Tag: The Lost Colony (Trunked)

Nope, no progress on the story today. !!!!حرام!!! حرام Shame!!! Shame!!!! And there are like four or five things I’d like to blog on as well. WHY do I never do the important things until 1:00 am?! Shame!!!!

Well, the news that I DO have is that I’ve decided to start organizing my life better. I made a list today of all the things that I have to do, and sorted it according to priority. I learned this pretty good system from my father, where you prioritize everything according to first priority, second, and third, and then within each of those groups, you prioritize according to A, B, and C. I made one list for all the periodic things I need to do, and another for the things that will be finished once I complete them. I plan to pick and choose maybe five or six things each day and write them on a 3×5 notecard that I’ll carry with me. Since I’m learning a language, I have PLENTY of cards.

Hopefully, I can use this to better discipline myself. As an experiment, I tried to do my homework first thing for a couple of days, and it was very surprising how liberating it was. I need to do that more often.

Something is happening to me that I NEVER thought would happen–I’m getting sick and tired of school. I figure this is God’s way of pushing me to graduate, because up until now I’ve loved college so much that I haven’t wanted to leave. God, being all knowing, knows that I’ll never leave this awesome university until I’m pushed to do so. Unfortunately, this only leads to more complications on my end of things. But I’m not complaining–God knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing it for my own good. I only wish I weren’t so stubborn–maybe then, God wouldn’t have to push me so much.

Mahlish. Tomorrow is a new day.

My story is double spaced, in 12 point Courier New, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome to break 100 pages.  What’s surprising to me is that that translates to 77 pages in single spaced 12 point Times New Roman.  I thought that my story was advancing really fast, but now, I’m not quite so sure.  A lot has happened so far, but I’m just getting to the point where Ian really begins to interact with the people of the strange planet–the part where his presence starts to upset the established order and turn society upside down.  Well, if it’s not progressing exactly as fast as I thought it was, at least it’s not progressing too slow.  This is probably a pretty healthy pace.

I was going to do a lot of other stuff tonight, but then I thought about how if you really want to be a writer, or into writing, the only real rule that you MUST keep is that you must write.  So that’s what I decided to do.  And it’s only barely midnight.  Maybe I’ll actually finish some of my homework.  Or maybe I’m too tired…

This really is the point where things start to get more difficult.  The act of writing was a lot more difficult for me now than it was a while ago.  I don’t know exactly why.  The words didn’t seem to flow out exactly the way I wanted them to, so I had to change my sentences a lot as I was writing them.  I’ll probably end up completely changing them again in the rewrite, but it was hard just to put the stuff out.  Writing is a lot of work.

I am really happy, though, that things are progressing well.  I’m just about where I want to be, in terms of the stopping point that I want to arrive at before November (and <gasp> nanowrimo comes upon us!!!).  I’m going to have to put this story on hold for nanowrimo.  I hope that nanowrimo doesn’t kill me–or my grades.

But another good thing is that I’m getting good ideas for what happens in the next few pages as I’m writing.  For example, about a month ago, I had a vague idea of a couple of characters that might be interesting, a possible rivalry between a naive Ian and a jealous prince, and some vague ideas about how the ancestors of the people of this planet pray towards the spaceships that brought them to the planet’s surface, much like how the Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.  As I was writing, those ideas began to take a much more definite form, and I know exactly how I want the main plot to progress (I didn’t necessarily know that a month ago).  Now, as I’m preparing to introduce a couple of the new characters that I’d thought of a month or two ago, they seem to be taking life in my head, as if I know who they are and know exactly how to start telling their stories.  I just want to get to the point now where they start to come in, so I can have them interact with the other characters and make the story more interesting than it already is.

Another good thing happened just yesterday.  I was  at the quark opening social (which was AWESOME!!!  Almost a hundred geeks like me gathered into a tight, confined space, watching sci fi and anime, playing computer games, and talking about Final Fantasy and other rpgs), and one of the new members (Danke) of the writing group asked me about my story.  She was asking specifically about the plot, so there really was no way I could get around telling her all about it (I tried–“it’s about a clash of cultures”–but that wasn’t enough).  To my surprise, after about ten or fifteen minutes of me monologuing about the plot of the story, she was still interested.  This leads me to two conclusions: 1) girls who like sci fi are AWESOME and 2) the story in my head has got some good potential.

Well, it’s only 12:30, but I just laid down for a couple of minutes, and it felt so good that I think I’m going to bed right now.

Yesterday was an extremely busy day! Much more than I was expecting. I probably would have accomplished more with a better plan and more self-discipline, but it was a good day. However, there were a few things I didn’t do–like write.

I think things are still going well, though. The day before, I wrote 1,300 words. I want to get to a certain part of the story before nanowrimo in November, because we’re probably going to do something for that contest as a writing group. Several people have voiced interest, and I would also like to participate.

For those of you who don’t know, “nanowrimo” stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s basically an informal worldwide (despite the name) contest, where the goal is to start and finish a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November. The idea is to focus less on editing and rewriting, and more on actually finishing something.

I would personally like to do this, since I’m so bad about finishing any of my stories. Also, there has been some interest in the club, and I think this could really be an awesome writing group activity as well. It takes place during an extremely hectic time, but I think we can do it–if we really want to.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for the writing group to do it if the leader of the writing group wasn’t doing it as well, so come this November, I’ll probably end up putting aside The Lost Colony for a while and focusing on the nanowrimo project.

I think that my story needs a lot more work than just writing the stuff down. There are some things that I’m going to need to think through a little more carefully. I watched a movie today in my Middle Eastern Geography class, about pastoral nomads in the Zagros mountains. It made me ask some questions about the nomads in my own story. I’m patterning the culture of the people of the lost planet loosely off of Middle Eastern cultures, and I’m getting to the point where questions about this culture are becoming more and more important.

As I watched the movie, I started thinking about the nomads that Ian runs into in the second chapter. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Why are they nomads? What do they produce? Do they have any flocks or herds? If not, what else do they do? Why do they travel with their women and children on their raiding forays? How do they migrate? What are their relations with the villages and kingdoms in the more pastoral lands? World building questions like this.

Fortunately, this is where half the fun is. If I didn’t invent worlds like this in my mind for fun when I don’t have anything else that I have to think about, I probably wouldn’t want to be a writer. It does take a lot of thought, though, and that takes time and effort. Probably I’ll be spending most of my time between classes thinking these things through–you know, when you’re walking from one part of campus to another, and don’t have to think about anything.

But still…one month…and I’ve got a lot of ground to cover! This is where I either start getting serious or where things putter out. But this time, I’m going to be serious!

This isn’t going to be very long, because it’s late at night.  Aneeka was kind enough to read my story, and gave some good pointers.  I was pleasantly surprised that she felt that she could understand and sympathize with the characters.  I was especially surprised that she sympathized with the main character, Ian, because he’s the one who eludes me the most.  He’s basically a quiet yes-man who keeps to himself, an average guy who prefers anonymity.  Definitely the opposite of my personality!  But I might have struck the right note with that.

She also pointed out a couple of flaws in the way I chose to develop two of the characters.  First, when I introduced Melinda before the crash, I introduced her as a very strong woman who had risen quickly in the military ranks.  After the crash, she broke down and displayed a lot of stereotypical feminine weakness.  I had done that in order to put Ian in a position where I could show something of his character, but later decided that he wasn’t like that after all, so I was more than happy to rewrite this scene.

She also pointed out how Leila, in the first scene in which she appears, does some things that are just stupid, which makes it harder for the reader to connect with her.  She’s a very independent young woman, but I had her stand up to her captors in a way that was just asking for abuse.  I wanted to introduce her as a prisoner receiving abuse at the hands of her captors, in order to generate sympathy for her right at the outset.  Having her do something stupid takes away from that, so I decided to have her think out her defiant thoughts without saying them out loud.  It did seem to work better.

So, instead of adding on any words to the story, I quickly ran through it from the beginning to end and made the revisions that made the most sense after chatting with Aneeka.  It took me about an hour, so you couldn’t exactly call it a major rewrite, though you could say that it helped to put me on a better track.

I’m not going to do much revising at this point–I’ve just got to get the darned thing down on paper.  You can’t rewrite what you haven’t yet written.  Just got to move forward.

1,079 words today, but I decided to throw out the last 487, so it balances out to about 500.  The really cool thing was that I wrote all this in the two separate hours I had between classes.  I’ve always thought that I should only write if I have a large amount of time set aside in which I could just focus on it.  This shows me that I can jump right into it and do fairly well!

I need to adjust my goals…basically, this weekly goal thing just doesn’t work for me.  I need a daily goal.  500 words sounds as good as any.  I’ll try it again.

But there are so many other things I should be doing that I never do…the story of my life…at least I’m only taking 15 credits this semester.

Aneeka is reviewing my story right now.  It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about it.  I know she can be pretty thorough, but all I wanted was an initial reaction, so I told her just to read it casually and tell me what she thinks.  She told me that sometimes, if she’s reading a book that has bad characterization or other elements, she’ll chuck the book across the room.  I told her not to throw her computer across the room!

Hopefully it won’t be that bad.  However, I still haven’t really figured out the main character’s character.  That’s probably for the best, though, because I won’t be falling back to stereotypes (like I am with some of the other characters).  It’s very easy to write a character when you have an archetype in mind.  It’s a lot harder when the character’s personality and life experiences just don’t match your own.  I’ve got some figuring out to do, but I won’t let that stop me from progressing forward.

Something happened the other day that worried me about how the story is progressing.  I was hanging out with my sister, and her boyfriend asked me to tell him about the story I’m writing.  A few months ago, I’d be dying to tell people about the story, and I’d go into great detail of the history of the story’s universe, how everything is set up, what ideas I’ve got for it, etc.  Usually, it would bore people to death, so I’ve gotten used to just not telling them about it.  This time, when he was actually asking me to tell him all about it, I told him but it just didn’t seem as exciting or compelling as it did before.  Am I losing my belief in this story?  Or is it just that I’ve got so many other things on my mind that this is getting pushed down the ladder?

Either way, I think the solution is to write more often, and just be immersed in the world that this is taking place.  You see, when I write, my writing surprises me.  I’ll find myself describing things about the world that I hadn’t thought up at all, but it will make perfect sense and fit in fairly well.  It’s pretty cool

So, the new goal is: write every day, at least 500 words.

I got out of classes today at 3 pm and had this really strange sensation. I wanted to go anywhere but the place where I was. It was very wierd. All through my last class, I’d been watching the clock, counting down the minutes, and when the time finally came, I still felt really cramped. So, naturally, I headed right over to the library and worked on my story.

I think it helped. I made good progress. It took more time than I was expecting, but I spat out about 2,000 words and I’m really excited to keep working on it. I just got through the scene where Leila and Ian meet each other for the first time. Now, Leila gets back at the women who abused her, Ian cluelessly follows her until she takes him back to the kingdom.

I’ve got Leila and Aaron’s character figured out fairly well, I think. They tend to match some archetypes that I’m pretty familiar with. Aaron is kind of like the gritty, reckless fighter pilot / mechanic type guy, the kind who has a magic touch with machines and spaceships, who shoots first and asks questions later, who talks and laughs in a brash, unrestrained way, and who has a fierce loyalty to his friends. He’s kind of like Starbuck from BSG, or maybe Hagrid (in some ways, but not all). Leila is an adventurous, strong, self-willed woman who has a lot of curiousity, an optimistic self-confidence, and a clever mind. She’s kind of like Mulan, or maybe Yuffie (ha, since I’m listening to the new FF7 album from ocremix).

However, I really don’t know very much about Ian’s character. He’s still a mystery to me. That’s not very good, because I really need to know who he is if I’m going to tell his story. He doesn’t seem to fit into any stereotypes that I know of, though in some ways I imagine him to be like myself before my mission. His greatest strength is that he’s got a very strong sense of justice and mercy, of what is right, etc. His greatest weakness is his own self-doubt. He has talents that he doesn’t know anything about.

Here is his story, as I imagine it now: He was born on a beautiful planet that was destroyed by the Naimechs when he was a child. He and his mother escaped and became refugees, while the rest of his family died. Soon afterwards, his mother died, and he was taken in by the government. He went through the military academy and found a home in the military. He was trained as a lower level technician and basically spent most of his late teens and early twenties going from battleship to battleship without anyone noticing him. He’s comfortable with that, and is basically a yes man, content to live in his little sphere without any interruptions or disturbances. However, he gets chosen for this mission to the lost colony world of Nova Salem, which completely throws him out of his comfort zone since he’s the chief navigator. When the ship gets hit by an sort-of EMP and he gets stranded basically alone on the surface, every barrier he’s built to keep his life from falling apart basically breaks down, and the real man emerges. He’s revered by the natives as a powerful religious figure, and eventually comes to be an ambassador for that world. He goes through a number of crises, where his true leadership talent and strong sense of right and wrong help him to find his way through them. He also comes to have a greater capacity to love, to serve others, and basically becomes an uncorrupted hero.

The story is basically about how he grows from being a nobody to a hero, by finding out that he had the capacity the whole time. It’s about more than that, of course, but that’s one of the key parts. The problem is that I don’t really understand him on a gut level–I don’t have this idea in my head of who he is and how he’d respond if we were just hanging out and doing stuff together. I don’t have a real pattern for him, and it’s hard to start from scratch.

Oh well. If you have any suggestions, I’d like to hear it. Other than that, this story is progressing surprisingly well.

Yeah!  1673 words, and that doesn’t include some major edits I made of the first chapter.  I got some good feedback from the Quark writing meeting, and made a few edits to the first chapter.  Some pretty sizeable edits, in fact, but I’m very satisfied with them.

Now, my philosophy is not to make any really major edits until I’ve finished what I’m working on, so I don’t plan on going back, rewriting the chapter, and submitting it again to the writing group.  In fact, now that I’ve implemented the suggestions that I found useful, I’m probably not going to hardly touch it until I finish the whole thing.  It would be violating Heinlein’s third rule of writing to do that (as if I haven’t violated enough of those rules already 🙂 )

The awesomest part was rereading the story from the beginning.  Honestly, just from the perspective of a reader, I really enjoyed it.  It surprised me because (for some crazy reason) I wasn’t really expecting it.  There were a couple of scenes that really stuck out to me, where I felt I was in it, and it was awesome. It makes me feel that this is actually a pretty good story, that it has the potential to go places.  Wow!

I’m finding, also, that I’m thinking more about my story in the spare (or not so spare) moments I have.  During my somewhat boring History class, I read an essay on the Hero cycle and started applying that to the general idea I have for my story, which got me thinking for the rest of the day about what’s going to happen, what the plot is about, and what the major themes are, etc.

So yeah, things are going AWESOME!  It’s funny, though, because the worse things seem to get for Aneeka, the better they get for me.  Maybe there’s some kind of a cosmic balance going on here, in which case, I hope she writes a dozen more suicidal poems, destroys her computer and all the backup files of her novel Cursed Cure, and runs away naked with amnesia into some Elven forest, only to remember who she is twenty years later and throw herself onto her lover’s sword (a ripoff from the Silmarillion, in case you aren’t a true blue Tolkien fan).  jk! You rock Aneeka! (and your freaking security code sucks)

So, it’s late now, but I’m going to finish this blogfart by making a list of the posts I would like to do in the next week or so:

• An in depth review of Escape Pod
• Discussion of the two main characters of The Lost Colony, Ian and Leila
• Discussion of the major themes that I have in mind while writing The Lost Colony
• A review on the Quark writing group meeting that we had today and how awesome the group is
• Upload the fliers that I designed for Quark
• Review some of the other good writing podcasts that I listen to

That’s about it for now.  It’s late, and I’ve heard that sleeping is good for your health.  Tusbah al-kheer!

It’s late at night, but I just got finished writing and I wanted to blog in about it.  It went fairly well.  I introduced a new character (Leila) and tried to develop her a little bit, show the different sides of her personality and how she reacts to trials and difficulties.  I hope that I got started off on the right note and that she’s an interesting character to read about.  I probably didn’t do all that good with the main male character (I’ve changed his name to Ian) and should probably revise that before I submit it for the Quark writing group.  It can be challenging to make your characters interesting in those first few pages when you introduce them.  You’ve got to be efficient.

I’ve decided to modify my goals a little bit.  I’m going to shoot for 4,000 words a week instead of 500 a day.  That way, if I miss a day or two, I’m still good.

For me personally, I don’t think that writing is the kind of thing that lends itself to doing a little bit every day (which is why I decided never to be a full time writer). I do much better when I write sporadically in big chunks, rather than consistently spitting out very small pieces every day.

I am a little bit worried that I’m too wordy in my writing, but I’m not going to worry too much about editing and rewrites until I actually finish the whole thing.  I’ve got to allow myself to suck if I’m ever going to be any good.  I’m optimistic about all this.

I’m wondering, though, if I should try to think out the entire story in my head, including the ending, before I go much further.  I tried that a couple of times with some of the other stories that I wrote, but things always changed so much midway that it didn’t really work.  On the other hand, if I have at least the skeleton of a complete story in my mind, I might believe in it more as I write it.  That would provide motivation and keep me from wondering if I’m just making a fool of myself as I write this.

And, one quick note, in case you’re getting sick of reading nothing but my whining about writing, I do plan on doing some useful things on this blog, such as reviewing some podcasts, talking about Quark, and doing some other things.  It’s not just going to always be me saying “well, this is how my story is going but I don’t want to actually post it on the internet since I may want to sell it someday.”

I hope that you enjoy my stream-of-conscious ramblings anyways.  That’s what blogging is about–random ramblings on interesting subjects.  At least I’ll try to keep it short!

1,127 words yesterday and I started class today, with TONS of Arabic homework, so I decided to take a break and go to bed early.  I need the sleep.

Yesterday, when I started writing, it was difficult at first because there wasn’t much action, but as soon as the action picked up the writing just flowed.  It was beautiful.  The scene that I saw in my mind matched the scene I was writing.  It’s moments like this that I enjoy writing.

It shows me that if it seems hard to write, it might be a good idea to cut out all the unnecessary stuff and get right to the action.  That’s very similar advice, actually, to what I’ve heard in my political science classes.  In academia, there’s a real problem with people writing in the passive voice.  It can make an article seem more prestigious than it really is, and put the reader to sleep at the same time.  In PLSC 200 they are nazis about passive tense, even when it’s actually legit.  The result is that your writing is simple and the action is clear.  Apply that to fiction, and it helps as well.

Even though I didn’t write anything tonight, I do need to keep the momentum going.  I’ve experienced this before, where I’ll have a great story idea and lots of fun writing it out, but then a few days go by without me working on it, which quickly becomes a few weeks, then a few months, and then it gets buried.  I may or may not pick it up again, but it’s usually a bit harder than it would have been if I’d have kept the momentum going.

On the other hand, there is a reason why I decided long ago that I would never become a professional fiction writer.  That reason is that writing would become a chore if it became my job. I don’t want that.  I enjoy writing.  It’s creative, expressive, therapeutic sometimes, meditative in others, and sometimes it can even be exciting and invigorating.  To keep it that way, I’m reluctant to let writing become the primary focus of my life.

When you’ve got momentum, though, it’s beautiful.  That’s why I’m a “binge” writer.  I don’t usually force myself to sit down and write (out of fear of turning a recreational activity into a chore), but when I do do it, I get in this sort of trance and I don’t want to get out.  Hours become minutes and pages flash by faster than my mind can notice.  It’s beautiful.  I could spend a whole afternoon doing that, once I’m in the right groove.

I’ll try to wake up a bit early tomorrow and write a bit, as an experiment.  Morning writing vs. evening writing. More on that tomorrow.