Well, my craptop’s hard drive is completely dead as of this morning. Can’t say I’m surprised, really. The funny thing is, Firefox seems to run much faster off the live disk than it did before. Could be that hard drive was slowing down my system more than I thought. (Could also be Firefox addons, but the whole UI seems snappier.)
EDIT: Er — perhaps not. Turns out fsck is pretty nifty. Who knew?
Yay for new lease on drive life. (Now taking bets on lifespan.)
Well.
My laptop’s hard drive has been threatening to fail for a while, and I think it’s finally gotten there. Upon unlocking the screen, the machine froze for about three minutes, and then everything GNOME pretty much went blank. It’ll boot about as far as the part where it’s supposed to mount stuff prior to loading the login, and then it goes to a lovely shell. So, y’know, the drive’s not completely shot, because it loads Grub and stuff pretty well. I’m running fsck now. Expect more updates when I figure out what the hell I’m doing.
Current music: You Belong With Me by Taylor Swift, courtesy of Kix 104.
Well, what with having a new job, a new kid, assorted bills, and a novel to revise, I’ve decided that this is a great year to give NaNoWriMo a shot. Last year when NaNoWriMo arrived I was about ten or twenty thousand years words into Derelict, and still calling it Ghost Ship. I briefly entertained the idea of trying for fifty thousand new words on Derelict that month, but ultimately decided not to.
You may remember me saying a few months back that I would take a month off from Derelict and start drafting Wings. That didn’t happen — something about moving taking time or something — so I’m starting fresh with drafting it now. And when I’m done drafting Wings on a given day, I’ll move on to revising Derelict. I figure I can find the time to do all this in the period I’ve been catching myself playing Civ IV.
(Then I’ll find time to play Civ IV when I’d normally be eating. That should work out about right.)
Unfortunately, I’m already a couple of days behind, so if you’ll excuse me . . .
I don’t know what my writing process is – or rather, I do, but it’s constantly changing. I have yet to settle on something I like that works for me in both the short and long term. Part of that’s probably due to my schedule – which is about to change – but not all. Since I’m putting Derelict in a drawer for a month while I start my next book and work on Zosias, I thought I’d talk about how I write, have written, and plan on writing.
I think it’s worth mentioning, at this point, how Derelict got its start. (It’s kind of funny, I’ve always thought.) In the summer of 2004, I was enjoying my last summer vacation before moving to Hot Springs for the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA). I had recently acquired the first computer I could call my own, an Emachines laptop (because I didn’t know any better). There were two main reasons I wanted a laptop: because I figured I would need one at school, and because I wanted a laptop to write on. I had done some writing on the family computer in the past, but for some reason the static environment in the computer room just didn’t do much for my muse. The fact that the computer was running Windows 3.1 probably didn’t help a great deal.
At the time, I was on my first read-through of The Wheel of Time. It got me thinking. I’d always wanted to be a novelist, right? What better way to get my start than a massive multi-volume epic like the one I was currently engrossed in? (I got better, I promise.) The first chapter of the story (entitled The Storms of Heaven, a name that sounds a heck of a lot like Jordan’s The Fires of Heaven) went great. But after that I found myself suffering from a pretty big problem: the second chapter. I concluded that I needed to develop the world more to continue on the main story, and started up a short story called Ghost Ship in order to do just that.
Around the time Ghost Ship hit 10,000 words, I accepted that maybe it was going farther than the so-called “main story.” In retrospect it wasn’t that bad: the original draft of Ghost Ship reached 11,783 words, while Storms reached 8,803 words, 7166 of which were in the first chapter.
In retrospect, my problem with Storms wasn’t what I thought it was. I kept trying to come back to it because I loved the characters in it – I still do, in fact. They’re neat characters, with a lot of potential, even if the old version of Rose does trip some Mary Sue-sensors in my head now. And I’m happy with the premise. The problem was that a bunch of neat characters, and a means for getting them in the same place, isn’t enough to carry a novel – much less a series. What I needed was a plot, and that, in a nutshell, is why Ghost Ship beat the socks off of The Storms of Heaven. Going into it I thought, “I need a clear idea of what this story is about, so I can get it written at short-story length.” (Look how that turned out.) And if most of the characters were cardboard cutouts, if literally every other scene was solid exposition, well, at least the thing got written. By the end of that summer it was too late for Ghost Ship to fit into a short story, but it could have been a decent novella. I was almost done with it as such when I left for ASMSA. It was probably within three or four thousand words of the end – and there it would stay, because by golly, ASMSA keeps you busy. What time I wasn’t devoting to schoolwork (and hanging out with large numbers of fellow geeks for the first time in my life), I was devoting to the process of meeting and falling in love with my then-future wife. I would occasionally pull out Ghost Ship to tinker with, and I made dozens of false starts on other works, but it would be quite a while before I got serious writing done again. Years, in fact — because the next serious writing I did was when I picked up Ghost Ship and began expanding it into the novel that is now Derelict.
Let me back up, though, to that summer before ASMSA. I think it bears studying, since the hypothetical topic of this post is my writing process. Let’s look at how I worked during that summer that I got so much done.
First, I didn’t have anything resembling internet. I had access to it at school and the public library, but not at home. I had plenty of books, but I don’t really think of those as a distraction from writing – ultimately, they tend to work as inspiration. (When I’m reading a lot, I want to write. When I’m playing a lot of video games, I want to create them. When I watch a lot of anime, I want to write, score, and animate one. For the sake of my sanity and that of those around me, I try to do lots of reading.)
Second, my schedule was essentially free. Most days I stayed home all day while my folks went to work. Sometimes, probably about once a week, I would go into town with them. But most of the time I just stayed home. Given a completely free schedule, I would usually settle in to start writing at the kitchen table with my laptop around the time my parents went to bed – about 8-10 PM. I would write until my mother woke up at four the next morning, spend some time with her in the morning, then maybe write another hour or two before going to sleep for the day. I’d wake up in the afternoon, often with an hour or two to spare until Mom and Dad got home, and I’d pretty much just do other stuff for a while, often involving hanging out with them.
And I got a lot of writing done. In retrospect, given that this process went on for around a month, and I got around 20K words written, that means I wasn’t actually churning out words at a very rapid pace – writing anywhere from six to ten hours a night, I got less than a thousand words a day in general. It wasn’t my typing speed – I was easily in the mid-60 WPM range at the time, and I’m not any more. It was mostly that I just dawdled around in my writing. Didn’t stress out about it, didn’t try to force it, had all the time in the world to write however much I wanted to and pretty much took my time. For years, I would look back on that summer – my last free one – with longing, as a sort of idyllic time when life was good. In some ways, that represents my ideal writing process: write by night, sleep by day, perform some human interaction in the afternoon, get paid enough for my work to not worry about anything else.
I didn’t expect this to take so long. Possibly because I didn’t think about it too much, who knows. Either way, I’ll save the rest of this for next Friday. (Look at me, I have a buffer!)
Current music: Better than Ezra, Greatest Hits album. I have it because of their song Desperately Wanting, which is rather nifty. As it turns out, it’s not the only one.
For the longest time, I’ve had this troubling problem with my laptop. You see, it’s extremely useful to be able to write anywhere. In fact, my first computer was a laptop precisely because the family computer was in a location that, frankly, was rather poisonous to my muse.
Unfortunately, writing anywhere on my current laptop has proved to be something of a challenge. For starters, the computer has a few issues. Nothing major, but its battery always reads at 5% charge – no matter what – and doesn’t last long at any rate, so it pretty much has to be plugged in most of the time I’m using it. Also, it occasionally has this problem on boot where the backspace, u, and a few other keys don’t work until I reboot. My account name on the laptop is Cthulhu, so you can see how this might be a problem. (My laptop’s name is R’lyeh, in case you were wondering.)
All that’s fairly trivial, though. That’s not what stops me. It’s not that my laptop runs Ubuntu, and as such doesn’t run most of my favorite Windows-based writing aid programs (not easily, anyway). It’s not that the aforementioned programs run slowly, though that’s a factor.
It’s that my files aren’t with me. They’re at home. I can transfer one to my laptop’s desktop via flash drive, modify it, transfer it back – but that’s a pain, because when I get home I have to set up my laptop, plug it in, turn it on – desk space is at a premium for me right now. I usually just end up making new files on the laptop’s desktop and transferring them in bulk every few days or so. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice, compact way to carry all my files with me from computer to computer?
The answer, of course, is a flash drive. And it’s not like I don’t have a few. I mean, they’re literally giving them out with boxes of cereal these days. (Seriously. 1Gb flash drive with 8 proof-of-purchases. Don’t remember the brand, but it was there.) The problem with my flash drive, see, is that it’s sticking out the front of my desktop, where it happily stays 24/7 holding my most important files and, well, not really doing anything else. Because I’m afraid of losing the bloody thing. Or breaking it (a justified fear with my most recent one, whose USB plug is at an angle with the rest of it). And then my precious, irreplaceable, neurotically-backed-up files would be gone forever. Except for, you know, the backups. (In all fairness I don’t back up stuff as much as I should, but it’s often enough.)
So I’m compromising. Today I dug up my old 512-meg flash drive, a nice compact Sandisk with a pretty blue light and, more importantly, a lanyard. This is, in fact, the very flash drive that I got back in high school and used until, oh, a couple of months ago when I “upgraded” to the 4-gig, lanyard-less, already-broken-necked flash drive sticking out of my desktop right now.
And you know what? Works like a charm. I loaded up a couple of files and spent the first half of my break digging through some of the more interesting stuff I’d left on it. Then, I wrote about a hundred new words on Derelict during the last ten minutes of my break. It’s sticking out of my desktop now, merely awaiting a quick file transfer. It’s like having an old familiar friend back.
Best of all, I finally got over my guilt for replacing the poor thing.