But first, I think you need a little background on how I wrote it in the first place.

I wrote the story as part of Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp. This means that I had to come up with an idea, stew on it a bit, and write the story all pretty much within one day.

For ideas, Card had us go to a bookstore and look for something we would never write about and then get an idea, interview a person, and watch people doing something.

I got the idea for this story by watching some kids play on a fake tree-thing where they would crawl through from one side to the other. And, ZING, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could use trees to teleport from one location to the next?

Then, we had to figure out a beginning and ending for the story using Card’s MICE quotient (milieu, idea, character, event – read Characters and Viewpoint for more information). I decided this was more of an Event story, with some Character stuff as well. Therefore, that meant that I had to start the story where something was wrong and then end it where it got fixed (or accepted). I did just that, but then I thought I needed to add a bunch of stuff in about the guy’s relationship with his wife, and it got really weird (I had been reading Heinlein, that is my excuse).

Then, I spent most of the day I had goofing around, thinking about what I wanted to have happen in the story. I also spent way too much time creating a map with a cool Mapping program (AutoRealm) that I had recently installed. I guess that was my way of doing a bit of background research. When I actually got down to writing, I wrote the entire 38 pages (double-spaced) in about 4 hours.

Then, we workshopped the stories and I got lots of great feedback on it from all the other students and from Card.

So, when I went to revise, I reread all the comments from people (I had consolidated them all onto one copy of the draft), especially Card’s, and thought again about what I wanted to accomplish here.

Then, I basically started from scratch (I had the original draft in the new document, but I only used about 2 pages of it). I stripped off the first 4 pages and started where the event began to be known and worried about. I added in more characters and conflicts (3 disaster structure). And, I made the mechanism of transfer more consistent and rule-based.

Based on the comments I got back on this from Ellen Datlow and the other Codexians, I still have a lot of work to do, but I didn’t get the same kinds of comments I did the first time, so I feel like I’m making good progress on both the story and my skill as a writer.

I am using the general story and plot that I created for bootcamp of the Transfer Loss short story. But, I am not using anything as far as wording goes from it in writing this book. Just the ideas. I am not even going to open the document to look at it. I have my written notes and that is all I’m using. So, it will probably end up being a completely altered story from the “original”. But, I can’t see this as being a bad thing. Hopefully I can improved it.

And, since last year’s novel attempt didn’t turn out as expected, or even a coherent single novel (just a bunch of different thoughts and non-fiction stuff that I was going through), this will be my first true novel attempt. I am determined to finish it this year. And while it will probably stink, at least it will be my attempt at one story and at learning what my writing process really is.

I don’t know that I’ll blog every day during this month, but I will try to catch highlights and to explore things I learn about myself and such along the way.

Cheers!

I need to go back to the 1000 ideas session and do it over again to get more non-cliche situations and plot.

I tried restarting it so that it was not in medias res, but I got stuck shortly after. Maybe I’m just to stuck on all the (great) comments the other boot campers gave me on it.