Category: journal

Year In Review

Laura Highcove

I just read through a post by Brandon Sanderson, which was extremely long, and was basically an overview of what he got done this year.

It gave me a few moments of panic and self-doubt. He’s turning 40 this year and has already been publishing books for 20 years. It’s easy for me to regret that I’m not further along than I am with my writing career. I mean I have been writing since the second grade. I wish I had realized earlier what I could do with that. Or that, at least, I had put a little more focus and discipline into it.

But then who knows what my world would look like if I had. I’d like to assume I would still be in a good place, but who knows what turn my depression may have taken had I not ended up at Advantage Ranch. I might not have gained the mental fortitude to get through the process of writing a book, and so I would have ended up writing my whole life without ever being able to stay with something long enough to make it good.

And, because I like making lists, here’s what I accomplished this year in the Storyteller:

I spent January through June working on the first revision pass of The Storyteller. It taught me a lot about my process and even ended up spitting out an improved rough draft.

I then took a month off. It was good to do, and I struggled a lot with what to write about on my blog when I wasn’t talking about what writing I was doing.

At the beginning of July I made a new plan to read through my story and add notes about everything that needed to be tweaked and changed without actually doing any of the changes yet. I was a little overwhelmed by how much I felt like wasn’t done. I had to do a lot of self encouragement during this time (and it helped that I went to Writer’s Digest in the middle for support from other writers)

The end of July and beginning of August was a lot of travel for Otakon, Writer’s Digest, and then a horse show in Florida. It really wiped me out. I got back on track by using Dungeons & Dragons to flesh out my character and their fighting styles.

At the beginning of September I refocused my plan. The plan only lasted two weeks until I decided part of my process is repeatedly going back to the beginning of my book to clean it up. So I stopped trying to fight it, and embraced it instead.

So I got through my revision of the first half of the book, and made the plan to completely rewrite the second half of the book during NaNoWriMo. I did that and I spent up until today putting what I wrote in order and ironing it out.

The plan from here is to go over the story once more and make sure everything is ironed down before I give it over to my husband on the first of the year for an alpha read. My husband is great at plot and pacing, so that should help to tell me what I’ll need to do next.

NaNoWriMo Still

Laura Highcove

So NaNoWriMo is going well. Pounding out words has never been the problem for me. Right now I am drifting back and forth between thinking that the Arthur tale and what it provides for the characters and their development is a great idea, and thinking it’s stupid and that it doesn’t fit with the story as a whole.

Such is the life of a writer.

I’m also getting a little bit of mentoring surrounding the POV challenges I have for this story. It means some more research, but for right now I’m still focusing on getting the story hammered out, then I can worry about how it’s told later.

Outside of my writing my husband made some slow cooker pork for tacos that was wonderful. I started learning about bending and suppling my horse on the ground. And I played some Hyrule Warriors last night for the first time in a long time.

NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

It occurs to me that writing a blog post while doing NaNoWriMo is just extra work. I have enough trouble convincing myself to do it when I am not trying to write 2400 words a day, because the weekends is when I have the most time to sit down and work on my writing.

I am certainly hitting the same wall I did before with the second half of my book, but having the word requirement means that I just pound out words and I get a few gems. I guess I’m annoyed that I have to write so many superfluous words to get to the good stuff, but I am happy that I am getting any good stuff.

Not much is happening in the rest of my life because I am spending most of my free time writing. Oh, but I am finishing up Christmas gifts for the hubby’s family since we’re going there for Thanksgiving, so we exchange gifts early. I love shopping for gifts.

Researching Arthurian Legend

Laura Highcove

So today I’ve done a bit of research on Arthurian Legend. The first part of the second half of The Storyteller, I’m sending Tabitha into The King Arthur tale.

Before this I knew the basics of this myth like most people:

There was a king named Arthur. He had a special sword called Excalibur that he got out of a stone or a lake, depending on who you ask. He had a wizard mentor named Merlin. He has a group of knights and a round table. He has a wife Guenevere who is also in love with one of his knights, Lancelot and that got everyone into a lot of trouble.

Places I have seen the Arthur Legend:

The Sword in the Stone by Disney, with adorable little Wart and old man Merlin who taught him everything important.

I saw a live action movie one time that may have been based on the book The Mists of Avalon (which I haven’t read) that focused more on Morgan le Fay. I don’t remember much of it except that she was tricked into sleeping with her half-brother, Arthur.

The BBC series Merlin, which toward the end used the less than happy ending to the Arthur story, ie Arthur getting mortally wounded by Mordred and then “disappearing”, but oh hey it might come back some day. (Argh, I don’t care how ‘faithful’ that ending was, I was so unhappy.)

New things I discovered:

Excalibur actually came out of the lake. There was a lady there who took care of it, and she and Merlin had a thing.

The sword that Arthur pulled out of the stone was not Excalibur.

There is apparently a lot of illicit sex going on among the peoples of this mythology. Arthur’s father slept with a married woman to get Arthur. Arthur slept with his half-sister Morgan and/or Morgause and sired the person who would kill him, Mordred. And some of his knights got naughty as well (Besides Lancelot).

Chivalry was a super big thing, but most things involving Courtly Love eventually just turned into illicit sex.

and …

I’m not sure how I’ll use this information for my story yet, but it was only an hour or so of research. Just enough to get me the basics. I think my main issue is that there are a lot of people in the Arthurian Legend, and if I’m keeping with calling people by their roles instead of their names, it gets a lot more complicated when there are all those knights. We’ll have to see what I come up with.

Writer Igniter Con

Laura Highcove

So this past weekend I went to the first ever Writer Igniter Con put on by Gabriela Pereira the instigator of DIYMFA. The best part was it was all online, so I didn’t have to travel beyond my couch.

Day One
The conference started on time and the digital conference room we were in was really a nice format with slides in the middle and a chat to the side so everyone could interact and ask questions without interrupting the presenter.
We had sessions on making a great outline, seven easy steps to a better novel, a guide to the first five pages of a story, and one on rocking your revisions. Some of the information was a refresher since I’ve taken the DIYMFA101 course before, but it’s always good to be reminded of the basics and I also got a lot of new tips since at DIYMFA they are always striving to make their content better.

First Page Critiques
There were also a chance for attendees to submit the first page of their manuscript anonymously and have some agents give a critique on it.
When we got to my first page, I was so glad there was a computer in front of me instead of real people. I could be as embarrassed as I needed to be about my page being read out loud. It actually went over pretty well with the agents. Much better than I was expecting, which felt super good.

Day Two
The second day dealt with the business side of writing more than the craft.
There was a session on copyright law which talked about how copyright works for authors, as well as a bit of advice on contract law, for those contracts we all hope to sign one day. It was a dense class, but had a lot of good information.
There were also sessions for marketing and social media, how to write a proposal, and an open panel where we could ask the presenters anything we wanted.

Meeting new People
And, of course, one of the best things about writing conferences is meeting new people. I am always on the look out for new writing friends and I even found two fantasy writers to exchange emails with.

And Beyond
With fresh encouragement and new techniques on the brain, courtesy of WICon, I am preparing for NaNoWriMo. I finished a revision pass of the first half of The Storyteller, which is now clocking in at about 50k words. During November, I will be writing the second half of the book from scratch, since I am still struggling there. I am hoping for a little ‘pantser’ magic to get some good stuff on the page that I can then revise into the second half of the book I need.

My Unicorn Horn

Laura Highcove

Much better progress this week. Got through two and a half chapters, though one of the chapters was rather short, I was still able to reach my goal which is great! I have started setting my timer again when I begin to write. Something about the numbers actually counting down with the threat of an alarm at the end adds a sense of urgency.

I also wanted to make sure that I don’t always just make this blog a grocery list of what I’ve done or haven’t done. Sometimes that’s all I’m in the mood for, but this week I wanted to share a little bit about me with everyone.

Ever since I was young, I’ve had a bump on my forehead. It’s a harmless little thing, but people notice it from time to time and ask me if I bumped my head. I got a little tired of telling them that, no, I just have a lump on my head (I know, it sounds so pleasant, right?), so I began telling people that it is where my unicorn horn is growing. That tends to give people a laugh.

When I read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, the thing that stuck with me the most from that book was when he claimed that writing is like telepathy. I feel like writing a book is all about the author taking what the story looks like in their minds and transferring it into the mind of their reader.

That is what makes me want to be an author, as opposed to just a writer. Someday, someone else will give my ideas real estate in their heads and, just maybe, they’ll care about my characters and stories like I do.

So now, when I get my first book published, that’s when my own psychic powers will have developed, and that’s when I’ll tell people that my unicorn horn is fully grown.

Next week was two more chapters, but I want to see if I can get the last three done so I can spend the last week of October planning, and then I can spend NaNoWriMo pounding out another 50k words to see if I can get the second half of my book out of them.

New Goals

Laura Highcove

This week I have been very down on myself. I have been scared about being confronted with the possibility that I won’t be able to meet my deadline. I am beating myself up about not working on my novel as much as I “should”. And I’m hesitating putting my fears and worries out there for people to see. Ironic because I also worry about how few people read this blog.

I’ve been human this week. It’s nothing I haven’t felt before, nothing I haven’t beaten myself up about before, and nothing I will not do to myself again in the future.

Yet despite all this doubt and fear, somehow I am always willing to keep going. I’m not sure why I haven’t given up yet. I wrote about 600 words of complaints and childishness before I got to what you see posted here. Maybe writing out this reflection really does allow me to put it behind me somehow.

This week I finished going through the Cinderella tale. The fight at the end is still rough, and I think it ends rather abruptly, but I have cleaned it enough for this pass.
12 weeks left. Let’s shift some things around. I spent four weeks going through the first 28k words (Four chapters). Seems rather slow, though I did have to do some serious rewriting so I technically did Chapter 2 twice.

I still need to finish going through the first half of the novel, which is another 4 or 5 chapters. Let’s see if I can get that done in three weeks. At that point I will better be able to judge how long the second half of the book should be. For those of you counting, that means I’ll end up with a book that’s way too long, but right now I’d like to run into that bridge.

This week’s goal is to get through the next two chapters.

Under a Deadline

Laura Highcove

This week I had a realization that I was glossing over something that Tabitha really should see, and that is the tale that her artifact sword is actually being used for. As a result I have, for the first time, rewritten some scenes that I think work perfectly well, because I needed to put in something that better works for the story. So I spent the past three days struggling how to not lose the important bits from the previous storyline into this new storyline.

It means pushing back the first occurrence of Rose actually telling a tale, and the town of Deerstep, which will be important later. But since everyone thinks Storytellers’ job is to kill mythics, having that be the first thing you really see them do probably works. I managed to keep in the fight, as well as introducing the concept of another Storyteller team, while also providing obvious proof of the tales and the artifact’s role in them.

Now I’m back in a little bit of panic mode. If I’m screwing with so much at the beginning of the story (It’s Chapter 2), I have no idea how I’m going to get everything sorted out in the second half of the book, which is still a good number of loosely connected points and a bunch of ‘hey, you know what would be cool’ ideas. At least it doesn’t seem to be adding too much to the ‘too long’ first half of the story.

I came to realize last night that I am feeling the stress from working under a deadline I don’t know if I can meet for the first time. I know I can work on my story until the cows come home. I love writing, I love working on it, but this is the first time that I am really expecting of myself to get something done. Now I mean I know I won’t have this publishing ready by January, that would be impossible, but even the idea of getting it ready for beta readers is massive.

At the same time, I will have a contract for a book one day, and then I will be expected to produce something. I need to learn how to deal with that stress, be productive, and not drive myself crazy while there’s no legal ramifications tied to it. I’ve never been the most efficient of people. I get things done, but it’s usually rather haphazard. I don’t know any other way to write though, so nothing to do but keep going. Like I said last week in my super short post, I either keep going or give up writing completely. I am going to get this story to readable by January.

Grinding and Polishing

Laura Highcove

I’m not sure it ever properly came across to me from the advice of other writers just how horrible first drafts actually are. I think that was one of the biggest ‘Ah Ha!’ moments for me, and I know some people’s first drafts look better than others, but I’ll tell you, I think I am at the bottom of the heap. What I started out with is just so far gone from what the story looks like now (and I’m still not near to publishable ready) and it really is turning into something great.

This is my second week where I planned to work on scenes involving Archer and Slayer. Since I finished those last week, I decided to go back to the beginning of the story and clean it up. I have been able to put in some more foreshadowing, nailed down some of the wavering character motivations at the beginning of the book, and now they all actually have fighting styles!

I love going back to the beginning of a story because it’s always so much more polished than the end. It makes me feel good about how far I’ve come before I get back into the still rough later part of the book. I just push the polish forward a little bit at a time with each iteration and eventually the book gets ‘done’ and then I just go back over it again and again.

I’ll have to play around with balancing how often I go back to the beginning and how often I put my nose to the grindstone and push through the new material, since the obvious downside of this method is that the beginning gets a lot more polish than the ending bits. But recently I think I may have been grind-stoning a little bit too much and I was just finding myself discouraged and stuck in a place where I didn’t think any of my writing was any good.

Internet Distraction

Laura Highcove

So my husband and I watched the first season of Sleepy Hollow and then missed the second season. We decided we wanted to watch the second season before the third season starts October 1st, so we signed up for a free trial of Netflix, only to realize we couldn’t watch Sleepy Hollow on Netflix. So we went to Hulu and signed up for a free trial there, only to realize instead of a month, like Netflix gives you, we only get a week. So we hunkered down to watch 18 episodes of Sleepy Hollow in seven days.

All was going well until yesterday afternoon our Internet (and cable) stopped working, and I stopped to think about it, and realized that being out of Internet for a few days isn’t all that big a deal (granted if it hadn’t happened on a weekend it would be a bigger deal because my husband works from home) except that this happens to be the week that we were trying to watch all that Sleepy Hollow. What a bother.

I sat down last night to do my writing and had to stop myself dozens of times from hopping on the Internet to ‘real quick’ check something, only to remember I couldn’t. It didn’t occur to me that it was that big a distraction. I think I might start turning off the Internet during writing time. I have a little wireless button on my laptop that will work perfectly well for that.

That being said, I am getting back into the swing of writing. I think my plan from last week really helped. It surprises me how much I have done, and how much I still have to do. Like I think I can get it beta reader ready by the end of the year, but I can’t imagine how long the polishing will take. Still, even if the polishing takes a whole year, the book will have gotten done in less than three years, which I can be proud of.