Category: blog post

Subjective Opinions

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I went to a horse show recently with my appaloosa gelding, Nick. I showed a number of classes, but one class in particular was Showmanship. Showmanship is a class where you show your horse in-hand and take them through a defined pattern, and it is a class both Nick and I are well trained in.

I ran my showmanship pattern at this show, and I knew I had done well. I hit the points I was supposed to hit, Nick stayed with me and went through the maneuvers as he should, and I was smiling as I left the ring. My coach even gave me a “good job” as I exited. Out of five participants in the class, I received 5th, 3rd, and 1st, one from each of three judges. I realized had no idea how to interpret that. One judge thought I did the best of the class and another thought I did the worst?

And so, of course, it made me think about book reviews, (of course!). While I don’t have any books of my own out there to be reviewed yet, I have read plenty of book reviews for other books. I’ve read plenty of reviews for books I haven’t read, but I have also gone back to read reviews for books that I have read. I have seen one star reviews on books that have literally changed my life for the better, and five star reviews on books that I thought were just horribly written.

The reminder here is that judging anything is so subjective. Different people put different weight on different things based on their experiences, skill/knowledge, and even current mood. Even on something as short as my two minute showmanship pattern, it’s possible that one of the judges saw Nick step out of line, or thought he was crooked, or not engaging his back. Another was impressed by a beautiful stop or a well done haunch turn. It’s possible that it was a matter of them looked down or up at different times.

After I thought about it, it just brought to light how little control I have over other people’s opinions. Even my favorite authors have people who don’t like their books. I will have my own book out there one day and I will likely get more of the same. People who laud my writing as something that spoke to them, and others who curse my name to the depths of hell.

While it is much harder for an entire book to be all good or all bad, if I can get such varying results from a two minute showmanship pattern, then it’s not surprising to get varying results from a 100k word novel. It just shone a little more light on the fact that I’d better like the book I produce, because I’m putting in far more time than anyone who reads it, and I have no control over how anyone likes it.

Never Give Up

Laura Highcove

Okay, so bear with me for a minute, I’m going to talk about professional wrestling. John Cena is a professional wrestler who has been a top guy in the company for many years. He has recently been on TV less because he is off doing other things like making movies, as such he missed out on getting a match at the upcoming Wrestlemania.

Cena’s storyline (because wrestling is scripted) had him repeatedly fail in attempts over the past few months to earn himself a match at Wrestlemania, but true to his catch phrase he has refused to give up. When he was unable to earn a match through tournament competition he began attempts to call out the Undertaker (an older, but super popular, wrestler who *should* be retired but often shows up for Wrestlemania). For four shows, Cena has come out into the ring and called out the Undertaker before getting the crowd to cheer for how much they would love to see the Undertaker again.

And every week the Undertaker has refused to show up or acknowledge this call out, yet despite this failure, Cena comes out the next show and tries again. What I liked about the Cena storyline is that he tried winning his way into a match at Wrestlemania and when he failed at that, he went and tried another way by calling out the Undertaker. And despite the Undertaker’s apparent apathy for Cena’s call-outs, Cena went out on four different shows and repeated a similar plea.

I think it’s important sometimes to remember it’s not about just throwing yourself at a problem over and over. It’s about having a goal and working toward that goal in an intelligent way. I want an agent, and while I am querying, I am also working on improving my book’s pitch. I am also writing another book because perhaps The Law of the Prince Charming will not be the first of my books to be published. I am also continuing to learn more skills, put my writing process to the test and help it evolve. I might even, at some point, stop pursuing traditional publishing and look at self-publishing. There are lots of different paths I can take to the eventual goal of getting a book out there in the world.

Now the Cena-Taker match happened (because wrestling is scripted) and ended up being what’s called a squash match, ie, Undertaker won decisively, very fast. Now Cena’s goal was not to get beat, but he did get the match he wanted, but he strove for it all the same. I know all I can do with my writing is keep moving forward by continuing to learn and remaining flexible. So if you have a goal, aim for it, but don’t be so focused on it that you don’t see other paths that will lead you toward your goal. And who knows, it might not end up looking like what you were expecting, but it could be even better.

Becoming More Myself

Laura Highcove

So I started writing a blog post for this week about a month ago. I came back to it a few times and edited it, but it was never quite feeling right. I talked through it with my husband to no avail and last night I realized what the problem was. The post was too much of a rant, me complaining about the world and my own opinion of how things ‘should be’. And when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that that’s just not my style. The whole reason I have such a problem with writing blog posts in the first place is because I don’t feel comfortable stating my opinions as ‘right’.

And I’ve struggled a bit with the idea that I’m only careful with putting my opinions out there because I’m a woman and yada yada. But that’s the same trap I found myself falling into for those years when I thought I wasn’t female enough. I was listening to people ‘out there’ tell me how I should react to the world around me. I thought because I don’t like jewelry, or bags, or makeup that I wasn’t female enough. It actually got worse with the “me too” movement because suddenly there were more opinions out there about what women should do or be like. At a certain point, I finally had to decide: ‘screw that’.

I think I’m finally making that same kind of distinction here. I write my journal entries that are basically just that, journal entries, because I want people to be able to read about the struggles I have in my every day life, see how I deal with them, and perhaps find something that will help them in their own lives. Giving my opinion on how people should deal with their feelings (that’s what the failed blog post was about) was outside of that. I don’t want to tell people how they can have a better relationship with their own feelings. I’d rather show them my own relationship with myself and my feelings and let people draw their on conclusions.

And finding that this is part of who I am has been a lot of trial and error in learning to distinguish between when something is hard vs when something feels wrong. I could never begin to tell anyone else how to differentiate that for themselves. The closest I’ve come is a set of posts I wrote a while ago that talk about feel and awareness.

Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

Though even in these posts I focus mostly on the process I used with a few suggestions of how it could work for someone else. These are the types of posts I like to write, I guess I just needed the reminder. Now I just need to wait until the next thing goes wrong in my life so I can talk about how I respond to it. Shouldn’t be too long.

Gryffins: In Books and Video Games

Laura Highcove

So in putting together a post containing my gryffin collection I made a discovery. My gryffin collection is large, and so I decided to create a few different posts to show it off, rather than trying to stuff everything into one post. So this is the first post of three.

Gryffins in Books

I mentioned last week that one of the things that started me on my love of gryffins was the Mercedes Lackey series starting with The Black Gryphon. This was one of the first fantasy series I ever read. I don’t remember if I picked up this series because of the gryphons, or if it was just a happy accident.

I also mentioned the Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce, which doesn’t feature griffins in the entire series, but does have the main character Kel take care of a griffin kit for a while before it’s parents come to take it back. This series I read because I loved the Lioness Quartet and it just happened to have griffins in it.

I have also picked up a few series because they feature gryffins:

The Fallen Moon series I wasn’t super thrilled with. It started out good, but I think in trying make both the protagonist and antagonist human, the author ended up making neither all that likable and I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be rooting for by the end.

The Gryffin Mage series was a unique take on griffin mythology, where they were creatures of pure magic born out of fire (I think) and while they could think and speak, the author was successful in getting across their unique way of being.

And I have also run into them in other books quite by accident.

This gryffin pops up in the first volume of Magic Knight Rayearth (it’s a manga) where a wizard summons one for them to ride around on a bit.

And also in the book, the Copper Promise by Jen Williams where gryffins are featured as a plot point later in the book. (It’s not a spoiler.) No picture of this one because there’s no picture of a gryffin.

Gryffins in Video Games

Gryphons existed within the World of Warcraft MMORPG that was crazy popular many years ago. I was actually a hardcore raider for a number of years. Anyway, gryphons are used by the humans of the alliance for their flight paths. Ie, you would talk to a flight master and a gryphon would pop out and fly you to your destination. If members of the other faction try to kill the flight master, the second picture is what would happen.


In the expansions, gryphons became mounts you could buy and use to fly yourself around. I count this as part of my collection because I did “acquire” all of the different types of gryphon mounts you could have and technically they still exist on my account even if I don’t play anymore. The first picture are two versions of the slower gryphon mounts, and the second picture is the faster armored version.


If you’re interested in seeing the other versions, here’s a link. I don’t have the High Priest’s Lightsworn Seeker (Though now that I see it, I’m rather regretful. My main was a priest.) or the two grand mounts. Those all came out after I stopped playing.

So there’s all my gryffins for this installment. More coming soon.

I Love Gryffins!

Laura Highcove

I have loved gryffins pretty much my entire life. While I love mythological creatures in general, gryffins have always held a special place in my heart.

One of the first fantasy books I ever picked up for myself was The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey. It’s possible that part of the reason I loved it so much were the illustrations at the beginning of every chapter of the main characters. I will often pick up a book series just because it features gryffins. I’ve had varying levels of success with this, but I am always happy when a gryffin shows up in a book/movie unexpectedly.

So what is a gryffin? Wikipedia gives a good enough explanation. Basically, a gryffin is a magical creature that has the body of a lion, the wings, head, and front feet of an eagle. Some have feathered ears (I prefer it this way), some don’t have the front feet of the eagle and instead continue with lion for the whole body.

Two things influenced the way I saw gryffins early in my career. One is that there seems to be no ‘right’ way of spelling gryffin, and tons of ‘correct’ ways. As such, I decided to spell it gryffin because I like the letter ‘y’ (I think, perhaps, because it was the only ‘vowel’ in my last name growing up.) and I also liked the look of the double ‘f’ over the ‘ph’. As such: gryffin.

The second was Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series, in which the main character, Kel, is forced to raise a baby gryffin for a while. When the parents finally come to get the baby, they give Kel some of their feathers which give truesight. I latched onto this idea of gryffins being the embodiment of truth as well as protectors (usually of treasure, but I took liberties with that.)

This is much of the way gryffins are portrayed in The Law of the Prince Charming’s world. Gryffins (Though we only meet one in the book.) have the Laws of Truth and Protection, as well as Wings and Wind. Though none of my other books have really made it ‘out there’, they tend to always have a gryffin in them somewhere. In fact, the first story I ever wrote that made it to 100 pages in a word document (I didn’t know about counting words back then) was about gryffins.

Stay tuned for more pictures (and explanations) of the gryffins I have collected. I have lots.

My Favorite Supporting Character Archetypes

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

DIY MFA Book Club, Prompt #7: What’s your favorite supporting character archetype and why?

My favorite supporting archetypes are the bff and the fool.

Most of my enjoyment out of books comes from interpersonal relationships. I love it when two people, or a group of people, come together to form a team based on mutual respect and trust. Bonus points if they really didn’t get along to begin with. That’s why I love the bff (best friends forever) archetype. Most of the main characters in my books end up in relationships like this just because I love it so much.

I am also a huge fan of the fool. For those who don’t know, the fool is the opposite of what you expect from the name. It’s a character put in the story to tell the truth, the way things actually are. Often times they have some sort of information the main character(s) don’t. The favorite example I have from my own stories is Chae. Despite being young, his particular abilities lend themselves to understanding far more than he should at his age.

“Best Practices” That Didn’t Work for Me

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

DIY MFA Book Club, Prompt #5: What’s one “best practice” that didn’t work for you?

I have a number of these “best practices” that just don’t work for me. I’ve learned to take any and all advice with a grain of salt, even the ones that seem so ubiquitous that there’s no way it isn’t true, like: “Write every day.” So let’s start there.

“Write every day.” – or, you know, on a schedule that works for you

I don’t write every day. I take Fridays off and other days when things are busy. For me, it was just important to set up a schedule and put aside time to write. When holidays roll around, or other “disruptive events”, I honor my reality and take off the days I need to.

I also don’t necessarily write new words every day. Much of my process involves rewriting over and over (I call this ‘smoothing’.). Some days I *have to* reorganize what I’ve already written before I can move forward with the story. That means sometimes I end up with far fewer words than I started the day with, and yet what I have is better.

“Stop writing when you’re on a roll.” – unless that means you lose momentum

The idea here is supposed to be if you stop in the middle of the action, when you sit down to write the next time, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off more easily. This one got me into trouble a few times because when I tried it, I found that the way my mind works is that once I lose an idea, it’s often gone completely. So I would be writing toward a goal, stop in the middle, and when I sat down the next day I would have literally no idea where I was headed. (Occupational hazard for discovery writers more than plotters.)

I have learned that I need to stop and write ideas, even in the middle of an ongoing scene, or else I will often forget it by the time I get done. And I always finish a scene, or at least a thought before I stop writing for the day. I’m learning to identify my natural lulls, which normally means it’s a good time to stop if I need a stopping point.

“Ignore your inner critic.” – when it’s a good idea

This is a tough one. Because a lot of times you do need to ignore the critic in order to move forward, and not get bogged down. But as you develop more skill writing, sometimes it is important to listen to this critic.

An example: I’ve been struggling with my most recent novel, a book two. I have a character in it that I absolutely love, but my inner critic kept telling me she was superfluous. I kept convincing myself that everything would come together with her eventually.

I finally had to admit that I needed to listen to my inner critic and get rid of this character completely. Her being gone left the main character more time to interact with the other characters, strengthening their relationships and tightening the plot. And truthfully, it’s better that I got rid of her now before I wove her throughout the entire story and made her even harder to take out.

“The only best practice is the one that works best for you.” – period

Luckily I had DIY MFA around to remind me of this one. And truthfully, now I roll my eyes whenever I heard an author say the best advice they have is to ‘write every day’. I would encourage you, as you grow more skilled at writing, to practice saying, “Something that has worked for me is …” Because there really is no advice that works for everyone, but there are people out there who will gain benefit from what you’ve learned works for you.

Storytelling Superpower

Laura Highcove

DIY MFA Book Club, Prompt #3: What’s Your Storytelling Superpower?

Result: The Protector

Your superpower is writing superheroes! Your favorite characters see their world in danger and will do whatever it takes to protect it and those they love in it. These characters may not wear spandex and capes, but they show almost superhuman fortitude in their quest to prevent disaster, whatever the cost to themselves. From Scarlett O’Hara to James Bond to Iron Man, you’re drawn to characters who stand up to the forces of evil and protect what they believe in.

Yeah, it fits pretty well for me, the Protector, as well as what I like to write about. My current book series is about a prince charming, who is a girl, and she is always doing whatever she can to protect the people around her. (If you’re interested in reading more about her, you can get a free chapter here.) The theme has come up often in past book attempts as well.

I (the author) like other people and so my characters and themes in my story usually revolve around people all wanting to protect each other in some way. I don’t usually like stories where people betray each other a lot (not that my characters won’t ever do that) or tend to mistrust persistently. I love to see the interactions among people who love and/or trust each other.

The other results for the Storytelling Superpower (I keep trying to type storyteller, because my book has storytellers in it. :p), in case you’re curious are: The Instigator, the Underdog, and the Survivor. You can probably sort of guess as to their meanings from the names, but if you’re interested scroll down on this page and they’re all listed out.

I am also a survivor. Which comes in handy for being an author. 🙂

Honoring My Reality

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

A prompt from the DIY MFA Book Club: Tell a story about a time when you had to honor your reality. Has there ever been a moment when writing felt completely incompatible with your real life–when it felt like there was just no way you could make the two exist together?

The problem I have with honoring my reality doesn’t come from a feeling of being unable to make my life and my writing coexist. Writing has always been a natural part of my life, completely intertwined. If life gets too busy, I stop writing and take care of it, and then I drift back to my writing naturally.

My problem comes from trying to determine the balance between my life and my writing now that I have a goal of being professionally published. I have a hard time figuring out how much time I “need” to spend writing vs how much time I “need” to spend relaxing.

When you have a boss who is not yourself, the appropriate amount of hours/effort is determined by someone else. You know that you work from 9 to 5, with a break for lunch, or that you have certain tasks that need to be done before you leave. You know (if your boss is any good) what is expected and how much of it.

My own hours/goals are defined by …whatever I think is manageable, or what I think I should be doing. Sometimes it’s reasonable, and sometimes I overestimate what I’m able to do. The variability and the fact that I’m the one that sets my schedule makes it very hard to be able to define the amount of work I do as ‘enough’.

There are certainly days where I convince myself that I’ve done enough when I really just want to read a new book, or play another level in a video game. There are other days that no matter how much I write, my mind tells me: ‘well I could be writing right now’ or ‘did I really get enough writing done today?’.

And at those times I try and remind myself to honor my reality. That I need time to write, and I need time to relax. It doesn’t always work. While I’ve never worried that I won’t have time for writing, finding the happy balance between work and rest is an ongoing struggle.

My Origin Story

Laura Highcove 2 Comments


A prompt from the DIY MFA Book Club:

Writing is a superpower and every superhero has an origin story. What’s yours? When did you realize that you wanted to write? What motivated you to get started?

I’m not sure that I can hone in on the exact moment where I remember thinking ‘Now I want to write’. I have just always written. It was as natural to me as breathing, and in fact it was not until much later in life that I realized other people *didn’t* write like I did.

However, the first memory I have surrounding writing, is about a story I wrote a long time ago called Cottontails Big Adventure. Why yes, I do still have the story and yes, you can read it. It has pictures!

Cottontails Big Adventure

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8

The thing I remember specifically about this story is that when I killed off the antagonist at the end of the story by having him fall in a lake and drown, the wonderful teacher that I had praised my originality. She told me it was very creative that my characters didn’t just end up getting along for no reason at the end of the story. (Which apparently many of my classmates had happen. I swear I don’t remember what grade I was in when I wrote this.)

That praise is the thing I remember most. It’s possible that after that is when I started writing more stories, or maybe this was just one in a line of stories I wrote that didn’t survive until today. All I know is that this story helped to define a lifetime of writing.