Tag: Thoughts and Reflections

New writing goals

Alright, the first week of school is behind me, I’m probably as settled in as I’m ever going to be, so it’s time I set some personal writing goals for myself this semester. So here goes.

My major goal, at this point, is to have three polished novel drafts in time for World Fantasy 2009 in San Jose, California. So far, I’ve got one complete rough draft, one incomplete rough draft, and a REALLY cool idea for a new novel that is just itching to be written. I’ve got a lot of other stuff, too, but that stuff has been dead and buried for a while, and I’m not sure whether I want to bring it back just yet.

So, if these are indeed the three novels that I want to have ready by next year, here are some goals:

  • Finish the second draft of The Lost Colony by January 1st, 2009.
  • Write at least 500 words per day.
  • Write one article in the wiki outline for the new story each day.

The first one is pretty straightforward. I’ve got to polish The Lost Colony and get it to the point where I feel like I can send it out. It won’t be perfect by any stretch, but polished enough to send it out. With four months to finish the rewrite, hopefully I can put this project in the backseat while I focus most of my energies on the new stuff.

The second goal is also really straightforward. 500 words per day, as I discovered with The Lost Colony, is very reasonable. It’s a good starting place, and if I feel like I’m doing well enough, I can always increase it to 1,000 like I did last year (and successfully kept it, for the most part).

The last goal is something of an experiment for me. My least favorite part of the writing process is probably prewriting–all the outlining, worldbuilding, planning, etc. I tend to do all that stuff in my head, not on paper, and I come up with as much as 60% of it as I go along. That’s just how I tend to write. However, I’ve never really tried the alternative, and I think it would be a really interesting experiment to see what happens if I formally plan things out before I sit down and write it. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe both. Whatever happens, I’ll be sure to let you know.

These goals are all pretty straightforward and practical. That’s not what goals are for, however. They exist to push you. So, in order to push myself, I’m going to give myself a goal that’s just a little bit reckless:

  • Finish the second draft of the untitled novel by May 1st, 2009.

Wow. This is crazy. I proved this past year that I could write a 168,000 rough draft in nine months. But this? I’d practically have to finish the thing by January/February in order to have time for the rewrite! And yet, if I can churn out at least a decently polished draft of a novel every 3/4’s of a year, that’s impressive. It might just be enough to prove that I can do this successfully full time (gasp!).

They say that you need to produce a novel a year in order to make a living as a writer. Last year, I proved that I could produce a rough draft in a little less than a year, but a solid, polished draft? Didn’t happen.

But maybe, just maybe, I can prove myself with this next novel. Maybe. We’ll see. At the very least, it’s worth the challenge.

First week craziness

So, this last week was the first week of school.  It was as crazy as anything.  Back to classes, back to papers, readings, buying books, waking up early…everything.

Fortunately, even though I’m taking six classes, three of them are only two credit hours, so the load is going to be somewhat lighter, freeing me up for time to do other things (clubs,  blogging, writing, dating etc…inshallah), and several of the classes are actually fairly interesting.  The poli sci 201 class in particular looks interesting–we’re reading all kinds of ancient texts (like Homer and Dante) and tying it in with Western political thought.

Unfortunately, a lot hasn’t been going very well this week either.  Just lots and lots of hoops to jump through, payments to make, expenses and such.  The little stuff really grates on me, especially when it doesn’t line up.  Probably has to do with my ENTP personality type.  The bigger stuff is harder to handle but I don’t flare up over it.

I don’t know where I’ll be working this semester, and that’s an issue.  I had thought that I would just be rehired by the BYU Bookstore, but right now that’s looking unlikely, because due to my class schedule I can’t work M-F.  It would be nice–REALLY nice–to get a TA job, but nothing has worked out so far.  Or maybe I could go and work for that used bookstore downtown?  THAT would be nice.

So, with all of these stresses and stuff, and just my general disorganization, I’m sad to admit that I haven’t really been doing much writing…but I have been working to get the quark writing group started up again, and I am starting to formulate some really awesome writing goals for this semester.  More on that to come.

And I even if I haven’t actually put any words down in the new novel I plan on writing this year, I’ve been thinking about it A LOT.

This week, as I was walking home to the FLSR under the sunny blue sky, I saw a patch of grass on a hill and decided to lay down and relax for a bit.  As I lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, I just immersed myself in the world of this new story, working out all the details for the first scene.  That led me to ask several questions about the characters (who are they?  what are they feeling/thinking?  what kind of a background do they have?) which got me to think through their back-stories, and the tribe they come from, and inter-family conflicts, and how I can tie all those into other characters and conflicts later on in the story.  I fell asleep for a little bit, and when I woke up, it was like I was waking up to a new world, coming down from meditating on a mountaintop or something.  Really sweet feeling.  I love taking naps on the grass.

There is SO much I have to blog about!  But it’s 1:58 am and I’d better get some sleep.  Tusbah ‘ala al-kheer!

Thoughts on being busy

I was browsing through some Facebook notes I’d imported from my old blog (now nonexistent), and I came across an old book review I wrote for Momo by Michael Ende. Awesome book–I recommend it 110%. However, the thing that got to me was what I’d written about how the book made me think about how I was living my life back then:

I don’t regret being busy. I’m VERY busy all the time (especially this spring, with Poli Sci 200 giving me a major beating). There are days where I wake up at 6:00 am and I don’t stop running from one place to the next until the evening. Sometimes, it’s true, I let the world around me just sweep me around and control my life. But I don’t think that things would be much better if I just cut out all the things that I’m doing.

I was home this time last year, not working or taking classes–I didn’t really have any responsibilities at all. And I was miserable. I felt like I wasn’t being productive enough, and I looked forward to coming out to BYU for the summer term because then I’d have something to do. Now that I’ve been really busy for a year, I’ve found that I really like it. It’s good to have a lot of challenging projects and responsibilities. I’m doing what I love and even though it can be difficult, I’m having a lot of fun. Work hard and play hard.

My sister Kate sometimes has problems with being overworked or underworked. When she’s busy, she’s so busy that it makes her anxious and she feels overstressed. We tend to fight a lot when that happens. So then, she takes time off to try and recharge, but she gets anxious because she feels that she’s unproductive. So then she fills up her schedule with things to do, until she’s overstressed again.

I think that the problem isn’t a matter of whether or not you’re always busy, so much as what you make time for. The people in the book got to the point where they figured that good things were something they’d only have time for sometime in the future, so they spent all their time doing menial things, and ignored their friends, families, and anything that was fun or enjoyable.

Life should be kind of like a car battery–once you’re up and doing something, it recharges itself. If I were only busy with things that drained me, I’d go crazy. It would just feel wrong, and I would make some major changes in my life. But if I actually enjoyed all of the things I was doing, and am doing, right now, I would know that things are working the way they should.

And ultimately, I think that that’s the message that Ende was trying to get out. Enjoy your life right now, where you are, and make time for the people around you.

This really gets to me for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I don’t think I’ve been following my own advice this last year. Ouch.

Second, I want to refocus and spend more of my free time doing creative things and/or spending time with people. The advice here about prioritizing really resonates with me.

Third, it’s totally true. Life should be just like a car battery, and if it isn’t, you’re doing something wrong. Trying to get stimulation without putting in any effort is just wrong, even if it’s innocent.

I guess that’s one thing I learned from my experience last semester writing that novel. It took a LOT more effort to sit down and write the thing than it did to play computer games or waste time on the internet, but the satisfaction it brought was a lot better.

At the same time, I didn’t spend enough time getting out and making friends. But really, it’s the same thing. Do you fill your life with busywork or do you make yourself busy with the things that really matter? They take a lot more effort, but give much better satisfaction.

I arrived in Provo a couple of days ago, and I’m still somewhat disoriented. I’ll have some new writing goals, though, before school starts. I’ll also have some new ideas for where I want to take this blog, and I’ll write about that tomorrow.

A million different things to say

Wow.  I feel like I have a million different things to say, and I’m not sure which one to start with.

I just got back a couple of days ago from the Jordan study abroad, and I’m currently at “home” (or something similar but not quite it), here in Massachusetts.  In a couple of days, I’ll be heading out to Utah with my brother in law, and we’ll drive with a trailer full of stuff.

I’m looking forward to the trip, but almost more I’m looking forward to being in Utah again.  It’s funny, because that place can feel so old after a while, but that’s where all my friends (and most of my family) currently are, so I feel like my life is on hold as long as I stay out here.

I put quotation marks around “home” because really, my parent’s house isn’t exactly my home.  Not in the full sense of the word.  It’s not where I grew up, and it’s not where I’ve lived for any significant period of time.  In some ways, it feels more like my grandparent’s house than anything else.

Nothing else for me to do back home except explore old memories, I decided spontaneously to drive up to the old house where I’d grown up. It wasn’t ours anymore. We’d moved out of it nearly two years go. The woman who bought it from us was single and had nearly a dozen kids from three different parents. After we moved out, they trashed the place. That’s the last I’d heard of it.

As I drove past, I saw that all the plants in the front were grown over. The red brick mailbox was partially destroyed, evidently by a careless driver. There was a For Sale sign leaning against it. The driveway was empty, but I was hesitant for fear of someone seeing me through a window.

Then I saw a black box dangling from the doorknob on the front door. “What the heck?” I parked the car and walked boldly across the lawn. Sure enough, there was a notice pasted on the door. It said “to enquire about this property, please call…”

The house was foreclosed. The previous residents were all gone.

Nobody was there.

I couldn’t hold myself back. I stepped around the house, peering in all the windows. I walked around back, as if exploring some ancient ruins in a far off land. This space where I had grown up, where I hadn’t returned in nearly a quarter of my life, was practically sacred to me–which only made the desolation that much more surreal.

Walking across the lawn where I used to play as a child, it seemed like the walls of the house were screaming at me. The place was saturated with memories, and they all came back to me as I reverently walked around the property. This was where we had built the old swingset. This was where we had house trained our dog, late at night, while watching Apollo 13 which had just come out on DVD. This overgrown, jungle-infested hill was where I had worked one summer to build terraces for a garden that we never planted. That window was the one that we kids used to secretly leave unlocked so that we could sneak inside if we had to. It was locked tight.

I felt like the place was a holy temple that some gang of street thugs had tagged with crude, ugly, spray painted words of hate. I felt violated. The plants which we had so carefully tended were collapsing on their own, untended overgrowth. Weeds as tall as myself grew in front of the doors. Inside the windows, the floors were scratched to pieces, the doors were dented at the corners, the carpets were stained and dirty. The awning we’d put over the deck was completely gone. The equipment for the fireplace was in pieces, leaning against the wall.

It was like ages had gone by, and the walls were screaming out to me. I was too shocked by what I saw to cry. Yet, at the same time, I was grimly fascinated. It was like I was watching a movie, entertaining myself with my thoughts while someone else controlled my body and my emotions.

All this time, I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be if one of my old neighbors called the cops on me. To be arrested for walking around the house that, five years ago, I’d left and entered every day. That to return to the place where I’d made the transition from childhood to adolescence and left my adolescence behind now felt like a crime and made me look suspicious. I didn’t care enough to let it stop me.

Later that night, I heard the rest of the story from my father. The woman who had bought the house from us had fallen behind on her mortgage. She was probably one of the thousands of Americans who used the housing bubble to buy a house far beyond her means. Instead, she took out a twisted insurance policy: she slept with the son of her creditor for ammunition to use as blackmail.

It didn’t work, though. In the end, she got foreclosed and evicted just like everyone else. And now, my old home sits ruined and abandoned.

To me, the place is as fractured and weathered as Jerash, Luxor, or Um Al-Jumaal. It’s just gone.

Well, that’s not something that I was planning on saying, but it just sort of spilled out of me.  That’s one thought of many, and one of them had to come out somehow.  Since this post is getting kind of long, however, I’ll cut it here and save the rest for a new one. 

Critical Mass

Stars form when billions of tons of gas, scattered across space in the midst of an impossibly huge nebula, gradually come together through the attractive pull of gravity.  Over the course of thousands of years, these gases slowly, almost imperceptibly come together, until they reach a critical mass.  When that critical mass is achieved, the ball of gas falls in on itself and ignites a trememndous nuclear reaction, millions of times more powerful than all the nuclear weapons of Earth with more than a trillion times the longevity.  Thus a new star is born.

Writing is not that much different; at least, not for me.  My mind is like a vast nebula of thoughts, ideas, feelings, impressions, images, and memories.  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, these ideas start to congregate.  As I work each one out and give it shape and gravity, they slowly start to fall into each other.  Some of them have more weight and fall faster, while others drift away.  Eventually, these ideas reach a critical mass–and when they do, they rapidly fall into each other and come together, igniting an exciting plotline.  A story is born, just screaming at me to be written.

This past week, the ideas for my next story came together and reached that critical mass…

Continue reading Critical Mass

Some thoughts on writing

I noticed something the other day when I went to write in Genesis Earth after a long hiatus.  I reread the last few pages I’d written…and reading the story, it seemed a lot different to me than when I was writing it.

The same thing happened to me when I started rereading The Lost Colony.  It felt melodramatic, wordy, and at parts really cheesy.  Is this the same story that I sat down and wrote just a few months ago?  It seems like something completely different.

It’s scary, because it makes me realize that when you write a story, you really DON’T have a lot of control over it…

Continue reading Some thoughts on writing

cool idea for nanowrimo

Now that I’m gone in the Middle East, the Quark writing group has to find its way without me at the helm.  So far (as far as I know) it’s been going really well, with Travis moderating the online meetings–from what I’ve seen, we’ve even got a few new people coming out, which will be really awesome if they keep coming into the fall.  But sadly, he’s gotten too busy to handle things, so I had to find another replacement yesterday.

I thought: who would be better than Aneeka to head off the writing group? Turns out, she was up for it, so now I can rest well knowing that the club is still alive and still in good hands, even with me on the other side of the world and COMPLETELY out of the loop.

But the whole thing got me to thinking about what’s going to happen in the fall, when I get back to Utah and I’m back in charge of the writing group again…there is a lot that needs to be done.  One of the things that a lot of people wanted to do was NaNoWriMo, something I haven’t done before but has become a really big thing among aspiring writers.  It would be a good thing to bring us together, to bring in some new people, to build connections with the wider writing community out in Utah, etc etc…

Trouble is, if we’re going to be doing it as a club, that means that as writing vp, I should probably participate in it this year.  And in order to participate, I need to come up with some idea for a story…

Continue reading cool idea for nanowrimo

Spin has spun me

Just last week, I finished one of the best science fiction books I’ve read all year! It’s called Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, and I think it won a Hugo award. My first reaction, after reading the VERY satisfying ending, was “Wow! This book is everything that good science fiction should be!”

My second reaction, however, was a little bit more disheartening: “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write a story this good…”

Continue reading Spin has spun me

Some things to work on

I just recently moved in to a homestay, where I’ll be living with an Arab family until the end of the summer.  You can read about it on my other blog.  It’s nice to have a routine now, because I have time in the evenings to go on my computer and write.

The Wormhole Paradigm (I’m going to change that horrible title…ugh) is currently at 16,000 words, and I’m finally caught up to where I was by the end of English 318.  There is still a LOT to work on, though, and a lot of this applies to The Lost Colony (gotta change that title too) as well.  Here are some of my thoughts:

Continue reading Some things to work on