some ways to make this culture unique and have it stand on its own, apart from anything else we know.  But do I really need to do that?

I don’t know.  But I don’t really want people to point at my book and say “look, it’s a bunch of Arabs on another planet.” I want them to point and say “look, it’s a culture that feels as foreign to us as the Arabs.” Because, really, I can’t write about Arab culture.  It’s just too foreign to me.  I’d butcher it up really bad.  I can write about what I think Arab culture is like, but it won’t be an accurate representation of the thing itself.

But really, I don’t want this culture to represent the Arabs.  When I started out, I did.  I basically started with this vague notion of trying to symbolize different Middle East struggles by the conflict of this society with the rest of humanity.  I scrapped that idea really fast–not only because writing fiction with a conscious and clearly defined normative message in mind is generally a very bad idea, but because I actually started to learn something about the Middle East, and realized that there’s no way this civilization could effectively mimic the Middle East as we know it today.  There’ s just too much history and too many complications.  I’d fall flat on my face with every word.

So, that’s where I’m at now.  I need to create a culture that can stand on its own, with a story unique to itself.  I’m not here to tell the story of the Arabs or the Middle East, I’m here to tell the story of Nova Salem (I might change that name sometime in the future…) and the Lost Colony that landed there (I’m definitely going to change that title).

How to do this, I don’t really know.  But I’m going to do it, because come April, the rough draft WILL be finished!

400 words tonight. I tried, really I did, to write more, but after a while I simply became completely incoherent. It seems like my brain shuts down and goes to sleep before my body. Towards the end (as in the moment before I wrote this blog post), my mind was just swimming. I couldn’t think straight or visualize the scnees too mcuh. bleha and typiwing was paingful. As it si now. tomorrow inshallah

640 words today, in two thirty minute chunks.  The first was between classes, and the second was just now, at night.  And I need to get some sleep, so this will be short.

We had an awesome quark meeting yesterday, but I’ll write about it tomorrow, inshallah.  I’ve got so much stuff to do, and to top it off, one of my good Arab friends called tonight wondering where I’ve been, so I’ll probably end up hanging out with him and his roommates and friends until late tomorrow night.  For those of you who don’t know Arab culture, there is an expectation that friends see each other every day.  This is a good friend of mine, and I haven’t seen him in about five days or so.  I want to keep up these Arab friendships and learn this culture.  So, on top of a couple of tests, a hundred plus pages of reading in one class alone, and much more, tomorrow will be VERY busy.

Fortunately, I’ve noticed that setting daily goals has been helping.  Or, in other words, I noticed that when I didn’t do it today, I was a lot more lost and squandered a lot more time than I did the days before when I had been planning.  So, I figure the best way is to go to the library at around eight in the morning and just do homework all day.  It goes fast when you focus on it.  Gotta train myself for nanowrimo, after all.

But as far as the story itself goes, I noticed today that because I haven’t been writing in it very regularly, it was hard to figure out what I wanted to do next.  By the end of the day, I’ve got it figured out, and the momentum is back again, but it’s much easier to write when you’ve got some daily and weekly momentum.  Once I lose the momentum, projects get put off until I forgot what I wanted to do with them, and I’m left with a bunch of half-finished storylines that I have no clue where to go with them.

But momentum is not hard to build.  It requires a little bit of focus, and a lot of time spent just thinking about the story when you don’t have to think about anything–walking to and from classes, driving here and there, walking to the creamery on ninth, etc.  Just thinking about the story does a lot to build momentum again, and renew the excitement.  At least, it does that for me.

I know what I want to do in the next twenty or so pages, and I’m excited to do it!  New characters, new conflicts, solving some of the old ones and creating new ones in the process, and describing the culture of the people indigenous to Nova Salem.  It’s going to be fun to write!  IF I can freaking find the time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Busybusybusybusybusy!!!!  But, I did write a little.  Mostly, though, I was busy today with homework and the writing group.  We had an AWESOME meeting that I’ll write about tomorrow (inshallah), but it left me really drained and tired.  I did take a few useful suggestions, though, and that’s really what I worked on mostly this evening; revising the stuff that I submitted rather than adding new material.  I did, however, advance the story one more paragraph.  WHOOOO HOOO!!!

Holy cow, I’ve got to do better.  But now that Tuesday’s writing meeting is out of the way, and I’ve got about a week and a half until the next one, I think I’ll find the time to advance the story as much as I’d like.  I would have written more tonight, but by the time I’d done enough homework to be functional in my classes tomorrow, it was two AM, and when I tried to write, the only thing that would come is a garbled mess.  Blech.  A foretaste of nanowrimo.  Man, writing fiction when you’re busy full time with school is HARD.