First, I wish to note with great sadness the passing of President Gordon B. Hinckley. He was a great man who had a deep and lasting impact on my life. I don’t doubt that he is in a better place, reunited with his wife, but for me, here on Earth, it is still very sad. He will be greatly missed.
I heard about the news when I was at a friend’s house, writing in The Wormhole Paradigm for English 318…
My previous attempts to write this story never felt quite right, and got a lot of critical feedback from the people in the group. After last week’s lecture (which I need to blog about), I decided to redo the beginning.
Sanderson’s advice on beginning is: 1) start with the major conflict, and 2) start with some motion. My last one started at what I thought was one of the major events of the story, but really, it happened before the conflict had even started. So really, I was just writing myself into the beginning.
I’m really excited about this story that I’m writing. Basic plot: boy meets girl (they are both scientists on a deep space mission through the first artificial wormhole to an unknown star system emitting the electromagnetic signature of a large spaceship traveling at 99.9% the speed of light), girl doesn’t notice boy (she is kind of obsessive / antisocial and is an extreme workaholic), boy gets girl (though I want to leave it with a really open ending–this is not going to turn into a sappy Adam and Eve scenario!).
Seriously, though, the story is much more complicated (and really, it’s not a space romance–not at all!). It was chiefly inspired by the philosophies of Heidegger, and what he said about the They and how Dasein (our Being) is constantly defined by other people, not by itself. I thought to myself, “what would it be like to cut someone off from everything and everyone? What would that feel like? What kind of an existential awakening would you have?”
That, and I think that wormholes are pretty cool.
I wrote 2,000 words, but it just flowed out, it was sweet. It took a long time, and I was distracted by a lot of other things that I was doing, but it was a real breeze to write. And fun. It’s really awesome when writing is just plain fun.
I’m way excited for this story. Though, at the same time, I think that the excitement you have for any given story is inversely proportional to the present wordcount of said story.
Here is a list of things I want to blog about before the end of the week: review of Old Man’s War, review of Starship Troopers, this Saturday’s Quark writing meeting, two posts on Sanderson’s 318 class, and just other stuff as it generally comes up.
But now, sleeeeeeeeeeeep.
