Draft 0

Laura Highcove

I finished Draft 0 of Blessings of the Neriel yesterday. (For clarification, I define a Draft 0 as a draft that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Those are the only requirements.) I was having so much trouble making myself sit down and write, and when I did sit down I just didn’t know what to do.

I sat down and wrote out everything else that needed to happen for the book to be done, and it was like, not very much. So I opened a new document in Scrivener and wrote the following:

“I am so resistant to/terrified of finishing this story. That’s okay, be terrified and write anyway. Make this the absolute worst trash you’ve ever written, use psuedo code, use clichés, break the fourth wall. Do your worst and get it done.”

And that’s what I did. I wrote each scene I had in my list. When I had accomplished the thing I was supposed to and stalled in getting from place to place, or from scene to scene, I just put a line break in and started writing the next thing. I called out issues I’d have to fix later and ignored them. I ignored scene plot holes (A lot of stuff happens at the Kismet Building, let me tell you.) and just wrote. And I got to the end. Is it good? No? It it readable? I mean technically since I used English words, but in terms of story, no. But is it done? Yes.

Still Missing Goals

Laura Highcove

So it’s 10pm on November 2 and I still don’t have my goals hashed out. I wrote both yesterday and today, but the goal I set for myself this morning ended up not being possible. I went into a scene I thought would be an easy edit, and ripped it to shreds. The next scene I still don’t know what’s going to happen in it.


There’s a lesson in here somewhere about ‘keep at it’, and ‘keep revising your goals’, and you know what? Right now I am just over it. I put in my time today and I’m done.


I mean this isn’t given up forever, but while I could continue pounding on this for the next hour trying to finish it, I think that would do more harm than good. Done for today. There is tomorrow.

Tripping Before NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

My plans were very much affected by life. I started off alright, only I underestimated …well everything. First off, there are a lot more emotionally draining scenes at the end of this book than I thought. There’s a lot going on, and obviously this is the point where everything is going wrong in order to make things seem the most dire. In addition to that, I had two appointments on Wednesday, one for the dentist which is just never fun, and another one that I knew would be emotionally draining. So I took it easy Wednesday, planning on getting back to writing on Thursday. Only there are some things going on at work that either on their own, or in addition to the events on Wednesday, made it so by the time I got to Saturday I was so completely and totally out of fucks.


As you may have guessed, that means I got very little (I did get some) writing done. I am still in Chapter 13 in a scene that is emotionally difficult to write, followed by a scene that is technically difficult to write. After that maybe I will get to a few scenes that are mostly together and less draining.


However, you may noticed, as I have, that NaNoWriMo starts the day after tomorrow. And the free time I have Monday morning is taken up by a rescheduled horseback riding lesson. So the short of it is, I can’t finish Draft 0 by November and it would be irresponsible to try. I will get some done, obviously. I think I can get through Chapter 13. Right now, I think I’m going to just get what I can done today, since I have other things I want to do as well. And I’m going to spend my first day of Nano figuring out where I am and then making some new goals.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2022

Laura Highcove

Here I am, five days away from NaNoWriMo, and for the first time, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Usually by this point I know definitively whether I will or will not be participating and what I will be doing as my project and what my goal(s) is/are. Those sometimes differ from the “rules” of Nano, but I make it work for me, and I stick to the rules I set up for myself.


This year I am at the end of Draft 0. So close that using Nano to finish it would be a waste, but far enough that I’m not convinced I’ll be ready to move onto another project. Add to that the wrinkle that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are coming out on November 18th, and let’s be honest, if I get any real work done in the month after that game comes out I will be very surprised.


The plan right now is, Nano or not, to get Draft 0 of this book finished and then turn it into a First Draft which can be beta read. The current word count is 97k. That does include some notes and such.


And I just went and made an outline (omg discovery writer writing an outline!!!) of what needs to happen from where I am to the end and I think it actually makes sense. I was rather surprised at how well it all came out. It took me forever to get a handle on this story and the characters, and I think I managed it. So now I just have to write the scenes I don’t have yet. It’s close enough to the end that I don’t think there will be many surprises, at least not big ones. (Please, please no huge surprises that require a reworking of the entire book.)


Now the question is, “Do I think I can get this written in a week?”


I think it’s possible assuming none of these scenes just wipe me out emotionally. I had a scene with Jen that I just finished that did that. Hard to write but totally necessary. There might be a few, but with a week to do it …of course I have lost all sense of chapter breaks after Chapter 12. Truthfully, the chapter breaks in this book suck in the first place, but I digress. This made it hard to plan out the rest of my schedule based on chapters. So I had to do it scene by scene, and let me tell you, judging how long it will take to write a scene from just a few sentences of ‘this is what’s going to happen in this scene’ is not a skill I have yet. If I push hard, I can get Draft 0 done by November.


Then I suppose the idea for the first half of November, not necessarily Nano, would be to read through and write down allll the plot holes, and try and get those finished before Pokemon comes out. Would be nice to be able to throw out the story to my beta readers when it’s time to play Pokemon. Let’s see.

[SGC Week 5] Shifting Goals

Laura Highcove

As expected, I got super ahead on my word count due to rewriting scenes as opposed to having to write things from scratch, which means I kinda stopped doing some every day. One of the pitfalls of being me. The SGC call was a little less useful this week, it was basically to go to the point where your character makes the choice that kicks off the story, and to slow it down and get real close, try and stretch it out. I think because I already had it written, it was kinda hard for me to purposely stretch it out. I did realize that Eira could see going to the city as possibly ‘I’ll either find out we were wrong about the neriel, or that this city is also evil and will need to be cleansed.’ Instead of just wanting to find out she’s right as a Sinner. Which will add a little more nuance possibly.

I keep rewriting what I have and finding Eira to be too soft and passive. Which is part of the problem I had with her in the first place. I know more who she is now, but that doesn’t keep me from having to go back multiple times and make her less nice. There was a scene with her and Ruri where I had her apologize to Ruri for treating him badly when she was a paladin. I completely removed that. She wouldn’t think that, nor would she say it. She’s still convinced that Sinners are bad and that her being one is a mistake. She understands their struggles more, but part of her still thinks they deserve it.

Anyway, the group has two more meetings. This weeks will be the other two group members, and next week we’re all getting 10 pages. Not sure what I’m going to submit. I actually got out a decent draft of my YA Fantasy critique for the first time in ever. I almost want to hand that to them to see how it lands. Not like I need more critique on my story since it will only be a tiny bit more, I’ve gotten a lot of the benefit from the group already in helping with that.

Anyway, I think my goals will be one scene rewritten a day, to figure out and post what I want people to critique next week, and to organize the next month or so after SGC ends, as I would like to keep to momentum going.

[SGC Week 4.5] Finding Eira

Laura Highcove

This week got away from me a little bit. I had some doctor things going on, all good, but necessary and requiring time and attention. The SGC call on Monday was talking about agents and querying and so while there were no cool breakthroughs with my story, I started getting back into the idea of being able to query again. Obviously I still need to finish this book, which likely won’t happen by the end of the course as I’d planned because I had such a huge shift in Eira that I needed to start over. But that is my process. Trying to force myself to keep going when I don’t have what I’ve already written to a certain point doesn’t work, and I’ve proved that to myself enough times through failure that I’m starting to accept it.

That being said, I am much happier with the beginning of the story now. Eira and I are still working through some things where I think I want her to care about people more than she actually does, but there isn’t no care there, which is what I was always the most scared of. And I got really good feedback this Thursday from my group when I gave them the first chapter and a half (rewritten, though they’d never read the old version). I mean there was the fact that what I’d given them before was very ‘rough draft’ and this was far more polished, but I was surprised by how well they responded to it.

I had my first moment of real ‘impostor syndrome’ where they were praising things I’d done and I’m just going ‘I have no idea how this story plays out’ and ‘I don’t know how to carry that theme through the whole book’, but the encouragement was nice and, well, encouraging. And I do still feel like I’m making progress, and that’s the whole point. Right now I’m just going to keep going and when the SGC is over in two weeks, I’m going to reassess where I am and how quickly I think I can finish this book. I got very close to the end before I restarted this time, so I think finishing draft 0 isn’t too far off. Then it’s just a matter of finding out how many huge plot holes I have to fill.

Goal for this week is to keep rewriting a scene or two a day. Some are easier than others, it’s really not an exact science, so it’s more that I work for at least a half hour each day. Usually I go a bit over. Also, read my group’s submissions. Since it’s so late in the week that’s all I have. Hopefully I’ll get my next post up closer to the day I had planned.

[SGC Week 3] The Epiphany

Laura Highcove

I have been trying, when doing these blog posts, to write about what has happened with my writing/life in the past week, which means before Monday. But I was sick this week, the blog post got delayed, and on Monday I had an epiphany. Prior to Monday I am working my way into the ending climax part of the story, and some pieces of that are coming together, but Eira was still…not right.

So I have been writing Blessings of the Neriel for a while now and I have never really gotten Eira, the main character,’s personality down. I’m still writing the book because that’s how I work. I write until I find out what I’m supposed to learn about the story and then I go back and fix it. It was taking a long time with Eira, or really, not so much. See, I had a period where I thought Eira might need to be a narcissist or a sociopath, but on researching it, one of the main traits is a lack of empathy. They literally cannot care about someone emotionally. And so much of the heart of what I write is about emotions and how people connect with each other this was just not an option. I couldn’t have a main character who cannot feel emotions, so I pushed it away.

But the writing exercise we did on Monday’s SGC writing class was ‘What does your character want’, and then exploring that like what’s in their way and what are the risks/consequences of going for it and for failing to get it. So I started writing and it was pretty easy to see that when I was forced to think about her motivation in those terms, that the only thing she cared about was getting back to her former glory by any means necessary. So she’s doing all this stuff that seems ‘good’, but for entirely selfish reasons. She just wants to be awesome again.

And that upset me, cause I’m back in the ‘well she doesn’t care about anyone’ space. I cried as I explained it to the group. I was encouraged to read some books with antihero protagonists, and to look a bit more into narcissism. I will tell you, one of the problems with looking narcissism on the Internet is that most of it is for people who know/love/interact with a narcissist, and how to keep from being taken advantage of or losing yourself in their narcissism. This is important, to be sure, but most of the first results do not talk about what it’s like to be a narcissist from their point of view. I suppose because a narcissist wouldn’t care to look up ‘am I a narcissist and what do I do about it’?

But I did find one thing that gave me hope, a quote from this article.

Both past and current life circumstances can evoke multiple features, but may not necessarily be an ingrained part of who someone is (their personality).

A broad, general example of this would be someone who experiences a season of financial hardship after years of financial wealth. They may be preoccupied with fantasies of the wealth and power they used to have. They may also feel superior to others, become envious of those who are wealthy, and tend to gravitate toward people who make them feel important. This individual may present with features of NPD, but these features are connected to their circumstances and not necessarily their personality.

In other words, just because a person may possess features of NPD, does not mean they don’t have the ability to love. However, it is quite possible that their capacity to love may be limited.

Which basically describes Eira’s situation. She was top of the world, loved, praised, talented and then it was all taken away from her. So she could present with bits of NPD without the undesirable (to me the author) complete lack of empathy. Obviously I’ll need to do more research, not that I think if I portray narcissists incorrectly they’ll be all that upset about it, but still, it’s the right thing to do. And hopefully after this, the story will start to come together a bit better, including the opening scene that I knew was not the correct opening scene.

Goal for this week: Keep up 1k words a day. (I have been and it’s been so awesome.), read my group’s submissions. Get my next submission ready.

[SGC Week 2] Settling In

Laura Highcove

It’s a blah kinda day, but really not all that bad. Been playing Triangle Strategy and Stardew Valley. Been keeping up on my words. Been keeping the pets fed. Been going to work. Been hanging with the husband. Been keeping the house somewhat in order. It’s a rather full and varied life, but that works for me.

I think one of the more interesting things I’ve realized is that writing 1k words a day isn’t really that much of a drain. Like, I’m getting it done but I don’t ever feel like I have to spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer doing it, and I’m still able to get other things done. Part of my brain wants to tell me ‘well then obviously you could be writing more’, but truthfully, the fact that I’ve been pretty consistent about getting this done for the past two weeks is awesome. I don’t want to try and do more and then burn myself out, especially since, like I’ve said before, this is the rough part of the book. If I can just make consistent progress for the next month I will be super happy.

The SGC writing class last week was on narrative distance, where were saw where we normally wrote, then tried the opposite. I write close most of the time, and writing far was really weird. I could see a point for it, but I don’t really like it. :p And the Write Ones group critiques were the other two people in the group. Both stories were enjoyable. Though we had one of the critiquees come out of the loving bubble of silence and then start explaining everything we had said we didn’t understand about the story. After about five minutes I took off my headphones because they just kept going and I didn’t want to hear it. The point is that you should find out about it from the story, some things should be questions, but I totally understand that desire to explain everything. I used to do it as well, so I don’t blame them. But I just didn’t want that information so I can continue to not know when I read more of the story.

This morning I still hadn’t put in my next pages for critique. I was feeling way too self-conscious about the roughness of my rough draft. But the group leader convinced me to submit anyway, and so I hope it goes well. The next critique day is on my Birthday so that will be exciting. I will have cake!

Goals: 1k words a day, keeping it up. Be accepting of the critique that will come in on basically the roughest thing I’ve ever let another person read. I know my group wants to help, so there’s no real danger, I just have to convince my lizard brain of that.

[SGC Week 1] First Impressions

Laura Highcove

So the first week of the SGC is behind me now. First impressions? It’s done what I expected it to do in that I have a group of writers to chat with, but mostly it’s applying just enough of that expectation of accountability for me to get things done. As much as I’d like to say that I can do things without some sort of oversight, I can’t. At least not on a regular basis.

But I have gotten my thousand words a day done, and I am very convinced that I have no idea where the story is going right now, which is not surprising. It’s that part of the book and I knew I was going to have difficulty with it. Right now I just have to convince myself to keep writing because that’s the only way I’m going to figure out what’s going on and get an actual story in the end.

More on the actual SGC, I really enjoyed the way we did the bubble method of receiving critique. In the past it’s always been that the critiquers are supposed to ignore the critiquee, and the critiquee is supposed to pretend not to be there, but that can be really hard to do. When someone says something about your story, you want to defend it. And even if you’re not defending, you feel the need to nod or agree with what people are saying. Since we were on zoom, the critiquee turned off their mic and camera so they could be neither seen nor heard. This means that I (when receiving critique) could respond, and emote and whatever, but they had no idea I was doing so, so they actually had a conversation among themselves, talking about what I had written. It was actually really cool.

And even though I plopped them into the middle(ish) of my story, and they didn’t have the benefit of the first part of the story (There is a story sketch they get that gives them some information, so they didn’t go in blind.) I still got some very good feedback on the scenes I gave them. So now the concern is that many of the newer scenes I’m writing, because I have so little idea what I’m doing, might be worthless for critique. But I keep reminding myself that I signed up for this class mostly just for the accountability. So anything else I get out of it is just bonus.

Now that I’ve spent time writing this, it’s time to get to writing my actual story. Goals are the same as last week, 1k words a day, and doing the two meetings, though this week I don’t have anything of mine being critiqued, so I just want to be a good critiquer.

[SGC Week 0] Realizations and Goals

Laura Highcove

So today started out pretty good. I got a package that was a video game shirt my husband had ordered for me. I pulled out the women’s large, and put it on, and of course it was entirely too small, because ‘women’s’ shirts are always that baby doll shape that actually comes in one, if not two, sizes smaller than that shirt would be for the ‘default’ (ie, a man). I had been looking forward to this shirt and now I can’t wear it, and it put me into a bad mental place because this is again one of those micro-aggressions society throws out against women. ‘You need to be small and petite.’ ‘Your breasts are too big.’ ‘Clothing never fits you, because you’re not ‘right’.’ It is the reason I spent so many years feeling like I wasn’t ‘woman enough’ even though the main reason this shirt wouldn’t fit is because my chest is too large. I have mostly moved past that, but today it popped up in an unfortunate way.


Then I had the first group call for a Small Group Coaching program I signed up for through DIY MFA. It’s eight weeks of group critique and writing classes and I’m hoping to use the accountability of the group to finish the rough draft for my next fantasy project, Blessings of the Neriel, which is half done but has stalled a bit. While everyone was introducing themselves, I realized that ever since the first book I finished, The Law of the Prince Charming, only got generic rejections from agents, and even though I had mentality prepared for that, and expected it, and tried to challenge myself to get like 100 rejections, it hit me really hard, to the point where I’ve been subconsciously not wanting to write because …’what’s the point’? Even though I know the point is that I love to write and I want to tell these stories. It’s funny how you can know something logically so well and yet your heart can still effect you in the ways that it does. And there’s nothing to do about it except eventually realize it, and start working toward your goal again, which is what I’m doing now.


We did a worksheet that has to make your overall goal, and then break it down into smaller, more obtainable steps. My first goal was sending out queries for Blessings of the Neriel to agents, but that’s not something I could, or would want to try and, do in the next eight weeks. So I broke down the first step toward that goal into it’s own three steps for the goal of getting the rough draft of Blessings of the Neriel done. Since it’s about halfway done, it should only be another 50k words or so, which doing in eight weeks instead of the four for NaNoWriMo, should be easier to handle. And along with that I get two meetings a week, one for learning new skills, and one that is group/critique meeting. Those will help to keep me up on things.


And this blog is just because writing things out like this very often helps me get it not only organized in my head, but helps me to remember the stuff I know logically instead of always acting on my feelings alone. Plus, I like being able to look back and realize how far I’ve come from the beginning, and I think that will be cool to do with this class.


Goal for the first week: 7k words and get what I can from the group critique and the group teaching.