Laura Highcove, Author at Laura Highcove

Getting Back Up to Speed

November 26, 2016November 26, 2016 Laura Highcove

Yep, Nano has kicked my butt this year. I got into a spiral of self-doubt and since my schedule was all screwed up because of the holiday I really didn’t get anything done besides grouping the multiple versions of scenes into separate files.

As soon as I got home and was able to organize my space (I swear, I must be the most organized discovery writer in existence.) all the ideas started flowing again. I’ve been able to make some good progress on some scenes I wrote a few versions of already, but now I’m getting it to the way I want it to be.

My plan right now is to continue organizing and rewriting what I have this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be ready to go forward a bit more. I’d like to get to 70k words by the end of NaNo (Just to say I did.) though I’ve likely written more words than my ending word count will suggest. It’s hard to count words on rewrites because I take chunks of previously written words along with completely new writing.

I’m disappointed that I’m not going to reach the goal I gave myself, but then I knew it was a rather lofty goal. I’m going to finish out the month strong, and there’ll be a post coming next weekend on reflections of the month and what I’ve learned.

NaNo Speedbump

November 20, 2016November 20, 2016 Laura Highcove

I met and passed the 50k NaNoWriMo goal. The problem I’m finding myself in now, is that I had to stop and organize what I’d written. I had no idea what had happened because I was writing scenes multiple times (yay discovery writer). Organization takes time away from producing words. And with my brother’s wedding and the holiday coming up, it would be hard enough to write 3.5k words a day, much less spend an hour or two reorganizing as well.

So I took a step back to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish this month. I could put out the words, that’s not a problem. But my goal is to write the sequel to The Storyteller and the less organized my writing, the slower my forward progress. Right now I have two or three versions of most of the scenes with only a vague idea of which one is the one I’ll keep.

I realized I was wasting too much time rewriting scenes. I am learning so much from this month, but I can feel that I’m not being efficient by pounding out words, so I’m stopping, reassessing, and reorganizing. Hopefully in a day or two I’ll have a new plan for how many more words I need to get done, and then I can plow ahead.

Starting NaNoWriMo

November 6, 2016November 6, 2016 Laura Highcove

I am now several days into NaNo and it is kicking my butt. This feels more like I remember my first NaNos, when it was a struggle to come up with 1667 words in a day. This month I started off doing 3k a day to reach my goal of 90k for the month. I’m pretty sure that I will never get many words on Fridays, since I work 7:30-5:30 and Friday night is when the hubby and I go grocery shopping, so the whole day is pretty much gone. The plan was to make up Friday’s words on Saturday, like I have in the past. Writing 6k words in a day ruined me pretty hard. This morning (Sunday) it took me three hours to get 1700 words.

I had to shift my approach. I decided I won’t expect any words on Fridays and divied those words to the other days. So now my goal is 3500, six days a week. Am I pushing myself past what is comfortable? Heck yeah, but I can do it for a month, and I have a good reward waiting for myself.

The Huntsman is probably the one story I have the most ‘outline’ for before I started writing it. Mostly because as I was finishing The Storyteller, I filled my head with all the things that needed to happen in the next book(s). As such, my writing process has shifted to a ‘stitcher’, super hard on this book. I am writing scenes in completely random order, as the ideas come to me, because if I don’t write them down then I will forget them. The idea is after I write it all, I will go back to order and smooth it out. This is not entirely dissimilar to my normal writing style, there will just be far more stitching required.

I am having to constantly remind myself that the important thing right now is to get through the words. Get through the story. It’s all there, even if it’s not organized right now. It has been a real struggle.

Working up to NaNoWriMo

October 30, 2016October 30, 2016 Laura Highcove

I did several prompts this past week, and then thought that maybe I should work on actually writing a large number of words a day. In the past I’ve been able to reliably bang out 1000-1500 words in an hour, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in output mode and not revision mode.

So I decided to work on the short story I had a vague idea about involving Cobalt and Archer. It takes place only a few days after the end of the Storyteller and involves them going to and also going to fix . It ended up being a good thing I did a little practice before NaNoWriMo starts this Tuesday.

Firstly, I had trouble producing words so I had a few days of reminding myself how to push forward through the resistance, as well as remembering the feel of how I get to the place where words flow.

Secondly, it helped me organize some of the fallout from The Storyteller. While that won’t be in The Huntsman, it’s still helpful to have it written out. I’m one of those authors who doesn’t know what I think until I write it down. I can plan all day long, but when I write, I think about it a different way and all the details flow into my brain. Most of the time it kills whatever my plan is and it’s glorious.

I am actually nervous about NaNoWriMo for the first time in several years since I am challenging myself to write 90k words in the month instead of the usual 50k. 50k just became to easy for me and I’ve had no challenge the past few years. Not to say getting out 50k words wasn’t helpful, because it certainly was. It will just be interesting to see if it’s actually possible for me to pop out an entire rough draft in a month, as opposed to it taking two months.

Still no more responses from agents. It only occurs to me now that I don’t know what the procedure is around announcing agent representation. When I (hopefully) find that lucky agent who loves my book, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it public right away. It might be that that only pertains to getting picked up by an editor. Either way, I’ll be sure to post about it as soon as I can.

Agents and Prompts

October 23, 2016October 23, 2016 Laura Highcove

I’ve been a little lackadaisical about my blog posts, and that’s because my writing has been lackadaisical. My novel is out with beta readers for the final polish and I generally get a little ‘omg, what do I do with my hands?’ when I don’t have a clear writing goal.

Last week I researched my first batch of agents, wrote my query letters and synopses (of different lengths), and put it all together to send out my query letters. But since it was the first time I’ve done this particular task, I backtracked to check things three or four times in an attempt to give each agent as close to what they wanted in a query letter as possible. I even made an excel sheet to organize.

I got my first form rejection letter by the next day. It was faster than I was expecting. I celebrated it as the beginning of my ‘writer’s school of hard knocks’, but at the same time, I thought I would be more upset about the rejection itself. Perhaps the time listening to Gabriela and reading articles on how rejection is never personal, that agents reject manuscripts for all sorts of reasons, actually sunk in. Agents all have their preferences. I just have to find that agent whose specific preferences line up with what I wrote.

As for straight up writing, I have close to 2k words on a new story, but at the same time I struggled with the idea of starting a new project when I know I’m going to be writing The Huntsman for NaNoWriMo. The solution finally hit me Friday night. I pulled out ‘The 3A.M. Epiphany’ on Saturday morning and did the next writing prompt in the book.

Prompts are an excellent way to write without having to have a project. And the prompt gave me a great idea for a unique pov that I may use in The Huntsman. I played around with pov in The Storyteller and it was rather enjoyable. So I want to keep that up. I think I may like playing with weird povs. Maybe it will become one of my things?

So the writing life is still going well. Every time I worry that I won’t be picked up by an agent, I remind myself why I write in the first place. I’d love to get my stories out there to share my friends and their worlds with other people, but I’ll keep writing even if I’m the only one who reads about them.

Next Step

October 11, 2016October 11, 2016 Laura Highcove

I typed a blog post on Saturday saying that I had a plan to finish smoothing the rest of my novel by my deadline of Friday. I let the post sit until Sunday, as I usually do, before posting. In that time I finished smoothing the rest of the novel and sent it out to my beta readers. As such, my plan is finished before the post had time to enter the world. Yay to me.

Then I researched agents who will be at the James River Writer’s Conference that I’m going to this weekend. That didn’t take too much time. I also went to the bookstore to try and find some Arabian fairy tales, but that didn’t work. So now I’m a little lost. I don’t want to start on a new project right before NaNoWriMo. At the same time, I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t spend time on writing. I figure maybe I should just sit down and write and see what happens. I am a discovery writer after all.

Extra time to Write

September 18, 2016September 18, 2016 Laura Highcove

Starting in September I now have my weekday afternoons to work on my writing. I knew it would be an extra four hours a day, but I don’t think I quite understood how much time that was when I made my plan the other week. Which is a good thing, because working through the fight scenes and the prose ended up taking longer than I expected.

It’s not that the work is harder than I thought it would be, just more tedious. The book is over 100k words. Even if all you’re doing is reading the book, that takes a while to get through. Though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in going through and fixing the ugly bits that I’ve been ignoring up until now. This novel is more complete than any other novel I’ve ever written, and it’ll only get more so. It’s very exciting.

I also did some looking into agents, which was a little intimidating. Partially because of the idea that I am actually going to start submitted before long, and partially because I realized I am going to have to write a synopsis. A synopsis is basically taking my book and boiling it down to two pages. Or one paragraph. I started working on it, just jotting down the main plot points and I already have way too much, and I’m only halfway through the book. I decided to put it aside until a little later.

For now I’m going to keep working like my plan is perfect and infallible. When October hits I’ll reevaluate where I am.

Analyzing The Prince of Persia

September 8, 2016September 8, 2016 Laura Highcove

I love a movie with a good title screen.

The Prince of Persia movie is one of the few video game movies that is considered good. It is in my own list of favorite movies, though not because it is a video game movie. This movie does a lot of things well and is overall an enjoyable experience, even if you’ve never played the game.

Here are a few of the things I think this movie does very well from a storytelling perspective:

Characterizing the three brothers

Dustan: “Garsiv, your hand is on your sword again.”
Garsiv: “Where it should be!”
Tus: “Oh, my brothers!”

From this first scene where the three of them interact while talking about whether to attack Alamut, they perfectly portray their personalities as well as their opinions of each other.

When Dustan is later framed for killing his father, the brothers act to type in that Tus is conflicted about what to do and Garsiv just wants to cut Dustan open.

It makes it all the sweeter when Dastan is able to convince both of them that he is telling the truth which leads to the feel-good moment when they come together at the end. I love that the trust between the three brothers is such an important part of the story.

Dustan and Tamina

The relationship between Dustan and Tamina is basically a perfect example of the kind of relationship development I love, down to them calling each other ‘prince’ and ‘princess’ sarcastically at first, which later turn into terms of endearment.

They have no reason to trust each other, each using the other to get what they want, but over time they begin to trust each other, and that leads to respect, and then love. It’s such a natural progression that you have no doubt that they will come to love each other again even after time is rewound.

Tamina: “Please don’t mock me, Prince.”
Dustan: “Oh, I hardly think we know each other well enough for that, Princess.
But I look forward to the day that we do.”

Parkour

The choreography for this movie is top notch and that includes all the parkour elements. Since it’s one of the selling points of the game, of course it’s important in the movie too. Unfortunately it is not easily displayed by screenshots.

I’ll just leave this here.

What I Didn’t Like

This movie is not perfect, and it has a few things in it that I don’t like, and it took a while before I stopped and looked at those pieces closely enough to determine why I don’t like them.

This scene always bothered me, because basically, the Sheikh and all his guys followed our heroes from the desert into the mountains before asking what the heck happened with the snakes the night before, and are about to leave before Tamina bribes them with gold. It’s a rather obvious example of leaving a discussion until a later scene in order to improve pacing, and it’s always bothered me since I’m not sure it would’ve been any worse for them to have that discussion when they were still in the desert.

Dustan makes a lot of leaps of logic. While this basically keeps the plot from being too slow, the boy really does piece together plot elements very accurately from very little information. He is characterized as thinking well on his feet, so maybe that’s where you’re supposed to get it from. Luckily he does draw a few of the wrong hasty conclusions as well.

The Sands of Time just …go away when Dustan and Nazam go back in time. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to assume that Tamina was just wrong about the Sands of Time wiping out the earth, or what, but it’s played up as a huge problem, and then it isn’t one.

Despite the flaws, I have watched this movie over and over again. Generally the only scene I skip is the race to the sandglass, which is pretty good for a movie I’ve seen so many times.

Analyzing Howl’s Moving Castle (And Why I Liked the Book Better than the Movie)

August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 Laura Highcove

Next in my series of analyzing my favorite media is Howl’s Moving Castle. I saw the movie before I read the book, mostly because I watch all of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. I loved the movie and so I went out to buy the book. I also loved the book.

Over time, when I would pull the movie out to watch, I found myself instead watching a few minutes of the movie and then going and getting the book to read instead. Howl’s Moving Castle is only 329 pages, so it’s a quick read.

Reasons I Like the Book

1) Character:
I love Sophie and Howl’s relationship and how it develops so naturally between them as they snipe back and forth. Especially! the tiny bits of care Howl displays between his irresponsibility and arrogance that gradually grow more frequent. In fact, I love this so much about the book, that it’s the biggest the reason I don’t watch the movie anymore, because it is practically non-existent there.

Howl said. “I think we ought to live happily ever after,” and she thought he meant it. Sophie knew that living happily ever after with Howl would be a good deal more eventful than any story made it sound, though she was determined to try. “It should be hair raising,” added Howl.
“And you’ll exploit me,” Sophie said.
“And then you’ll cut up all my suits to teach me,” Howl said.

2) Voice/Plot:
Both of these have to do with the book being well written. The narrator is so delightfully playful and the dialogue is witty and appropriate.

“Go to bed, you fool,” Calcifer said sleepily. “You’re drunk.”
“Who, me?” said Howl. “I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold stober.” He got up and stalked upstairs, feeling for the wall as if he thought it might escape him unless he kept in touch with it. His bedroom door did escape him. “What a lie that was.” Howl remarked as he walked into the wall. “My shining dishonesty will be the salvation of me.” He walked into the wall several times more, in several different places, before he discovered his bedroom door and crashed his way through it. Sophie could hear him falling about, saying his bed was dodging.

I also appreciate how well the plot is explained to Sophie in the end. Howl does a lot behind her pov and the Witch of the Waste’s plot is rather complicated, but at the same time I never remember feeling confused about what was happening and why.

Reasons I liked the Movie

1) Bishounen:
Bishounen is a Japanese word that literally means ‘pretty boy’. I grew up watching a lot of anime and this is a trope that is quite prevalent in anime. I love men who are classified as pretty over handsome. Howl is a bishounen.

2) Sense of Wonder:
Hayao Miyazaki knows how to add wonder to his movies by just showing the beauty of nature. It’s probably why I like most of his movies.

Why I Like the Book Over the Movie

1) The movie plays Howl up as noble, with his ‘saving’ Sophie from the soldiers at the beginning and his rampant disapproval of the war. This overshadows his being an irresponsible, arrogant womanizer. I can see why I liked the movie so much at first, because who doesn’t love a beautiful, noble character? Then I fell in love with the flawed Howl. I read the book to watch Howl become a better person through his interaction with Sophie.

2) Sophie does not have any magic. At least not that’s obvious. The one bit of ‘overt’ magic that she does do, in returning Howl’s heart, is in no way foreshadowed, so it’s easy to say Sophie can do it because she loves Howl. I suppose this is rather petty, but I feel like the magic was so naturally a part of who Sophie was that its absence gives her a different feel.

3) The whole war, which was there to create conflict instead of the Witch of the Waste …perhaps because her plot was too complicated? In the end the war didn’t mean anything except there were bombs dropped during the climax. (That and it reveals that Suliman was apparently covertly creepy/evil what with her mini-Howls and the implication that the war was just an excuse for her to gather and strip the powers of witches and wizards.)

4) The Witch of the Waste being horribly ineffective. She curses Sophie, admits she can’t undo the curse, can hardly walk up stairs, gets her magic taken away, and then turns into a senile invalid.

Now I’m sure a lot of parts of the movie suffered because, well, it was a movie and not a book. Books just have more time for detail and character arcs. What I can’t forgive is just how different the Howl from the book felt than the Howl from the movie. I could have been fine with the war subplot if Howl could have just been himself. But since one of the things I enjoy the most in my media are the characters and their relationships, I’ll just continue reading the book and using the movie for character designs.