Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Laura Highcove

So I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them over my Thanksgiving break. I could only give it 2/5 stars. (Warning: Spoilers Below)

I loved the actor who played Newt, but the character himself was horribly written. The only time he really shone as a character was when he was in his briefcase taking care of his animals.

I really enjoyed Jacob. While Newt ran around for the first part of the movie with no characterization or motivation, we saw Jacob’s personality and dreams.

I also loved seeing the inside of the briefcase and all of the mythological animals that were there. It wasn’t enough to carry the movie to the end, but it was entertaining.

Most of the rest of the movie was terrible.

First off, If owls just magically give school letters to kids from muggle households, then how do any wizarding children get passed over? Even if they can’t go to school because of stupid parents, the wizarding world should know about them.

Tina is nothing but incompetent and ineffectual. Even when I thought she might matter because Credence had met her before, (ignoring how that flashback was shoehorned in) it ended up not mattering at all.

Also, let’s not pretend that people didn’t die during the climax, you know, with the buildings collapsing all over the city. Then they all got a memory-wipe, which basically means people wouldn’t even remember their loved ones existed. (Hermione did it to her parents, remember?) This movie made me suddenly realize the discrepancy between wizards and muggles and the horror comes from the fact that this is the way the wizarding world is supposed to work. Magical mishaps happen. Maybe if you want to keep magic a secret, you shouldn’t be building your Ministries of Magic in the most populated cities in the world.

Overall, pretty disappointed. It had enough charming bits of the wizarding world I love so much sprinkled throughout, but I would probably not watch it again. I’m hoping that they’ll do a better job with the second movie, but I’m not holding out hope. If you’re a hardcore Harry Potter then go see it, otherwise, please don’t use this as your introduction to the wizarding world.

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Last year I realized that NaNoWriMo was too easy for me. I have participated every year since 2008, and have won every year but two. This year I decided to give myself a new challenge, 90,000 words. Not quite double the original goal, but actual novel length. I went into NaNoWriMo with the first anticipation I’d had in years. I failed to reach my goal. But it’s not about the failure, but about analyzing the why and learning what I can from it.

Why did I fail?

1) I started out with a goal of 3,000 words a day. Then I reached my first Friday and had no time for writing (due to my normal schedule, I just didn’t take it into account.) I caught up Saturday by writing 6,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day, and that burned me out. I changed my daily goal to 3,500 with no writing needed on Fridays. I couldn’t keep this up either.

2) This story came out in a way I was not used to. That being: I wrote scenes out of order, and multiple times before I wrote something that moved the story forward. I don’t know if this was caused by my sudden need for such a large amount of words, the fact that this was a sequel, that I’ve learned so much craft in the two years since I wrote The Storyteller, or something else entirely. Either way, the result is that my forward momentum kept coming to a screeching halt, and while I could produce words, I wasn’t actually moving the story.

3) Politics. I’m actually not kidding. Despite your opinion about who should’ve won or why, the amount of anger and hate that existed on the Internet in the days following the election wrecked me emotionally. I had to abandon Facebook completely.

What did I learn?

1) While 1667 words a day is pretty easy, 3,500 is not. I believe it might be because writing this much didn’t give me enough time in between to think about my story and live my life. I felt very dry, creatively. In the third week I backed off the schedule I had set for myself for a few days and after a few days the ideas started flowing again. So what I learned is I should try something closer to 2,000 words a day for a while.

2) I am a multi-drafter. For those who haven’t read my blog previously, I know that one part of my process is that I write, go back and rewrite from the beginning and go a little further into the story, then go back and repeat. While somehow I managed to plow right through the Storyteller two years ago, that did not work this time. So I also learned that I need to let myself stop an reassess when I need to, otherwise I end up just spinning my wheels.

3) I also learned I should’ve removed myself from the toxic environment online more quickly. As much as I wanted to support the people who were scared, my emotional well being is more important.

Getting Back Up to Speed

Laura Highcove

Yep, Nano has kicked my butt this year. I got into a spiral of self-doubt and since my schedule was all screwed up because of the holiday I really didn’t get anything done besides grouping the multiple versions of scenes into separate files.

As soon as I got home and was able to organize my space (I swear, I must be the most organized discovery writer in existence.) all the ideas started flowing again. I’ve been able to make some good progress on some scenes I wrote a few versions of already, but now I’m getting it to the way I want it to be.

My plan right now is to continue organizing and rewriting what I have this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be ready to go forward a bit more. I’d like to get to 70k words by the end of NaNo (Just to say I did.) though I’ve likely written more words than my ending word count will suggest. It’s hard to count words on rewrites because I take chunks of previously written words along with completely new writing.

I’m disappointed that I’m not going to reach the goal I gave myself, but then I knew it was a rather lofty goal. I’m going to finish out the month strong, and there’ll be a post coming next weekend on reflections of the month and what I’ve learned.

NaNo Speedbump

Laura Highcove

I met and passed the 50k NaNoWriMo goal. The problem I’m finding myself in now, is that I had to stop and organize what I’d written. I had no idea what had happened because I was writing scenes multiple times (yay discovery writer). Organization takes time away from producing words. And with my brother’s wedding and the holiday coming up, it would be hard enough to write 3.5k words a day, much less spend an hour or two reorganizing as well.

So I took a step back to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish this month. I could put out the words, that’s not a problem. But my goal is to write the sequel to The Storyteller and the less organized my writing, the slower my forward progress. Right now I have two or three versions of most of the scenes with only a vague idea of which one is the one I’ll keep.

I realized I was wasting too much time rewriting scenes. I am learning so much from this month, but I can feel that I’m not being efficient by pounding out words, so I’m stopping, reassessing, and reorganizing. Hopefully in a day or two I’ll have a new plan for how many more words I need to get done, and then I can plow ahead.

Starting NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I am now several days into NaNo and it is kicking my butt. This feels more like I remember my first NaNos, when it was a struggle to come up with 1667 words in a day. This month I started off doing 3k a day to reach my goal of 90k for the month. I’m pretty sure that I will never get many words on Fridays, since I work 7:30-5:30 and Friday night is when the hubby and I go grocery shopping, so the whole day is pretty much gone. The plan was to make up Friday’s words on Saturday, like I have in the past. Writing 6k words in a day ruined me pretty hard. This morning (Sunday) it took me three hours to get 1700 words.

I had to shift my approach. I decided I won’t expect any words on Fridays and divied those words to the other days. So now my goal is 3500, six days a week. Am I pushing myself past what is comfortable? Heck yeah, but I can do it for a month, and I have a good reward waiting for myself.

The Huntsman is probably the one story I have the most ‘outline’ for before I started writing it. Mostly because as I was finishing The Storyteller, I filled my head with all the things that needed to happen in the next book(s). As such, my writing process has shifted to a ‘stitcher’, super hard on this book. I am writing scenes in completely random order, as the ideas come to me, because if I don’t write them down then I will forget them. The idea is after I write it all, I will go back to order and smooth it out. This is not entirely dissimilar to my normal writing style, there will just be far more stitching required.

I am having to constantly remind myself that the important thing right now is to get through the words. Get through the story. It’s all there, even if it’s not organized right now. It has been a real struggle.

Working up to NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I did several prompts this past week, and then thought that maybe I should work on actually writing a large number of words a day. In the past I’ve been able to reliably bang out 1000-1500 words in an hour, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in output mode and not revision mode.

So I decided to work on the short story I had a vague idea about involving Cobalt and Archer. It takes place only a few days after the end of the Storyteller and involves them going to and also going to fix . It ended up being a good thing I did a little practice before NaNoWriMo starts this Tuesday.

Firstly, I had trouble producing words so I had a few days of reminding myself how to push forward through the resistance, as well as remembering the feel of how I get to the place where words flow.

Secondly, it helped me organize some of the fallout from The Storyteller. While that won’t be in The Huntsman, it’s still helpful to have it written out. I’m one of those authors who doesn’t know what I think until I write it down. I can plan all day long, but when I write, I think about it a different way and all the details flow into my brain. Most of the time it kills whatever my plan is and it’s glorious.

I am actually nervous about NaNoWriMo for the first time in several years since I am challenging myself to write 90k words in the month instead of the usual 50k. 50k just became to easy for me and I’ve had no challenge the past few years. Not to say getting out 50k words wasn’t helpful, because it certainly was. It will just be interesting to see if it’s actually possible for me to pop out an entire rough draft in a month, as opposed to it taking two months.

Still no more responses from agents. It only occurs to me now that I don’t know what the procedure is around announcing agent representation. When I (hopefully) find that lucky agent who loves my book, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it public right away. It might be that that only pertains to getting picked up by an editor. Either way, I’ll be sure to post about it as soon as I can.

Agents and Prompts

Laura Highcove

I’ve been a little lackadaisical about my blog posts, and that’s because my writing has been lackadaisical. My novel is out with beta readers for the final polish and I generally get a little ‘omg, what do I do with my hands?’ when I don’t have a clear writing goal.

Last week I researched my first batch of agents, wrote my query letters and synopses (of different lengths), and put it all together to send out my query letters. But since it was the first time I’ve done this particular task, I backtracked to check things three or four times in an attempt to give each agent as close to what they wanted in a query letter as possible. I even made an excel sheet to organize.

I got my first form rejection letter by the next day. It was faster than I was expecting. I celebrated it as the beginning of my ‘writer’s school of hard knocks’, but at the same time, I thought I would be more upset about the rejection itself. Perhaps the time listening to Gabriela and reading articles on how rejection is never personal, that agents reject manuscripts for all sorts of reasons, actually sunk in. Agents all have their preferences. I just have to find that agent whose specific preferences line up with what I wrote.

As for straight up writing, I have close to 2k words on a new story, but at the same time I struggled with the idea of starting a new project when I know I’m going to be writing The Huntsman for NaNoWriMo. The solution finally hit me Friday night. I pulled out ‘The 3A.M. Epiphany’ on Saturday morning and did the next writing prompt in the book.

Prompts are an excellent way to write without having to have a project. And the prompt gave me a great idea for a unique pov that I may use in The Huntsman. I played around with pov in The Storyteller and it was rather enjoyable. So I want to keep that up. I think I may like playing with weird povs. Maybe it will become one of my things?

So the writing life is still going well. Every time I worry that I won’t be picked up by an agent, I remind myself why I write in the first place. I’d love to get my stories out there to share my friends and their worlds with other people, but I’ll keep writing even if I’m the only one who reads about them.

Next Step

Laura Highcove

I typed a blog post on Saturday saying that I had a plan to finish smoothing the rest of my novel by my deadline of Friday. I let the post sit until Sunday, as I usually do, before posting. In that time I finished smoothing the rest of the novel and sent it out to my beta readers. As such, my plan is finished before the post had time to enter the world. Yay to me.

Then I researched agents who will be at the James River Writer’s Conference that I’m going to this weekend. That didn’t take too much time. I also went to the bookstore to try and find some Arabian fairy tales, but that didn’t work. So now I’m a little lost. I don’t want to start on a new project right before NaNoWriMo. At the same time, I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t spend time on writing. I figure maybe I should just sit down and write and see what happens. I am a discovery writer after all.

Extra time to Write

Laura Highcove

Starting in September I now have my weekday afternoons to work on my writing. I knew it would be an extra four hours a day, but I don’t think I quite understood how much time that was when I made my plan the other week. Which is a good thing, because working through the fight scenes and the prose ended up taking longer than I expected.

It’s not that the work is harder than I thought it would be, just more tedious. The book is over 100k words. Even if all you’re doing is reading the book, that takes a while to get through. Though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in going through and fixing the ugly bits that I’ve been ignoring up until now. This novel is more complete than any other novel I’ve ever written, and it’ll only get more so. It’s very exciting.

I also did some looking into agents, which was a little intimidating. Partially because of the idea that I am actually going to start submitted before long, and partially because I realized I am going to have to write a synopsis. A synopsis is basically taking my book and boiling it down to two pages. Or one paragraph. I started working on it, just jotting down the main plot points and I already have way too much, and I’m only halfway through the book. I decided to put it aside until a little later.

For now I’m going to keep working like my plan is perfect and infallible. When October hits I’ll reevaluate where I am.