Back from Beta Readers

Laura Highcove

So this past week was a delightful collection of both wonderful and completely horrid moments. As you may have guessed, I got my story back from my beta readers! It ultimately ended up going pretty much as well as can be expected from sending your baby out into the world for the first time. All of the comments were positive or the helpful kind of critique.

However, there was a misunderstanding about part of the story, and the comments regarding that section left me in three days of misery. Both beta readers jumped to the same conclusion and since it was an emotionally charged scene, it left a rather deep emotional impression on them that was not what I was going for. It took some dwelling on comments and reading between the lines to figure out that they had reached a conclusion that was not the one for which I was aiming.

Once I figured out the misunderstanding and had talks with the both of them, things turned out much better and all of the critique they gave me was entirely manageable. I mean, sure I’d love for it to have already been perfect, but then making mistakes is how you learn.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a person besides my alpha reader husband, read through a whole story of mine, and it was an amazing experience. One of my beta readers had trouble with names, since different characters call each other different names. It didn’t occur to me, since I live with these characters. The other was much more in tune to how information was parsed out to the reader, pointing out places I had done it well and places I had done it poorly. After reading the comments and seeing the way both of the beta reader’s minds worked through the story I feel like I was able to see the story in a new light.

Anticipation

Laura Highcove

I spent last week working through some things with my story, ‘The Colors Of’. It started off as a pokemon fan fiction back when the first pokemon movie came out in 1998. It has changed a lot since then. I spent some time on brushing off the world building. It is set on a planet that was ravaged by war, such that the world started to turn metallic and the only animals are computers that are built to look and act like animals, some of which serve people, and some of which have escaped into the wild. The story is about what it takes for people to survive in this world.

However, I knew I was only going to work on that long enough to get back my story from my beta readers, and the first of those came in this week. I’m scared, but I’m trying to convince myself to be excited too. Hopefully this will help me to get a better insight on how others see my story and thus be able to improve the book. Also, chalk it up to a new experience. This is the first time someone who is not my husband has gotten to see one of my stories in its entirety. (Unless you count the really bad version of Shifting Winds, which technically didn’t have an ending, I just didn’t know it at the time.)

I’m not sure what I am expecting. I know points of the book are weak. I know some of the prose is messy. I think I’m more scared to find out about things that are wrong that I don’t know about yet, that I may not be able to fix? I’m not sure if that’s possible, for something to be unfixable, but then most of the time we worry about inane things anyway.

Looking to the Next Project

Laura Highcove

I finished going through the story and adding in Wildrose’s cards. I only had a few hiccups in the three major arcana cards that get used in the story, as I really had to actually come up with names for them, and having their powers somewhat work with both what I needed done, and (even if loosely) with what they actually mean in the tarot.

With that done, I changed one scene with the Archer and I’m kinda …like done until I get the feedback from my beta readers. I’m not sure how to reconcile that. Now if I got back and read through the story again I’m sure I could find things that need to be fixed, but there’s little point changing them until I get my feedback.

Now my plan is to go through a few of my favorite old drafts and see if they speak to me as my next project. If any of you are following along in the sidebar, I’ll be looking at The Trickster, Blessings of the Nerial, The Colors Of, and Demonslayer. Though it occurs to me now that I go look over there, maybe I should update that page a bit. Look for that to happen in the next week or two.

What’s Your Favorite Type of Story?

Laura Highcove

Another prompt from the DIYMFA.com. To find out more, you can check out the DIYMFA.com’s instigator, Gabriela Pereira’s new book DIY MFA.

QOTW 15: What’s Your Favorite Type of Story?

My favorite type of story is one that has a theme of camaraderie, either a pairing or a team of some kind. This does not (necessarily) mean an ensemble cast. I am a fan of characters interacting with each other in a place of teamwork and/or trust. It can be romantic or not. (I am always a fan of a good bromance.) I also like it when it starts out as hate or reluctance.


The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Examples across media include:

Castle: The four main characters are willing to do anything for each other, even if it’s sometimes outside the law.

Psych: Shawn and Gus seem to know what each other is thinking and are always together, have each other’s backs, and the jokes they pull off together are amazing.

Suits: In the cutthroat lawyer world, the two main characters are seriously loyal to each other.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (TV Show and Movie): In the TV show, the two main characters are partners and work very well together. In the movie they start out hating each other and come to a sort of grudging respect.

BBC’s Merlin: The two main characters start out hating each other and eventually develop into friends AND in later seasons get a whole team that works together on trust.

Speed Racer This movie has a theme of family, and plenty of times when everyone has to work together to get stuff done.

The Avengers: More an ensemble cast, but they all have to learn to work together

Blue Exorcist: Team of students that bond through their adventures enough to keep them together when they find out the main character is the son of the devil. (This one’s an anime.)

The Legend of Eli Monpress: The main character and his team are already established at the beginning of the books, but it’s their bonds to each other that keep them from failing.

Brandon Sanderson novels: He likes to have a tight knit team that works well together and gets along (fairly well) in most of his books.

As you can see, it’s a wide variety of different types of relationships and teams that gets me interested, but it’s no surprise that I have a similar theme in all of my own stories.

Why does this archetype appeal to me so much?

Because I inherently want to trust people.

Because these are the kinds of relationships I want to have.

…it’s something like that I’m sure.

I don’t like books where everyone betrays everyone else all the time and are just out for themselves. I like to see people willing to go to the mat to defend a friend. I like to see people throw it all on the line for something they might not even understand because it’s important to the person they trust. I never get more teary eyed than when two people (especially who hated each other previously) go back to back. It’s about that connection. It also tends to result in some pretty awesome dialogue as friends snark at each other.

Out of this I am planning on doing a series of blog posts going into more depth with what I like about my favorite media, and what I didn’t like about media I consumed and didn’t like. I expect I’ll find that a lot of the things I like about the media I consume end up in my own stories, like this one, but there may be some that I’m not even aware of right now, and if I become aware of them, then I can manipulate them to better effect in my own storytelling.

Limits

Laura Highcove

I finally managed it. I figured out what Wildrose’s artifacts are. For a long time (while writing the story basically) I wanted Wildrose to just have a whole bunch of random artifacts that would do random spells that he would use cleverly. I have come to realize pretty hard, during writing this book, that unlimited options is the worst thing you could possibly have. With too much variety, there is no focus. I finally decided I had to sit down and figure out what the common element was for Wildrose’s artifacts. I knew three things:

1) He works at range. Ie, I kept wanting it to be something he could throw into melee from a distance and then have it do the thing.

2) He is very precise.

3) He has a larger variety of things he can do than the others.

I wrote a few scenes with different ideas, brainstormed several times with my husband. and eventually came up with his having a deck of tarot cards that are each an artifact and each have a spell in them. There are a few rules for the cards*:

1) The maximum number of cards in the deck is set, as are the spells for those cards. (I actually haven’t figured out what either of those are yet. I want the number of cards in the set to be a multiple of three as opposed to clinging faithfully to the actual tarot, and no, I have not spent the time yet to figure out what every spell he has is.)

2) He can have duplicates of a specific card, but he still can’t have over the maximum number of cards. For those of you who know D&D it’s like the 3.5 wizard with his spellbook and prepared spells.

3) It takes a certain amount of time to re-imbue a spell into a card once spent. Time it takes is effected by the strength of the spell. If he happens to lose a card, the process of recreating the card is far more arduous.

So now comes the step of going back and retro-fitting this into all the fights. As I said before I really should not have let myself get this far into the story without figuring this out, as it’s going to require a lot of rewriting, plus my beta readers don’t have it to give me feedback, but that’s where I am.

*This is the disclaimer that I’m still working on this story and ideas are bound to change, so nothing here is set in stone.

Warcraft Movie

Laura Highcove

So a few weeks ago I went to see the Warcraft movie. I knew it wasn’t going to be good and I knew it wasn’t going to have a happy ending (cause the whole Alliance vs Horde thing), but I was hoping that I could get some entertainment value out of it.

Now at one point I was a pretty big Warcraft lore buff, but it’s been three or four years since I played World of Warcraft, and so most of it has faded. The only name I remembered was Medivh, and that he wasn’t a good guy.

As for the movie itself. The script was pretty terrible, however the characters did a good job of showing what good friends they were with each other. I don’t know if that was the script, or just good acting, but it made the movie bearable.

The graphics were, of course, amazing. Especially the orcs and how they moved and looked. I was also pretty impressed with the magic effects. I could see people saying that the magic was a bit overblown, but after playing World of Warcraft, it’s exactly what you see swirling around a mage or a warlock when they cast.

Seeing the cities of Ironforge and especially Stormwind was just amazing. I enjoyed seeing Karazhan and Dalaran as well, though they looked a little less like their in-game counterparts. Also, kudoes to the Alliance’s armor, showing off the shiny and the bling. Not realistic in the least, but who the heck cares?

And the movie did bring up nostalgic feelings of playing World of Warcraft, which I did from 2006 through 2012 in a hardcore raiding guild. I admit, I got goosebumps at the end when the crowd was chanting “For Azeroth!” and then shifted to the one “For the Alliance.”

Overall, movie was not great. I’d probably watch it again, but I have a feeling this is one of those movies where I’ll skip a lot of it. If you loved World of Warcraft, go check it out for old times sake. If not, you won’t miss a thing.

Only a few bits

Laura Highcove

It really is a lot harder to write these posts at this stage of the revision phase because there are fewer and fewer things that take a long time and it’s hard to remember all the little steps.

I went through all the commands people use with their Storybook and try to figure out a common syntax. During that time I actually realized the Storybook was too powerful, and had to reconfigure how I thought about some things on the back end. Fascinating! I then went through and fixed all the syntax for the Storybooks in the story.

I went through and changed all the instances of Storyteller Guild or Storyteller’s Guild to Storytellers’ Guild. That didn’t take long, but it made me realize that I need to label individual files for the draft number or else I end up search/replacing every file from every draft instead of just the ones that are current.

I spent over an hour working on an important section of about 10-15 lines toward the end of the book that I needed to hash out. Not really in the ‘world building’ section, but it was something I needed to get done. I am much happier with it than with what I had before.

I did some brainstorming on what will happen in the next book(s), just to make sure there isn’t anything I have to add in this book.

Now I need to go through and add in the syntax for using remnants. After that there are a few scenes I want to add in. Then I’ll get to the dreaded task of figuring out Wildrose’s artifacts. I swear, I should not have let myself get this far into the book without figuring it out, but here we are.

Working on Random Bits

Laura Highcove

A very disjointed week in terms of what I got done.

I put in the artifacts in the places I wanted to put them. So that one is done.

I sat down and actually thought about the syntax for using remnants and tried to write out a few things, but I had problems just with some of it. It works to say “Tabitha used the hellhound’s law of fire.” But it’s a little more awkward when it’s “Tabitha used the stone ram’s law of charge.” It feels like it should be ‘charging’, but then that’s a verb rather than the noun. Anyway, I’m still working on it.

I thought about the syntax for the Storybook and had good reasons to have the command be both: ‘Identification’ and ‘Authorization’. Blech.

I now have a list of all of the important characters in the story. i.e. People who get their roles capitalized! I mostly made the list to figure out if I’m balancing the number of male vs female characters until I realized out in the world of this story, there wouldn’t be an equality. Still good info to have though. Also made me think about who is important enough to have a true name, and who needs to have a color.

This week I’ll make a list of the remnants Tabitha uses and how. And the things that people use the Storybook for. That way I can compare what I already have and then stylize them while they’re all next to each other.

New Stage of Revision

Laura Highcove

My writing process involves a lot of: ‘oh I’ll add that foreshadowing later’ or ‘I guess I’ll need to stick in an extra scene sometime’ or even ‘well I’ll get around to explaining that.’ in it. Now, for the first time, I have reached a stage where I actually have everything I wanted to do in the story. It’s not all perfect and beautiful and flowing, to be sure. But it’s all there.

And since it’s out with beta readers, I sort of hit a spot where I have no desire to work on it. It feels like a little switch in my head got flicked to ‘done’, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not, in fact, done.

So I am using this blogging time to both blog, as well as plan what the next few steps will be, still holding to the DIYMFA revision pyramid, which for it’s simplicity, is so powerful. I have the bottom of the pyramid done. I know my pov. I have my character development done. My plot and story structure is all there.

That leaves making a list!

World building:

  • Make sure I have enough artifacts floating around that the world feels like it has artifacts.
  • Make sure all my magic is logical (As well as Tabitha’s progression through learning it.)
  • Hashing out the syntax of commands used for the Storybook.
  • Figuring out syntax for using remnants.

Description/Dialogue:

  • Mark all the places where description needs a boost. (Most of the fights fall in here.)
  • Make sure every person’s voice sounds right in their dialogue.

Theme:

  • Choice vs Fate
  • Everyone needs friends

Line Editing:

  • Print out the story on paper and see what typos pop out.

Now, the world building is still something I can do while the story is out with the beta readers, because if any of the feedback involves “well, I dunno about this world having magic” then I have other problems. The rest of it should wait until I know what scenes I may be adding or subtracting or moving around. Line editing won’t happen until I’m ready to submit to an agent. (I’ve only line edited one story before. It was annoying, and that story was only 12k words.)

I think the biggest thing I got from this week is remembering the benefits of sitting down and making a plan. Even though I never cleave 100% to the plan I make, it just helps to organize everything in my head and makes everything seem attainable as well. And it’s always important to give myself a little ego boost from time to time.

Embracing Your Zero Moment

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I wrote this blog post in response to a prompt from DIYMFA.com. I’m a bit behind the curve in terms of timing, but I wanted to write this post anyway, so it gave me an excuse.

Embrace Your Zero Moment
The hardest step in your creative development is the “zero moment,” the point where you go from doing nothing to doing something. The distance between the zero moment and being a newbie is far greater than the distance between newbie and pro, yet rarely does anyone celebrate this pivotal, important step. Today, we want you to celebrate. Think back to your zero moment and do something to celebrate that incredible leap of faith.

The zero moment I remember the best is for my current story, probably because it’s most recent. I have always wanted to do a story based in or around fairy tales, due largely in part to The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey but for a long time I didn’t have a way to make it work or any real inspiration.

Then, in March of 2014 I was skimming through the “fairy books” by Andrew Lang which were published online. I was reading through different fairy tales until I stumbled on one called ‘The Little Wildrose’. As with all of my ‘research’, I don’t so much take what is, as use what I read to come up with a spark of my own. As soon as I got to the point about the Wildrose being raised by eagles, my mind immediately went to gryffins. (Because I love gryffins, but that will be a future post.)

And as basic and uncomplicated as this tale is, this was the spark that I needed to throw me into the whirlwind of creating a new story. I forget why I decided to make Wildrose a guy instead of a girl. I think it may have started as an idea to have all the roles in the fairy tales gender swapped, as an early version of this story had Wildrose attempting to stop a female Bluebeard from collecting and killing husbands. As I wrote my early drafts I kept coming on the issue of needing another character for Wildrose to play off of.

Eventually Tabitha popped out and took over as the main character of the story. I wrote a chapter or so and then the story sat there until October of that same year when I decided I was going to do this story for NaNoWriMo, only one month wasn’t enough, so I gave myself a goal of 40k words for October, and then did the 50k words in November as well, leaving me with over 90k words by the end of November.

During December I organized what I had written (I don’t always write in order, and I tend to go off on a lot of tangents while writing a rough draft) as well as had a mentor call with Gabriela that helped me to make a plan for tackling the revision. This story is actually what started me on my ‘post a week‘ habit as I wanted to keep track of what I did.

Now everything did not go nearly as beautifully as my plan would suggest, but I certainly did a lot of editing and character development and world building in the next five months. I ‘completed’ my revision only to realize the story was only 55k words.

After a break to let the story rest I came back and did more development work until I threw myself at NaNoWriMo again in order to hammer out the second half of the book. (Which I had really struggled with.) Then I stopped and reassessed.

I had my husband alpha read the story at the beginning of this year, and then I just started hammering out problems over and over, until we get to the present, where the story is out for its first beta read. It really is encouraging to be able to look back at the zero moment to see exactly how far I have come. Two years is a long time, but I’ve also gotten a lot of work done, as well as improved myself as a writer. Even with all the ridiculous doubts along the way, it really is all about not giving up.