The dreadful time of finals has ended at last, and I am going home tomorrow! Today I finally summoned the courage to open my story files, which have gone completely untouched in the last month (and a nightmarish month it was. It went like this: Thanksgiving break=research/reading time for classes, last week of classes/doing non-final papers & presentations, reading week/finals, and exam week/finals), and peeked. Eep. It's going to take some effort to get back onto whatever train of thought I had been taking.

The thing with plots is that if they're well done, they look so easy. The best plots are the ones that aren't forced. They're natural and build out of the other elements present in the story. But when you're plotting, oftentimes the other elements come later, in hindsight. Or sometimes they don't come at all. Then you have Plot-FAIL. Which is where my train is headed if I don't turn it around.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My visit to Purdue was good. But I haven't written much at all lately. I really want to write. But I have so much other work to do...

Yes, I'm behind, I admit it. To be precise, I missed 4 complete mornings and am 2h 50min behind. Yes, I will get on it. I'm finally done with classes and am free for break. Though I have a ton of work to do over break, in addition to visiting Purdue, but I should really try to catch up on my writing too. So much to do! I am still at something of a loss as to how to proceed with the story. Ganbaru ze.

Also, after reading this article, "Should I Tweet?" I started to think more about my platform, or lack of one. So far, I've really had no success with building an online presence because in the end, I'm actually shy online too, even if less so than in real life. So I've started and abandoned, or left in various states of neglect, four blogs since high school, not including this one. I guess I never had a theme I could stick to and write consistently about. But thinking about it, and thinking about the kinds of people who might buy my books in the future, maybe I should start a blog with a theme about Japanese history. Well, Japan and culture in general, but history too, since that's my particular area of interest. I think the market for my writing would be people interested in Japan, and people who have been brought over by the soft power of cultural things like anime and manga and video games. That's probably the most promising potential market of any substantial size. Of course I want my writing to be accessible to everyone in general, but it's probably the people who have some degree of established interest in Japan who will be the main kind of reader. Anyways, maybe I should think more about this and start a blog with the new year or something? Maybe with blogspot or wordpress, seeing as those seem to be the most popular for literary types. Livejournal is excellent for fandom, but I get the feeling it might not be the best for what my subject will be. Or maybe I should do more research. I guess because two of the four blogs I've flubbed up have been lj, it would be harder to have that feeling of starting anew, if I did start a new blog there.

This morning I flailed, but I made it! The previous night, I went to bed much later than usual, almost midnight (as opposed to 9 p.m.) due to putting in a few serious hours on my Japanese history paper and watching several fabulous episodes of the fabulous anime about American football, Eyeshield 21 (Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game). I set my alarm and woke up with it at 4:20 a.m., but with so little sleep, I was far too tired, and yes, wasted, to apply myself to writing. Plus I hadn't finished the Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game yet and had had dreams about how Deimon could pull off a 20-point touchdown, so I ended up watching the last three episodes of the game. Which worked to wake me up because I have never fallen asleep while watching anime. Then I took a shower, and then I forced myself past my reluctance to write and my uncertainty about where to take the story. And I wrote. And I somehow produced a page with plot progression that I can build on. Thank goodness. Sometimes you just really have to power through.

It was a bit risky to watch anime first thing in the morning instead of writing or showering, but it worked out. Day 12 of NaNo and still going strong.

Also, arrangements have been made for my visit to Purdue in a bit over a week! People there sound very nice, and I am quite looking forward to it!

Day 10, and I am keeping up. Although to make a confession, today I spent my hour today deleting instead of writing. It's because I've moved on to a part of the story where the plotting and everything is still up in the air. I had about 25 pages of old stuff for this chapter, but having made some decisions as to where the story is headed, I had to sort out stuff that I wouldn't need anymore, and stuff I wanted to keep but needed to figure out how to incorporate still.

This is usually the point in my writing where I become deathly afraid and unsure of where to take my story, and then it languishes for a year. I suspect this is why, from college graduation until now, I've averaged a bit more than one new good chapter a year. It's a really sad pace at which to make progress on a novel. That being said, I must find a way to plow through this. Thinking is involved, yes, and planning, and plotting, but I can't let myself stop writing either. It's too easy to stop under the pretext of needing more time to think, and then suddenly half a year has passed and not a word written.

Thinking on it this afternoon, I realized that thus far, my characters have faced no great obstacles. Sure, there's the obvious one around which the story is centered, but there's nothing that throws a wrench in the works when they decide to do something. Perhaps that is why my story is languishing at this stage. Throwing obstacles in front of my characters would be a good thing to revive the pace of the story, introduce new things in interesting ways, and just keep the story going. My characters have had it too easy. But vacation is over! It's time for them to start working.

What is this, Day 6? Writing is still going well and I am keeping up. I finished Chapter 5 yesterday/today and today wrote the first page or so of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 goes back to the other character's side of the story, which is good because I need more time to think about how I want Hinako's story to progress. It's nice to finally be making progress, even if the quality is not so great.

Thursday at dinner a girl from my program asked me how my writing was going. I told her how I had not written anything for well over a month and then recently started writing an hour a day. She said, "Oh, that's good, to take a break and then start writing again when you're inspired." Maybe it's okay to take a break sometimes, but I think a one month break is just awful and lazy. There's nothing good about it. And I didn't start writing again because I was inspired. Inspiration happens in the early stages as a story idea is still fresh with endless possibilities. At this point, maybe a fourth of the way through the story, it's all about discipline. Forcing yourself to write and slugging through it no matter how you feel that day. There's no inspiration, except that which you create if you desperately need to delude yourself into believing that there is inspiration. Inspiration, if there is such a thing, only comes when you stick your butt in the chair, open up that story file, and start typing out the shaky ideas that you don't think will work but type anyway because you've got nothing else. That is my kind of inspiration.

Day 1 of NaNoWriMo off to a good start. One hour, one page. And a few great ideas, big and small.

One big idea was to change Kyoshi's name to just Kyou. That way it might better follow the conventions of female names in the given setting, and also it contains a delightful pun in Japanese that is particularly relevant to the story itself. You wonder why I didn't think of this earlier. Well, I still need time to consider it, but I like it, particularly in terms of the historical aspect and the pun.

Wrote another hour this morning, yay! Probably got somewhere around half a page, or a bit more, but more than yesterday, I think. I really want to try writing without obsessively going back and editing, because now I realize that that approach gets me one new, really good chapter about every year. Which is sad. So we're going to try to power through and not worry about details, even big ones, which I will need to change later.

Tomorrow the real (well, my version) NaNoWriMo starts!

I've failed pretty spectacularly at writing for the past month and a half. With NaNoWriMo coming up, I feel like I should get back on track. Even though November is perhaps a terrible time to do this, particularly as the semester wraps up and heads towards finals and papers in December. But you could say that about life, and never get around to writing.

So what I want to do in November is just one hour a day on my story. It's pretty impossible to do NaNoWriMo with classes, and I thought about doing a sort of half-NaNoWriMo where I halve the word count, but then, thinking how word counts have never done much for me in terms of productivity, I decided a timed goal would be more effective. One hour a day is manageable. I did one this morning to warm up, and yes, I think I can do it. I even resisted the temptation to open a mindless game, which is the usual bane of my writerly productivity.

Just finished reading the latest book of Orson Scott Card's Ender series, Ender in Exile, which is a midquel between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Excellent as always, and it does the tricky job of linking events and timelines between Ender's Game and all the Shadow books quite well.

Of the lessons in writing I picked up along the way, the one that comes first to mind is omission of scenes and information. There are some scenes that, while you'd like to see as a reader, don't need to be shown, i.e. Valentine and Ender's reunion. You can pretty much guess how that goes, based on what you know of them, what their feelings are going into it, and then how it is with them afterwards. So sometimes omitting key scenes due to their predictability can help improve the pacing. But of course you have to keep the reader engaged enough with everything else that they're willing to forgive the omitted scene.

There is also omission of information, such as the thoughts and plans of various characters. This can be pretty obvious, but there is the pleasure of surprise or confirmation when you don't know exactly what the characters are plotting until they go through with it.

Along those lines, OSC also makes free use of POV, switching from chapter to chapter or even scene to scene. It works not only to remove you from (and thereby hide) a central character's thoughts and plans, but also to place you in someone else's head so that you can see the story from their POV, with their different set of expectations in mind. Switching to Morgan's POV as their ship arrives on the colony works with entertaining results, as the reader is both laughing at Morgan's delusions of grandeur and relishing his eventual defeat. There are even many cases of using a certain character's POV just for one scene, or one chapter. Whatever works. There's no reason to be tied down simply for the sake of uniformity in narrative structure or whatnot.

One other thing that stands out upon reflection are scenes of primarily dialogue, with very little physical setting described to ground them in. Oftentimes I'm concerned with grounding everything in a physical setting--describing exactly where the characters are, what they're doing, how they're sitting or standing or feeling, as they talk. Perhaps this is because physical descriptions were once one of my greatest weaknesses, at least in writing a scene. Of course it's important to ground things in a physical setting and to describe things clearly. But only if it's important. That is, when the key point of a certain scene is the content of the dialogue, perhaps the setting is not so important then. Quick, back-and-forth dialogue without awkward insertions of, "He looked at the ground," or "She bit her lip," (although those kinds of lines have their place, if used correctly) can be far more effective and entertaining, as the pace picks up with the reader concentrating on the words exchanged. Also, while a description of a physical setting can be minimized, it can still be mentioned within the dialogue--a quick, clever way to set a cursory image within the reader's mind.

Next on the reading list are some of Ursula LeGuin's books, Wicked, and Poe's tales.

Okay, as of this morning I have a brand new rough story outline. The last things are completely disjointed and will probably see great change, but having this really helps for where I am now. Which is, Chapter 5. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are more or less fine for this draft, Chapter 3 needs a ton of revision but I'm leaving that for later, and so now I'm working on Chapter 5.

Still have trouble pinning down K's voice. Is she taciturn and clipped or freely sarcastic? I want both, but I haven't figured out how to balance it.

Back home in Ohio! It's so green, and the sky is so blue, and the windows are not gray with pollution. Wow. No sound of traffic or neighbors' voices, no more crazy humidity and high temperatures, no more cockroaches anywhere, and very few mosquitoes, thank goodness. On the downside, there are still bugs--a large black ant was crawling on my leg while I lay in bed reading manga, and I proceeded to flick it from my leg and whack it with an LSAT book, to little avail since it was on my bed, and then I took some tissue and killed it. Yay. I vacuumed up a bunch of dead bugs in the upstairs rooms and felt relieved.

Drinking directly from a faucet again. It feels strange. Super absorbent toilet paper, three squares of which are the equal of four thin sheets of toilet paper in Taiwan.

I went running outside yesterday morning while the sky was still black outside. It was 3 a.m., I was jetlagged and out of shape, and the electricity had gone out, so I decided it was time to do some exercise. I ran a mile really slowly. 11 minutes and 45 seconds. =_= Today I waited until there was some daylight, around 6:30 a.m., and ran the same distance in 11 minutes and 8 seconds. I'm getting back into shape!

Today I did laundry. Oh, the dryer is wonderful. In Taiwan, we hung up the laundry outside to dry, since we didn't have a dryer, and the clothes would feel all stiff and crinkly afterwards, and you'd have to iron it if you didn't want it to look wrinkled. Today I pulled the clothes out of the dryer--soft clothes!--and folded them, and that was that. Bliss.

To end, an article that perfectly details my unproductiveness in writing: "What Took You So Long? The quiet hell of 10 years of novel-writing."

Feeling sick again, but hopefully I won't actually get sick, seeing that I was just sick last week (for all of 2-3 days).

Grad school news is finalized: I'm going to Yale next year for my MA in East Asian Studies, and then Purdue the year after that for my MFA in Creative Writing (Purdue is a three-year program). I can still hardly believe my good fortune in Purdue agreeing to let me defer. They must really like me, right? In sum, my application results have ended in a best-case scenario, somehow. (And I have full funding on both programs, did I mention that? I'll have to teach at Purdue, but that will be a good experience, or so I'd like to believe.)

My nose isn't just a leaky faucet. It's a freaking waterfall. Gaaaaaaah. I am sick as a dog, sick like a log stuck in a bog lost in the fog.

In other news, nice blog post on willpower here. BIC. Butt In Chair. I like that.

I wrote a 7-page short story in Chinese as my final paper for Chinese class last quarter. Despite coming up with it on the spur of the moment, and despite no one being able to understand what was really going on in it, I thought it had actual potential (the premise: when the world forgets how to read). So tonight I did a quick rough translation of it into English. And whoa. The story idea is still not bad, I think, but whoa. I wince. Everything has to be completely rewritten, starting with the tone. It's one thing to write like a crazy person in Chinese where I misuse and abuse the language horribly, I'm sure, but knowing exactly what I sound like in English, I just can't keep up the crazy person tone for an entire story. That's why there are only short scenes told from K's POV in my novel, and I still have trouble deciding how crazy she should sound.

Also, I need to stop playing mindless games like Minesweeper and this matching game in the HP game Purble Place. Gaaah. Such a waste of time.

Reading a fanfic online tonight, I found I was annoyed by this use of the ellipse: "For the first time, he felt something like...hope." The line already gets its own paragraph. I think there's an implied emphasis on hope even without the ellipse. Let's look at it ellipse-less: "For the first time, he felt something like hope." Much smoother, mmm.

Oh yeah, so this is why I need more angst in my life--so that I can write

Friend A was somewhat offended that Friend B had told all their other friends about her (Friend B's) problems a while ago and only now chose to include her (Friend A) in her confidence. I wrote to Friend B, "Well, now she knows how it feels to be left out of the loop when everyone else knows."

As I typed these words, bitterness I thought I had conquered three years ago welled up like bile in my throat, irrepressible and undeniable. An old wound of betrayal, scarred into an ugly shape; a memory that will never be happy; a thousand regrets. They clog my senses with salted pain. Go away, I whisper. Ghosts of the past have no place lingering in the daylight of today and tomorrow. Go away. The apparition remains. I close my eyes.

Describing something in a beautiful way makes you suddenly realize that what you are describing is actually exquisite. Mmm.

So, grad school: I'm going! Very likely to Yale for a Master's in East Asian Studies, seeing that they've accepted me. Yay! I still have to hear back from several more schools, but chances are I'll choose Yale. On the topic of grad school applications, perhaps I could have saved a lot in application fees if I'd thought out what I wanted to do more thoroughly. But the whole reason I applied to two different types of programs because I couldn't decide, and I wanted the schools to decide for me. Yay fate. Though I applied to thirteen schools (11 MFA, 2 EAS), I didn't exactly have a reach school--with MFA programs, there's no guarantee I'd get into any of them. If I had a school I thought I should get into, it was Yale. And that was mostly because Jeff got in when he applied, and I don't want to think that I'm any worse than him, academically. Hah. But Yale's not a safety school either. Because it's Yale. Obviously. So yeah. Anyways. Yay for having a place to go next year! Yay for East Asian Studies!

...And now I need to stop my brag-fest and get working on my novel before I run out of free time.

Uwwah, okay. I really can't keep up blogs. I don't know how some people do it.

So right now, I'm working quickly through Chapter 5. The plan is to get a first, hasty draft done by my birthday next month, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed, when they're not typing or otherwise engaged.

I applied to 11 MFA in Creative Writing programs and 2 East Asian Studies M.A. programs. So far I've heard from 5 MFA programs: 4 rejections and 1 waiting list. Keeping fingers crossed on the waiting list school. I guess perhaps I aimed too high and underestimated the competition.