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A Collective Sigh of Relief

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021 Laura Highcove

I didn’t post the previous post until the same day I posted this one (though I back-dated it to the day I wrote it) and part of that was because this past month, almost to the day, has been particularly hard. On top of the normal seasonal depression, my grandmother-in-law passed on Christmas, despite Biden winning the election it has been a continual shit-fest (oh yeah, I’m cussing now, not a lot, but some things deserve it), then we had a coup attempt, and it could’ve been so much worse than it was. I also had several other family things going on. The last post really encompassed my malaise.

And I’m just now managing to pull myself out the other side. I think Biden actually taking office and Trump actually being gone has had more of an effect than I expected. It’s like the entire country is finally allowing themselves to be okay again. This article by Chuck Wendig is a thing of beauty and it might do you good to read it. It helped me a lot start putting things into perspective.

The Hubby and I discussed the absolute glut of Bernie Sanders in Mittens memes that have literally flooded the Internet. I’ve never seen a meme storm like this one. And we both agree that this is the entire country latching on to the joy that is a nonsensical meme because we can finally do that again. Because we’re no longer terrified of what Trump is going to do next, that we might lose our country, our freedoms, our lives to the capricious will of that fucking sociopathic narcissist.

Things aren’t normal, they’re not safe yet, but there’s finally hope. And that hope is being expressed by the whole country, using this man in mittens.

The “New” Year

January 18, 2021January 24, 2021 Laura Highcove

Here I am, more than half way into January of a new year and there’s no retrospective, there’s no plan for my writing, no excitement about what the future could be. I feel like I’m drifting through some sort of of alternate reality dream space while mechanically performing my every-day tasks.
Maybe that’s how the entirety of the last year (well since March) has gone, and I just didn’t really acknowledge it until now. I mean I knew the last year was bizarre, but somewhere in my mind, even though I know on an intellectual level that a new year doesn’t mean anything to the cosmos, I was still expecting something to have changed? Something to have shifted? Something to have settled? That there would be something to latch onto. And there isn’t. The agreement reality of the country that surrounds and informs my existence is coming apart at the seams.

My faith in the general goodness of humanity was cracked last year, and that rift continues to grow. I don’t believe that there is no goodness in people but, well, this post sums it up surprisingly accurately.

I look at everyone in my life fundamentally differently now. I believed for a long time time that people are born good, and they are, only now I realize that this world whispers lies, tiny lies over and over again. And some people look at those lies and they question them and search for the truth that will make the world better for all. And other people look at those lies and make them their world, so when they search for truth, the truth is grown from those lies, and they become so convinced of their own rightness that nothing else matters.

The Christmas Break

December 27, 2020December 27, 2020 Laura Highcove

It occurred to me earlier this week that I generally have a vacation around Christmas. Since we’re not going anywhere because of THE PANDEMIC, basically it’s been business as usual, which means the same work schedule as normal. Then I decided, screw that, I don’t have do anything! So I just played fast and loose with my schedule for a few days. In fact I clocked in 15.6 hours on a new game that I bought yesterday morning, in the first day. Excessive, but fun!

As for my writing, I’ve been jumping between Blessings of the Neriel and Jeremy Five-five, since my husband and I are trying out something new with the fight scenes. BotN I’ve been smoothing out pretty hard. Getting a few previously all over the place scenes much more focused, and trying to figure out where I’m going to go from here. I think I have a pretty decent idea, I just have to write it. J55 (which is my new favorite abbreviation for a story) is a story that I absolutely love and I want to write, but the plethora of fight scenes was really a problem for me. This is what I get growing up on shounen anime. My husband got back to me with the first set of bullet points for the first fight we tried, and it still wasn’t easy to write, but now that the rough draft of it is done, I’m hoping it will clean up nicely later. The one we did first was also a short fight, and there are some longer, far more important ones coming up. It’ll be a lot of fun.

I still haven’t gotten back to the Wizard. But my lackadaisical attitude around my writing this week didn’t really lend itself to diving back into that anyway. I want to at least touch base with it tomorrow, though technically the month break isn’t over until next weekend. We’ll see. This is the home stretch, the hard part, and I refuse to give up. I totally get the thing now that writers say about getting distracted by shiny new stories because the one you’re working on has lost it’s mystery. I basically know what I have to do with the Wizard, I just need to write it, and that’s not new and fun, even though I’m sure I’ll still discover new things about this story before it’s all over.

Thanks for continuing to root for me. You’re awesome.

Back to Writing

December 20, 2020December 20, 2020 Laura Highcove

My writing the past two weeks has focused rather heavily on the Blessings of the Neriel. Most of what I’ve done is pushing through what I had written and smoothed out some of the scenes where I had too many different versions to know what my characters were actually doing. I also finally wrote out a character list, because for some reason that story I just didn’t really have all of my characters consistently named. Only the main character, I’ve always known what her name was.

I’m also doing an experiment with my hubby. I have a story I’ve always wanted to finish called Jeremy Five-five. I posted a Chapter 1 of it to my newsletter …last year? Omg was it just last year? …

Anyway, this story is about Jeremy, who is sent to an Academy where the students take part in a video game that allows them to fight each other, only this video game is there to mask the fact that there is magic in the world, in which Jeremy is well-trained, only has sworn off using.

This story, predictably, has a lot of fight scenes. And while I’ve gotten better at them, I’m not convinced I can provide the nuance in the choreography to make the emotional beats land properly. As such, my hubby, who is good at fight choreography, is helping and he’s just gotten back to me with the first set of ‘bullet points’ for the fight so I can take them and turn them into an actual fight.

I also gave myself a bit of a break from the Wizard after Nano, and I’m now getting back to a place where I want to pick it up again. I would like to get through the rest of the smoothing in Blessings of the Neriel first, but that will likely be happening soon. At this point I don’t even remember all of what I wrote, so it’ll be interesting when I dive back in.

Either way, Nanowrimo really did kick me back into my writing habit, and I’m glad that it did.

End of the Year

December 8, 2020December 8, 2020 Laura Highcove

So I have been having a hard time getting back into the habit of these journal entries, but I really want to. Not for all of you necessarily, but because they help me focus, plan, and …why isn’t goal a verb? Even goaling isn’t. Making a goal. Planning a goal. Bah, I’m annoyed by that the same way I am that there’s no word for shaking your head.

But I digress. Last week was the end of NaNoWriMo for one of the …most eventful years of my life. I finished my 50k words. I had been debating authenticating them because of all of the rules I had made up for what I was counting as words for this year. Only the website has changed such that as soon as you put in 50k words as your word count total, you’ve won. Maybe it’s for the best. I did the work, and that’s really the important bit.

And the Wizard still isn’t finish, but it’s so much closer than it was. And I’ve decided I’m taking the month off, or at least a few weeks to just let it settle. Then in January I’ll start organizing what I have and see what’s still missing.

I’ve also been working a bit on the story and characters for Blessings of the Neriel, which has been fun. I’d really like to work on this story next, but I do want to finish the Storyteller Trilogy first.

Pushing Through

November 24, 2020November 24, 2020 Laura Highcove

After the last post, I feel like I should update you on the two big upheavals in my reality.
1) Supernatural’s final episode was complete and utter trash.
2) Trump is refusing to concede to Biden and he’s encouraging his ‘followers’ in the belief that he was cheated out of the election.

Neither of these come as a surprise, but I’m still very upset about both.

That being said, I had a great vacation in Williamsburg. Went to see family briefly, went to a number of nurseries, hung out and had great food with my husband, and got a new video game that I haven’t had time to play since I got back.

Writing has been rough. I kept up with my word count in Williamsburg, but I’m at the point where I have to wrap up everything beautifully. I have to tie up all the loose ends and make it satisfying and once again I’m stuck in the my dead zone, (from the halfway point of the book until the 3/4 mark). I suppose the only thing I can do now is just go write the ending in more detail and hope that at some point I’ll figure out how to get there. It’s already 6pm today and I only have half my words. I wanna put it off for tomorrow but I know it’ll just be worse. Sigh. Just have to keep pushing.

Breaking the Rules of NaNoWriMo

November 9, 2020November 9, 2020 Laura Highcove

Friday and Saturday each gave me a ridiculous upheaval to my reality and I’m still reeling a bit.

Destiel

First, and the one you likely don’t know/care about, is that on Friday I saw the gay relationship of two characters on the long-running show Supernatural Dean and Castiel actually canonized. Like legit. Not like the subtext for the last twelve years that, while amazingly obvious, was still subtext. It was an amazing moment that made me cuss out loud because I never thought I’d see it. And there are still episodes left in the show.

POTUS

Then on Saturday Biden won the presidency. I cried for about a half hour in relief. And I know this doesn’t fix anything, and there are still problems, but right now I’ll settle for it not getting any worse for a bit.

NaNoWriMo

And around all of that, I’m still working my way through NaNoWriMo and I will tell you that I am playing faster and looser with the rules than I ever have simply because it’s necessary. I am doing everything I possibly can to make it the easiest and most productive experience possible. Partially because of mental health issues (which come in no small part to everything that’s been/going on.) and partially because my process has changed so dramatically over the years.

The past few years I’ve had difficulty/gotten stuck in NaNo because what I had written wasn’t organized and thought through yet, thus I couldn’t see the way forward. When trying to pound out words, I write things out of order, I write scenes multiple times with different focuses, everything just comes out into a huge pile. And editing makes it very hard to keep track of word count.

So this year I just said ‘screw it’. I write what I write and count those words, and then I edit those words: copy/paste, write more, delete even more, all to get a working scene, and I count those words as well. Is it to the law of NaNo? Absolutely not. But it’s following the spirit of Nano, which has always been to get you writing. I gave myself permission to do what I needed to do in order to be as productive as I can be AND free myself from the guilt of not following the letter of NaNo. And maybe I won’t verify my story at the end, maybe I will. But either way, I will have more of my story written, and that’s what matters.

My NaNo Pep Talk

November 1, 2020November 1, 2020 Laura Highcove

Okay, so yes it’s scary. Terrifying even that I might not be able to come up with an ending, or a good ending. But all I need to do is write. Write, spend time with the characters. Ask them what they’re doing and see what they say. They’re all established pretty well by now so they should be able to answer. At the end of this month you’ll either have an ending, or you’ll have 50k words getting you closer. And yes, that includes this because the mental game of writing is also important in the writing process. So just write.

Falling into NaNoWriMo

October 26, 2020October 26, 2020 Laura Highcove

Hey, thanks so much for stopping by and checking on how I’m doing. It’s officially fall and we had a great one this year. Two weeks of high 60s, low 70s with 40s overnight. All with the gradual shifting of the trees to their autumnal colors. Beautiful!

So bringing you up to speed, I attended SiWC for the first time. Luckily it was all online, because I’m not sure I would go all the way to California for a conference, even without covid. This was the official alternate meeting place for the displaced Writing Excuses Cruise. Not getting to go on the cruise this year was one of the bigger disappointments, but thankfully I was able to get a little bit of the Wxr Cruise feel around the SiWC.

I attended some Wxr events in the week leading up to the start of the conference itself. Thursday was an all day masterclass, then Fri-Sun were the conference workshops. I learned about plotting, conflict, decolonization, word choice, social media, and endings just to name a few. I’m going to be sorting through that information for a while yet, I’m sure.

And now that October is almost over, it’s time to look ahead to NaNoWriMo! This year has really been rough for writing. Covid simply killed my motivation for several months, and I’ve been working my way back up. This year I’m looking forward to NaNo as a way to just get through the rest of the rough draft for the end of The Storyteller Trilogy so it can be complete. Not only does it mean I’ll finally get to know what happens, but I want to help these characters finish their journey, AND I want to move on to the next project.

I’m also making the shift to a journal entry a week. Every two weeks made it hard for me to remember. Plus, I use these journal entries mostly to reevaluate where I am in my writing and to reset goals if needed, and truthfully, I probably need that weekly right now.