On Writing – Page 7 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Breaking 90k and other mundane excitements

(I almost always have trouble figuring out titles for these blogs posts. I mean, my writing life isn’t all that exciting–I just write. Check out my study abroad blog from last year for true (if old) excitement).

I broke 90k words in Bringing Stella Home today. According to my goal of 120k, that’s the 3/4 mark. Yay! I’m happy to say I’m going strong, and will probably “finish” this thing in a couple of weeks.

I say “finish” because it needs a LOT of work. Oh yeah. Not even ready for the alpha readers yet.

But I’m excited for the story. Dave Wolverton at CONduit this past weekend suggested full and complete immersion as a way to write well. I think that applies here: without school or a job, I basically write all day.

Speaking of which, I haven’t quite gotten up to doing 4k words steadily each day. Right now, I’m hovering at around 3k, which is twice as much as my daily wordcount during the school year, but not yet up to where I want it to be.

However, getting up to that level is like training your muscles. Through a number of small, intangible things, I feel that I’m working myself up to the 4k/day level.

For example, I’ve been opening my word document and plugging out the first few hundred words BEFORE I open a web browser and waste an hour of time checking out my favorite blogs and websites. That’s progress.

I’ve also started writing more in the time that I set aside to write. These days, I usually write for a couple hours from 11pm to 2pm, take lunch and do something to recharge my creative batteries, do some more writing in the midafternoon (usually not too much), then take dinner, head out to the library (because the parking gate opens at 7pm) and write until about 11:30pm when the LRC closes.

In each of those three blocks of time, I used to be getting around 800 to 1,200 words done. Today, from 11am to 1pm I wrote about 1,500. Progress.

The bar says that I only did about 2,9k today, but that was because a good friend of mine is going active duty in the Air Force and his farewell party was tonight. Also, Leading Edge took up the 7pm to 9pm slot. So, without those things, it probably would have been 4k.

However, I’ve noticed something interesting: doing the math, 4k/day equates to just over 120k per month. 120k is a freaking novel! Taking out Sundays, that’s still over 100k, which is also an acceptable novel length.

So…if I were really doing 4k/day, would I be writing a rough draft of a novel each month? Or are most published writers doing less than 4k words of new material each day? I wouldn’t be surprised–this is not a business you get into because of your glowing math skills.

Regardless, 4k/day is still my goal. Heck, if I get used to writing that much and find that the practice improve my craft, I might even go up to 6k/day.

Oh, and one more mundane excitement: Charlie got freaked out by a spider today and had me come over to hunt it down. After sprawling out on her bathroom floor and looking under all the appliances, I didn’t find it–but I did find the hole that it probably escaped through. I didn’t think it was much of a deal, until I read this post from Miss Snark’s archives. So…I may start making it a practice to shake out my shoes from now on, especially since my room in my sister’s apartment is slightly buggy.

Fortunately, I usually wear my old pair of Birkenstocks these days. Awesome footwear. I quite literally love them to pieces.

The second wind of inspiration

The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that in order to finish a novel, you have to rediscover something powerful about the story that motivates you to tell it. The thing that motivates you to start the story is rarely the thing that drives you to finish it.

Around the second half of the novel, I usually find yourself losing steam and groping for inspiration. As I write, the story takes its own shape and morphs into something different than it was when I started. My initial motivating idea becomes obsolete, and I have to find another source of inspiration to drive me to finish.

For Genesis Earth, that thing was a scene in the fourth chapter. Late at night sometime in March 2008, I sat down in the FLSR laundry room to clunk out the 2,000 words required for my English 318 class that week. I don’t know what it was, but everything aligned just right and the words flowed out beautifully onto the page. When I was finished, I looked over what I had written and realized that it wasn’t that bad. On the contrary, it was unusually good.

A few months later, when I was about halfway through, everything seemed to be going wrong. The characters weren’t working, the conflict was petering out, my writing sucked, and it was all terrible. I was honestly tempted to throw out the whole novel and forget about it.

But then I remembered that scene–the one that was so much better than all of the other stuff that I’d written. I realized that if I threw out the novel, that scene would die with it. I had to finish my story, if for no other reason than to give that scene a place to live. As a result, I pulled through and finished the novel–and I’m glad I did, because that work represents a major landmark in my writing life.

The scary part is that you can never really know what it is that will give you your second wind. If you’re too critical, too judgmental of your own work, or sometimes just too focused, you’ll miss it. To find it, you have to be flexible with your outline, sensitive to new thoughts, emotions, and impressions, and (perhaps most important of all), you just have to have faith in the story you’re trying to tell.

I recently found the inspiration for my second wind with Bringing Stella Home. It’s a scene that I wrote just last week, where a major character dies. I’d planned it out as a gut-wrenchingly tragic moment, the ultimate low point in the protagonist’s quest. When I wrote it, however, I realized that it was much more than that: it was a merciful release for the character who died, and (though he doesn’t realize it) a victory of sorts for the protagonist.

That scene affected me in ways that I was not expecting. While the prose itself needs tightening and the scene needs revision, I realized that it has some great potential. Because of that, I now have a driving desire to see the story finished.

4k a day

It’s late, but I really need to write something of my recent thoughts on this blog, so this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness word-vomit sort of post. But please keep reading, it probably won’t be uninteresting.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog recently, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing recently–specifically, the practicalities of trying to make this my career, getting serious about it, etc.

In fact, for the past three weeks, it’s been just about the only thing on my mind. I’ve been listening and re-listening to just about every episode of writing excuses, the LTUE mp3s that I recorded, the old English 318 mp3s from last year, and various other talks and speeches on the subject of writing as a career.

I don’t have the time to really explain all my thoughts on the subject, but to sum it up, I’ve been angsting over it quite a bit. Will I be able to break into publishing in the relatively near future, or does my writing need years and years more work? Am I making a mistake to spend my summer just working on my writing? Am I making a mistake to be pursuing this so vigorously as my primary career path? and a whole lot of irrational angsting besides all that. You get the picture.

Well, I’ve gotten sick of doing all this thinking and now I think it’s time to just do it. I heard back last week from the agency in New York–turns out they already have someone, so I won’t be going there for the internship–but that’s actually alright, because it means I can take the summer to really focus on improving my writing.

Of course, if I’m not doing anything else, I need to be treating this like my full time career. The standard thing I keep hearing, at least from the professionals in the local scene, is that the average per-day wordcount is 4k. Depending on deadlines and other projects, that may increase, but the average daily wordcount is 4k. Since I plan on making writing my focus this summer, that’s my goal: 4k a day.

Last week, my wordcount was above 10k, but that’s actually a bit misleading. I wasn’t writing 10k words of new material each day, I was doing a quick mid-draft revision to add in a few crucial characters and scenes that I didn’t know I needed until I got midway through the book. It wasn’t even much of a revision; when I saw places where my writing really needed work, I made a note for later and kept on skimming. I only stopped to rewrite the sections that needed major changes in order to set things up correctly for later.

As a result, I feel that I’ve lost a degree of momentum. Now that I’m through all the old stuff, I’m writing entirely new material, and it’s very hard. I’ve only been skimming the last few chapters and scenes; as a result, when I picked things up this morning, I had difficulty getting into the story again.

I did 3,248 words today–that’s 3.2k words of new material–and by the end, I felt like the momentum was building and I was starting to get back into the story. A couple of weeks ago, when I was still angsting uselessly over the whole writing career thing, I kept feeling like this novel I’m writing is just crap. Now, however, I’m starting to see my faith in it return.

Writing is like that sometimes: the further you are from your story, the worse it seems, while the more you get into the story, the more faith you’re able to have in it. If you don’t have faith in the story you’re trying to tell, you just won’t be able to write it.

I could say more about what I’ve learned from my experience these past few weeks, but this post is getting long. To sum it up, that’s my new goal for this summer: 4k a day, as if I’m doing this full time.

At that rate, I’ll probably finish this novel sometime before the BYU writer’s conference (which I will be attending, at least the afternoon sessions–just registered yesterday). The personal deadline I set was June 15th, after the conference, but I think I can get it in early.

Okay, enough word vomiting. Time to get some sleep.

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:

New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip. I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious backstory worked out. So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting. It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people. I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now. I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format. Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go. At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up. The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days. I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap. Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating. Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh. It doesn’t matter. Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud. If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k. That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure. Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June. 3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes. I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June. It’s a good target. It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project. Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)

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.

Revision, revision, revision

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the other chapters.

The thing about revising is that if you change something fundamental about the character / setting / plot early on, it changes everything that happens later, meaning that you have even more revisions to make. It’s like ripples on a pond, or switching tracks at a railroad junction hundreds of miles before your destination. Right now, a lot of the changes I decided to make earlier are making much larger changes necessary later on. That’s one reason why this chapter took so long to revise.

Another reason is because I felt I’d told it wrong the first time. A lot of my alpha readers said that my novel was weakest on conflict; they didn’t feel that it had enough conflict to carry them through the longer parts in the middle. I realized, when I reread it, that the conflict was mostly there, it just wasn’t emphasized properly.

A lot of these revisions had to do with connecting the events better, starting late and exiting early, creating more of a build up to the climax. They also involved changing the order in which I explained certain things–it created more tension to bring up certain things earlier, before the action. Tension and release.

I think I failed to do all that in the rough draft because I’m more of what Sanderson calls a “discovery writer.” The middle sections are always the hardest for me, because I have to figure things out as I go along. I’ve tried planning everything out from the beginning, but when I did that, the story that came out was completely different than what I’d planned.

Trouble is, if I’m discovering my story as I’m going along, the middle sections are going to be much more choppy and rough. I can write a pretty good beginning, and I think I can pull off a decent ending, but the stuff in the middle is just all over the place, every time I write.

Fortunately, I think the revision process is going well. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s producing results. I think chapter 6 works much better now, though it could probably use a little more tweaking just to fit it into the context of the story as a whole. Better finish the 2.0 revision before I do that, though.

For a while, I thought that with school out and all this free time on my hands before I really go anywhere, I could finish the 2.0 revision before the end of the week. Now, I’m thinking it will probably take more time. I could probably be about 75% done by the end of the week, though. Even with all these deep revisions, I’m plugging along at a healthy pace. And honestly, this is the kind of work I enjoy. It’s a challenge, but not an unpleasant one at all.

Some thoughts

This is going to be real quick, since it’s 1:30 am and General Conference is tomorrow. The revision is going along really well for Genesis Earth–I am really excited about this project. My only regret is that I don’t have more time to dedicate to it. As it is, I’m probably putting too much time into it already. But it’s worth it–it makes me happy, and I feel I’m telling a story worth hearing.

Yesterday was also the awards banquet for the English department. It was a very positive experience. I saw a few familiar faces–Chris from my English 318 reading group last year, and slipperyjim from Quark.

The main address and proceedings in general were very interesting. There was a lot of talk about the value of literature, its importance in our society, but more than that, the importance to write good literature. By that, I don’t mean the kind of stuff that has the stamp of approval of some elite clique of stuck up literary types somewhere–by that, I mean literature that has purpose and meaning, that shows us something worth living for, not merely pointing out the absurdities of our modern world. There are plenty of absurdities and paradoxes and stupid little meaningless things, but where does it really get us to be pointing those out all the time?

I came away from the conference with something really valuable: a heightened awareness of all the things that made me want to write Bringing Estella Home, the novel I’ve been working on this semester.

Bringing Estella Home is very tragic, a little dystopian, and has a lot of unrealized hopes–a lot of shattered lives. It’s essentially a tragedy, and I’ve found that I don’t particularly enjoy writing tragedies. When you’ve worked on one for a few months, it tends to grate on you–all of these suffering characters, and you with the knowledge that it’s only going to get worse. Not very feel-good.

But that’s not the thing that made me want to write this book. There were two things that I wanted to get across, two major ideas: sacrifice and loyalty. If that makes any sense. I guess it won’t, unless you read the finished book, but I wanted to show how people struggling to do the right thing in a world turned upside down could find meaning and depth in their suffering, in their trials. Suffering comes and goes, but it shapes you in ways that last forever, and I wanted to show good people becoming better through their suffering. I guess that’s the best way to put it.

I think I’d lost sight of that recently. This novel needs a lot of major changes to it, especially in the middle section, which I was just wrapping up when I put it on hold. But with a clearer idea of the overarching goal of the story–what deeper meaningfulness I’m trying to get across–I think I’ll be able to pick it up again and give it a strong finish. That’s good.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write another tragedy again. This one has been quite a ride. However, I shouldn’t just throw it out and run away from it–I really need to listen to this story and tell it like it needs to be told. I guess that’s the ultimate motivation, or should be. I don’t just sit down and write because it’s what I do, I do it because it is something meaningful, something that can help others see the world in a new, better way, and obtain those truths that will really bless their lives.

Ugghhhhh…

Man, I am sick. It sucks.

I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel. That sucks too.

When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project. Is this really any go0d? Is the story really holding out? Things slow down a lot, and you lose most of the enthusiasm that carried you through the first half. The daily drudgery of writing becomes harder and harder, and pretty soon you can’t see beyond the chapter you’re presently writing. It’s not a whole lot of fun.

Then, as you get into the final stretch, the ending comes into sight and you start to regain a little bit of the enthusiasm. Your goal isn’t too distant, and you start to see how things wrap up to bring you to that final climax and ending. You find yourself believing in the story again, and excited to see it to the grand finale.

Of course, the actual writing gets harder and harder, exponentially, right up until the last page, but you’ve regained the motivation and you have at least a portion of the drive.

Right now, I’m kind of at the low point. It doesn’t help that school is starting to get busier, too. It certainly doesn’t help to be sick, even if it does give me more time around the house (man, I need to get out…I need to get out…). But I’m almost at the end of the second act–one climactic battle, one huge and tragic development, one major try-fail cycle, and then I’m on the final stretch. I’m currently at 64,250 words, so I should wrap up part two by about 68k and finish up the novel at around 100k. Perhaps a little longer, but I don’t think part three is going to be much longer than part two.

One of the major doubts I have about this novel is that it’s too predictable. All of my readers from English 318 have been making their predictions, and…really, most of them are correct. In fact, they’re correctly predicting stuff that happens WAY later, stuff from part three that I haven’t written yet. If this story doesn’t have any surprises, I worry that it might not be as good.

On the other hand, it has some ideas and concepts that are really drawing in my alpha readers, particularly with the Hameji. Over and over again, that’s the comment I get–they want to find out more about the Hameji. This is something that might help me to carry the book, even if it is a bit predictable: show this barbarian spacefaring culture at their most brutal, make them the key antagonists, and then slowly humanize them until the readers understand exactly why they do what they do, and even come to agree with them. That is pretty fun.

So we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early–9:30 or 10:00. This sickness is just killing me, and I don’t know of anything more effective at curing it than sleep. G’night.