weather – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Winter in Kutaisi

From what I hear from my friends, it’s been a pretty mild winter back in the States. Here in Georgia, though, it’s been a much different story.

I think we’ve had only three sunny days since I arrived here in Kutaisi almost four weeks ago. The natives tell me that this is highly unusual. The temperature hovers right around 0 degrees Celsius, which means the snow is wet and melts extremely fast. It’s pretty for a day or two, then it turns to rain again, and that means mud…lots and lots of mud.

During a break in the snow, I ventured outside to take a few pictures of my neighborhood. In a couple of weeks, the weather will hopefully be warmer and things will look a lot different, but still, I thought it would be good to give you guys an idea of what this place looks like.

My host family's apartment. We live on the second floor, which is good since there isn't an elevator.

I live in the Avtokarkhana settlement, near the old Soviet auto factory. The apartments are about 50 years old, and haven’t been renovated much since then. It’s a poor neighborhood, but it’s comfortable enough, with all of the basic amenities like water and heating.

An abandoned bus along the road to my school. My host father has some choice words to describe his Russian-made vehicle.

The roads are pretty nasty; they haven’t been repaved in decades, and the potholes are so deep you practically need a raft to get across the street. Most of the locals wear rubber boots during the rainy season, but I recently treated my boots with beeswax and that seems to be doing fairly well. Besides, after a while, you figure out where the stepping stones are, and then it’s not so bad.

One of the local free-range chickens. There's a cow, too, but she was staying out of the snow.

Where the chickens go to keep warm. My host family laughed when I showed them this picture.

Even though Kutaisi is a fairly large city, I get the feeling that there’s still a few lingering elements of the village mentality. How else would you explain all the free-range chickens that people still keep? The school is within walking distance, as are the stores where we buy our bread, and even though the pharmacy is a short drive away, I could probably walk there in fifteen or twenty minutes.

The local church. It seems pretty small, but Georgians don't really have weekly worship meetings like we do in the States.

Because of the snow, I haven’t gotten out much in the past few weeks. I haven’t been stranded, though; there are about a dozen other TLG volunteers in the city, and we’ve had a few parties and get-togethers. Kutaisi is a small city, as far as cities go, but there are plenty of interesting places if you know where to look, and even in the dead of winter, it’s still quite pretty.

The road I walk back from school every day.

So yeah, that’s what my neighborhood is like. When the weather gets better, I’ll bring my camera to school and take some pictures of my school. I should also take some pictures of my host family’s apartment, come to think of it. What else do you guys want to see?

Snowmageddon! Hooray!

So for the past week, a series of crazy snowstorms has been pelting the Mid-Atlantic. President Obama has dubbed it “snowmageddon,” and it’s so bad that all federal government offices have been closed since Friday. With another storm hitting us tonight, it looks like we’re going to have the whole week off! Yay!!!

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been hanging out around the Barlow Center, watching movies, doing random stuff with my friends here in the program, taking naps in the middle of the day, and writing. Lots of writing! It’s awesome–I haven’t had this much free time since Christmas (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…)!

Today I didn’t write quite as much. I got in about 1.1k words, a decent amount, but if I’d pushed myself I could have finished the current chapter. Monday went much better, because I sat down and forced myself to write in the morning. Once those initial hundred or so words were out, the rest came much easier.

On the first day of snowmageddon, when we were snowed in at Valley Forge, I got in over 1,000 words before noon. It was rough going, though–nothing was flowing, and everything took a lot of effort. I hate it when that happens–blegh.

But I think it was necessary, because now, the scenes are flying by pretty easy. Sometimes, when I’m struggling with momentum, I find it helps if I take a day to focus and push myself through it. Get rid of all distractions, put my butt in the chair, close all internet browsers, and just write, no matter how difficult.

My next novel, To Search the Starry Sea, is going to be a lot of fun. It starts out almost exactly like Homer’s Odyssey, with the same basic conflict and setup. Beyond that, however, I have nothing solid planned–I’m just following where the story takes me. And boy, is it taking me to some crazy places!

For example, one of the first places Katriona (the Telemachus character) goes is a nearby world, ruled by a friend of her father’s. To liven things up, I decided to have him live on a giant rotating space station, where the inside is covered by forests and jungles–scenery that Katriona has never seen.

This got me wondering, however: how did the jungle get there? The answer: thousands of years ago, before superluminal space travel, a group of colonists set out for this world, freezing themselves in cryo. When they got there, they found that a solar flare-up had rendered the planet uninhabitable, so instead they built this massive station, hoping that it would serve as a second ark for humanity.

Instead, a raiding party of space barbarians took them over, enslaved the colonists, and built their palace in the midst of the carefully maintained artificial biosphere.

This opened up a series of new possibilities for subplots, which shapes my protagonists interactions with the people here, which points her in new directions for the main plot–the next few places that she’s going to go.

This is discovery writing at its best. Even though I have no clue where she’s going to go next, things are unfolding very nicely, and I’m excited to find out!

Running the gauntlet

In the past five days, I have written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words. None of them has been fiction (at least, not explicitly–more BS, if anything).

One monster history term paper, one middling poli sci essay, and two exams requiring 2,000 and 1,000 word essays. Blegh. Like pulling teeth.

The upside is, it’s almost finished! Just got my history exam left, and it shouldn’t be too hard. There is an essay, but the teacher already gave us the two questions from which he’ll pick the one on the test, and a short answer section. The rest is multiple choice. Not too hard, especially because I’ve really enjoyed the class.

The two exams I took today…let’s just say I’m glad it’s behind me. The deeper you get into your major, the more you have to take dumb classes about things you don’t care just to graduate. Blegh.

There is one other exam besides the history one, but I’m not counting it because it’s Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class. His final exams consists of the first three chapters of you novel, plus a query letter and synopsis that he’ll mail out to the editor/agent of your choice (sending out the submission is a required part of the final). I did some research, found an agent, sent out a query email. If I get a response, I’ll send out the chapters to her. If not…I’ll send it out somewhere else. It didn’t seem like she wanted people to send her partials without her requesting it, so I didn’t send that out.

You know, it’s funny how the title of your novel seems a whole lot less clever when you’re finally sending it out to people.

And, as if things weren’t crazy enough, Utah decided to play jokes on us with the weather. We got our worst snowstorm of the year…on April 15th? Holy cow! WTH? (that’s “what the heck,” for all of you non-Utahans)

Here are some shots from my photoblog, before and after (or rather, before and during).

Crazy!