This is going to be a quick post (very quick), since it’s 1:00 am and I am TIRED. FYI, it might not be edited all that much. What the heck–it’s my blog anyway.
So today I left home to move into the Barlow Center for the Washington Seminar! Took the train (Dad had an accident a block from the station–yikes! A minor one, but still…); left around 6:30 am and arrived at 1:30 pm. Took the metro to the Barlow Center, unpacked, walked up to the office for my internship (it’s only a 15 minute walk!), then made new friends and hit up the city!
It’s going to be a good semester.
I’ll probably start a separate blog for all the stuff that I’m doing in Washington DC. It might be a little while before I get it all set up, but I’ll probably run it roughly the same way as my Jordan 2008 study abroad blog. Still thinking about that.
But, more importantly (at least as concerns the stuff I write about on this blog), I started a new novel today! After much deliberation, I settled on the title To Search the Starry Sea. It’s a space opera science fiction novel that rough parallels The Odyssey, at least in the first part.
The main character is a girl named (at least for now) Katrione. She lives with her mother on the family estate, a medium sized moon orbiting a gas giant planet far from civilized society. Her father was lord of the estate, but he went off to war a long time ago and hasn’t returned.
The novel starts when a woman starship captain piloting the ship Minerva arrives with some limited news of Katrione’s father’s survival, and gives her the encouragement she needs to be more aggressive and proactive about rescuing her father, even if it means crossing some gender-based boundaries in the starfaring society.
I’m totally discovering this story as I write it. I got stuck on the second paragraph, wondering what sort of things Katrione would be doing before the Minerva arrives–what she does in her spare time–and when the answer came to me (reading a novel), it opened up about a dozen interesting story possibilities. Things just flowed…at least until I realized I need to come up with more character names. Blech.
Also, after working so hard to polish and revise Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, it is very difficult to get over the fact that this draft doesn’t need to be immaculate. I’m writing down sentences and paragraphs and thinking “this is SO telly,” but I can’t do any better at this point because I don’t know the story.
The important thing at this point is not to perfect the craft but to perfect the story, and that’s a HUGE transition from everything I’ve been doing the last 6 months. I just need to tell myself that until I believe it.
Anyway, I am definitely excited for this story. VERY excited! And excited about Washington DC–it is going to be a very, very interesting semester. And hopefully fun as well!
Good luck with your internship and your new book. You might want to decide on a bunch of character names before the next time you sit down to write. =P