{"id":1762,"date":"2010-03-22T00:13:53","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T04:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=1762"},"modified":"2010-03-22T00:13:53","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T04:13:53","slug":"dinner-with-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/dinner-with-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Dinner with friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had dinner tonight with one of my classmates from English 318 last year, who is a frequent commenter on this blog. \u00a0He and his wife were kind enough to invite me over to their apartment, where we ate, talked, hung out, and had a general good time.<\/p>\n<p>It was great to see an old friend from Sanderson&#8217;s class! \u00a0We talked a <em>lot<\/em> about writing, and that was way cool&#8211;I haven&#8217;t been around people who can talk writing since I left Provo (not counting the IM conversations I have with Chuck every other day). \u00a0At one point, his wife had to stop and say &#8220;wait, let&#8217;s put this conversation on pause and let me get to know this guy&#8221;!<\/p>\n<p>He showed me this interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugcs.caltech.edu\/~karlh\/wot.html\">online compendium of <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugcs.caltech.edu\/~karlh\/wot.html\">Wheel of Time<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugcs.caltech.edu\/~karlh\/wot.html\"> characters<\/a>, which blew me away; I haven&#8217;t read the <em>Wheel of Time <\/em>series yet, but just looking at how many characters are in the books, I have no idea how anyone could write something like that. \u00a0I guess that&#8217;s the direction Fantasy is going in&#8211;enormous worlds, long books, dozens and even hundreds of characters.<\/p>\n<p>We talked about all kinds of other things, too&#8211;school and work, career decisions, future plans, social pressures, life in general, etc. \u00a0It was great being with interesting people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. \u00a0I tend to be a little self-conscious about the fact that I talk too much, but they got me to talk a lot&#8211;about how I decided to be a writer, how I wrote <em>Genesis Earth<\/em> from story idea to the latest draft, my future goals as a writer, etc etc. \u00a0It was a lot of fun.<\/p>\n<p>We also talked about my current project (working title: <em>Bringing Stella Home<\/em>), and I shared the 30 second story blurb. \u00a0I then asked them what they think the title should be, and together we came up with an interesting title idea: <em>Saving Ben and Stella.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What do you think of it? \u00a0I kindof think it has a nice ring to it. \u00a0Mentions Ben and Stella, which shows that Ben&#8217;s storyline is important as well as Stella&#8217;s. Then again, it&#8217;s not much of a change from the previous one.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I had an awesome time with Stephen and his wife. \u00a0It&#8217;s great to have friends wherever you travel, and meet up with old classmates after graduating from college. \u00a0Thanks guys!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had dinner tonight with one of my classmates from English 318 last year, who is a frequent commenter on this blog. \u00a0He and his wife were kind enough to invite me over to their apartment, where we ate, talked, hung out, and had a general good time. It was great to see an old&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/dinner-with-friends\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Dinner with friends<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,32],"tags":[89,376,1004,263,122,30,374,373,357,375],"class_list":["post-1762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ge","tag-career-decisions","tag-epic-fantasy","tag-fantasy","tag-food","tag-friends","tag-life-decisions","tag-stephen","tag-titles","tag-washington-dc","tag-wheel-of-time","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-sq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1762"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1769,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions\/1769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}