Just a quick update, since it’s 3 am and I’m kind of in a daze after playing Halo: Reach on Xbox live with my roommate.\u00a0 Whoa, decompressing…<\/p>\n
This whole week, I’ve been in a weird funk.\u00a0 It sucks to be unemployed, especially since I can’t commit to anything long term because I’m waiting to hear back from the wilderness job.\u00a0 Man, I really hope I get it–but even if I do, I’ll need to raise some cash to keep me going through January until the paychecks start coming in.\u00a0 And if I don’t get the job, I have no idea what I’ll do.<\/p>\n
But mostly, it has to do with my writing.\u00a0 I’ve been running through the rough draft of Worlds Away from Home<\/em>, and…holy crap, it REALLY sucks.\u00a0 It sucks to the point where I’m not sure exactly how to fix it.<\/p>\n Part of it probably has to do with my initial ambitions for it, which I probably set too high.\u00a0 I originally wanted to write a science fiction romance that turned the “romance” element on its head by having the sex be the thing pushing the characters apart rather than bringing them together.\u00a0 I got a little too didactic in the rough draft, though, and failed to tell a story that, at it’s root, is meant to entertain.<\/p>\n That’s probably the most important thing–to tell a story that’s fundamentally entertaining.\u00a0 So I’ve been looking at that, and I’m finding that there are significantly fewer plot threads here than there were in Mercenary Savior<\/em>.\u00a0 That, and there’s considerably less suspense.\u00a0 The character arcs are still sufficiently complex, I think, but there aren’t nearly as many hooks and cliffhangers as my other work.<\/p>\n This whole week, I’ve been vacillating between “alright, I can do this” to “this novel sucks and I should just throw it out and never work on it again.” In fact, I drew up a chart today of all the novels I’ve started, finished a first draft, and finished a polished draft–and the results are a little stark.<\/p>\n I only just produced a fully polished draft for Genesis Earth,<\/em> so at 2010 I’ve finally gotten one novel to the point where I think it’s as good as I can make it without an editor\/agent to help.\u00a0 One freaking novel–and that’s after two years of work.\u00a0 Mercenary Savior<\/em>, I’m finding, isn’t quite where it needs to be, though it’s close–probably I’ll nail it down in early 2011.\u00a0 But other than those two?\u00a0 I’ve got nothing.<\/p>\n I started Worlds Away from Home<\/em> back in 2008, and I’m wondering whether I was even good enough back then to craft a story that could carry through a complete novel.\u00a0 Ashes of the Starry Sea<\/em> was probably a bit too ambitious, and Genesis Earth<\/em>, while it ended up working out, was so small in scope that it wasn’t that hard to pull off.<\/p>\n Is something fundamentally flawed with Worlds Away from Home?<\/em> Did I bite off more than I could chew?\u00a0 Is the story premise so screwed up that I should just abandon it and reuse it occasionally for scraps?<\/p>\n I have no idea.\u00a0 Maybe I’m just being too angsty–after all, I started Genesis Earth<\/em> BEFORE I started Worlds Away from Home<\/em>, and that one turned out great.\u00a0 It took two years, of course, but it worked out in the end.<\/p>\n So will this one work out?\u00a0 Probably, I suppose–but only if I can solidly get behind it.\u00a0 I’m trying to put together a detailed plot outline to figure out what the story needs, but if I can’t find something else–something on par with the cryo scene and the first line of Genesis Earth,<\/em> which for the longest time were the only two things keeping me from trashing that project–if I can’t find something redeemable like that, I might just drop this monstrosity and let it die.<\/p>\n Blarg.\u00a0 I hate this.\u00a0 I might just take a break from things and write a couple short stories.\u00a0 This whole week, I’ve been writing nothing but outlines and revision notes–I need to do something a little more creative.<\/p>\n Anyhow, that’s what I’m currently slogging through.\u00a0 Before the end of next week, I’m hoping to find out whether I’ve got that wilderness job or not.\u00a0 Let’s hope…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just a quick update, since it’s 3 am and I’m kind of in a daze after playing Halo: Reach on Xbox live with my roommate.\u00a0 Whoa, decompressing… This whole week, I’ve been in a weird funk.\u00a0 It sucks to be unemployed, especially since I can’t commit to anything long term because I’m waiting to hear… Continue reading Slogging through a funk<\/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":[68,44,32],"tags":[88,73,156,423,599,312],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","tag-doubts-and-fears","tag-planning","tag-revising","tag-wilderness","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-work","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-UZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533","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=3533"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3538,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions\/3538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}