My schedule has been horribly thrown off these last few weeks following the GMAT. I’m getting it back together – my writing, at least, seems to be back on track – but certain things like blogging have been neglected. I’ll get back to it regularly after the holiday.

Additionally, I am curious about what you readers think about the current look/feel of the site. Do you like the minimalism, or do the people demand their sidebars?

Coming soon: review of “Absolutely Free,” review of Stranger in a Strange Land, commentary on trends in computing and consumption, and possibly a piece on politics. (Yes, n00bs, this was once a fiercely political blog – that is, before I started working in politics.) Stay tuned.

In retrospect, I feel foolish for not reaching this twist earlier. It was the obvious one, but I neglected it due to my desire to keep certain plot elements a secret until late in the story. By executing the twist and pushing a major revelation forward in the story, I am allowing myself to develop a different type of dramatic tension, while also strengthening my protagonist’s arc. But sometimes I guess you need to realize what’s not working and why before you can accept an alternative approach.

So now the story continues, albeit slowly. My pace has slipped. I devoted a lot of time in recent weeks to the GMAT (with spectacular results), but couldn’t spend much time writing as a result. Now, with a bit more time on my hands, I’ll hopefully get rolling again.

More than any other show, Lost has taken viewers on a substantive literary journey, from the opening frame to the cusp of the finale. Has it always been perfect? No. But it has always been interesting, and I have confidence that tonight’s episode will be, if nothing else, memorable.

I plan on rewatching the whole series some time soon. As I do, I’ll be blogging with my thoughts on each episode. But for tonight, I’ll be content to sit back and enjoy as it all comes to an end. Hope you all enjoy it too.

Update: It was perfect.

Having finished draft one of my novel, I thought I could go back and cruise to a second draft by making edits and adding to/subtracting from the whole. This has, after all, been my primary mode of writing to date. It is very rare for me to simply start over again, and I assumed that my old habits would carry me through this new adventure. Not so, it appears. As I have made my way through this second draft, it has become increasingly apparent that simple tweaks aren’t going to do the trick.

Think of it like an old code base: you can change bits of it, add to it, subtract from it, etc., but eventually you reach a point where if you want to move on, you have to simply take all the lessons you’ve learned and start from scratch, with a new code. And it’s hard to accept that, because you’ve put so much work into the first version, but if you want to get where you want to go, then you have to suck it up and do what the job demands, and that’s what I’m doing.

That’s not to say I’m abandoning what I’ve done. In fact, I’ve made tremendous progress on the story, the characters, the setting – really, every aspect of it – and I fully intend to finish telling this story. But to get it where I want it to be, I need to start from word one all over again. I know the story, I’ve got extensive notes, and I have my original manuscript to reference. Now it’s time to sit down with what I now know and write it again.

What I’m trying to say is that after trying to carve a second draft from a first, I have now decided to write a second draft. This is going to take time and it’s going to take energy, but having examined the options available to me, I feel it’s the best one left. My goal has always been to have something that I am personally happy with by December 31st, 2010. I think that this is the best way for me to achieve that goal.

So, here goes!

This is, I believe, the hardest phase of the writing process. I’ve gotten the story out on paper. Now I have to face the cold, hard reality that large swaths of the first draft are simply terrible. I mean terrible. Rationally, I can accept that, because let’s face it: first drafts suck. No first draft in the history of man has ever been any good. But emotionally it’s very difficult to go back and see that what you were so satisfied with the first time around was just godawful. That means discouragement, which you have to overcome to get to the next step in the process. I’m a little past that psychological summit, but I’m still deal with the fact that the first time through, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Now I’ve got to take a whole bunch of discordant plot threads and jumpy character arcs and smooth them out, tie them up, and make it look like I knew what I was doing.

The biggest challenge personally is reordering out character hierarchy. Some characters are clearly just there to support the main ones, and I need to make them stand alone and give them their own stories, their own motivations, and their own arcs. Now that’s not going to be easy, but as a fan of ensemble dramas, I have trouble just leaving characters in a supporting role. I’ll get it worked out eventually, but it’ll take a lot of time and a lot of thought.

After I get through this draft, I’ll be able to focus on making the novel sing, but right now, I’ve just got to buckled down and plow through it and hope that I like what I have when I’m done.

By babies, of course, I mean fictional character that I have created and invested in emotionally. And by killing, I mean… well, killing. Yes, I’ve reached the point in my narrative where I have begun to off my main characters. Not all of them, of course. There’s still enough story to tell to justify keeping some of them around (for now… muahaha…). But I have begun to gradually eliminate certain characters in order to advance the plot and the emotional arcs of more important characters.

So far I’ve killed two, one of whom was critically important to the plot and the other of whom was a semi-major supporting character. I have mixed feelings about this. The first of the two was created for the purpose of being killed. I knew from the moment that I gave him a name that by the end of the story he would be dead. As he developed, though, I found it more difficult to pull the trigger, so to speak. Although I had conceived of him as a simple romantic rival to one of my protagonists, he ended up being tremendously sympathetic. I liked this character as I was writing him. I liked him so much that I tried to think of ways to save him. But when push came to shove, he needed to die. And because of the way that he developed, and because of the way that I chose to kill him, his death had a significantly greater impact on my other characters than I thought it would. The strength of this character made the story stronger, and I didn’t lose that by sacrificing him.

The other character went somewhat in the opposite direction. When I started the story, I intended for him to have a much larger role, but over time he slowly faded to the background until he simply became expendable. I didn’t intend to kill him, but when I realized that I could tie his demise into some important character growth, it became a no-brainer. He had to die, and I have no regrets, especially knowing where his death will allow other characters to go as I race toward the climax.

The process of killing a character is interesting. You create these souls from scratch and build them into recognizable entities. If you do your job right, they are distinct from one another and have their own lives within your tale. Making the decision to end those lives is not easy, especially when you think about how their survival would affect the story that you’re crafting. And if you’re going to eliminate them, you better get everything out of them you can before you do. I’ve mentioned before my reluctance to plan my full stories out ahead of time, but the major exception that I do make is for character deaths. Usually, I know when I create a character if he or she will survive or die. It helps structure not just the plot as a whole, but also their individual arcs and the arcs of those around them. This is sometimes referred to as “The Joss Whedon Effect.”

I can only think of one definite example of saving a character that I created with the intention of killing him. That character was the masked Nazi supervillain Baron Heinrich Von Devious from my Nazi Hunters radio serial. At various points in time, I had Devious being stabbed with a rapier, crushed by falling debris, suffocated by the vacuum of space, and burned alive in a volcano. And every time I was ready to do away with him, I just had to come up with a way of saving him from his fate. He was too wonderful a character for me to kill, and every time I brought him back, it made the story better. But when I think about why I was able to save him, it’s very simple: the stories being told and the characters at the center of them would not have gained a tremendous amount from his death. It would have been an unnecessary sacrifice, made solely because he was a villain and convention dictated that he must meet his maker at some point. In that instance, I am glad that I ignored convention.

But Devious is the exception rather than the rule, and some characters need to die that others may flourish. I’ve got a few more left to kill before the end of my story, and I think I’m ready to do it.

Second, independent of any next steps in the process, I’m just ready for this draft to be done. It’s a tremendous intellectual strain to force myself to write every day after work. Some days I hit my word goal, some days I don’t, but I am at least getting a couple of pages done every day, and I’m finally reaching the point of exhaustion. I need to finish this draft just so I have a draft finished, at which point I’ll be able to step away from the process for a couple of weeks before starting again. I’m honestly just ready to be done with the thing for a bit, but in order to do that, I have to finish it, as exhausting as that may be.

But I’m slowly but surely making my way to the finish line, and I hope to have a draft completed by the end of the month. Here’s hoping!

Being creative every day is hard. If this statement comes as shock to you, then you’ve probably never tried it. I’m about 170 pages into my novel right now, and even though I know where I want to get and know the road that I need to take to get there, actually walking that road is getting very difficult. I think part of it is just fatigue from having written so much over the last couple of months, and the rest is an eagerness to just finish this draft and be done with it. I’m thinking more and more about what needs to be fixed with what I’ve already written and less about the writing I’m doing now. That doesn’t make for productive writing, but it’s also unavoidable. The story has developed in ways that I didn’t expect, and now I’m filled with the desire to return to the beginning of the story and make changes to reflect the turns the tale has taken. Themes have begun to emerge, and I want to make sure that those are properly seeded throughout. I also want to make sure that the characters are behaving consistently, as well as make serious changes to the language used throughout. Truthfully, I always expected the first draft to run long, and now I’m ready to cut it up. But I can’t do that until I finish this draft. I’m guessing that I have between 70 and 100 pages left to go. Here’s hoping I can finish before the end of March.

I’ve decided not to get an iPad right now. Don’t get my wrong: I’m still wildly enthusiastic about the device, and am convinced that it represents the first step into the future of computing. But unfortunately being a poor white boy is not conducive to buying highly advanced technological devices, even when they are semi-reasonably priced. The bottom line is that right now I need to be watching my money, and spending $500+ on an iPad would not be fiscally responsible. But there’s another factor at play as well, namely that just as v2 of the iPhone was a huge leap over v1, I’m confident that v2 of the iPad will be light-years ahead of v1. The design will be refined, we’ll likely see a front-facing camera integrated , and the price may well drop. When that happens, a purchase will be inevitable. But for now I’ll just to be content staring at them through the display window. Alas…

I’ve spent way too much time recently improving my computer. I’m coming up on the end of my warranty, and consequently am taking steps to make this thing last as long as possible. I’ve cleaned out nearly everything Power PC related, moved a significant amount of media to external hard drives, and freed up about 30 additional gigs of memory on the machine. I’ve also replaced all my icons, installed Adium as my chat client, and have been experimenting with Boxee, among other things. I would ask if that makes me a nerd, but I know that the answers is no. There are many, many other things that make me a nerd. This is just frosting.

Was I the only person bored by the Incredibly Important Summit to Decide the Fate of Our Health Care System yesterday? No? Good.

I have been listening to the Alan Parsons Project way too much lately.

I have been blogging way too little.

Go USA.