I Wrote a Novel Last Year...

Firstly, some administrative notes and such. This particular blog was born on 09/09/09 because I have been meaning to find a nice central place to put my blogs and the day was just a nice one to pick. I may move some or maybe most of my older posts over from other places where they reside, ideally dating them when they originally were published (on the Ning) as it seems that might be possible. Since I didn't really do any blogging this summer, I have as a goal to do somewhere between one post a week and one post a day. So far that hasn't worked out quite as well as I had hoped, but really nobody to blame but myself for that. I should be adding my List of Books Read posts sooner or later.

Well, onto the heart of the post. I decided to participate in Relay for Life for the first time last year [well, last April which was last school year]. I had been hearing about it for a while, but didn't really know what it was all about and never really felt motivated enough to find out. I decided to join the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) team participating for the first time in the event. It was in Drake Stadium at UCLA (go Bruins!) and there were tons and tons of people there. To sum it up, the experience was a blast, I ended up staying awake the whole time, met a lot of cool people, rode the emotional roller coaster and helped raise over $120,000 for the American Cancer Society. After that, I decided to get involved for next years Relay for Life.

Relay for Life at UCLA is put on by the Colleges Against Cancer club. The club has events year round focusing on cancer education, advocacy, survivorship, and of course raising money for the American Cancer Society, mostly though the Relay for Life event. With that in mind, I joined the club this [school] year. Everyone in the club is assigned a committee which focuses on various tasks throughout the year and for the all important Relay for Life event in April. Tonight all the members learned about their committee assignments and got to meet their team. I was assigned to the Outreach/Sponsorship Committee, which mostly works towards securing donations for Relay. No easy task in these unstable economic times, but I think we'll do well. On thought was to try contacting alumni and see if they would be willing to help out either with donations, forming teams to participate in Relay or even just spreading the word. We will start working on that in the next few weeks.

Wondering where this is going? So, when I met my fellow committee members, we introduced ourselves and said one interesting thing about ourselves in addition to the standard name, year and major. I was the only Senior present at our little introduction. Anyway, my interesting thing was of course "I wrote a novel last year." I didn't mention the part about writing it in a month or how I decided to write it the day before. I just said "I wrote a novel last year." I always love the way people react to that. I get a little thrill whenever I get to say it, which isn't all that often, actually. I am of course referring to my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, which was officially done at 77,721 words (but I've since added more.)

So yes, I decided quite spur of the moment to participate in NaNoWriMo last November. I signed up on Halloween with a vague idea of what I would write about and just started writing on November 1st. It was the ultimate discovery writing exercise. Which is also one of the problems with it. My first novel needs lots and lots of editing. To be honest, it probably needs a complete rewrite. For one thing, I am fairly certain one of the main character's names changes half-way through the novel. I also ended up doing a ton of the world building during the first week or so of writing, so there is a whole lot of telling and not much in the way of showing going on. I also feel that the novel needs something else to really make it work. I decided to make it a YA novel, but have since learned that YA really means characters about 13-17 years old and not my slightly older 20ish protagonists, apparently.

In broad strokes, my first novel is set in India, but not really an India we would recognize today. (Don't ask me why it is set in India.) It is a post-apocalyptic India of the future, something like a few hundred years at least. An ecological disaster and a few other things have conspired to kill off much of the world's population. The novel is set in a world recovering from that disaster. A world full of some awesome technology (did I mention this is a Science Fiction novel as well?) Oh yeah, there is a nice threat of impending death for the Earth as well in the form of a giant asteroid (or was it a comet?) Right, there are also aliens involved which may or may not survive a rewrite. Oh, and the novel is also a response, in some ways, to John Green's Paper Towns. So you have my young protagonists dealing with growing up under the threat of impending death and also dealing with how to imagine others complexly.

Part of the problem is that it likely tries to do a bit too much for a single novel. It doesn't help that I kinda sorta didn't plan out chapters, or indeed even write things in chapters per se. Mostly I did separate scenes each writing period (1-3 hours a day, usually, for 20 something days, since I skipped a few days around Thanksgiving, when I got sick.) I suppose these scenes could be turned into chapters, but it would take some work. Also, I don't remember now if I split things into paragraphs, but I must have. It has been a few weeks since I looked at my draft, but I must have. Word also ate my day's work several times during the month, so quite early on I transitioned to using Google Docs to write. I also saved each day as a separate file and then added it to a master file as well. I only had to rewrite 5-6k words, and was lucky enough to merely have to type them out again from the corrupted files. Although some of the times Word freaked out and tried to eat my file but I was able to recover the file through Word, I ended up with some scrambled and missing lines. Still finding a few of those, even though I though I had fixed most of those right after the incident.

So it was a major process for me. I still really don't trust word. Likely it will all be written in Google Docs, then saved to a Word file and then probably even emailed to myself in a Word file. I got to be pretty paranoid about that. Which reminds me, I have been meaning to reinstall Office in the hope that it will stop Word from trying to eat my writing. Back to the novel, right now it is sort of just sitting there, waiting for me to do something with it. I have a though about a complete rewrite, which will probably focus more on the characters and less on the SF elements. It would be a pretty ambitious re-write, especially given my perceived experience as a writer (I consider myself to be still very much a novice). I really want to step back from the novel and try to sink my teeth into something a bit different.

Which brings me to this year's NaNoWriMo. I've decided to take a more measured approach this year. I came up with the basic framework for my next novel over a month before November. I plan to use October to get my thoughts down and have a nice foundation from which to launch into some serious writing in November. So far I haven't really done as much as I would like with that, but the month is still young. This next novel will be a paranormal YA novel (more on why YA interests me on a different date) focusing on a yet to be named female protagonist. I already have a nice magic system mostly fleshed out and the basic plot more or less figured out. I want to have a nice structure to work with, but also want to have some flexibility to work with new ideas that come up during the writing process. Hopefully this approach will make editing a whole lot easier and produce something that looks more than vaguely like a novel. We'll see.

Stay Awesome,
Chris Hall

Appearances

I have noticed something over the last month or two, but especially since coming back to school. For the longest time I have had a certain hair style, more or less what you see in my profile picture right now. I will put it right here since my profile picture won't be permanent. This picture is from around three years ago as I recall, but it will give you an idea of my hair style up until recently. This summer I decided to get it cut way back. Part of the reason was because I was working outside a ton and wanted a cooler hair cut, but I also wanted to try something different.

With that in mind, I got my hair cut fairly short. I don't think it has been this short since probably some time in Elementary School (found some photographic evidence of this on an old science fair project poster, unfortunately I don't have a picture of that.) Basically my new hair cut highly resembles my brother's preferred style, which he has had for a few years now. He eventually started cutting his own hair and is pretty good with most of it by now. Yes, he cut my hair for me. This was the Saturday before he left for New Orleans to go to the National Youth Gathering for about a week. Anyways, we now looked even more alike. If before people were confusing us for each other, it only got worse. (I'm fine with that, but I couldn't understand why people kept doing it when I had relatively long hair and he had the short hair. Now it is completely understandable because we more or less have the same hair length.) There must be a dozen or two photos of my new hair cut, but I don't think I have access to any of them yet. I'll have to update when I do get a hold of them.

On the whole, I like my new hair cut. People say my brother and I could be twins, but since we have parted ways (I go to school at UCLA and he just started his first year at UoP) it is pretty hard for people to make that comparison. Except when I was moving into my new apartment a few weeks ago, my roommate thought I was my brother at first. My old hair cut made me look younger than my age (I got a "you don't look 21" a few weeks before the major cut), but I've also heard that my new hair cut makes me look even younger. Hard for me to be objective about it, but I have noticed that a whole lot of college students have similar hair cuts, at least around here.

Back to appearances, my old look seemed to make people assume I was smart. Perhaps it is the glasses. Again, it is hard for me to get much objective data on the subject (which is subjective, ha). I am smart, so that is fine. Not to sound boastful, but it is true. I'm not sure what my new look makes people think, since it has only been a month or two. (My hair grows pretty quickly, so just before moving up to UCLA, I got a second hair cut, which made my hair even shorter than the initial one. Coming up on two weeks with that new hair cut and already my hair is quite noticeably longer.) Coming back to school has allowed me to notice one interesting thing. It is often very hard for people to recognize me now.

Some people from previous classes haven't recognized me when I pass them on the way to class and try to talk. One of my professors from last quarter, one I had taken two classes with, seemed to have difficulty recognizing me at first. I spoke with one of the librarians lately about some things, this is somebody I met last spring and talked with for a while, and she hasn't seemed to recognize me. I find it fascinating how one small change can make all the difference. I also didn't consider how this might impact my ability to get a job. My current hair cut looks a bit better than my previous one in terms of professionalism, in my opinion. However, some of the recruiters and professionals I talked to during the Spring didn't recognize me. My distinctive look has changed so in some ways I am at a disadvantage. Hopefully it will all work out for the best in the end.

Stay Awesome,
Chris Hall

A Book A Day

Yesterday I started reading a book and finished it. There is something magical about starting and finishing a book in the span of a single day. It is a bit more manageable for me than reading books in a single sitting since it tends to take up a large chunk of the day. The experience is different than say reading a book over the span of the week. There is less time to mull over particular passages, to let the scenes and sentences roll about in your mind and perhaps knock loose interesting ideas. If I had my way, I'd probably read a book a day. There are a number of good reasons why that is unlikely to happen (unless I read very short books of course) but perhaps I will one day be able to do that for at least a year.

That book puts me at about 49 for the year without really trying. My goal is to at least match last year's total of approximately 60. I wanted to read at least 50 books in 2008, but that was the first year I actually kept track of what books I read during the year. It averages to a bit over a book per week. I did that with the massive Wheel of Time books when I (re)read the series over the summer of 2008. I probably could have cut that down to maybe 2-3 days per book if I really wanted to. It is basically what I did anyways, mostly reading the books on the weekend.

Anyways, the book I read yesterday (also the first day of classes) was The Lost Fleet Dauntless by Jack Campbell. I found it to be a rather interesting piece of military science fiction. Also, I want to read the other books now. I suppose technically I got the book for free as it was a gift when I purchased some other books from my favorite independent bookstore that I've visited all of like once (perhaps I exaggerate, but it has been a while since I visited the store itself.) That bookstore is Mysterious Galaxy and mostly I interact with them when they come to UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I got the book when I purchased most of John Scalzi's books.

I've only read a few military science fiction books, I suppose. I was introduced to the genre in general (science fiction, or I suppose speculative fiction as a whole) some time in Elementary school. Probably around 4th grade or so or around 10 years old I guess. This is the stuff marketed for adults. Really the first adult SF book I remember getting and reading was Shield of Lies which is actually the second book in a Star Wars series. (I'm sure I purchased it because it said Star Wars on the cover.) The first reading of it bored me to tears. Lots of politics in that book, as I remember. Or it seemed rather like a lot when I first read it, and boring to boot. That really started my Star Wars phase of novel reading. I don't keep up as much with the new books as I once did, but they are still fun to read. Certain books in my collection have been read maybe a dozen or two times and all of them have probably been read at least two to three times.

I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit (again) when I was in 6th grade or so, probably around the year 2000 if I have the time line correct. That paved the way for my real love of fantasy which would really start in Middle School with the discovery of The Wheel of Time series. I read The Eye of the World in a single day. Over 800 pages. I started at lunch (at school) and finished some time that night. To this day that is the longest book I've read in a day. Still waiting for a conclusion to that series, but the 12th book comes out October 27th. Unfortunately Robert Jordan passed on before he could finish his epic series and Brandon Sanderson is working with his notes and Editor-Wife and assistants to publish the last three books (originally slated to be a single volume but keeping with the established tradition of
Jordan's promises, originally the series was to be much smaller, that number has turned to three.) I will be (re)reading the 11th book in the series prior to the release of The Gathering Storm in addition to everything else I'm doing.

Back to military science fiction, it is a subgenre that I haven't explored in depth before. In keeping with my goal of trying to expand my reading horizons, I will probably read more of it in the future. It is interesting to visualize the battles as they happen and particularly with space battles you get to play with many different dimensions. I think Jack Campbell does a good job of depicting those battles and the type of tactics that can be utilized in such an environment. I have heard people complain about too much detail from certain military SF writers where they have been confused by all the battle descriptions. We'll see what I think when I delve deeper into that particular subgenre.

For now though, perhaps I have rambled on enough.

Stay Awesome,
Chris Hall