Tag: The Lost Colony (Trunked)

This sucks and I’m a horrible writer

It’s getting really, really hard for me not to believe that statement, especially as I finish up with the middle part of this novel.  I’m starting to realize that I made a whole bunch of mistakes pages and pages ago, and that the climaxes just aren’t working without everything set up right.

I know, cognitively, that it’s mostly just psychological and that this book probably isn’t as bad as I think it is, but I’m finding it hard to convince myself of that.  I got to the climax of part II yesterday, and it was…not what I’d had in my head.  That’s probably what’s frustrating me the most.  If I can’t write down the story as I have it in my head, what does that mean?  It either means I’m a terrible writer, or that I didn’t get the setup right (or both…gah!).

So…where do I go from here?  Throwing out the entire story isn’t an option–I’m not going to allow myself to do that.  I could, however, put it on the back burner for a while, let it simmer…or I could do or die and finish the 1.0 draft, no matter how crappy it turns out.  I suppose that would accomplish something for my self esteem, but is that the way to best serve the story?

Fortunately, this past week we talked about revision in English 318.  Listening to my recording of the class gave me a few ideas.  I could make a list of known problems, with their fixes, and continue as if I’d already made them.  I think I did that a few times with The Phoenix of Nova Terra, but I don’t know how I feel about that now.  I could probably make it work…

The main issue is that I feel very, very distant from this book.  A month ago, I was immersed in the thing, writing over a thousand words each day, just chugging it out.  Now, for various reasons, other things have come up and drawn away my attention, so I don’t feel that I’m really in this world anymore.  I feel like I’m more of an outsider, writing for the sake of writing rather than trying to tell this story the way it wants to be told.  I can’t really remember what I wrote a hundred pages ago, despite that big sheet of butcher paper up in my closet.

Another thing that complicates all of this is that I’m really, really excited about the other novel, Genesis Earth. I’ve gotten back comments from most of my alpha readers, and I’m all but chomping at the bit to start working on it again.  If I had nothing else going on, no pressing obligations or assignments, with the enthusiasm I have for this project I could probably finish the second draft in a week, and the third draft the week after that.

So…what’s next?

Well, I think I’m going to start the revision on Genesis Earth today or tomorrow.  When I was this enthused about revising Pheonix, I decided to wait and finish Genesis Earth instead, and the enthusiasm for that project died down surprisingly fast.  Better to start now than wait until I’ve got the free time but struggle with motivation.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish the current chapter of Bringing Estella Home and let it rest for a bit.  I’ll probably reread what I’ve got from the beginning, make a few revision notes, perhaps an outline of sorts–try to figure out what’s wrong, what I need to change to make it work.  I’ll restrain myself from actually making those revisions (though I did that, mid-draft, for Genesis Earth, and it turned out alright…sort of), but once I feel I’m sufficiently “into” the story again, I’ll get back to work and finish the 1.0 draft.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to do all that before the end of May.

The trouble here is that I’ll probably end up writing the first draft of this novel and revising the other one at the same time…something I tried last September and failed miserably.  However, by the time all of this is finished, inshallah school will be over and I won’t have to worry about it.  Things are looking really good for me to get an internship in NYC, which makes me think I should drop my Spring classes and just take it easy for a month before I start (as for housing, that’s a whole other conundrum…).

Gah!  Writing is complicated.  Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life?  Something I can do?  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I just have to keep on writing through this depressing pessimism and trust that it will pass.

As a side note, I took the title of this post from a Writing Excuses episode some time ago; here is the link to that episode, in case you want to hear it.

Slow but steady

Okay, quick post before I go to bed.

Things are progressing in this novel, slowly but surely, as you can see from the wordcount.  Unlike past weeks, I’m not pushing myself too hard, mostly because I’ve got a lot of schoolwork right now and if I were to spend much more time on this novel, I would neglect a lot of the more important stuff.  Even though my course load is relatively light this semester, I’m a senior and I’m really not as motivated to do this stuff as I used to be.  I get done what needs to get done, but just barely.

I have been successfully getting up early, however.  And I’ve discovered something very interesting: I’m more productive when I have less free time.  Thursday, I didn’t have class until noon, so when I got on the computer at about 6:30 to write, I opened up the email, opened up facebook…and, by the time I had to leave for class, I had only written about 430 words.  Disgusting.  But today, when I had class at 9:00 am and still had my Arabic homework to do, I got in about 700 words in half an hour.

I still have a lot of self discipline to learn, I guess. 😛  The scary thing is that my idea, up to this point, has been to keep my time open in the summer so that I’ll be able to write.  Err…yeah.  We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments back from my alpha readers on Genesis Earth, and it’s been REALLY fun!  Even the criticism–as long as it’s helpful criticism, I really appreciate it.  This one girl in my ward asked me if she could be an alpha reader, then read the whole thing in only a couple of days.  She had a LOT of positive comments–in fact, almost all of her comments were positive–and she said she really loved it!  So much so, in fact, that she said she was having withdrawals, so I sent her The Phoenix of Nova Terra v1.2.  Hopefully, getting her comments back will give me motivation to pick up that old thing and rework it…goodness knows it needs it.  Needs it bad.

My first two novels, The Phoenix of Nova Terra and Genesis Earth are completely different in some ways, but very similar in others.

<spoiler alert>

They both have an important romantic element, and they both have generally positive endings.  The book I’m writing now is something of a tragedy, at least at it’s core, and there is a completely different dynamic there.  No love stories, no happy resolutions–lots of pain, lots of violence, lots of grappling with difficult issues.

</spoiler alert>

I suppose it’s good to try out a lot of different things early on in your writing career.  That’s what I’m doing.  At the same time, though…I get feedback on the one novel, and I kind of want to work on it instead of the one right in front of me!  And when I think about what I did right in the one I finished, I look at the one I’m currently writing and I think “man, this is crap.” Of course, I keep working on it because I recognize that I ALWAYS think “man, this is crap” at some point before I’m done.  Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, however.

Jason from the FLSR writing group said something interesting about that, however.  He said that writing a draft of a novel is like climbing a mountain: you do it three times.

The first time, you climb it in your mind as you plan it out.  You’re excited and motivated, and busy with all the preparations.

The second time, you actually physically do the work of climbing.  It is long, hard, and frustrating, you get lost a few times, the summit is anticlimactic, and the return is boring.  You can’t wait until you’ve finished and it’s all over.

The third time is when you look back on the experience after you’re safely back down.  No matter how excruciating the climb was, you look back on it fondly and remember all the best parts.  You thrive on the memories and wish that you were back up there, standing on the summit, enjoying the experience.

Right now, I’m on my third climb for Genesis Earth and my second climb for Bringing Estella Home. I can remember how miserable I was when I was still in the middle of Genesis Earth–for a while I seriously thought about throwing the whole thing out and doing something else.  However, now that I’ve been letting it sit for a while, I’m getting really, really excited about it!  I can hardly wait before I can get back and write the second draft.

But that’s not going to happen until I finish Bringing Estella Home.  And, no matter how difficult it gets, I swear I WILL finish this book!  I’m a chapter away from act III, and that’s too deep into the thing to quit and start something else!  This book WILL be finished–if not by April, then by sometime in May!

Productivity breakdown

I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing I accomplished in the past few semesters. In some ways, I worry that I’ve become a lot more disorganized and a lot less productive than I was a year ago.

Back in winter ’08, I took a couple of really difficult classes, got up early each morning to work in the BYU Bookstore stockroom, wrote a handful of very difficult research papers…and still managed to write about 120,000 words. Oh, and I wrote on this blog almost daily. I finished my first novel, started my second, read a dozen other novels, wrote reviews of them all…
I accomplished quite a lot.

In fall ’08, however, my workload was much lighter, my classes were ridiculously easy, I didn’t have to get up early to work…and yet I only wrote about 70,000 words, didn’t hardly write for this blog, only read a couple of books, etc etc.  Much less productive.

Though, I guess you could say that I made up in other areas.  I started working for the FHSS Writing Lab, and that took a lot of my time and mental energy.  Also, I think the quality of my writing improved quite a bit, and I experimented a lot with things that I hadn’t tried previously.  Right now, I feel that Genesis Earth, my second novel, is a much better work than The Phoenix of Nova Terra.

So maybe all of this “oh my goodness where did my productivity go” is just me worrying for no reason.  It’s hard not to worry about it, though.

I know for certain that I could be much more productive with my time.  I come home tired, with less than an hour before dinner, and I usually squander the time on the internet or with video game emulators.  I tend to put off homework, and only do the stuff that will get me in trouble if I don’t do it (though some would say that that’s a life skill…hmmm…).  On any given day, the last two hours before I go to bed is filled purely with time wasting activity.  I could use an extra two hours of sleep…

Meh.  I guess it’s always a struggle.  A year from now, I’ll probably be saying “I can’t believe how productive I was back in winter ’09!” That, and “holy cow, what am I going to do after I graduate??”

Assessment

Well, it’s a new year now, and English 318 has started! We had a wonderful class yesterday, getting things set up, figuring out our writing groups and all that. I am so looking forward to this semester!

With all of these changes happening, I thought I’d do a little recap and assessment of the last six months. I tried out a lot of new things over this time, and learned quite a bit about myself as a writer. I wish I could say that all of my experiments were successful, but at least I know a little bit better what works for me and what doesn’t. Here goes.

Experiment #1: Extensive planning and prewriting

About three months before I started Hero In Exile (the book I was writing last semester), I downloaded wikidpad and wrote a huge collection of articles, all about the world and the story plot. I spent a lot of time in worldbuilding before I’d even written a single word. I wanted to try this because I’m a discovery writer, and in my previous writing I tended to figure out the details of my world on the fly, as I wrote out the story.

This experiment was largely a failure, I think. I stopped writing Hero In Exile because it became too massive to write. As I wrote the story, I kept receiving story ideas and tried to integrate those, but towards the end of the first part, I realized that I was trying to doo too much. Planning didn’t stop me from discovery writing like I always do, and by the end everything was just too cluttered.

Experiment #2: Extensive prewriting of characters using Meyers Briggs personality types

I remember how a few months ago how I wrote a long post describing my characters using the Meyers Briggs typology (INTP, ESFJ, etc). I did this because I wanted more depth to my characters, and I supposed that by planning them out a little more, I would be in a better position to fully develop them.

My assessment on this is mixed, but overall I would tend to call it a failure. There were a handful of descriptions in the personality profiles that helped me to better understand these characters, but once I sat down and started writing, the characters started to do things that surprised me and that didn’t fit into what I had planned. By trying to describe their character before writing them, I wasn’t giving them enough room to show me who they really were; I didn’t give them enough space to act on their own and surprise me.

Studying the personality profiles was good in that it got me thinking more about my characters, but not a good way for me to conceptualize them before writing. I was simply trying to structure too much and not giving myself enough room to discover them and let them act on their own. By the end, I felt as if I were forcing my characters too much, and that made things very difficult.

Experiment #3: Waiting for the ideas to accumulate critical mass

For Hero in Exile, I felt all of my ideas reach a critical mass and converge while I was studying in Jordan. I then waited for nearly a month before sitting down and writing chapter 1. I did this for a couple of reasons: first, it simply wasn’t practical to start the project while I was studying abroad, and second, I had heard that a good novel is built out of a synthesis of several ideas, not just one, and I wanted to have all my ducks in a row before I started.

This also proved to be a mistake.  Yes, it takes more than one idea to make a novel, but you don’t have to have all the ideas lined up before you start.  I guess that planners do, but I’m not much of a planner, I’m more of a discovery writer.  By waiting too long to start the book, I had too many ideas to work with.

However, with Genesis Earth, I had the exact opposite problem.  I started way too early, before I had enough ideas to work with.  Now, a year later, I’m struggling to wrap it up.  The ideas have come, but the writing process was very choppy.

How do you judge when you’re ready to start?  I have no idea how to measure it.  It’s very touchy feely.  I think I started Phoenix at the right time, but Hero was too late and Genesis was too early.  At least I’m in a better place now to tell when is a good time to start.

Experiment #4: Spend more effort on detailed physical descriptions

When I wrote Hero in Exile, I found myself spending a lot of time on the aesthetics and physical descriptions of the world.  I did the same in Genesis Earth.  In doing so, I always tried to show, not tell, by giving some visceral or sensuous detail of something the viewpoint character was sensing.

I think this was a success.  Whenever I brought in an excerpt from Hero into the quark writing group, everyone always complimented me on how how full and engaging my world was.  The descriptions really added to the sense of wonder and helped them to feel that they were there.

Experiment #5: Avoid info dumps at all costs

Related to #4 was my decision to completely excise all info dumps from my writing.  Anytime I found myself telling instead of showing, I stopped and focused on what was happening in the here and now of the story.  I also withheld information to create curiosity and intrigue within the reader’s mind.  Throughout this, of course, I always tried to keep my writing as clear as possible.

This, also, was a success, I think.  At times, the readers became confused, but the withholding of information did create a lot of curiosity and desire to read more.  Many times in the quark writing group, people said that they were sucked in by the writing and very much wanted to read on to find out what happened next!

Experiment #6: Create difficult ethical dilemmas and have the characters wrestle with them

I wanted to try writing stories that are more thematic and deal with controversial and difficult issues.  For Hero, I had the main character struggle to keep his honor and chastity, where the people he trusted and loved the most try to manipulate him by tempting him to give in to his sexual urges.

I’m not sure if this was a success or not.  I think that it was, but it was like pulling teeth, and some of the scenes are a little bit graphic.  I guess that without giving my story out to some alpha readers, I have no idea whether it was a success or not.  I have learned, however, that it’s not a good idea to sacrifice entertainment for a message.  It’s possible to do both, and if your own story is something you’re not excited to tell, it’s not going to be easy to write it.

In short, last semester I wrote about 75,000 words total, without much to show for it except the unfinished rough draft of a flawed book, and a partially finished novel that I started last year.  Still, I think I’ve learned quite a bit from the experience.

Back in school

So, school has started again!  As fun as the vacation was, it’s good to be back.

I think I’ve more or less finalized my schedule by now.  I’m taking an Arabic grammar class, a poli sci class on Islamic politics (taught by an Arab guy who drove ambulances in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion/occupation in the 80s), a class on modern Middle East history, a class on Islam and contemporary society, and…English 318!  The one taught by Brandon Sanderson!

I took this class last year, and it was a lot of fun.  Brandon Sanderson is the best selling author of the Mistborn fantasy series, as well as the Alcatraz YA series and Elantris.  He also teams up with Howard Taylor and Dan Wells for the excellent writing podcast, Writing Excuses.  Genesis Earth, the novel I’m currently working on, is a novel I started in his class last year.

Last semester was really miserable for me because few of my classes were challenging or interesting; most of them were easy, boring classes that I was only taking because they were required.  Not so this semester.  Even if two or three of my classes this semester turn out to be tedious and draining, English 318 is going to make it all worth it.

Here’s the thing, though; I’m not sure if I should rewrite one of my older novels or start a completely new one for English 318 this year.  Brandon tends to encourage us to start with something fresh, but I would really like to revise the novel I wrote last year.  I was originally planning on doing that, but then I thoought about it for a little bit, and realized that I wanted to do something with the Mongols in space idea before it drifts out of my mind.

In some ways, though, this throws a wrench in the works for my long term plans.  I want to have three novels polished for World Fantasy 2009, and I was originally thinking about doing The Phoenix of Nova Terra, Genesis Earth, and Hero in Exile.  However, if I were to start something completely new, that would mean throwing out all the work I did last semester for Hero in Exile and doing something completely new.

I don’t know, but before I can do anything, I’d better finish Genesis Earth, and fast.  The first English class is in two days, and I don’t want to juggle two novels.  That means I’m going to have to sprint these next two days to finish this novel.

Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

So is trying to hit 3,000 words each day.  For the past week, I’ve been doing between 1,500 and 2,500 words every day, but lately it’s just been really hard.  I’m on break, and I know that I should have more time for this kind of stuff, but I don’t know.

It has been a while since I’ve worked on this story, and that might be a part of it.  I dropped it in the summer and just picked it up again a week ago.  That might have something to do with it.

I think it’s more than that, though, and I’m not sure what it is.  Instead of savoring the time that I have to write, I dread it and find myself putting it off and finding other things to do.  Most of my writing has been coming late at night, at the end of the day.  If I really was driven and enthusiastic about writing this novel, I think I’d be doing all my writing earlier on in the day.

Bah.  It’s like there’s some law of the universe that the closer you get to the end, the more you think it sucks and the less motivation you have to finish the damn thing.  At least, that’s the way it is for me.

But I will finish it before school starts up again.  That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish.  Even if it ends up being less than 50,000 words, which is quite possible.

Right now, I’m just over 35,000, and right on the cusp of the central climax of the story.  At least, that’s the way I’d originally envisioned it–the rest should mostly be winding things down.

The really interesting thing is that now that I’m banging my head against a wall with this story (Genesis Earth), the other one that I was struggling so much with before (Hero in Exile) doesn’t look nearly as bad.  I could almost pick it up and work on it again.  And the novel I finished last year–the one that I want to workshop in Sanderson’s English 318 class this year (The Phoenix of Nova Terra)?  When I wrote the last chapter, I felt like the book was pretty crappy.  Now, though, I can’t wait to work on it, I think it has so much potential!

It’s all so weird.  All I can hope for is that something publishable will come out of it all. 

The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!

A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols.  Fascinating stuff!  Really epic!  Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols.  When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?

This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow!  This would be so cool as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.

Here’s what I came up with.  I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.

First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization.  That much is obvious.   The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.

The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle.  Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.

The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer.  Similarly, the  Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military.  Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high.  Basically, every Hameji ship is a warship.

Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.

First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian.  That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature.  When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise.  There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated.  What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job.  Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.

In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community.  But basically, it was rule by strict tradition.  With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law.  Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe.  They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.

Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal.  They believe in a ruling class and a following class.  Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.

Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born.  Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock.  Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.

You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive.  They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing.  Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.

Mongols in space.  How cool is that?  It’s definitely got potential, I think.  I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict.  We’ll see which one ends up getting written.  It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth and The Phoenix of Nova Terra get written.

2,850 words more than I thought I could write today

Yes, that’s true. I wrote 2,850 words today, and it’s more than I thought I could do.

I’m trying to finish up Genesis Earth, but it’s difficult because I haven’t been with these characters in a long time and I’ve forgotten a lot of their motivations. I look at what I’ve written before and I see all these inconsistencies in the things they say and do. Not that regular human beings are without inconsistencies, but I just worried that these ones were too…inconsistent.

Eventually, I had to come back down on that cardinal rule that you have to allow your first draft to suck. Yes, not everything they say or do really runs together, but I’ll be in a better position to make sense of it once the first draft is done than while it’s still mostly a cloud of ideas in my head.

Today, I just kept on putting off writing, and I started wondering why I was doing it. Was it because my characters aren’t making sense? Was it because I’m finding my own story to be unbearably boring? Am I really cut out to do this for a living when I’m struggling with these things? Those are some disturbing questions.

I took some time to watch The Empire Strikes Back, on the twenty five year old VHS copy my parents taped it on when it came to HBO, with all the wavy lines and fuzzy resolution–the one that captivated me when I was nine years old. It’s such a classic! Space opera at some of its finest! Yeah, there were holes all through the science, and the romance is kind of cheesy at parts, but the script, the overall story, the buildup and the climaxes–so classic! In some ways, I think that Empire is the best movie of the entire series.

It got me thinking, maybe I just need to get interested in my story again. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. Genesis Earth, while still being a primarily character driven story, has a lot more hard science to it than the epic space opera that I tend to write. Maybe I’m more cut out for space opera than the hard stuff.

I got about a thousand words in, watched a movie with my family (it was Elf–reminded me of everything I hate about Christmas and Hollywood, simultaneously), and sat down to blog and go to bed, but I noticed that I’d only done 1,190 words, and decided I’d at least finish the chapter.

I’d no sooner picked up the story than the characters started to take on lives of their own. Yeah, I might not have them figured out before this point, but I can fix that later. Better to focus on what they’re doing right now.

And as I did, things got really interesting. They went from almost killing each other (especially scary, considering that they’re both alone on a small spaceship twenty light years from anyone else) to rolling on the floor together, laughing and giggling and letting loose with all the things they wanted to say back at home but couldn’t because of what everybody else would think. When you’re alone on a spaceship, you’re free from a lot of social norms and pressures.

It goes to show that the way to get out of writer’s block, or writer’s avoidance, is to ignore all the doubts, worries, and negative thoughts in your head and just write. Those doubts and worries are all just illusions anyways. The story is still there, underneath it all. Give yourself to the story and you’ll figure it out.

Genesis Earth is now around 27.7k words. I’m making progress but I want this thing to be a full blown novel, so I’ve got at least 22.3k words to go. That’s roughly 2,000 words a day before school starts. My goal is 3,000 words a day from now to January 5th. That should be enough to tie up all the loose ends and finish it up.

And when that’s done, I can focus on rewriting The Phoenix of Nova Terra! I’m really excited for that!

Change of plans

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit.  I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story.  I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later.  The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character.  From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it.  In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on.  Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind.  A lot harder than Phoenix.  With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was.  Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding.  I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider.  The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space.  I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next.  It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this.  But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard.  This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel.  Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum.  With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step.  I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back.  Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler.  I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward.  What’s more, I’m excited about it again.  When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely.  I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas.  As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off.  I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better.  Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins.  I think I can do it.  Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less.  I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words.  With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day.  I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter!  Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it.  I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing.  I’m excited.  I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009.  One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes.  It basically details where I see the story going from here.  I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense.  However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time.  When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner.  Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far.  On to Genesis Earth!

Unstuck

Happy Thanksgiving!  Holy cow, I ate a lot.  Had dinner with the McQueens, my sister’s husband’s grandparents, and all the inlaws.  My sister-in-law can cook a mean chocolate pie.  Holy cow.  Delicious.

So, when I wasn’t eating or groggily digesting over at my in-laws’ house, I was writing.  It was pretty tough, to be honest.  Even though yesterday I got through the climax of the chapter that was hanging me up, I still felt really stuck today.  It took me more time than I’d expected to finish the chapter, and I didn’t know how to start the next one.

I was really frustrated the whole day.  There was nothing to do, and nowhere really to go.  I took a break and walked down to campus in the middle of the afternoon, but it was dreary outside and all the buildings were closed.  There was barely a car on the road, and even though it was good to get out and go for a walk, I didn’t come back with any good ideas for how to start things out.

To be honest, I contemplated putting this project on the back burner and working on something else for the next two months.  My novel Genesis Earth is halfway done, and I could probably finish it by the end of January if I put this other novel away and focused all my energy on it.  I’ve recently gotten excited about that story again.

But that would be an admission of defeat.  I didn’t know if I needed to do that yet.  I do have a lot of really good ideas for Hero in Exile–the trouble is, they all take place about a hundred pages from where I am right now!  I should probably write them down before I finally get there and realize that I’ve forgotten them all.

I figured that things are hard just because I’ve been so distant from the story these past few weeks.  I decided I needed to start the chapter out with some action–or, if not action, at least with some dramatic momentum–and figured the best way to do that was to have my two main characters kiss in the first scene.  I was going to do that somewhere in the chapter, but I figured it would be better to start things out with it rather than gradually build up.  After all, that’s not the climax–the climax is much more twisted and painful than that.

But then, before I could start, I had to figure out just how, exactly, these two characters would end up in that kind of a situation.  I mean, it was hard for me to work through their motivations in my mind.  I’ve been building up the tension for the last few chapters, but it all felt so distant, and it was hard to remember exactly how these characters are supposed to be feeling.

It was really frustrating.  I had this kissing scene all figured out in my mind a few weeks ago, but I’d forgotten it all.  As I kept mulling through my characters’ motivations, I got more and more frustrated.  After all, things have changed so much from my original idea.  Are these even the right characters to pull my story through to the end?

I started wondering if I’d made a mistake by starting the story when I did–whether all my ideas had truly come together to the point where they were ready to begin.  Back about a month before I started, I thought I was ready–but now?  I don’t know.  It’s very frustrating and discouraging.

After all, maybe I bit off too much with this novel.  My first novel, The Phoenix of Nova Terra, was more of a straight up adventure story.  There were some deeper ideas and ethical dilemmas in it, but I felt like I had to slog through those parts.  They didn’t work out as good as I’d hoped–the main focus was the adventure, the suspense.  With Hero in Exile, I want to focus a lot more on deeper questions–like, what is honor?  What is heroism?  How do you keep your honor in a dishonorable world?  Do you have to prove your heroism through some grand, daring act, or does true heroism manifest itself in other ways?  These were some of my original questions, but now…I don’t know how it’s turning out.

As a side, note, that’s where I was going with my question a few weeks ago about depicting immorality as immoral without watering it down–how do you get your characters to deal with these challenging issues without driving away readers?  It’s tough, and my main frustration has been that the scenes just don’t seem to be well executed–I’m afraid that they fall flat.  I could be wrong, I could be overexaggerating, I could be trying to write a perfect first draft, and I could be doing all three of these at the same time, but it’s been really frustrating.

Oh well.  At least I know I’m pushing myself.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I guess you could say that I had something like it today.  I knew where I wanted to go, and I knew what I wanted to happen, I just didn’t know how to get there.  So then, after checking email and facebook some twenty million times, I opened up my outline and decided to work on that.  Ten minutes later, I remembered how I’d envisioned this scene, and I set down and finally started the next chapter.

Romance is kind of hard for me to write, not only because of my lack of experience, but because it’s hard not to fall into cliches when you’re describing things.  Because of that, it took me a few hours to slog through the end of the opening scene–but I did it!  And now, I’m excited about this story again!  I know where we are, what we’re doing, and exactly where we’re going over the next few scenes.  It’s great!  I’m FINALLY unstuck!

So now, I just have to keep up at a good pace before I forget everything again.  Shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of this vacation, but the next two weeks are going to be a tough sprint to the end of the semester.  Still, it won’t be impossible.  And after, I’ve got more than two weeks of winter break–with the netbook I went ahead and ordered a couple of days ago!  Hooray!  I can hardly wait!