Before the Shift

Laura Highcove

Didn’t quite make my goal of getting through Gabir’s turning point by Sunday, but I was pretty close. I had it done by Tuesday. All things considered, this first part of the story is starting to come together. However, this is the point at which the story really starts to fall apart. I have ideas of what I want to have happen, and some of them aren’t working, some of them feel forced, and others just aren’t good.

Part of what I want to get out of the alpha read is feedback and even suggestions for the story. At the same time, I feel rather icky with the idea of sending it out in this state. (Even to people I trust.) The Law of the Prince Charming’s story was solid all the way through before anyone but my husband saw it.

A few things happened since my last post. The Show Team is back from Nationals (they did very well) so I am currently enjoying my first full day off in two and a half weeks. However, two weeks ago Nickel, one of my cats, started having a health issue and while I don’t have a solid answer as to what’s wrong, the possibilities are rough. As such, I haven’t been in an entirely good mental state. I haven’t been able to go ‘head down’ on my story like I was planning once the Show Team was back. Nickel has an appointment with a specialist next week, and depending on the answers (or lack thereof) I’m not sure how things will be going forward.

I’ve been trying to get as much done as I can before the possible shift in my reality. But even on a good day it’s hard to slog through the story when nothing feels like it is coming together. Maybe I really do just need this feedback. While I was able to write the Law of the Prince Charming almost entirely off my own ideas, it’s a book two and I have even less skill with this than I have with ending a book. Maybe a little outside influence is exactly what I need.

Pushing Through the Huntsman

Laura Highcove

Things are a little rough right now. I’m in the middle of working the barn 7 days a week (with one coworker) for two and a half weeks. I’ve done a pretty good job of losing track of what day it is, and I’ve been grumpy, tired, and watching a lot of Supernatural.

As such, I’ve gotten very little writing done. But not none, because I like writing and I want to write. I made a bit of a breakthrough a week ago with the order of some scenes in a few chapters, and then hit the wall of the most underdeveloped part of the story. My brain’s a little lacking in the “organizing the overall plan” space right now, so it’s probably harder than it should be.

But, as you may have seen in my newsletter, my plan is to have some alpha readers look at the Huntsman at the end of July. Last time I had my hubby read it. He was able to give me some very good advice that cleaned up a lot of things and I’m hoping this time will do the same. It would probably really help for me to have writer friends who are willing to do critiques, but I’m not strong at making friends.

I still have work through this weekend, and then I’ll be back to my regular schedule. It’ll probably take me a day or so to get back into the swing of things, but after that the plan is to plow ahead full speed and get the Huntsman as ready as I can make it. Right now I have 11ish chapters left. (41k words) Things are rather haphazard at the end of the story, so I can’t really count on those to be anywhere near the same amount of words or work to bring them up to snuff.

My first job will be organizing the scenes I have written into a workable order, sight right now they’re mostly scenes I wrote totally independently of each other, all stuck into the same part of the story. Then I need to make sure all of the elements I need are in there, and then smooth it out a bit. That, of course, being the least important bit, since my alpha readers will know it’s a little rough. I actually left notes in the story when I had my hubby read it to warn him at two distinct points when the amount of polish took a moderate, then severe nosedive. He still got through it enough to help me out.

Anyway, so measurable goal: By the end of next Sunday I will organize though Gabir’s turning point, which is approximately three chapters. All scenes need to be orange, which means all of the elements are in the scene, even if it’s not perfectly readable.

Review: Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

Laura Highcove

My Review of Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

My summary: An RPG/Squad/Kingdom Builder/Idle Game blend about a young prince whose father is murdered, and is then saved by the President of the United States (not even kidding), and gathers a group of friends to create a new kingdom and unite the world in peace.

Why I picked up this game: Someone told me about the kingdom building aspect of it, and I was interested in that, plus I needed some sort of reward for finishing Camp Nanowrimo.

What I knew going in: Kingdom builder/RPG with Ghibli designs.

My response:

Positives:

This game is actually like three games in one.

There’s the RPG game, with free-moving combat a-la FFXV, only fighting felt easy and much more natural than FFXV. You level up, get new weapons and armor, and unlock and level up spells. There were also higglties. I didn’t use them the way they expected you to, but meh. My gear was so overpowered by late game that I didn’t need them.

There was also a …squad combat game, that you used to fight battles they they wanted to feel better than a party of three versus some monsters. You had four squads of people that would then fight other squads of people as you took territory and built structures. It was a ton of fun, but I don’t think I made it sound all that great.

And lastly, my main reason for purchasing the game, a kingdom-building idle game that I focused most of my attention on. The resource you needed in order to build up the kingdom was timing based. So even when I wasn’t playing the game proper, I would leave the game running and check back every half-hour or so to use the recources or finish research. You also recruit people from other kingdoms to yours in order to put them to work. I found out later that there were checkpoints in the main story where you were required to have your kingdom to have a certain amount of “reputation”. I wasn’t even aware of this because I was basically building up my kingdom as much as I could whenever I could. This is also why my gear was so boss by the end of the game.

An interesting feature was that every quest basically told you exactly where to go and who to talk to. There were even markers on your map telling you who had a quest for you. And when you were tracking a quest 90% of the quests showed you exactly where to go on the map. Part of me was annoyed that the game held your hand so tightly in this regard, but the other part of me was happy to not have to do much wandering around without purpose, or talking to everyone each time a major plot point resolved in order to find new quests. So in the end, I enjoyed it, but I could see some people being annoyed by the simplicity of it.

Overall, loved the game-play itself.

Negatives:

Not impressed with the dungeons or the so called “mazes”. Dungeons were stupidly linear (and bland looking), with no more than two paths at a time, one of which would either loop back in or end in short order. And then there were the Dimensional Mazes. I was terrified to go in the first time because they talked about how you couldn’t save, and there was no map, and over time the enemies would get stronger. They were stupid and not at all difficult, and the ones I found during the course of normal game-play didn’t even have good items in them.

Music: I started playing without sound on at all because the music in almost every place besides Evermore had this …urgency to it that made me tense. Like the kind of music that plays when you need to hurry up, only it was like that all the time. English voices weren’t bad.

The Story. Okay yes, there are spoilers from here on. You’ve been warned, but the story is so bad and literally nonsensical in places that I really have to make fun of it. Tuck yourself in, this is going to be a long one.

So the game starts in a motorcade in what appears to be the ‘real’ world. We zoom in on an older fellow in front of what is very obviously supposed to be the seal of the United States President. He is driving into “New York City” and a nuke goes off. Stay with me. The Potus, having survived, begins to glow.

Cut to Evan, the prince who’s father has just been killed because of course he has, with the bad guards are closing in and suddenly light! Out of nowhere, the Potus, Roland, who is now like 30 years younger (and hott for Ghibli), shows up, takes in the situation, and shoots the guards.

Eventually Roland gets decked out with swords and a weapon-holding magic armband that refills his gun with bullets … They escape, leaving Evan’s bad-ass nursemaid behind to fight a mouse centaur who looks awesome but who never shows up again!

We (the party) meet up with some air pirates, and then go find some unsettled land, fight off a few bandits, get their own Kingmaker (a magical animal you need in order to prove you’re a king) and establish Evanland. Okay, so now the Kingdom Building aspect finally starts.

Everyone goes to Dogland in order to have the leader sign our peace treaty to unite the world. (Evan is a cat from Cat/Mouseland) We discover a sinister snake-wearing man is controlling the Dogleader and using the country’s love of gambling to make things very uncomfortable (financially) for people. Snakeman steals the Dogland Kingmaker, but everything’s okay otherwise and we get the treaty signed. No problem with this story yet.

Then onto the water kingdom. We get there and there are all kinds of weird rules in place (like it’s illegal to fall in love and outsiders are shunned) and there is this creepy eye watching everything. We get the Waterqueen’s right hand man in our party, who swears the queen is good even though all evidence points to her being all sorts of insane.

After we finish this area’s dungeon, (and lose the Waterland Kingmaker to Snakeman) we learn that the Waterqueen’s rules are not insane. In fact this kingdom was blown up by a volcano some time ago, and she has been continually turning back time so the kingdom still exists, but for the spell to work the number of people on the island has to stay the same. So no one can move off or onto the island, nor can any new people be born. But it’s okay (and totally not insane) because she’s going to let the spell lapse since they’ve had enough time, but before that she wants to marry her right-hand man, but weddings take a while to plan so she tells him to stay in our party until the wedding is ready to take place, and of course she’ll sign our peace treaty. I’m not even making this up. This was literally the ending cut scene for this area. Not to mention immediately after this I started recruiting people from her kingdom to my own. The kingdom never blew up and the Waterqueen and her subjects helped in the final battle …

Next we headed to Techland, a kingdom where technology (and guns) exist. (So at least I have some sort of explanation for why the armband was able to create bullets.) Here, Techleader is working his workers literally to death, but turns out he’s also controlled by Snakeman who steals Blastoise, I mean the Techland Kingmaker. Once Techleader is no longer under Snakeman’s influence, he’s cool again. No matter those people who died. We’re all friends forever.

Brief interlude where Roland convinces Evan (and the rest of the party) that he’s betraying him so he can sneak into Mouseland and get an important artifact by buddying up to Mouseking. Only Mouseking was never fooled, Roland manages to get the artifact, and explains the convoluted plan to Evan after the fact …

Then we all go back to Mouseland, where the cats now live in the slums because they treated the mice horribly before. Was Evan’s father a bad guy? Turns out no, because we find his journal, which is holding his soul (or part of it?) and he was trying to fix the hatred between the cats and mice, but Snakeman messed things up. Oh, and Snakeman shows up and takes the Mouseland Kingmaker. But Mouseleader signs our treaty. Yay!

Now Snakeman has all four Kingmakers and brings back his lost kingdom, along with a huge Kingmaker, the Horned One, that starts sucking the souls out of everyone in the world (except Evanland, because we still have our Kingmaker)

All the kingdoms have united and go to fight this new threat. (All while Roland starts having dark energy fits.) We get to Snakeman who reveals his plan to us along with the fact that he is Roland’s soulmate! (!?? Literally the day before I got to this cut scene I was watching a speed run of Ni No Kuni the first, and found out a big part of that game is that there are two worlds and each person in one world has a soulmate (in that they share a soul, not they’re lovers) with someone from the other world. There was no mention or allusion to this in Ni No Kuni II until this reveal.)

Anyway, turns out this is why Roland was pulled to this world, and we can’t fight Snakeman because it will hurt Roland. We fight him anyway. Then we find out Snakeman is doing this because he fell in love with the Kingmaker of his own kingdom and the gods punished him by wiping out his kingdom, and turning the Kingmaker into the Horned One.

We eventually triumph only to find out Snakeman (and kingdom) was not cursed by the gods, but the Kingmaker chose to become human to love Snakeman. In doing so she released the energy that made her a Kingmaker, which then destroyed the kingdom, and (I think) in trying to stop the backlash of energy she released, got caught in it and turned into the Horned One? I kind of gave up on the story by this point. Either way, they can’t be together. But Snakeman is going to start over and build a new kingdom from scratch because Evan inspired him with 12-year-old wisdom.

Now at the end of each chapter, Evan has been meeting a “curious boy” in his dreams who often says something wise and/or hints at something that happens in the next chapter, leaving the player to wonder who he could possibly be! (Mostly I forgot about him until each chapter ended.) Well, turns out he is King Ferdinand, the king who, in the past, united the whole world. Only King Ferdinand is actually Evan’s son, from the future, but he has the ability to send his mind through time, and of course he wanted to go back and see his father as a child, because who wouldn’t? Oh, and why was Evan told King Ferdinand lived in the past? Obviously because the person who told us was a seer, but didn’t know she was a seer, so she thought King Ferdinand was from the past. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

/sigh

And then, of course, Roland gets pulled back home, ends up in his motorcade again, heading into “New York City” when fireworks go off instead of a nuke.

Thanks for playing!

Do I recommend this game?: I highly enjoyed the game and feel I got more than my money’s worth of enjoyment, I just had to ignore the story to do so.

Keep Making Goals

Laura Highcove

Two weeks ago I went back to revise the Huntsman from the beginning, going much deeper than I usually do. I’ve been forcing myself to fix the issues and adding the descriptions I have marked for ‘later’. I don’t think any of the changes have seriously effected the story, but then that was why it was safe to leave them for later in the first place. However, I did this because now, the point at which I’m ready for alpha readers is coming into focus. ~cringe~ As such, the story will need to be as readable as possible for someone who is not me.

Now of course I don’t have the middle of the book solidified, and gosh darnit I still don’t know what I’m going to do with Tabitha. It has been very helpful to have The Law of the Prince Charming under my belt. It is good and it is done so I can convince myself that if I could complete that book, then I can complete this one. You know, eventually. I give myself goals only to realize a few days later they’re unobtainable. And the timeline to finish the book keeps stretching out into “someday”.

I wanted to try and get a pass of the story done before June 21, because that’s when the show team is leaving for Nationals, and I’ll be working full time + weekends while they’re gone. That means it’s unlikely I’ll be spending much, if any, time on my writing. While I realized about three days into that goal that I wasn’t going to reach it, I have been ridiculously productive this week. This is particularly helpful since I’ve had a string of less than productive weeks and I’ve been feeling crappy about that.

I’m not sure yet if I should attribute this surge of productivity to the fact that I restarted my yoga habit, or just the fact that I sat down and had a reset at the beginning of this month. For right now, I don’t think it matters. Productive is productive, and as time goes on I’ll evaluate and reassess. And then I’m sure I’ll turn it all into a post, because that’s what I do.

Letting my Characters Go

Laura Highcove

I did a few smoothing passes on the Huntsman, each focusing on one of the main trio: Gabir, Tabitha, then Wildrose. I was able to push what I had written a little further with each pass.

Wildrose’s storyline is the one that needs the most work right now. I know where I need/want him to be at the end of this book, but he still has a large number of steps to get there. This is after I admitted to myself that the way I *wanted* him to get from here to there wasn’t going to work. I think the past two weeks I’ve repeated: “No, it doesn’t fit with my plan, but it’s what the character would do.” sooooooo many times.

Whenever I get stuck, like sit and stare at my computer screen for ten minutes without typing, stuck, it’s generally because I’m trying to force a character to do what I ‘need’ them to. (And I don’t always realize this right away.) When I release that expectation, they go off on their merry way, and while I have no idea if it will tie back into what I already have, it is much more natural and enjoyable.

I also made a list of the scenes that still need to be written. Not nearly as long as it was last time I did it which is encouraging. I wrote out two or three of those scenes and revised a few that I had previously written but needed to be updated. I had a few new things pop out that very possibly could lead somewhere nice in the way of tying things together. Still worried that I have too much going on, but I figure I’ll never figure out what’s the most important if I don’t write everything first.

Review: A Gathering of Shadows

Laura Highcove

My Review of A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab

My summary: (Spoilers for Book 1) Kell and Rhy deal with the fallout of the now infamous Black Night, for which not only the country, but even Kell’s adoptive parents blame him. Lila, now in Red London, manages to get herself hired on a pirate *cough* privateer ship in order to run from …well everything.

Why I picked up this book: Word of mouth. The series is hailed as amazing. I’m just catching up.

What I knew going in: It had actually been long enough since I read the first book that I sort of had forgotten what happened. I knew Kell could go between worlds with rare magic, that Lila reluctantly helped him, and then things went bad.

My response: Truthfully, I was not all that impressed by the first book. I thought it was alright, but while I liked Kell (he’s just my type) I didn’t much like Lila and when I got to the end of the book I don’t remember being very impressed.

Something changed between when I read that book and this. Either Schwab got a lot better at writing or I leveled up a few times in reading between the books. (Or both.) The writing was lyrical and kept impressing me. And the relationships between the characters felt so much more real in this book. I marked several conversations to go back to because I just loved the way the characters talked to each other.

And the story itself felt smooth and natural, which is some of the highest praise I give to a book. It was still a second book (ie, setting up for the third) but it gave me the payoffs I wanted, and several that I wasn’t aware I was looking for.

Do I recommend this book?: Yes.

A Personal Essay on Personal Essays

Laura Highcove

I had a rather interesting revelation the other day. I was listening to one of the DIY MFA Radio Podcasts, Episode 198 to be exact. Gabriela and the guest, Will, were talking about personal essay book, and how there doesn’t seem to be as large a market for personal essays on the Internet because everyone is more focused on throwing their opinions out there.

I’m listening to this and thinking about how I am no good at writing posts for my blog that state an opinion. In fact I just recently wrote an article about how I decided to avoid doing just that.

As I was listening to how they define a personal essay, I came to the realization that what I prefer to write are, in fact, personal essays. I look back at the articles I’ve written that are my favorites and they are basically me saying ‘here’s my experience, get what you can out of it.’

I have no desire to push my opinions on other people, and I am well aware that even the life changing experiences I’ve had for myself won’t necessarily mean anything to anyone else. My opinions are formed by my experiences, the same way yours will be. No one can tell you what those are unless you choose to let them.

If I want anything for you, it’s just for you to be more aware of yourself so you can figure out what is important to you and how that looks. And the way I do that is to be as authentic about my own experiences as possible, and let you glean whatever it is you want to out of what I’ve written, even if that’s nothing at all.

That’s just what feels right to me. I’m not sure I’ll change anything in the wake of finding out what I’m writing are personal essays. Maybe I will. My biggest takeaway from this is the label so I can speak and learn about it more intelligently.

Review: Winter

Laura Highcove

My Review of Winter by Marissa Meyer

My summary: The final installment of the Lunar Chronicles, Princess Winter of Luna has hallucinations due to not using her Luna Gift of being able to control the minds and/or body of anyone she comes into contact with, supported only by her beloved personal guard. Her Step-mother, Lavana in in the final stages of her plan to marry Prince Kai of the Earth’s Commonwealth, and the characters we met in the previous three books: Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress (along with their bos and Iko) are trying to stop her by raising an army of the mistreated Lunars.

Why I picked up this book: I read the first three a while ago in the hay-day of when these books were popular, but I didn’t quite like them enough to pay for the hardcover of Winter, so I put it off until I could get a paperback version, which just happened now. I picked up the first book in the series because …well cyborg Cinderella. It was a cool idea.

What I knew going in: We had met Winter briefly in previous books, so I knew somehow she was not entirely sane, and that her OTP was a royal guard.

My response: I liked this series as a whole. The world building felt solid, the characters were rather likable, and the story was enjoyable enough. I liked the way she hit the beats of the girl’s respective fairy tales within the story. The only one that ever felt really forced was Cinder’s orange beetle (the car type) that she drove to the ball.

My problem with this series ended up being the powers that the Lunars had. As you read above, most (like 97%) of Lunars have the power of mind control. They can make you see anything they want or take over your body and force you to do what they want, and as far as I could tell there is no way for you to know you’re not seeing something real (without a cyborg implant which very few people have), no way for anyone else to know you’re being manipulated, and no way for anyone else to know someone is doing manipulation. The ‘limitation’ of the power seems to be distance and possibly line of sight. Oh and some people are better at it than others, but in this book the quashed, cast off workers are able to take control of their guards in order to start their rebellion.

I remember reading after the first book that the author wished she had not made the Lunar gift quite so strong. In the first book, there is not a lot of interaction with any Lunars using their powers except the Queen, who is just straight up evil, so I can see where she didn’t thoroughly consider the effects of an entire race having these powers. But the more we interacted with a society where basically anyone could do this, and there was no defense against it outside of being controlled by someone else, I just found myself in disbelief that there were not more insane Lunars trying to control everything. In fact, I’m not even convinced there could be an easy peace between the peoples as the solution at the end of the book is everyone having an electronic device installed in their spines as a protection against being controlled. /shrugs

I don’t know the extent to which the powers were specifically detailed in the first book, but I spent the last half of the book thinking: “She *really* needed to have limited these powers in some other way because it’s just too powerful and there’s even a severe downside to being a good person and *not* using them. At one point, someone without the powers admonishes Winter, the princess who is going insane because she doesn’t use her powers, that she should just make everyone around her see her hair as orange if she doesn’t want to affect anyone in a negative way. And that’s really it. The entire race is built on a foundation of “it’s just easier to use my powers to mislead people than to not.”.

Setting that aside, it made Winter an interesting character in that she was basically schizophrenic. And she still functioned fairly well within the world, and people loved her, and she made friends. I think that was a rather important message, though it didn’t hit me for what it was until the very end.

This was a good capstone to the series, and it wrapped up everything nicely, if not simply in true fairy tale fashion.

Do I recommend this book?: In spite of the above, I did enjoy this series, and I would recommend it. Just, if you’re too hard of a simulationist, be wary about the powers.

Resetting

Laura Highcove

I came off of last week being on vacation where I really didn’t do much, if any writing. I came back and got back to work as I should finishing up rewriting a few Gabir scenes and then restarting the story to focus on Tabitha’s storyline. I put in a good number of hours through the week. Since I had last week off for Williamsburg, I agreed to work this weekend to give my coworker a nice long weekend. Oddly enough, despite that, Saturday I still got a lot done, and it wasn’t until Sunday that the extra barn work started dragging me down such that I told myself I needed to not push the writing too hard and just recover.

It’s a shame to lose the momentum I had, but I’ll get back to it tomorrow. I want to try and have Tabitha’s scenes done by June 3rd. I had to do a bit of a recheck into myself because I realized I was not enjoying the story because I was so focused on whether or not the story was technically ‘good’. One of the things I realize from writing this journal is that I keep having to come back to the same realizations, because it’s so easy to get caught up in life and goals and expectations that I lose focus on what’s important. Then I have to not beat myself up for having forgotten, because it’s just another one of those things. Every once and a while I just need to stop and reset by reminding myself of what’s important. And the ability to realize I need to do that is one of the most important skills I’ve learned. Anyway, I am back to feeling like I am making progress as I focus on writing a story I enjoy. Cause who cares if it’s technically ‘good’ if I hate it?

I’ve now pushed to the end of what I have so far for Tabitha, so I’m going to shift over to Wildrose and smooth through his scenes and see what comes out the other side. I’d like to get that done by the end of the week at the latest, and start trying to weave more Tabitha/Wildrose storylines together to catch up to where Gabir is. (By the end of the *next* week.)

Review: Sightwitch

Laura Highcove

My Review of Sightwitch by Susan Dennard

My summary: Ryber is a Sightwitch hopeful, living her life in the hidden convent where the Sightwitches serve the Goddess of the world. She tries to do everything perfectly, but she has never been chosen to gain the sight. Her Threadsister is chosen by the Goddess, and then doesn’t come back. And soon the rest of the Sightwitches are chosen, until Ryber is the only one left.

Why I picked up this book: I feel in love with this series at Truthwitch, and keep managing to stumble on it again right before a new book comes out. This one, though a novella, is no exception.

What I knew going in: The summary from above, and the fact that I love this author.

My response: It was really good, but not amazing. It was done up as journal entries that sometimes had other people read them and leave comments, which was cute, and the way the storylines wove together really worked well. At the same time, the characters felt very one note, and I assume that’s because the book was so short, there was only so much time for development. I also knew how to solve the “puzzle” the book presents to the main character from the beginning, so there was less mystery to that. Still, overall enjoyable and a solid read.

I was also glad to finally see some more of the “wonderful world-building” they’ve been talking about for this series since the beginning. Truthfully, I wasn’t all that impressed by the world through the first two books. There are some clever things, but this book really starts diving into some of the deeper aspects of the world and I’m happy with what I saw.

Do I recommend this book?: If you have read the first two books in the Witchlands series, then this is a good accompaniment. Time will tell whether having read it will mean much for your understand of the two books that are yet to come out. If you haven’t read the series, then no.