Tag: The Lost Colony (Trunked)

Okay, a new direction

I owe a lot to Aneeka.  She is the one who motivated me to write The Phoenix of Nova Terra back in 2007 when I didn’t really think I could finish a novel before the end of the school year.  Like I said in the last post, I’ve hit something of a wall in my writing life recently, and a couple of days ago she was the one who pointed it out to me.  The conversation went something like this:

Empress: lol – okay, okay!
how are your stories going?
me: very slowly
frustrating
mostly just because of personal disorganization
Empress: yeah, that can happen. tired of school? or just a lot of things you want to do?
me: school is pretty easy right now
it’s just hard to get back into writing regularly
I dunno
I’m trying to juggle two projects
Empress: maybe that’s the problem?
it’s hard focusing on two stories at once
(says the girl that does it all the time – the irony!)
but it really is hard to get all focused on two projects at once
me: it probably is
Empress: I flit between projects because I’m not that into them and write because I’ve been inspired (and tend to be inspired on different stories all the time)
when I get into a project though, then it’s best that I leave the rest behind and just focus on that one
get out all that I have and see how far I can go before I get distracted again
me: yeah
I’m trying to be 100% into two projects at the same time
trouble is, I can’t keep the momentum going on both
Empress: yeah. looks like you’re human, after all 😉
me: dangit!
Empress: you should choose one to focus on and then, if inspiration hits for the other one, focus on that one for a bit before turning back to the main project
me: grr
Empress: think of it this way. You could struggle for 6 months trying to work on two projects and arrive halfway done with both
OR you could focus on one project for 6 months, finish it, and then have plenty of energy to finish the next one
me: that’s true I guess
Empress: it’s better than wearing yourself out
then you’ll be left with no project finished
and just a heap of frustrated dreams
me: I guess that’s right
question is, do I revise my old novel or do I go ahead with the new one?
I’m more excited about the new one, but I want to get the old one finished
Empress: how long would the old one take to get finished?
wait…and you’re having problems with them right now, right?
you know, I would think it’s easier to edit two stories then to write two stories at once. maybe you could finish up the new story and then edit both of them at the same time?
me: that’s an idea
Empress: and NaNoWriMo is coming up. you could finish up the first draft by next month and whallah! only have 2 stories to edit 😀
me: ugggggggggggh
I coooooooooould
that’s intense, though
Empress: well, doing two projects at once is intense as well
why not just switch it around and do this kind of intensity instead? 😉

So, after mulling it over for a couple of days, I’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Instead of trying to do two major projects at once, I’m going to put the revision of Phoenix on hold for now and focus all my energy on Hero in Exile.  For November, instead of doing nanowrimo, I’ll try to get 50,000 words deep into this novel instead.  After that, if I do roughly 1,000 words a day, I should be in good shape to finish it before the end of January.  I don’t anticipate this novel going over 120,000 words, and if it tries to, I’ll do my best to reign it in.

So that’s my goal: Finish Hero in Exile before the end of January.  Oh, and write 50,000 words in November.

I’ve noticed that I tend to either be too focused or too distracted.  Trying to balance two projects at the same time has taught me that…well, I can’t do it very well.  But I do know that once I have one project that I can focus on, I can focus on it until it gets done.  That’s what I’m going to do now.

In the meantime, I was chatting with Drek from the writing group, and found out that he could program a way cool widget for my sidebar!  It’s going to be a pair of speedometers that show my daily wordcount and my wordcount over the course of the last seven days.  Oh, and if I’m nice, he might program a widget that displays my writing projects as status bars!  I’m way excited!

Drek recently designed a website for nanowrimo this year.  The idea is that every minute, it displays a new word from his novel.  Something like that.  It’ll be really interesting to see what happens once november starts up.

I can definitely say that the goatee gives Drek programming +2.

Updates

This week has been pretty good.  Scholastically, I’ve had two (well, three) midterms, a paper, and other assorted homework.  I managed to pull it off surprisingly well, and now I feel like I have a bunch of free time.  Yay!

I still seem to be in a rough spot, though, with my writing.  It’s starting to appear that this “rough spot” is more than a minor bump.  I don’t know what it is exactly–maybe I’ve overextended myself, maybe I’m just not organizing my time efficiently enough (probably it’s a combination of both)–but I feel like I’m not writing as productively as I could.

It’s not a lack of ideas problem.  I’ve got tons of ideas for my stories.  It’s usually a daily thing where I’ll come up with a new idea for the plot of one of my stories, or a cool thing about the setting.  Thinking up this stuff is the easy part–it’s the writing that’s difficult.

In Phoenix, the trouble is that I’m coming to sections where I have to throw out 90% of what I’ve got so far and synthesize the remainder into something more workable.  That is a very daunting thing.  Yesterday, I only did about two pages before calling it quits.  Today I haven’t even worked on it at all.  Blegh.

Because I’ve been paying so much attention to that project, my other project, Hero in Exile, hasn’t got the momentum it needs to carry through the hard stuff.  I spent three hours of my free time today writing that novel, but in all that time I only got through 1,000 words.  That’s progress, true, but it was very slow and painful.  I don’t know why.

Ugh.  This lack of progress is getting to me.  It doesn’t help that the semester is half over by now.

I’m hoping that once I get through the current slow spot in Phoenix, things will pick up.  I was really surprised when I edited this one scene in like half an hour.  The scene worked largely as it was, I just had to polish it up, and in just about half an hour (or maybe an hour, I forget), I’d run through almost ten pages of manuscript.  Not bad.

I just hope the rest of the novel is like that.  Otherwise, I’m just going to have to start cutting stuff out.

In other news, almost all my friends have read The Hero of Ages, but I’m still in the middle of it.  It’s way good, though!  Very dark and depressing at this point, and most of the characters have almost given up, but not entirely.  Nobody ruin this book for me please!

20% through the rewrite

Well, I don’t know exactly what it means, but yesterday I got to page 117 in the revision of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.  Divide that number by the total pages of the current draft, and you get .20blahblahblah.

So, I guess you could say that I’m roughly 20% through with this revision.  In reality, I have no way to tell–I’m expecting the final wordcount to be significantly smaller than what I have right now, so in terms of pages I might be quite a bit further.  Or, the stuff I have to revise might be a lot more difficult than the stuff I’ve worked on so far, so I might be much further behind than 20%.

Whatever.  It’s a statistic.  Am I having fun doing this?  I suppose…though I wish my life were better organized right now.  20% doesn’t mean much when you consider that the semester is half over.  How in the heck am I going to have three polished novels by November 2009?  Sigh.

On a happier note, I took a midterm today and freaking owned it!  HIST 240, Middle East history up to 1800–I got a 98% on the t/f / multiple choice.  YEAH!  The short answer wasn’t that much harder, either.

Also, this Sunday I decided to just sit down and do my work for a change.  Homework was backed up (which is unfortunate–I really do like to keep Sundays open for non-school non-work related activities), but I got all the stuff finished that needed to be done, and dove into both my novels right afterward.  By midnight, I’d written 500 words for Hero in Exile and revised 6+ pages of Phoenix.  Wow!  Both goals, hit right on the head.  I need more days like that.

When I should be doing other things, I’m reading Mistborn 3: Hero of Ages, and it’s really interesting so far (which is to say that the first five chapters are interesting).  I really enjoyed the first Mistborn book, but didn’t enjoy the second one as much.  However, I think that has to do more with the fact that it’s the middle book of a trilogy, and so most of the conflicts were left unresolved.  Also, the opening section took a lot of time to introduce the characters and the world.  The final book dives right into the action and doesn’t take time to describe anything that readers of the first two books wouldn’t already know.

Speaking of Brandon, I read an interesting post on his website that basically tells what writing was like for him before he got published. I’ve heard his how-I-got-published story a few times now, but I’d never heard about any of this stuff before, and I found it really interesting.  Also, it was really interesting to hear about the struggles and uncertainty that comes along with being an unpublished writer, because…that’s where I am right now.  Or rather, I’m right at the start of the trail, so it’s very good to hear about someone else who went through the woods and made it out to the other side.  I want to know what I can expect for the next five to ten years of my life.

Quick updates

Last night I climbed Y mountain with Steve and Warren, old friends from the Capitol house last year, and Steve’s new roommate Dan.  It was awesome!  More on that later.

However, we left around midnight and didn’t get back around five.  I slept for four hours, went to a Quark writing meeting, then did laundry and slept until dinner with my sisters and brother-in-laws.  Ugh.  Disgusting.

I feel so bad because I have so much stuff that I need to do.  Arabic homework.  History test.  MESA test.  MESA paper.   Poli Sci readings.  Humanities study guides.  None of these is really that hard (except the history test–I’m not sure what to expect there), but they are time consuming.  Time that I didn’t make for myself this past week, so it’s starting to crunch up.

Also, I feel really bad because I didn’t hardly write at all this week.  I got stuck on chapter 6 for Phoenix and that really intimidated me.  I guess I just kept putting it off, until finally I just sat down and wrestled with it until it seemed acceptable.  And as for Hero, I haven’t written in that story for nearly a week.

I don’t know what’s wrong.  I don’t even really know what I’ve been doing that’s taken up all this time.  It kind of sucks, to be honest.

Well, this next week is going to be different.  Once I’ve got the tests and papers behind me (which should be by Monday or Tuesday), I’ll have more time to write and do other things.  I just have to sit down and force myself to get it out.  No more excuses.

Sorry if this post is rambling, but that’s kind of the state I’m in.  I’ll write later (probably tomorrow) about the following things:

  • The hike last night to the top of Y mountain (the TOP of the mountain–it was awesome!).
  • Thoughts and frustrations with Hero in Exile, specifically Tristen’s character and the show-don’t-tell philosophy.
  • A really cool idea that came to me Thursday about creating a far future sci fi universe compatible with Mormon cosmology without crossing genre lines from mainstream to LDS sci fi.  This is one really cool idea, and I am excited to share it and get your thoughts on it.

In the meantime, I’m going to just go to sleep now and hope that I can prepare my Sunday school lesson in the morning.  That, and do my Arabic / study for my tests tomorrow.  Ugh.

Wrestling with my novel

Grrr…writing was so hard today.

It probably didn’t help that I was operating on only four hours of sleep, or recovering from a sickness, or constantly allowing myself to be distracted, but for some combination of these and other reasons, it was just really hard to write today.

I usually love revising.  I think it comes naturally to me, in some ways.  However, I’m well past the beginning of Phoenix and just starting to get to the part where I got muddled the first time I wrote it

Last year, I started to stall and sputter at this point because I had followed several of my initial ideas from the beginning to their preliminary conclusions and had to start adding new ideas to enrich the main story.  I still didn’t know the ending, so I was basically throwing all sorts of ideas in at random and waiting for the magical reaction to happen.

That reaction did happen, but it didn’t really take off until around page 300.  By that point, I’d thrown in enough random story elements that I had the start of a causal chain that would carry the story to an ending that excited me.  I let things take off and rode the story to its conclusion, having a wonderful adventure right up to the last page.

Trouble is, now I have to clean up the mess I left behind–all those other random elements I threw in that never really mixed well with the others.  Loose and frayed ends that I need to cut out or tie back in.  At the same time, I need to isolate and strengthen the elements that ended up being important.  That involves restructuring sections within chapters as well as paragraphs within sections, and it is bloody annoying.

It’s more than cutting and strengthening existing narrative.  It’s cutting and pasting from multiple places, reorganizing it, and then throwing it all out and totally rewriting it in a way that actually works.  It is so difficult, I’m probably going to get it wrong and have to rewrite the whole novel again to get it right.

(If I hadn’t taken a step back a few days ago and started outlining each section and chapter from a more macro view, I wouldn’t know what I need to do to fix this story.  I’d see the problems and know that they exist, but I wouldn’t know how to restructure things so that the novel works together as a whole.  So thanks, Reigheena, for helping me to step back and look at the wider picture.)

The most frustrating thing about this process, by far, is the choppiness.

When you have a blank page in front of you and you’re forging ahead with the first draft, it’s difficult but fairly linear.  Everything flows out in a relatively streamlined progression.  When you’re fixing the relatively minor details, it’s deliciously linear because you’re going going from paragraph to paragraph.

But when you’re revising the novel on a more macro level, overhauling the major story elements, you have to look at the story as a whole, transforming stuff on page 120 and introducing it in its new form on page 90, or adding new stuff between pages 80 and 100 to make the stuff before and after flow more smoothly from one to the other.  You get a whole section full of dialogue and you realize it’s not working, because you’ve developed your character deeper than you had at this point in the original draft, and so you end up throwing out and rewriting everything.

Because the process is so choppy, I find it really easy to be distracted.  I’ll have the exact sentence in my mind that I want to say, but the urge to get just a few moments of relief will be so strong that I’ll switch over and check my email, or check Facebook chat, or check my blog aggregator, or play a game for a little while, etc etc.  So then, when I get back to work, it takes time to readjust, and that sentence that I had will be buried under half a dozen other ideas, so then I have to dig it out.  Grrrr…

I’m tired, it’s late, I’ve had a miserable time wrestling with this novel today, and I’m going to bed.  But before I do, I want to link to this highly interesting and well written blog post I saw on A Motley Vision, a Mormon arts and culture blog.   The blogger tells the story of how she picked a controversial LDS fiction novel by Virginia Sorenson for her ward’s book club.  Both her reactions and her friends’ reactions to the novel were really interesting, especially because they were so different.  The ensuing discussion on the blog is really interesting because it’s all about the pros and cons of controversial, edgy LDS fiction, both to the readers as well as to the LDS publishing industry and LDS society in general.  At least, I found it interesting.  You can check it out and see for yourself.

I am so going to be in bed twenty seconds after I finish this sentence!  Gnight!

I really love this story

I should have written this last night, but yesterday I set out at 8:00 to write in Hero in Exile, and two hours / 1,300 words later, I realized that I really like this story.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the romantic, exotic Western view of the Middle East–stunning deserts with their rocky cliffs and enormous sand dunes, desert caravans with their exotic wares, colorful clothing and tents, etc.  Desert Bedouin with long, flowing robes and headscarves, swords and horses, striking fast and then disappearing back into the desert.  I know it’s not entirely true…but I’ve been over there, and it’s not entirely false either.  But in any case, I just really love this kind of stuff, and it really shows in the stories I write.

I mean, both Hero and Phoenix feature relatively primitive tribal desert cultures.  In Phoenix, though, the people have a very low level of technology (bows and arrows), whereas in Hero they have stuff like nuclear powered dune buggies and portable hydroponic gardens.  However, in both stories, the society is very tribal, monotheistic religions with prophets play a very important role, women and men are strictly separated, and everything else is just very…Arab.  Maybe not Arab 100% (because hey, I’m not an Arab myself and even though I’ve lived among Arabs for the past year+ I’m sure I still have some misconceptions about them), but enough so that a Westerner reading one of these stories will basically be like “oh, these are Arabs on another planet.  Cool.”

But last night, as I finished up the first chapter of Hero, I realized that I’ve got a really interesting set of conflicts going on here.  Tristen (the main character) basically crash landed on this world after his family’s ship was attacked in orbit, and he’s been raised by this group of pseudo-Arabs in the desert.  He wants to get back out into space and find out what happened to his biological family, but he has mixed feelings because he’s strongly attached to his adopted family.

Meanwhile, the sheikh of the tribe (Tristen’s adopted father) doesn’t want Tristen to leave because he has no living sons to inherit after him.  He wants to manipulate Tristen to keep him in the camp.  And the way he tries to do it is sooo dirty!  It’s going to screw up Tristen’s emotions and relationships so bad, it’s just going to be so much fun to write.  Because, you see, the sheikh assumes that Tristen, like most adolescent boys, is a slave to his hormones.  The thing is, though, that Tristen has a conscience and a sense of honor that he’s willing to die for.  But when everything starts to go grey, and all the role models Tristen’s ever had turn out to be false, what does he do?

Oh, it’s going to torture him!  And this is just the first section of the book–this is nothing!

The trouble is, if I’m already 7,700 words into this novel and I just finished the first chapter, the completed first draft is going to be WAY long.  As in, maybe 150,000 words if I’m lucky.  I mean, the scope of my novel here borders on epic.  There is so much cool stuff I’ve got planned for this story, and I haven’t even really figured out the ending.

So, if I’m going to write this novel, I’m really going to have to focus.  No more avoidance behavior or procrastination.  Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.

I did that the last two days and really had a lot of fun.  Friday, I wrote 1,300 words in Hero in Exile, and today I revised the first part of chapter 6 in Phoenix of Nova Terra.  Trouble is, I have trouble switching between the two projects.  I can work on one the one day, and the other on another day, but not both on the same day.  Still need to work on that.

So anyways, since I talked about how my understanding (and love for) Arabs and Arab culture has influenced my writing, I’d like to close this post by linking to some my friends’ blogs from the Jordan study abroad this summer:

I hung out with Nikki quite a bit on the Jordan study abroad, and she’s got a pretty cool blog.  She has tons of pictures on her site that you can check out.  Right now she’s in Ecuador blogging about her experiences there, but if you check out the archives you can see some really interesting posts she wrote.

Gini didn’t blog very much while we were in Jordan, but she has an interesting post up right now about her feelings on Americans and the Arab-Israeli conflict.  I’ll just say that I share her frustrations 100% and leave it at that (for now).

Nate’s got an interesting blog about the far off places he visits.  You should check it out; he’s got some interesting stories and perspectives about the places we visited in Jordan.  Plus, he can name 88 countries in five minutes.

Finally, Breanne blogged extensively about Jordan and the Middle East, probably more than me in fact.  Even though her experiences were not always as positive as mine, she describes what things are like over there really well.  Her blog isn’t active anymore (she’s on her mission now), but it’s worth it to check out the archives.

One last thought: I was chatting with an Arab friend of mine from Zarqa today.  She’s a writer like me, and we exchanged stories and gave each other book recommendations while we were over there at the University of Jordan.  I emailed her a copy of Hero in Exile (what I have so far), and it’s going to be really interesting to hear back from her.  She’s probably going to think it’s ridiculous–my dreamy, romantic ideas about Arab culture as a foreigner looking at her culture–so it’s going to be really interesting to get her feedback.

Revising, outlining, and a goals adjustment

The comments on my last post were really interesting, and made me do some thinking today. When I sat down to work on Phoenix today, I decided to look at the broader picture by outlining, in two or three sentences, what is going on in each scene I’ve revised so far.

As I did this, I realized that my chapter breaks are in all the wrong places. Not only are most of the beginning chapters way too short, but the breaks just didn’t feel natural. I decided to rearrange them.

At first, I thought it would be easy, but after an hour of trying to figure it out, I realized that it was a lot harder than I’d thought.

Then, I remembered what Brandon Sanderson taught in English 318: chaptes are like miniature stories in themselves, where each one has a beginning, middle, and ending that leads to the next chapter.

Once I starting thinking of it this way, I was able to organize things in a workable pattern. While the story progresses at a steady pace throughout the book, each chapter is organized around a common theme. The chapter begins with an issue or problem, and ends when that problem either is solved or totally spins out of control.

For example:

Chapter one begins and ends with Ian’s unease about setting his feet on the surface of a planet since he was six years old. His ship, the Avion-45, gets hit by some kind of futuristic EMP and the captain decides to abandon ship. The central issue is Ian’s fear of going planetside–a fear that he doesn’t understand.

Chapter two begins with the crew loading onto the escape pods to make an emergency landing on the planet. There is an accident, and Ian’s pod gets separated from the rest of the crew. Ian, with Melinda and Ben, crash land in a desert. The chapter ends with the bandit attack, with Ben and Melinda wounded and possibly dead. The central problem is that Ian is progressively separated from his peers, and it gets worse right up to the end.

Chapter three introduces Leila, a princess kidnapped by the bandits and abused by their women. They send her out to investigate the battlefield, and she meets up with Ian. She manipulates the situation so that the bandit women think that Ian has rescued her and subjugated them. The main problem is Leila’s subjugation by the bandits, and the chapter ends with her successfully turning the tables on them.

Etc etc.

So then I used this way of thinking to outline the next chapter that I need to revise. As I wrote it out, scene by scene, I realized that the best way to develop the central focus of that chapter was to combine two events into one and reorganize how I did the perspectives. Not only would that shorten the chapter, but it would also make it less choppy and more straightforward. It would also build the suspense a lot better.

So now, even though I know that I have a ton of work to do to rewrite that chapter, I’m stoked to dive into it because I know what I’m doing. If I keep to this method, I think that the second draft will be much stronger than it otherwise would have been.

Oh, and I decided to revise my goals a bit. Here are some daily goals that I think I can actually accomplish:

  • Revise at least six pages of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.
  • Write at least 500 words in Hero in Exile OR write a wikidpad article about some aspect of the story universe.

These are goals that I feel I can actually accomplish on a daily basis. And if I think I can accomplish them, I’m sure I will.

What I really need is to keep my mind in both stories at the same time. That’s the real challenge. But if I want to write professionally, that’s a skill that I’m going to need.

Finally, here’s something cool a friend of mine just showed me. If your Meyers Briggs personality type is INTP (or if you have a significant other whose personality type is INTP), this might interest you. It’s just so hilarious that a bunch of INTPs got together and made a website devoted to their personality type. If any of the sixteen types were to do it, it would definitely be them.

Question about revising

Here’s a question about an issue I’m starting to have with revision.

I’m currently revising the rough draft of my novel The Phoenix of Nova Terra.  So far, I’ve just been cutting out unnecessary descriptions/wordage and rewriting some of the passages to make them stronger.  Although I’m making a lot of changes, I haven’t really changed any of the larger story elements, such as character, plot, setting, etc.

Yesterday, I got to the point in my novel where Leila’s father, king Malek, makes his first appearance.  Leila is a major viewpoint character, but her father is not.  When I wrote the rough draft, I didn’t really develop him at all–in some ways, he was just a placeholder for the plot, a fatherly figure for me to use to develop Leila’s character.

But as I thought about his role in the story, especially his role in the first scene where he makes an appearance, the more interested I became in his character.  Whereas some kings are tyrants, Malek is a cultured, diplomatic gentleman.  This is all the more interesting because the world on which he lives has a very violent and tumultuous history.  The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became with his character–and interested in taking some time to flesh him out.

There are two problems with this, however.  The first is that this novel is already too long as it is–check the sidebar.  165,000 words is really pushing it for science fiction.

Second, it would require…well…work.  I mean, if I tried to add something in every time I see something new and interesting in my story, wouldn’t I be writing a different novel every time I revise it?  That sounds…hard.

So my question is, how do I know when I can (or should) go in and change something fundamental to the story on the rewrite?  Editing and deleting scenes is fine, cutting out or adding dialogue is not hard, tightening descriptions and viewpoint is fairly straightforward and not too challenging–but rewriting character, setting, or plot?  That is a major overhaul.

How do I know what major elements to change, and how much?  I want to have this draft finished before the end of this year, after all.

I did it!

Yay!  I finally hit all three of my daily goals in one night!  Six+ pages of revision in Phoenix, 500+ words in Hero, and a contribution to the wikidpad notes on Hero!  It may not sound like too much, but it makes me happy.

And I’m sick.  Blegh.  Since it’s after 1:30 am and I have a class at 8:00 that I absolutely cannot miss, I’m going to bed now.  Hopefully, I will not be a wreck in the morning.  Nothing gets you down like sickness.

But the sickness didn’t get my writing down!  Woo hoo!

General Conference and weekend progress (or lack thereof)

This weekend was General Conference.  I watched most of the sessions from friends’ apartments here in the FLSR.  While I enjoyed many of the speakers and caught all four sessions, I have to confess that I slept through a lot more of the talks than I should have.  I’ll definitely download the mp3s and listen to them when they come out.

As far as writing goes, this week was a lot slower than I would have liked.  Yesterday was packed from the moment I woke up (10:30 am) to when I finally went to sleep, though I did get in a little bit of writing between sessions.  Today, I woke up feeling sick, which didn’t help things either.

Despite all this, I’m really happy to say that I made some serious progress in Phoenix.  Cut out more than a thousand words and revised nearly twenty pages altogether.  Things are right on track for that story, and I’m really enjoying the rewrite.

Hero in Exile, though, is different.  I didn’t make nearly the progress that I wanted to on that one. <sigh> looks like I’ll have to wait for the next weekend.  That, or start writing in it more consistently.

That’s all for now.  In the meantime, check out this amazingly cool picture of a solar prominence from Astronomy Picture of the Day.  Or my friend Steve’s blog.  Just remember, Steve claimed for the longest time that he would never write his own blog, so don’t believe a word he says.  You have it from me.