Author: Laura Highcove

Author Photoshoot

Laura Highcove

At a certain point, a few years ago, it occurred to me that I needed to have a nice picture of myself to put up on my social media platforms. I have always taken lots of pictures, but I have never had lots of pictures taken of me. So I planned a day with a friend where we staged a photoshoot at the barn where I work. It ended up being a rather cloudy and windy day, but we did the best with what we had. Here are some of the pictures from that shoot.

The horse is Nick, my Appaloosa gelding who was born on the farm. These pictures are from 2014 when he was 2, so he’s quite a bit bigger now. I haven’t changed all that much.


My Stories

Laura Highcove

So I have been writing for …well my entire life. This is the list of stories I have “finished”, in that they contain a beginning, middle, and end. Not a huge list, but then most of my early years I spent bouncing from one project to another so very few of them ever were finished. Since I’m matured as a writer, I have a better track record of finishing.

Silverfire: Technically a set of stories (not just one boo) about a silver fox who rescues a kingdom. Other characters include Brightfire and Redfire. They were all, likely no more than a few thousand words and very rough, but they had endings. The idea came from Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, in which I was rather infatuated in my younger years. This story did evolve with me a bit and I have a much more current version of it started but the concept is so simple really just a trunk novel. However, Silverfire holds a special place in my heart and I’d love to use her in a novel some day. (Though probably with a name change.)

Gryphons, Gryfalcons, and Makkar: The story of a gryffin princess who finds allies in gryfalcons, and enemies in the makkar. A milestone in my career, this story was over 100 pages (in Microsoft Word). I was very proud. Again, trunk novel, but the main character Wirith’s name pops up when I need a name for a gryffin in other stories. This idea came from Mercedes Lackey’s The Black Gryphon trilogy.

Warehouse: A girl with powers ends up in a house where children with powers are raised and must unravel the mystery of why they exist. Totally ripped off from X-men. I tried fixing it once, but it’s a trunk novel.

Demonslayer: A woman with amnesia finds out she was trained by a group who are the last line of defense against demons, and that group has been wiped out. This story marks my first fully fleshed out world, and important first step into being a high fantasy writer. I have other novels and stories and characters planned in this world. However, the story is still rather immature and needs a complete rewrite, especially considering it’s only 23k. (Man, it felt really long when I wrote it.) This was influenced by a book google helped me to remember, Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon.

Blessings of the Nerial: A little faith never hurt anyone, but it’s about to start. Wrote during NaNo one year, and I’m not positive if there were any strong influences for this one. I really like the concept but I don’t actually like the main character …so if I were going to rewrite it, it would need an overhaul.

Shifting Winds: Angelica is a princess who lives life the way she wants, until she’s kidnapped by a demon. I love this story, but something is fundamentally broken in it, and I don’t have the skill to fix it. Inspiration for this story came from a mini series that played in a Harvest Moon video game. Bizarre right?

The Colors Of: Environment was ruined in a war and computers are designed to look like animals. This story was inspired by a Pokemon fan fic I wrote back in my fan fic days …so yeah. It took on a decent life of it’s own since then. I’d love to clean it up some day.

The Asir/Vanir War (12k): Loki leads a group a vanir to Asgard in order to stop the war raging on Midgard. Meant to be a prequel to a story I haven’t finished. This is a short story (fantasy short story), but it is clean and polished, and thus it gets to be on this list. I’ve loved Norse mythology for a long time. I wrote this before the whole Marvel/Loki/Tom Hiddleston thing.

The Storyteller: Once upon a time there was a prince. She was a girl. My first complete and polished novel. I’ve been working on the sequel.

Commission of Tabitha

Laura Highcove

This is a picture I had commissioned of Tabitha from my novel, The Storyteller. I love it tons. Not really much else to say about it. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

Tabitha © Laura Highcove

If you want more information on Tabitha,
you can click here to get the first chapter of her story.

If you want more information on the artist, you can find it here.

I Went to Mysticon, But Not to Have Fun

Laura Highcove

So this weekend I went to Mysticon, a Science Fiction and Fantasy con that happens up the road in Roanoke every year. I’ve never been to Mysticon before, and like the title says, I didn’t go to have fun.

Why I did go:

I decided that if I’m going to be marketing my books at conventions, then I should get used to going to conventions as an author and not a fan. So, I went without my husband or any friends, which was a conscious decision. I went to watch other authors do their own marketing and see what I could learn from them.

Thankfully, since I’ve been going to Otakon for over a decade now, the convention space is comfortable for me, even without friends. This is my tribe so I am able to feel confidant in the space.

What I learned:

I went to a panel on marketing your book after release. This helped two-fold. One, I was helpful to hear authors talk about things they do to promote their books. I got notes on insights on ads, social media, reviews, going to conventions, and book signings and that kind of thing.

I was also able to watch the authors themselves. How they have books to display as well as having an ipad that scrolled through pictures of other books they either didn’t have with them, or left off so the table wasn’t too cluttered. They were also both engaging, helpful, and just friendly all around. That is the type of thing I want to be able to do, because when you are able to connect with someone who is just talking, you’re more likely to want to buy their books.

After that was a panel that I thought would be on Firefly because it was called Honor in the Verse. It ended up being a panel by numerous authors talking about honor of characters in books. So that ended up being even better than I thought. It made me realize that I’ll definitely have some ‘sit down and think’ time before I ever go on a panel. I’m not sure how good I’ll be at coming up with answers to questions on the fly. At the same time, it was a fun, comfortable atmosphere.

I also learned that while I have made leaps and bounds with being able to meet people’s eyes in the hallway and even make a little bit of small talk, I still shut down pretty hard when someone expects me to know something. I’m not sure how to work on that, but at least I’m aware of it.

What I plan to do better next time:

I should have stayed and talked to some of the authors after their panels. I am never good at coming up with clever/thoughtful questions to ask. If I had thought about it, I could’ve asked if I could follow one of them to their tables for book signings just to see the process, see how they interact with people and that kind of thing. I also could’ve asked how you get invited (or volunteer) to be on a panel at a convention. Slowly, but surely, I am pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

And, of course, I did still have fun at the con, even if it was not my goal. The more comfortable I get going as an author, the more fun I will be able to have.

Review: Final Fantasy XV

Laura Highcove

Or as I liked to call it: Bromance: the Road Trip

Story:

The Crowned Prince Noctis heads out on a road-trip with his personal guard/best friends to meet his fiance in order to get married. His car breaks down on the way and while it’s getting fixed they find out that his father has been murdered, his city occupied/destroyed and his fiance has gone into hiding. Noctis then goes on a cross countries road trip to get all of the artifact weapons, get the blessings of the world’s gods, and find the ring that will allow him to use a magic crystal to save the world from encroaching darkness and demons.

The story was interesting but not mind-blowing. At least it was better than the storyline in FFXII, which I basically don’t remember. However, I was sufficiently invested in the characters throughout the story. I even felt regret whenever I would go back to ‘present’ time to advance the storyline, so now that I’ve beaten the game I can just hang out in the past forever.


Who needs responsibility when you’re beautiful and sleeping on a chocobo?

Characters:

I liked all of the characters. I am a sucker for bromance, so I loved the main four, and there was a colorful cast of side characters throughout the story.

Clothing put me in a weird mood. Remembering back to X-II (That’s ten-2, not 12) I feel like whenever there are outfits and girls, the variations are sexy, plentiful, and etc. When I found out there were outfits in this game I thought there would be a little more than: you start with two outfits with two variations each and the only other one you get is storyline based. Sure, I loved ‘dressing up’ the car as well, but not quite the same thing. I would’ve liked a little less cleavage on Cindy and the Dragoon or a little more shirtless action for the boys. Equal opportunity nudity please.

Gamyplay:

The combat was a little too spectacle fighter, and not enough rpg for my immediate liking. I got the hang of it over time, but I never actually liked it. I also found the ascension grid …well not exactly complicated, but annoying? I had to play for quite a while before I figured out which spheres were beneficial to my play style.

I was also pretty astonished by the number of items I needed to get through fights. I think Ignis kinda sorta turned into a healer at some point, but not really? I kept waiting to get some sort of healing spell for myself, but no, I ended up chugging potions and elixirs at an alarming pace. Now I doubt I was playing the game as intended because there was some kind of “crouch” mechanic, but most of the time when I tried to crouch during a battle I would either jump forward instead of crouching, or the monster would come over and eat my face, so I gave up on it pretty quick. I probably also should’ve used the point warping more, but it’s hard to find a point warp while avoiding the baddies and you can’t move the camera in wait mode.

But the one thing that I think caused me more annoyance than anything else were simply the load times. I mean I’m not entirely surprised because of the complexity of the world, but when driving around doing different quests, the downtime really added up.


I would go take bathroom breaks and come back and still have to wait.

Graphics:

This game is gorgeous to look at. Not just the characters and mob models, but the world itself is so seamlessly put together and…well just real-looking. I found myself in awe over and over again. Once I finally learned to put up with the camera being annoying to control (and way too close) and my disappointment over having to wait for Prompto to take pictures instead of being able to take them myself, I settled well into this world.

Overall, I enjoyed this game the most out of the Final Fantasies I’ve played, though I am really into the whole bromance thing and pretty graphics. I could take or leave the fighting system (though when I managed to get a link strike, that was rather cool) and the Ascension grid. The world was just so huge and interactive. It might even be that it feeling like it was just a step outside the real world really did a lot for it. We’ll just have to see if this is an upward tick in the Final Fantasy genre, or a dying gasp.


The graceful Prince Noctis

Review: Moana

Laura Highcove

I went to see Moana a few weeks after it came out. Disney’s been doing a good job with movies recently, but with the complete glut of movies, it’s hard to find time to get out to see them all.

Anyway, Moana is a story about a young girl who is next in line to be the chief of a tribe on a Hawaiian island. The tribe has everything they need, but Moana really want to be a sailor, only her father, the current chief, is super against it.

Moana’s grandmother encourages her by showing her that their tribe did once travel the waves, moving from island to island. Cue Moana heading out on her own to find a demi-god who needs to replace a magical stone.

Overall, a wonderful movie. I loved the whole thing (except for the crab) and the ending was spot on.

Meta talk: Hero’s Journey straight up. Also, really? Could you have been any more obvious that the pig is only there to sell stuffed animals?

Also, there is no love interest. That’s right, ladies and gentleman: this story has no love interest. Just a girl out there being awesome.

I was also pretty happy with how realistic the body types were (ignoring Maui, who is a demi-god). No unreasonably skinny waists in this movie. And yet you can’t argue that Moana isn’t attractive. I’m really hoping this trend will be continued.

My Holiday Break

Laura Highcove

I travel for holidays. I got all my files in dropbox, added tons of chargers, my DS packed some reading books, and, of course, clothing. Everything I wanted or needed. Got to my mother’s and realized I had left my netbook on my desk while it was syncing with Dropbox as I finished packing.

I was three hours from home with NO LAPTOP. Yeah, it’s probably a first for me.
I don’t really care about being unplugged from social media. No, my real concern was that I had planned to write the rough draft of my newsletter, this journal post, and get some revision done. Instead I had only the scrivener app on my phone (which is great, but I use it more for notes or quick things than sitting down and writing, and it’s not connecting to my regular dropbox anyway for reasons.)

Then my husband reminded me that I’m on vacation. That writing those things was akin to him checking his work email (which I give him hassle for). While the writing itself is not really work for me, writing blog posts and such is. So I decided to listen to his advice and actually take a vacation. As such there was no post last Monday.

In the future, I would like to get far better about being prepared for blog posts and the like ahead of time. (I could’ve done a cute little Merry Christmas post). I just find myself in the same rut of “Oh, I’ll write up the blog post and post it while I’m traveling.” And yeah, that doesn’t really work for me. I need to stop telling myself I will do it when I very obviously will not.

I did plenty of writing in the week before taking my holiday break. I’m still moving forward on Law of the Prince Charming revision (almost done now!) and re-writing the beginning of the Huntsman. Once I’m done with LotPC, I’ll be hammering a bit harder on the Huntsman. According to my own planning, I am waiting to see where I am with that story by the end of January. If I am *still* having trouble it might be time to consider some different options. After reviewing this last year I realized I’ve been struggling with the Huntsman for almost the whole year, and that just doesn’t work. One possibility is throwing it at people who have read the LofPC and getting suggestions/feedback on the rough draft that I do have. I dunno, I’ll see at the end of the month.

My holiday was tons of fun. Got to see my siblings, their significant others, and offspring as well as my parents. Since I don’t live nearby I generally only see them for these holidays though we keep in touch some through the wonder of the Internet. I got some good presents, I got to talk about my writing with a few different people. (That’s always nerve-wracking. :p) I also played a lot of Story of Seasons. And now we’re back to the grind, which really isn’t that bad. I missed writing.

Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Laura Highcove

So I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them over my Thanksgiving break. I could only give it 2/5 stars. (Warning: Spoilers Below)

I loved the actor who played Newt, but the character himself was horribly written. The only time he really shone as a character was when he was in his briefcase taking care of his animals.

I really enjoyed Jacob. While Newt ran around for the first part of the movie with no characterization or motivation, we saw Jacob’s personality and dreams.

I also loved seeing the inside of the briefcase and all of the mythological animals that were there. It wasn’t enough to carry the movie to the end, but it was entertaining.

Most of the rest of the movie was terrible.

First off, If owls just magically give school letters to kids from muggle households, then how do any wizarding children get passed over? Even if they can’t go to school because of stupid parents, the wizarding world should know about them.

Tina is nothing but incompetent and ineffectual. Even when I thought she might matter because Credence had met her before, (ignoring how that flashback was shoehorned in) it ended up not mattering at all.

Also, let’s not pretend that people didn’t die during the climax, you know, with the buildings collapsing all over the city. Then they all got a memory-wipe, which basically means people wouldn’t even remember their loved ones existed. (Hermione did it to her parents, remember?) This movie made me suddenly realize the discrepancy between wizards and muggles and the horror comes from the fact that this is the way the wizarding world is supposed to work. Magical mishaps happen. Maybe if you want to keep magic a secret, you shouldn’t be building your Ministries of Magic in the most populated cities in the world.

Overall, pretty disappointed. It had enough charming bits of the wizarding world I love so much sprinkled throughout, but I would probably not watch it again. I’m hoping that they’ll do a better job with the second movie, but I’m not holding out hope. If you’re a hardcore Harry Potter then go see it, otherwise, please don’t use this as your introduction to the wizarding world.

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Last year I realized that NaNoWriMo was too easy for me. I have participated every year since 2008, and have won every year but two. This year I decided to give myself a new challenge, 90,000 words. Not quite double the original goal, but actual novel length. I went into NaNoWriMo with the first anticipation I’d had in years. I failed to reach my goal. But it’s not about the failure, but about analyzing the why and learning what I can from it.

Why did I fail?

1) I started out with a goal of 3,000 words a day. Then I reached my first Friday and had no time for writing (due to my normal schedule, I just didn’t take it into account.) I caught up Saturday by writing 6,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day, and that burned me out. I changed my daily goal to 3,500 with no writing needed on Fridays. I couldn’t keep this up either.

2) This story came out in a way I was not used to. That being: I wrote scenes out of order, and multiple times before I wrote something that moved the story forward. I don’t know if this was caused by my sudden need for such a large amount of words, the fact that this was a sequel, that I’ve learned so much craft in the two years since I wrote The Storyteller, or something else entirely. Either way, the result is that my forward momentum kept coming to a screeching halt, and while I could produce words, I wasn’t actually moving the story.

3) Politics. I’m actually not kidding. Despite your opinion about who should’ve won or why, the amount of anger and hate that existed on the Internet in the days following the election wrecked me emotionally. I had to abandon Facebook completely.

What did I learn?

1) While 1667 words a day is pretty easy, 3,500 is not. I believe it might be because writing this much didn’t give me enough time in between to think about my story and live my life. I felt very dry, creatively. In the third week I backed off the schedule I had set for myself for a few days and after a few days the ideas started flowing again. So what I learned is I should try something closer to 2,000 words a day for a while.

2) I am a multi-drafter. For those who haven’t read my blog previously, I know that one part of my process is that I write, go back and rewrite from the beginning and go a little further into the story, then go back and repeat. While somehow I managed to plow right through the Storyteller two years ago, that did not work this time. So I also learned that I need to let myself stop an reassess when I need to, otherwise I end up just spinning my wheels.

3) I also learned I should’ve removed myself from the toxic environment online more quickly. As much as I wanted to support the people who were scared, my emotional well being is more important.