On Running up Mother

Don't worry, the post title will make sense eventually. I promise. :)

Back in high school, our track and cross country coach had a saying: "The longest distance you will ever run is the one between your ears." What he meant, of course, is that no matter how hard it is to run any particular race, the mental battle is the hardest part.

When he laid out our cross country course, Coach Cohen made sure it reflected that. Every part of the course carried its own particular mental challenge--from the start that took us right up a pavement hill to the finish that tricked hasty runners into a final all-out sprint half a mile from the finish line--but none of them were quite as painful as Mother.

Mother was a trail named for who knows what reason. Our course was filled with trails like that, from Ice Cream to JV, but I always tended to imagine that Mother got its name from the first half of the vulgar, instinctive reaction of the runners who first encountered it. The trail came about two thirds of the way through the three mile course and it started out easily enough. Just a short, mildly difficult incline that you had to run up before you reached a slight turn to the left. A lot of runners, especially those who hadn't run the course before, would sprint up that first little hill and make that turn, fully believing they would have no trouble reaching the top.

The turn was the trick you see. No sooner did you make that turn than a monster confronted you. It was a sharp, long incline that seemed to stretch on forever, and you could see every painful inch of it the moment you made the turn. I remember more than one competitor coming to nearly a dead halt the instant they were confronted with that sight, and I have to admit that I often looked forward to blasting past runners who had so overconfidently sprinted past me a moment ago. It was the ultimate test of your endurance and mental fortitude, and I think I will remember running it the rest of my life.

At this point in my writing career, I think I'm running up Mother all over again. I've made it a pretty decent part of the way through the set up phase. I've got three different novels, and I've set up a writing schedule that will let me get two more done by the end of the year. I know I write well, and I am excited to start breaking into the finish. At the same time, I've turned the corner and realized that it's still going to be a long haul until I start seeing profit and benefit from it all. It's daunting to think of everything I have left to do, and it makes me wonder if the Lord will help me last that long.

At the same time, though, Mother's the wrong time to decide to quit. The best thing I can do is push harder, make it to the top and keep going. Otherwise it'll all have been for nothing, and I'll have to watch some other dirtbag sprint by me as I putter around the trail. So, head down, arms pump, time to hit it hard. Cause, if there's one thing I learned from cross country, it's how to make it up a hill.

This has been your regularly scheduled philosophical rant. More interesting posts will return Friday. See ya!

On the Fifth Book

My fifth book is one that I've already discussed fairly often on this blog, and hopefully it will be the one I publish this December.

Wolfhound was a new experience for me in a lot of ways. With the exception of my aborted Star Wars fanfiction early in my attempts to write, virtually every story I had done had been fantasy genre. In fact, I had never really considered writing science fiction after that, even though a lot of my favorite authors wrote in the genre.

I guess in large part the decision to change things up came from the condition I was in at the time. My writing on Brellan's story had kind of stalled a bit, and I hadn't worked on Jakeson's book in months--almost years. It had not been the best of years for me. Graduation had kind of ended my time at BYU with a whimper instead of a bang, and our move to Houston had not turned up the opportunities that I had been hoping to find. Rejections from medical schools were coming in fairly regularly, and I began to question whether that was the type of career I wanted anyway. All in all my outlook on life was...well, let's just say it wasn't good and leave it at that, okay?

So in the middle of feeling a little lost and confused, I remembered something from my teenage years when things were, needless to say, better. It was kind of an obscure memory, but it was what I needed to have at the time. I had written a talk for church and it went fairly well. My dad had asked to see the paper I had written it on when we got home, so I gave it to him and walked into a different room. When I came back I remember my dad looking up from the page and saying to someone else "This is why he should be a writer!"

Not much of a memory, I'll admit, but my dad has something of an effect on me at times. I decided that since he had always been there for me before, I might as well give it a try as long as everything else was crashing and burning.

Starting out, I hit on the idea of writing a story about a hero along the lines of Captain Moroni. That kind of story would have to be science fiction, if only because fantasy doesn't fit that kind of character as easily from my perspective. The next idea was to have it on a ship modelled after the USS Constitution, a ship that has always kind of captured my imagination. With a name like 'Old Ironsides' how could it not? Bit by bit, the pieces came together for me, and I had the idea for a story. Jacob Hull's introduction to heroism and war was a pretty standard action adventure story, but I worked hard on it, and if I do say so myself, it turned out pretty well. Of course, once it's on Amazon you should probably buy it and find out for yourself... heh heh heh.

So that's the background on the fifth book. If only the sixth book had gone nearly so well... See ya!

On the Fourth Book

Okay, so since I've already plowed through a description of the first three books in my writing history, I might as well go through some of the more recent stuff as well.

My last semester at BYU, I decided to take Brandon Sanderson's creative writing class. I ended up wishing that I had taken it both sooner and more frequently, since that class broke me out of the revision loop I was doing with Guardians of the Past. His main assignment in the class was that I needed to pick a new story and start writing it from the beginning, one section at a time. It meant that I had to write something that wasn't in Jakeson's world, which meant that it had to be entirely new.

The story I ended up with was Brellan. It was a fantasy tale in a slightly darker world where a group of evil magic users manipulated people with mirrors. Basically it was two parts fantasy and one part horror, with the main hero battling all sorts of monsters as well as his own issues to save an isolated little town.

Brellan ended up having a lot of problems. The pacing sort of got lost about partway through the story, which was a major problem because the tension dissipated as well. Brellan, the main character, did not get nearly enough development, and ended up fairly contradictory, and the villain didn't get nearly as developed as she could have been either.

The main problem, looking back on it, was that I tried to include too many types of horror at one time. Brellan was supposed to face fear of rejection, fear of being killed by monsters, fear of becoming a monster, etc. That took the story and Brellan's character in too many directions for it to work out. If I ever get the time, I need to go back and focus the story a bit more on one theme--probably Brellan's fear of being turned into a Mirrorwitch's tool--and run with that. I think it would resolve a lot of the problems of the book in general.

In any case, Brellan was finished the fall after we moved to Houston. There were several months between the end of school and the finish of the novel where I made only halfhearted attempts to finish it, but it wasn't until I started the fifth book that I became determined to bring Brellan's story to a close. Right now the story still exists in its third draft, waiting for me to find the chance to revise it up to snuff. Perhaps someday I'll get the chance...

On the 4th of July

I don't know why but my family has never had a really strong tradition for the 4th of July. Maybe it was because fireworks were never all that interesting to us, or because we usually had plenty of barbecue at our house anyway without the 4th, but we never really made a big deal out of it. Not that we don't appreciate our nation, we just tended to show it a bit differently.

So it is a bit interesting to contrast that background to the excitement all around Houston about it. Parades are everywhere, flags all over. I'm pretty sure that if we were not in a drought situation there would be fireworks going off all over the place. To be truthful, I suspect that quite a few may be gong off anyway. We shall have to see...

On the Third Book

So, to review my previous posts, my first and second attempt at writing a novel involved basically two poorly backed up fan fictions for Chrono Trigger and Star Wars respectively. Both ended when my current versions of the novel disappeared, leaving me woeful, discouraged and generally unable to force myself to continue.

Now we will fast forward a few years to high school. I had, alongside my futile attempts at writing, developed a series of progressively-better role playing games which occupied my idle time and that of my friends. The most modern version of that hobby, known as the Game to the one or two people who still read this blog, was one that eventually drew me back to the writing habit.

You see, part of the interesting thing about GMing a game is the opportunity to help your players tell a story. It trains you in how to keep a reader hooked on a plot; players and readers both enjoy twists and mysteries enough that the skills crossed over easily, for me at the very least. The background of the Game gave me a ready made world to work with, along with the worldbuilding skills I had developed in making the Game itself. All I really needed was to put pen to paper, so to speak. So I did.

For all of those groaning in despair at the thought of a book written about a role playing game character, consider your feelings entirely justified. The characters in the story, which went from the name Star Heir to Guardians of the Past eventually, were by all accounts horribly uninteresting. The world, while complex and mildly interesting, was way too overdone, and while the plot contained some interesting twists, I drew the whole thing out way too long for the horrible reason of "because that's the way it happened in the game." Combine that with the fact that it stretched, over the course of a year, to about 300 single spaced Times New Roman pages in Microsoft Word (I estimate it was something like 150k to 250k at least) and we have a recipe made for disaster.

Nevertheless, I would draw your attention to the fact that this was a book that I actually finished. I did not lose this sucker; I had at least one or two backups of the story at all times. I introduced characters, outlined scenes, used dialog and detail. For all intents and purposes, this was like a journeyman's project where I refined my writing style and learned how to make a book work.

Even better, I stayed at it! Once I was finished I came back and rewrote it. And rewrote it. And rewrote it. I would tell you how many times I went through this monster, but I lost track around version seven or so. I think I started working on it, and it was pretty much the only book I worked on until my senior year of college. While I'm sure many would consider that time wasted on just one story, I have to remind you that this was like a learning novel for me. It was this story that brought me to my first writing group in Quark, that introduced me to things like Tolkien, Jordan and Sanderson, not just as cool writers (which they were and are) but as people I could learn from and emulate. When I was on my mission, this was the book that I wrote the outlines for sequels to, keeping some small edge sharpened on my writing skills during preparation days whenever I had a rare, quiet moment. For all intents and purposes, this story was the beginning of my love of writing.

And I still have it. The whole thing still sits on my hard drive and jump drives at this very moment. While I currently have no plans on what to do with it, I don't think I will ever get rid of it. It's kind of like an old friend; you may not talk as much as you used to, but it is nice to know they are still there. That, and there's still some part of me that suspects I may do something with it someday, even if it means reshaping it into something a bit more trimmed.

In any case, here's to old stories and the growth they give us. May we never forget them. See you around!

On Trail Markers

When I still lived in Connecticut, the Scout troop I was a member of used to have a tradition of hiking the Appalachian Trail every summer. We’d pack up a bunch of belongings and supplies, throw them in backpacks and march our way along the trail for fifty miles or so. It was something that I actually really enjoyed, since the hike was challenging enough to be interesting, and we got to see some pretty cool sights.

One thing we quickly learned to respect was the system of trail markers. Every so far along the trail, the path was marked with arrows or dots to show the way we were supposed to travel. Seeing one meant that we were still on track and not wandering through the forest on our own. Walking for a while without seeing one meant we started feeling a bit worried pretty quickly. They also acted almost like goal posts, giving us a way to measure our progress as we hiked.

The markers were more than merely reassuring, however, as we discovered quite a few times during our hikes. Once we missed a trail marker indicating a turn and wound up hiking halfway down a mountain to stop in a confused huddle at the edge of some farmer’s field. We ended up having to travel half a mile or so uphill, looking for the marker that we had so blithely walked by on our way down. Another time a portion of our group missed a marker and ended up at a random camp site while the rest of us passed them by. Since we had thought they were out front, the rest of us assumed that they were still marching along ahead and kept going, hoping to catch up to them. When they finally returned to the trail, they wound up having to chase the rest of us for a mile or so, and only really managed to reach us because one hiker decided to stop on their own. Missed markers were bad news, and pretty much all of us quickly learned to keep a sharp eye out for the little white splashes of paint—and learned to despise the clumps of lichen that imitated them on the tree bark.

I guess my thoughts have been wandering to this point in my life because lately I’ve been feeling like I’ve been walking along the trail without seeing a marker for a while. The standards and guides that I used to use to measure my progress and keep myself on track have seemed to vanish, and I no longer seem to see the goals that once led me forward. The haunting fear of having left the trail and the dread of having to hike back to find it are creeping around with me, too. If such a course correction is unpleasant on a hiking trip, I can only imagine how bad it will get when I’m doing it with life choices.

Then again, sometimes markers pop out at times when you least expected or hoped for them. Perhaps that is what I need, right? :) In any case, I think I’ll post again on Wednesday and Friday this week. I promise to try to be a bit less melancholy and mopey. See ya round!

On Writing Groups

So the past few weeks I have been genuinely missing the writing group back in Quark. It seems like that nostalgia would be a good source of a post, so here we go.

I first attended the Quark writing group almost seven years ago, at the instigation of my good friend Aneeka. Well, she’s a friend now; at the time she was just a vaguely terrifying, anonymous internet person who managed to notice that I had signed on to the Quark internet forum out of curiosity. She managed to wheedle the fact that I wrote as a hobby out of me and invited me to a meeting, where she became far more concretely terrifying. :)

In that writing group I quickly found a solid group of friends and fellow writers, one of whom turned out to tolerate me enough to marry me. The continued support and feedback I got from that group, as well as the social interaction and friendship, allowed me to view my writing in a new light and get serious about forming my stories into something much more effective. My writing group friends quickly became an inspiration to not only continue writing, but expand my abilities. I even began to first consider my lifelong dream of actually publishing something seriously after I was involved in the Quark group.

Now, however, my old writing buddies have scattered to the four winds, and I seem to be hurting for lack of a similar group. That direct encouragement is something I miss, although I’ve preserved it in some form by having some of my old friends read things over for me from time to time. Still, it just isn’t the same as having a group discuss a bit of writing together, with that same amount of discussion and support that comes from a direct meeting. Finding one here in Houston might land me in the middle of a bunch of teenagers writing Twilight fan fics, which is something I would not look forward to, but gathering the old group is more or less impossible. I doubt that everyone could make their way to one location from Japan, Utah, the West Coast and Houston to one place to have a writing group, and the wide diversity of time zones kind of stops any attempt at internet groups. Grg. I may simply have to resign myself to the fact that the Quark group was a unique opportunity for me in terms of my writing development, but it would be awesome to have some of that same motivation and inspiration right now. Oh well. To good editors and better friends, wherever they might be. May all go well for you, and at least one of us get published so we can all get bragging rights. :) See ya!