writer’s block – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

13,837 words in a day?

Yeah, that’s right. Believe it or not, I barreled through about 13,837 words today. That’s thirteen THOUSAND, not thirteen hundred.

Now, only about a thousand of that was new stuff that I was writing. Most of the rest of it was rearranging scenes that I’d already written, touching them up only a tiny bit. I did merge a couple of scenes, delete or tone down some stuff, etc.

So really, about 90% of my work today was just revision, and not even really hardcore revision at that. I’m still treating this version of my story as a rough draft; I’m not taking the time to polish things up and fix the known minor problems. Really, I’m just running through what I’ve already written to make sure I have what I need to get past the roadblock I hit back in April.

The biggest thing I’m doing right now is rearranging scenes into entirely new chapter arrangements. This seems to be a problem everytime I write a story with multiple viewpoints: I never seem to get the prelude-rising-falling-resolution-cliffhanger action that good chapters have. I write scenes as they come to me, in a progression that seems natural at the time, but once I take a step back, I find that things work better on the macro-level if I complete rearrange which scenes come where in the narrative.

Part of that is that sometimes I just need to write a few paragraphs (or even a few scenes) just for me to figure out what’s going on, plotwise or settingwise. What I’m finding with Bringing Stella Home is that I’m taking scenes from James and Danica’s viewpoints and moving them up a chapter or two, cutting out the filler in the middle.

I’ve got a long way to go before I master the art of good chapter structure. Or perhaps it’s something that I do better when I’m revising, not drafting. After all, I think I’m more of a discovery writer than a firm outliner. Perhaps I write in a sort of puzzled up everywhere kind of way, and then do best when I don’t put all the pieces together until after I’ve vomited them all on the page.

I am getting more excited about this story, though. Taking a step back and looking at things from a more global perspective has really re-energized me. I can see the major turning points, and that helps me to build up for them much better.

I’m only worried that the “midpoint” is going to be somewhere around the 3/5ths mark, not the halfway mark as it should be. One of my goals with this book is to see if I can hold to the three act structure and whether that makes my story any stronger. But, according to the website, the midpoint occurs “approximately” at the halfway point, so I guess I can fudge it.

Also, the midpoint is supposed to be where the main character hits rock bottom. Hee hee hee…oh, he will. He will. Bwahahahaha!!!

In the meantime, you owe it to yourself to listen to this:

Almost done!

Yay! I’m almost done with Genesis Earth 2.0! 6k words of revision done today, bringing the project up to 95% complete. Just the final scene of the final chapter, and then the epilogue, and she’s done!

(Well, at least the second draft is done. She’s probably going to need a lot more work after that, but if I don’t put some distance between myself and this novel for a month or two, I’m not going to be able to see what she needs. Still, I feel confident that this rewrite is a significant improvement from the first draft.)

The coolest thing about this revision process is that it’s actually been kind of fun. It has involved a lot of work: hours and hours of grappling with the text to find the right way to say things, research ranging from various psychological disorders to the structure of wormholes to the composition of DNA, and lots and lots of time thinking through various aspects of the story (basically, daydreaming…but hey! it was hard work!). But even though it was a lot of work, it was fun work and I really enjoyed it.

What’s even cooler is that I’ve got 22 beta readers lined up to read it and give me feedback–boo yah! Inshallah I’ll be finishing the second draft tomorrow sometime and sending it out to everyone before the end of the day.

After this project, I’ll be moving on to Bringing Estella Home. It needs a major rehaul before I can pick it up from where I left off (the rough draft is currently incomplete), but that shouldn’t be too hard.

I put up a status bar for Bringing Estella Home on the sidebar, even though it’s stilll the rough draft. It’s currently at 60k words, and I set 100k as the base for calculating the percentage complete. It probably won’t be more than 100k…120k at the very most. We’ll see how that works out.

Currently, it’s at 0%, since I’m going to start from the very begining and rewrite it up to where I left off. I know, everone says that’s not a good idea–and usually it is–but it’s been almost a month since I’ve worked on this project, and I need to get back into it, starting with the beginning.

Taking a break from it for a while was a good idea, I think, because I realized things just weren’t working. The time off helped me to step back and see what was wrong, as well as recouperate my energy and enthusiasm for the project. I made the mistakes of simultaneously outlining too much and too little as I was still writing the rough draft; too much, because I was keeping a map of every scene on a piece of butcher paper, cementing scenes where some of them needed to be cut; too little, because I tried to create a private mercenary outfit without figuring out all the crew roles I needed the various characters to fill.

But now, none of that is an issue, and I’m ready to get started. Tomorrow, in fact, if all goes well. 🙂

Breaking a roadblock

About a month ago, I stopped working on my novel Bringing Estella Home because I hit a roadblock. Basically, I realized at the end of the second part that I had failed to work out all of the secondary characters and their duties and responsibilities in the mercenary group that the protagonist hires. I had a pilot and a navigator but no engineer, no medical officer, and no difference between the officers and the enlisted men. When I came up to a battle scene, I realized that most of the characters I’d be killing off were either invisible or nonexistent, and that didn’t help out the dramatic tension very much.

Well, after the last post, it seems that my two most interesting projects (according to my friends) are Bringing Estella Home and The Phoenix of Nova Terra. Bottom line: as much as I want to avoid it, this is probably one of my most promising projects and I really should revive it.

So today I opened up my outline for the story (I’m not very consisten about keeping outlines while drafting a new novel, but I usually have at least a couple of notes here and there in them), and I diagrammed out the mercenary organization. I figured out what all the important officer roles are, reassigned/added new characters to fit those roles, figured out how many enlisted men there would be and who would be in charge of them, and figured out everyone’s responsibilities. Here is what I’ve got:

* Captain — Commanding officer of the mercenary unit. Lead missions, accept contracts, look over welfare of the crew, etc.

* Chief Petty Officer (NCO) — Provide link between officers and grunts, relay commands from the captain to the enlisted men.

* Astrogator/Pilot — Navigate routes, pilot during combat.

* Cybernetics and Intelligence Officer — Provide useful intelligence to captain, infiltrate enemy networks, general cybernetic espionage.

* Chief Engineer — Maintain, repair, and upgrade the ship, keep inventory of ordinance, foodstuffs, and other supplies, maintain shipwide computer network.

* Chief Medical Officer — Maintain the health of the crew, perform surgeries and medical operations as needed, etc.

* Wing Commander — Remotely pilot and command fighter drones, monitor enemy movements within the field of operations.

So, that’s seven officers, including the NCO (I’m not really a military person, so I’m not sure if you’d count the NCO with the officers or the enlisted men…man, I’m so ignorant when it comes to the military). On the enlisted side, I’ve got two sergeants commanding two squads of twelve soldiers each.

Did I miss anything? Please let me know if I did.

I’ve got to admit, the structure of this mercenary unit comes from my own very, very limited understanding of the military, drawn mostly from 1) conversations with my military roommate over the Jordan 2008 study abroad, 2) the Schlock Mercenary webcomic (which is a lot more space opera than military sf), 3) Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, and 4) Wikipedia.

You know, I really should join the military before I attempt to write military science fiction (no, really, I’m only half joking–it is a temptation). But yeah, that’s the best I can come up with…so, really, this is pseudo-military sf, or the best space opera imitation of military sf that I can come up with.

But the cool thing is that as soon as I had everything diagrammed out like this, it all clicked together and the roadblock was gone. Gone! A month ago, when I started hitting the rough patch, I really didn’t have a lot of motivation to keep working. It was broken, I knew it was broken, and I couldn’t really move on until I’d fixed it. Well, now I know exactly how to fix it, and I really want to get back to this project and do it right.

Except…this is such a dark story. It’s so tragic. Just as I started to come along and really like my characters…but it’s better that way. You’ve got to torture them, cause them pain. It makes the story much more interesting and engaging, raises the stakes.

But first, I’ve got to finish Genesis Earth. And go to bed. Probably not in that order.