Author: Laura Highcove

Revision Update: The Plan

Laura Highcove

So here it is, the new year. 2015. Yay. I suppose you could say that revising this story is my New Year’s Resolution, but really it’s just happened like this because January happened to be the next full month after I sat down and made the plan to revise my story.

So here is a recap of the overall plan:
December 6 – 31 (3.5wks): Extract an Outline (Done)
January 1 – February 5 (5wks): Plot and Story (Currently here)
February 6 – 27 (3wks): Main Character
February 28 – March 13 (2wks): Secondary Character(s)
March 14 – April 4 (3wks): World Building
April 5 – April 12 (1wk): Dialogue
April 13 – 27 (2wks): Description
April 28 – May 12 (2wks): Theme
May 13 – 20 (1wk): Line Editing

So this coming Thursday I will have completed the first week of world building revision. I figure I would throw this post up saying what my plan is for this week. On Thursday I will look at what I did and reevaluate if what I’m did is working, or if I need to tweak it.

So, for this week I am working on Plot and Story. The plan is to dive into the story I have after extracting my outline and fill in the bits I was planning that I never got around to writing, or fitting in bits that I did write that are just out of order.

It will probably require a decent amount of new writing, which I think is where I really stumbled in my last attempt at revision. Somehow I didn’t know it was okay to completely rewrite whole sections and chapters. Now I am aware it’s simply part of the revision process.

I would like to get through the whole story in four weeks, so the fifth week I can read through, pull another outline, and make sure everything is there. That’s the plan. Look for the next post Friday.

Revision Update: Extract an Outline 3

Laura Highcove

So the outline I said I was doing last week ended up not being as helpful as I was hoping. I think the issue is I was still relying on all the ‘well I’m going to write this’ stuff. So this week I worked on actually pulling out the scenes I’ve written that are the most complete. That doesn’t mean they’re great, but they are the closest to what I want in the final story. So now I have an actual starting point instead of just everything still in a jumble of files. It’s bare bones, and it’s ~40k words, which scares me a bit.

I did a lot of writing in October and November, but I knew I wasn’t going to use all of it in the final project. Some of it was background, some of it was playing around with the same scene with a different twist. But to actually pull out what it is that I think I’ll be able to use and have it be that little is just an odd feeling, considering how much I had to actively pull from the last rough draft I was attempting to revise, just to get it down to 100k.

On top of that, I am running into the same problem that I was having in that previous rough draft in that the second half of the story is floundering. Turns out that writing the first half of stories for 20 years gets you really good at writing the first half of stories, and not so good at writing the second half. Go figure.

But now that I know it’s a weakness, I’m going to have to do some super heavy lifting in order to figure out how to write endings. I think part of my problem is that I have such lofty expectations that I feel like if I can’t come up with a world shattering ending (a la the Mistborn trilogy; darn you Brandon Sanderson), then I’m worthless as a writer. I need to not aim for that world shattering ending. Not until I can manage good endings. Otherwise I’m just setting myself up for failure.

Now I have my outline pulled. I think for the rest of this month I am going to focus on fleshing out some character backgrounds and working on a short story that needs a tiny bit of tweaking. Then starting January 1st I will actually jump on this thing and start hammering out the plot (a lot of which will be focused on the second half of the book).

Revision Update: Extract an Outline 2

Laura Highcove

So as I move into my second week of extracting an outline, I am now actually pulling out the outline. Making a file for each section that has the main points of what happens in that section, along with notes of things that I want to happen that I might not have actually written yet.

I just hit a section where I know there are certain things that I want to happen while the characters are in a certain place but I have no idea in what order. The scenes I wrote are not in a particular order. So I just put that I have those points to hit. (It didn’t really occur to me until now that I sucks that I can’t really say much more specific than this because of spoilers. Sad.)

I am about 3/4 the way through the story on writing this. It’s making me realize that I have a lot of planning and writing that I still have to do, which is kind of discouraging. I feel like my writing is so much more complete on older stories. I just have to remember that I have had years of work on those stories and this story is only a few months old. It’s going to need some work, so work it will get.

Revision Update: Extract an Outline 1

Laura Highcove

One of the biggest things I had to accept when I made the move from being someone who wrote all the time to being a writer was that even though you have a rough draft, you are still going to have to do some serious writing and rewriting during the revision process.

This has been a very large step to swallow. I have been writing since, well since I learned how to write, so I have that part doing pretty well. Not saying I don’t have more to learn, but in the overall scale of knowing something vs not knowing something, I know a lot about putting words on the page for a story.

Revision is the big bad scary monster with whom I have virtually no experience. As such, I am going to be recording how the heck I manage the revision of my latest rough draft (which I pounded out in two months) so that when it comes time to do this again, I have a plan to follow.

It also creates the secondary effect of holding me accountable to you, the person who is reading this. Yes, hi. Since now you know I’m doing this revision using the revision pyramid from DIYMFA.

Here are the details:
December 6 – 31 (3.5wks): Extract an Outline
January 1 – February 5 (5wks): Plot and Story
February 6 – 27 (3wks): Main Character
February 28 – March 13 (2wks): Secondary Character(s)
March 14 – April 4 (3wks): World Building
April 5 – April 12 (1wk): Dialogue
April 13 – 27 (2wks): Description
April 28 – May 12 (2wks): Theme
May 13 – 20 (1wk): Line Editing

So about six months worth of work (when you take into account that extracting the outline won’t likely take all of this month. I just have to account for Christmas travel). Seems like a lot looking at it from here. But then that’s why I’m taking it a step at a time.

So far I have spent two days, or about six hours … ish reorganizing my story, which came out in a rather haphazard manner. I put a folder with each ‘scene’ and then put in all of the scenes from those scenes in the proper folder while cutting out some of the notes that I tend to write in-line as I’m going (especially for NaNoWriMo, which allows me to help my word count).

In this next week I’m going to make a spiffy outline with what I have, so I’ll see you next Monday for the next Revision Update.

Gotham

Laura Highcove

So at this point I’ve seen a decent number of episodes of Gotham (It’s seven). Gotham is, in case you didn’t know, the city where Batman does his Batman thing. In this TV series, which airs on Fox at Mondays at 8, is actually focusing on James Gordon just after Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, (spoilers!) so at least a decade or two before Bruce goes vigilante. The series follows Jim around as one of the only good cops in corrupt Gotham.

So far we’ve had a lot of ‘monster of the week’ episodes, with the mob boss/penguin storyline weaving its way through the background. At first the overacting nearly killed me. Perhaps it’s because Batman is such a well-known franchise that everyone wanted it to do well so bad that they tried too hard. I don’t know. It was just painful. Thankfully it has gotten better (depending on the character …Fish is still pretty bad.). I also thought the pacing of this show seemed off, but the most recent episode really pulled things together beautifully. That’s part of why I decided to write this review now. The show has proven itself to me to be smart and well written enough to stick with at least until the end of the season.

Now for the characters:

Jim is likable, and I think he is, for the most part, realistically written. You just feel bad for him because he wants to do good and is so far underwater. Every little win for him then feels that much bigger because of the odds.

His partner Harvey is the jaded cop who was once like Jim. His actor is one of the only ones I think has acted well from the beginning. I feel like he is a character, not an actor playing a character.

They also show off Bruce Wayne as a child. He annoyed me at first, but now that he’s further past his parent’s murder, he’s started showing the characteristics of the Bruce Wayne we know and love as Batman. He is, though, still just a child who lost his parents recently and they don’t forget that. I’m warming up to Alfred. He is another of the actors doing a good job; I just didn’t necessarily like the character to begin.

I am disgusted with Barbara. I’m not sure if it’s that the actress has no charisma with the other characters, if the character was written poorly, or it’s a combination of both. I wince whenever she’s on screen and am sort of upset that I know she’s the one that ends up with Jim, so there won’t be any losing her … and all of the scenes that she had with the female cop, Montoya, feel like they were just put in there to have a yaylesbiancouple to drum up some funsexualtension or something. It falls flat; the actresses have no chemistry with each other at all. Just. Yuck.

However, I feel like the Penguin is stealing the show. It is a hard feat to pull off a character being so utterly evil and yet entirely endearing at the same time. He’s the bad guy, he will stay a bad guy, and yet I find myself rooting for him. Perhaps I will change my tune a bit if?/when! he betrays Jim.

They’ve also thrown Selina Kyle in (not really doing much yet, but she saw the Waynes’ killer apparently, so I’m sure it will come up). Poison Ivy as a child was in like one episode. Edward Nygma is just an awkward, pathetic dweeb, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going for. Oh, I also love that they have the three crime bosses vying for position. I mean Gotham is all about the crime. For a while I thought Falcone was going to get shoved to the side, but they reminded us why he is the most powerful man in Gotham.

Overall, this show is worth watching if you’re a fan of the world around Batman. If not, there’s very little there for you. I don’t think it’s so well written that it would be enjoyable without a preconceived relationship with the characters. Then I could be wrong. I had no attachment to the penguin before watching Gotham and now I love him.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Laura Highcove

Elantris starts off in a world on the verge of a religious war. There are only two holdout countries and from those two countries we get the main characters who are signed up for political marriage; only the prince dies while the princess is on route.

Or at least everyone is told he died, because it’s a better idea than telling them he turned into one of the cursed creatures of Elantris. We follow the prince through the mysterious circumstances inside Elantris, which used to be a wonderful place filled with god-like creatures. On the outside, the princess, now a widow, tries to establish herself in the court with many of the prince’s old friends. She also has to pit herself against a powerful representative of the strongest religion in the world as he tries to convert everyone before a time limit.

In my opinion, the characters were believable and a lot of fun to follow. The mystery of Elantris kept me guessing, and I enjoyed finding out about it along the way. There were a few plot devices that were very obviously there only to be useful at the end, but those are forgivable, and there were plenty of others that managed to catch me by surprise.

One of the things I like about this book is the relationships/friendships between characters. Also, I feel like the author knows the ins and outs of his world such that he can play with it in a way that really makes the world feel real. I felt satisfied having read this book and would recommend it to others.

Drawing my Own Lines

Laura Highcove

So I have always been creative. Besides the fact that I have been writing stories since I learned to write, I have always been interested in all manor of other artistic pursuits.

I had a Lion King coloring book when I was around 12 (since that’s when The Lion King came out) that I meticulously colored. I would carefully outline each section by pressing hard with the crayon such that it left a dark line, then I would lightly color in the inside of the lines, such that there was a nice contrast.

My mother also introduced me (and my siblings) to painting ceramics. Taking entirely white figures, usually four or five inches tall, and painting them with acrylic paints. This was also a hobby for many years.

There was also my deep interest in photography, though I don’t remember when I started taking pictures, I was in a class for photography in high school, which put me in the Art Honor Society. I even got one of my pictures published in the high school’s art book.
When I began hanging around online more, after high school, I had a friend who drew pictures and I taught myself to color them in using Adobe Photoshop. I got rather good at it.

These days my main artistic hobby besides writing is painting miniatures. Both Warhammer and Reaper. Some for fun, some for D&D. You can see many of my coloring jobs in my gallery and my mini paintings among my blog posts.

But I came to notice after all these years, that many of my artistic pursuits actively used something someone else has created as a base. My creativity was in adding my own touch to it. I, basically, am very good at coloring inside the lines.

However, my writing is born completely out of myself. Though I am influenced by the ideas all around me (as it’s impossible not to be), the conclusions I draw and thus the characters and worlds I create are entirely of my own making. Writing, I realize, is entirely about drawing my own lines.

A Lesson on Backups

Laura Highcove

So when I was in middle school, I first heard of the pokémon craze. Kids were playing it, talking about it, and I wanted in on that. I got a game boy for Christmas, along with the blue version of the game. I played the heck out of that game, catching all the pokémon I could, leveling them up, reading strategies. When the next games came out I got those as well.

As I grew older, the pokémon franchise did as well. They made a new generation of pokémon where the stats were fundamentally different, as such the older pokémon could not be transferred to the new games. Everything after that cutoff however could be moved forward each time there was a new game. I collected pokémon for years. I saved all the rare or once a game pokémon. I saved pokémon that had a special place in my heart, like my team (generally the only pokémon I named) that I played through each game with. I even got legal copies of the pokémon you couldn’t get from the game at all, mew, jirachi, and celibi. Along with a mewtwo named Jessica that I specifically made sure had the proper personality, that I got only speed and special attack EVs. All those special pokémon got moved from old game to new game up until pokémon SoulSilver came out.

In my opinion HeartGold and SoulSilver was the pinnacle of pokémon. The game was everything I had ever wanted, it had the pokéwalker which was a huge hit, and I spent tons of time getting all the pokémon that I had collected over the past decade onto my SoulSilver game.

I never actually found out what happened, but my theory is that one day I had gotten a new video card for my computer, and all the packaging was on my desk. When I threw away that packaging, my SoulSilver cartridge was on my desk and somehow got collected up and thrown out.

It was a few weeks (I wasn’t actively playing the game at the time, hence why it was out of the game boy) before I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. It took another few months of desperate searching before I had to finally admit that the game cartridge was gone, and with it was every pokémon I had ever collected.

My husband tells me that I was actually in mourning. For several weeks I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and lament that my pokémon were gone. Even now, years later I still wish I had them. Just because they represented so much of my childhood and the memories there.

Unless you played pokémon like I did, it’s unlikely that you really understand the loss involved. I mean it was just a video game, after all. However, this event in my life has made it super clear to me that some things are irreplaceable. Even if I played all the games again (and I did try this briefly) the collection would never be the same as it was.

As such, I do not even take a chance that one day I might wake up having lost all of the stories that I have written over much the same period of time. I daily back up the stories from my laptop to my desktop, which in turn backs them up to an external drive overnight. Once a week I zip the files up and upload them to both Google Drive and my own website, as a college professor once warned us, a backup in the same physical location as the original is not a backup.

I still mourn my lost pokémon but I choose to look at it as a price I was willing to pay in order to never have to suffer through losing all the work I’ve done on my stories. And perhaps this little nudge from me will convince someone else to back up important files so they never find themselves without a backup.

A Kinder, Gentler Website

Laura Highcove

While I don’t have any books published yet, I am hoping that when I do, people will have a yearning to come to my website. That they’ll be interesting in knowing more about the story or even about me. So I want to have a website where people can come and do that.

I recently read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. I have never read any of Stephen King’s books before (I don’t like horror.) but I had heard that this book (which is a memoir + how to write book in one) was good, so I got around to it fourteen years later. Despite his rather haughty attitude and opinions, by the end of the book I felt a kinship with Stephen. Not that I thought we would get along and be bestest friends if we got together in a room, but I understood and connected with him as a writer.

In fact I enjoyed the book enough that I wanted to write him a thank you note. It seemed, at the time, like a good idea. I figured as a super popular author he would never reply, but I felt (as a writer) I would appreciate receiving such a note. So I went to his website to see if there was an email where I could send my letter. I hit a wall of stone and steel. His website is nothing more than a professionally made cookie-cutter front.

Now that’s not to say I blame him. He has a ton of fans. Like tons, and it’s not like he can interact with them all. At the same time, I will never quite forget the way I pulled up his website to see if I could thank him for a wonderfully written book, and I literally (yes, I mean literally) felt the warmth and appreciation sucked out of my body by the soulless website that represents him online.

I never want my website to be that, even if I become popular, I want people to be able to come to my website and find some of me there. Occasional blog posts, cute little stories, or tidbits about characters or story creation. My goal is to have that connection be available for the people who want it because it’s what I want too.

Writing Struggles

Laura Highcove

I have found, in my writing, that I have times when my writing just flows, and it comes naturally, the dialog, the actions, the description. And there are other times when I struggle with a scene, I force myself through it NaNo style. Then I’ll come back later to try and iron it out, and it will flop all over the place like a fish trying to escape a butcher’s knife. I have come to discover that a lot of times when I have these troubles, the only way that I can fix them is go back and completely rewrite the scene, from scratch, and what I generally find is that the struggle I had was in me as a writer trying to force my characters into doing something and them desperately trying to tell me that they were having none of it.

I am getting a bit better with recognizing when this is happening. If something isn’t flowing, most of the time I can catch it and go back to the rewrite step before I put myself and my characters through a non-working scene.

However, this weekend I ran into what felt like this struggle, where my writing just wasn’t working, only it followed me from story to story. After two days of things not working I pulled out a short story that I’m pretty happy with and went to revising it. And it very shortly turned into a massive struggle, when all I was trying to do was streamline the story a bit. This one hit me much deeper because this was something I had already written, something that already worked, and somehow I was unable to revise it into something that still worked.

I cried. I admit it. I felt that somehow I had just … lost whatever it was that made me able to write. At lunch, my husband admitted that he could tell I was upset and so I explained to him what was happening as best I could.

And wonderful man that he is, made me realize that what was happening was that I had been rereading one of my favorite fantasy trilogies, and in that, I was trying to write in a style that was not my own, while I desperately tried to tell myself I was having none of it. So the reason I was struggling with all of my stories over the past few days was because I was forcing myself to do something that was against my nature. I can’t write like someone else any more than someone else can write like me.

Just chalk it up to another life lesson where I am coming to realize that when writing is a struggle, (and I mean a real struggle, not just ‘oh I’m too tired’) that it is simply a character not being able to be who they are, whether it be a denizen of my fictitious worlds or my own self.