Finals are OVER!!! Fall semester is FINISHED!!! Holy Cow! And I’m home for the holidays! That means freedom!…for a couple of weeks, anyways. So, the question now is: how to use this freedom? Here’s what I plan to do over the break:
- Read at least three Sci Fi books and review them
- Finish قصص كتاب مورمون (Book of Mormon Stories)
- Various other Arabic goals (you can check out my Arabic blog for more specifics on that, if you so desire)
- Get up to a certain part in The Lost Colony and then make a quick revision
- Submit Decision LZ150207 to Writers of the Future and some other places
- Submit The Clearest Vision to a few places
- Watch season 3 of Battlestar Galactica
I have a few Sci Fi books to choose from for the first goal: I’m currently reading The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I’ve also got Neuromancer, Red Mars, Helconia Spring, and Starship Troopers. I think I’ll read Neuromancer next; I hear that it was a very influential novel. After all, it spawned a whole subgenre (cyberpunk).
Arabic is going to be a lot more fun, now that I don’t have all the hoops that I have to jump through! But I’ve already written about that.
As for The Lost Colony, I know exactly where I want to end up–I have the basic plot of the next thirty or forty pages clear in my head. I’ll get up to that point and stop, because I’m a little bit afraid that I won’t be allowed to work on a 60,000+ word manuscript for English 318. We’ll see how it goes. But another thing I want to do is make a revision–not a deep revision, but enough to incorporate some of my more recent ideas for the story.
As for submitting my short stories (and I’m going to try to finish the other one as well), it’s something that I really should do but have been putting off. I had the writing group look at Decision LZ150207 and got some good feedback, so I’m going to use that as a basis for making some final revisions before sending it out. It won they Mayhew contest last year, so I’m hoping it will find a home (even though it was rejected by Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine show…but hey, you’ve got to count on rejections).
But I’m REALLY looking forward to Battlestar Galactica! To be honest, BSG was a huge influence on the novel I’m writing right now. The story basically takes place in the centuries following a BSG type conflict (humans invent hostile AI, AI destroys human civilization, the refugees flee and rebuild that civilization from the ground up). A friend of mine introduced it to me about a year and a half ago, and I watched the first season and miniseries on my computer before watching seasons 2.0 and 2.5 with him over the previous Christmas break. Without cable, however, I totally missed season 3, and BSG is one of those shows like Lost or Heroes that you can’t just jump into in the middle of the season. So now, I’m looking forward to figuring out what happens after the Cylons took over their colony at the end of season 2.5!
All in all, I think this is going to be a pretty cool break! Much needed as well. Hopefully it will not only be a time to recharge my batteries, but a productive time as well!
