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.

Review: The Fifth Season

Laura Highcove

My Review of The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

My summary: In a world where some people (called oroenes) can control the earth but are reviled for it, we follow three characters: A child, shunned by her parents and sent to the Fulcrum to learn to control her powers. A young woman is sent by the Fulcrum to train under a more powerful orogene. And a middle aged woman whose youngest child has just been killed by her husband who found out that child had the reviled power and then ran off with their daughter, just as the world has been split apart bringing a devastating Fifth Season.

Why I picked up this book: I’ve heard tons of great things about it, including it winning a Hugo. I’ve had several friends who throughly enjoyed it.

What I knew going in: Very little. I actually didn’t even read the back-cover copy. I bought it based on reputation alone.

My response: Overall I liked it, however it left much less of an impression than I was expecting. The biggest thing that stuck with me was the voice, which I liked so much I wish I could emulate it. Much of the book is written in second person, which also took a little getting used to. I very much like the ‘magic’ system and the feel of the world. Everything came very neatly and satisfyingly together in the end. The best thing I can say about it, however, is that it is very well written.

Will I pick up the next book?: I bought the trilogy together. I’m working very slowly through the second book because I’m not sure how attached I am to the actual characters. I think I’m more interested in seeing what the setting and the mysteries are going to do next. Unlike Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind series, however, I care enough about the characters to keep going. I just don’t have any overwhelming urge to sit down with it.

Celebrating My Victories

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

This week, more on my new timesheets, because that is data and I love messing with data. I am really liking the effect the timesheet is having. It pushes me to do more work when I need to, but is also a way for me to sit down and say: “Okay, I’ve worked on my novel for two hours today, so no I don’t need to work on it more now.”

The other effect is that it lets me, definitively, see how long it takes me to do certain tasks. I find when writing new stuff, I tend to work better in half hour increments. When smoothing or revising, I can more easily work for up to an hour (or more).

It also lets me see what other things I did over the course of a week that I might forget I had done, like these past two weeks I went though my blog and re-jiggered the categories and tags. I now have:

Journal: Mostly talking about the writing I’ve been doing, but some of what’s going on in my life in general.
Blog posts: Which are posts that are meant to be more informational or topic focused than ‘what I’ve been doing’.
Reviews: Because I realized I really like doing reviews and talking about why I did or didn’t like particular media (tv shows, movies, books, and video games).
World of Warcraft: For all my old world of warcraft kill posts that I just can’t bring myself to delete.

It took some time, but it now means things are much neater, and that makes my heart happy.

Also, two great things happened this past week. First was that I reached the point in Huntsman where I *usually* bang my head against it, think nothing can be done, and become sad for several days. But this time I remembered my process after only one day, and went back to the beginning to smooth for a while. (I am also taking notes on the things I still need to do.) I am proud that I was actually able to look at my resistance and realize what it meant. It’s all part of getting comfortable with my process.

The second was that I got depressed (okay the depressed part wasn’t great) but I *realized* that I was depressed and gave myself the day off instead of beating myself up over the fact that I didn’t feel like working on the Huntsman. Instead I read more in my mushroom book (research for a potential story) and spent almost three hours writing the first drafts and taking pictures for the gryffin posts I have coming up. And those were both productive and fun.

So it was two wins in the “self-awareness” category and I am celebrating that fact. I didn’t try to force myself to feel the way I thought I should, I just listened to what I needed and worked from there and ended up more productive for it.

Added Feb 07: I totally forgot to make myself a writing goal. On Jan 21 my goal was to finish removing a character from the Huntsman and smooth to the end. Since then I got about halfway in, then went back to the beginning for another smoothing pass during which time I started taking notes on what I don’t like, or that needs to be fixed in each scene until I now reached the place where the book basically breaks down completely.

Plan for the next two weeks is now this: Finish off taking notes on the whole story (Wed), move the scenes around to try and make the story more whole (Thurs), write the new scenes I put in my notes as needing to write. (Sat/Sun).

Then the next week is another, heavy duty, smoothing pass. I’ll reevaluate where I am over the weekend and include my new plan in the next journal entry.

Review: The Last Jedi

Laura Highcove

This review has spoilers. It’s been a month since I saw the movie, but I never got around to putting up this review, so we’re probably outside the time when I need to warn about spoilers, but here it is all the same.

I loved this movie. I thought it was entertaining and well-written. Did it have problems? Sure, but I walked out of the theater excited about what I had seen. The resistance is on the run from the First Order. I was not expecting that to be the plot of the entire movie like it was, but it ended up working out.

Rae is off doing her own thing, trying to get Luke on board, learning about the force, and in general having a surprising (but not that surprising) amount of skill considering her lack of training. In fact, I was really happy with how they had her basically get completely duped by prune head (I am bad with names.), due to her lack of training.

And Rae’s brush with the ‘dark side’ on the island really lead me to believe that maybe we would get off this stupid ‘light side’ ‘dark side’ crap and realize that the force should be balanced in a single person as opposed to there having to be a good person and a bad person to balance them out. I bet that would piss off the die-hard star wars fans though.

Finn gallivanted off with our new character, Rose, sewing the seeds of hope back into the minds of tiny children. This ended up being the only thing the two of them accomplished considering everything else they did turned out to not matter.

Poe got a character arc. Which is good, because he seemed rather ancillary for the first movie. I’m happy with the lessons he learned, even though they basically came out of Purple-hair straight up not telling Poe what the plan was. There could be the argument that she was trying to teach him a lesson after Leia demoted him for being reckless, and not just that if she had told him, everyone would’ve sat around on their hands waiting for the plan (ie, not telling him was just a plot device).

Someone who had seen the movie before-hand told me there was some humor in it that was completely unexpected for a Star Wars movie. It certainly caught me by surprise, but by half-way through the movie I realized that all of the comedy was completely necessary or else the movie would’ve been crushed by it’s own weight. This is Star Wars, the emotions and expectations for it are high. I feel if they’d tried to play it straight, it would’ve become a parody of itself.

And I like how well this movie played with expectations. From expecting Finn, Rose, and Poe to be successful, to the Codebreaker betrayer, as well as the connection between Rae and Kylo. And every time another bad thing happened, whatever popped up to save them had been foreshadowed well beforehand.

And oh man, taking a ship to warp speed through a fleet. Even the anime-style-see-this-shot-from-three-angles did not ruin the majesty of that.

Overall score: 5/5 because not only did I enjoy it, it blew my mind and inspired my own writing.

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.

Removing a Character

Laura Highcove

So after two more weeks of tracking how much time I spend on my writing, I am much happier with my productivity during the week. I am better able to stay on track and I spent more hours working on writing. However, weekends gave me trouble. I don’t have a particular block carved out on weekends because they can be so variable. What this means is while I get writing done, I have dropped the ball on more than one occasion on actually writing down the hours spent and on what.

Added to that the change in schedule caused by some news I got on Tuesday (more details about that in my newsletter this month.) and the Roanoke Regional Writer’s Conference I went to this past Saturday, meaning I’m taking today off, my spreadsheet is nowhere near as beautiful as I would like.

However, I have been feeling productive. (And I think I have been, despite not having all of the cold hard data to back it up.) Being able to look back and see: “Oh yeah, I actually spent an hour and a half smoothing the Huntsman.” Does wonders for dispelling my mind trying to tell me I’m slacking off too much.

I’ll likely keep trying with the spreadsheets and see if I can’t get writing down my time to be more habitual, since it’s something I would like to keep up with.

The “event on Tuesday” also lead to a change in priorities that means I got very little done with the Huntsman. That in itself wouldn’t be horrible except that that morning I had finally decided to pull the plug and yank a (fairly) main character out. So not only did I get less done, I had just given myself more work.

So this journal entry is my reset point for my goals. I need to remove the character from the manuscript, and finish smoothing it out by the end of the month, which is only a week and a half. Looks like that’s most of what I’m going to be doing during this time.

Review: Oathbringer

Laura Highcove

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

My basic summary: In a world plagued by regular hurricane-like storms and made mostly of stone, our intrepid heroes (Established in the first two books) continue on their path to try and reform the Knights Radiant. This book focuses on Dalinar and his purposely hidden back-story as he leads the charge with the Knights Radiant, tries to bring together the monarchs of the world, and figure out who he is, all while exploring a ancient city none of them understands. Then they find out who they’re really fighting.

Why I picked up this book: It was written by Brandon Sanderson.

What I knew going in: I knew Oathbringer was going to focus on Dalinar.

My response: Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Because of its length, I had to read this book over a much longer time period than I usually read books, and as such I think I had far more time to mull over what I was reading before I was finished. This resulted in my stepping back and seeing the writing more than with other books. (Well I suppose it could also be that this book was more poorly written and thus more transparent, but I’d rather liken it to my being more aware of writing instead.)

There were certainly some plot choices where they left me scratching my head, and others that made perfect sense. As always, the climax pulled everything together pretty perfectly. And I am so happy with where Adolin’s story arc is going. I was really worried about him after the end of Words of Radiance.

Also, because these books are so large, I made sure to mark places I wanted to go back to before I left them because I don’t see a world in which I have time to read these monsters more than once. Though most of these were for picking apart his writing at a later date.

Sanderson also did some beautiful things regarding depression and ones view of themselves in this book that brought me to tears. Nothing heavy-handed, but just a reminder that we humans always feel so alone and yet there are other people out there who have experienced what you have.

Will I pick up the next book: While I know it will be at least two years, yes. And I am following details about it closely. (Though truthfully, I am following details about most all of his books and their release schedule.)

“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. 🙂