Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Laura Highcove

Elantris starts off in a world on the verge of a religious war. There are only two holdout countries and from those two countries we get the main characters who are signed up for political marriage; only the prince dies while the princess is on route.

Or at least everyone is told he died, because it’s a better idea than telling them he turned into one of the cursed creatures of Elantris. We follow the prince through the mysterious circumstances inside Elantris, which used to be a wonderful place filled with god-like creatures. On the outside, the princess, now a widow, tries to establish herself in the court with many of the prince’s old friends. She also has to pit herself against a powerful representative of the strongest religion in the world as he tries to convert everyone before a time limit.

In my opinion, the characters were believable and a lot of fun to follow. The mystery of Elantris kept me guessing, and I enjoyed finding out about it along the way. There were a few plot devices that were very obviously there only to be useful at the end, but those are forgivable, and there were plenty of others that managed to catch me by surprise.

One of the things I like about this book is the relationships/friendships between characters. Also, I feel like the author knows the ins and outs of his world such that he can play with it in a way that really makes the world feel real. I felt satisfied having read this book and would recommend it to others.

Drawing my Own Lines

Laura Highcove

So I have always been creative. Besides the fact that I have been writing stories since I learned to write, I have always been interested in all manor of other artistic pursuits.

I had a Lion King coloring book when I was around 12 (since that’s when The Lion King came out) that I meticulously colored. I would carefully outline each section by pressing hard with the crayon such that it left a dark line, then I would lightly color in the inside of the lines, such that there was a nice contrast.

My mother also introduced me (and my siblings) to painting ceramics. Taking entirely white figures, usually four or five inches tall, and painting them with acrylic paints. This was also a hobby for many years.

There was also my deep interest in photography, though I don’t remember when I started taking pictures, I was in a class for photography in high school, which put me in the Art Honor Society. I even got one of my pictures published in the high school’s art book.
When I began hanging around online more, after high school, I had a friend who drew pictures and I taught myself to color them in using Adobe Photoshop. I got rather good at it.

These days my main artistic hobby besides writing is painting miniatures. Both Warhammer and Reaper. Some for fun, some for D&D. You can see many of my coloring jobs in my gallery and my mini paintings among my blog posts.

But I came to notice after all these years, that many of my artistic pursuits actively used something someone else has created as a base. My creativity was in adding my own touch to it. I, basically, am very good at coloring inside the lines.

However, my writing is born completely out of myself. Though I am influenced by the ideas all around me (as it’s impossible not to be), the conclusions I draw and thus the characters and worlds I create are entirely of my own making. Writing, I realize, is entirely about drawing my own lines.

A Lesson on Backups

Laura Highcove

So when I was in middle school, I first heard of the pokémon craze. Kids were playing it, talking about it, and I wanted in on that. I got a game boy for Christmas, along with the blue version of the game. I played the heck out of that game, catching all the pokémon I could, leveling them up, reading strategies. When the next games came out I got those as well.

As I grew older, the pokémon franchise did as well. They made a new generation of pokémon where the stats were fundamentally different, as such the older pokémon could not be transferred to the new games. Everything after that cutoff however could be moved forward each time there was a new game. I collected pokémon for years. I saved all the rare or once a game pokémon. I saved pokémon that had a special place in my heart, like my team (generally the only pokémon I named) that I played through each game with. I even got legal copies of the pokémon you couldn’t get from the game at all, mew, jirachi, and celibi. Along with a mewtwo named Jessica that I specifically made sure had the proper personality, that I got only speed and special attack EVs. All those special pokémon got moved from old game to new game up until pokémon SoulSilver came out.

In my opinion HeartGold and SoulSilver was the pinnacle of pokémon. The game was everything I had ever wanted, it had the pokéwalker which was a huge hit, and I spent tons of time getting all the pokémon that I had collected over the past decade onto my SoulSilver game.

I never actually found out what happened, but my theory is that one day I had gotten a new video card for my computer, and all the packaging was on my desk. When I threw away that packaging, my SoulSilver cartridge was on my desk and somehow got collected up and thrown out.

It was a few weeks (I wasn’t actively playing the game at the time, hence why it was out of the game boy) before I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. It took another few months of desperate searching before I had to finally admit that the game cartridge was gone, and with it was every pokémon I had ever collected.

My husband tells me that I was actually in mourning. For several weeks I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and lament that my pokémon were gone. Even now, years later I still wish I had them. Just because they represented so much of my childhood and the memories there.

Unless you played pokémon like I did, it’s unlikely that you really understand the loss involved. I mean it was just a video game, after all. However, this event in my life has made it super clear to me that some things are irreplaceable. Even if I played all the games again (and I did try this briefly) the collection would never be the same as it was.

As such, I do not even take a chance that one day I might wake up having lost all of the stories that I have written over much the same period of time. I daily back up the stories from my laptop to my desktop, which in turn backs them up to an external drive overnight. Once a week I zip the files up and upload them to both Google Drive and my own website, as a college professor once warned us, a backup in the same physical location as the original is not a backup.

I still mourn my lost pokémon but I choose to look at it as a price I was willing to pay in order to never have to suffer through losing all the work I’ve done on my stories. And perhaps this little nudge from me will convince someone else to back up important files so they never find themselves without a backup.

A Kinder, Gentler Website

Laura Highcove

While I don’t have any books published yet, I am hoping that when I do, people will have a yearning to come to my website. That they’ll be interesting in knowing more about the story or even about me. So I want to have a website where people can come and do that.

I recently read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. I have never read any of Stephen King’s books before (I don’t like horror.) but I had heard that this book (which is a memoir + how to write book in one) was good, so I got around to it fourteen years later. Despite his rather haughty attitude and opinions, by the end of the book I felt a kinship with Stephen. Not that I thought we would get along and be bestest friends if we got together in a room, but I understood and connected with him as a writer.

In fact I enjoyed the book enough that I wanted to write him a thank you note. It seemed, at the time, like a good idea. I figured as a super popular author he would never reply, but I felt (as a writer) I would appreciate receiving such a note. So I went to his website to see if there was an email where I could send my letter. I hit a wall of stone and steel. His website is nothing more than a professionally made cookie-cutter front.

Now that’s not to say I blame him. He has a ton of fans. Like tons, and it’s not like he can interact with them all. At the same time, I will never quite forget the way I pulled up his website to see if I could thank him for a wonderfully written book, and I literally (yes, I mean literally) felt the warmth and appreciation sucked out of my body by the soulless website that represents him online.

I never want my website to be that, even if I become popular, I want people to be able to come to my website and find some of me there. Occasional blog posts, cute little stories, or tidbits about characters or story creation. My goal is to have that connection be available for the people who want it because it’s what I want too.

Writing Struggles

Laura Highcove

I have found, in my writing, that I have times when my writing just flows, and it comes naturally, the dialog, the actions, the description. And there are other times when I struggle with a scene, I force myself through it NaNo style. Then I’ll come back later to try and iron it out, and it will flop all over the place like a fish trying to escape a butcher’s knife. I have come to discover that a lot of times when I have these troubles, the only way that I can fix them is go back and completely rewrite the scene, from scratch, and what I generally find is that the struggle I had was in me as a writer trying to force my characters into doing something and them desperately trying to tell me that they were having none of it.

I am getting a bit better with recognizing when this is happening. If something isn’t flowing, most of the time I can catch it and go back to the rewrite step before I put myself and my characters through a non-working scene.

However, this weekend I ran into what felt like this struggle, where my writing just wasn’t working, only it followed me from story to story. After two days of things not working I pulled out a short story that I’m pretty happy with and went to revising it. And it very shortly turned into a massive struggle, when all I was trying to do was streamline the story a bit. This one hit me much deeper because this was something I had already written, something that already worked, and somehow I was unable to revise it into something that still worked.

I cried. I admit it. I felt that somehow I had just … lost whatever it was that made me able to write. At lunch, my husband admitted that he could tell I was upset and so I explained to him what was happening as best I could.

And wonderful man that he is, made me realize that what was happening was that I had been rereading one of my favorite fantasy trilogies, and in that, I was trying to write in a style that was not my own, while I desperately tried to tell myself I was having none of it. So the reason I was struggling with all of my stories over the past few days was because I was forcing myself to do something that was against my nature. I can’t write like someone else any more than someone else can write like me.

Just chalk it up to another life lesson where I am coming to realize that when writing is a struggle, (and I mean a real struggle, not just ‘oh I’m too tired’) that it is simply a character not being able to be who they are, whether it be a denizen of my fictitious worlds or my own self.

Cottontail

Laura Highcove

There were two constants in my young life: reading and writing.

I have no idea if I learned to read early or easily, but once I had, there was no stopping me. I have memories of winning an award in elementary school for reading the most books. My mother used to go the library and bring me a stack of books. I would polish them off in a week and she would go back for more.

Apparently somewhere along the line I taught myself to speed read. Always impatience to find out what happened at the end of the story, I tore through books at a speed that continued to impress teachers and friends. Once in second grade we were reading a story in class. It was about ballerina shoes and the class had to all read it silently to themselves. I read the story, and when I was done I looked around to see how everyone else was faring. My teacher came over and told me I needed to read the story. When I told her I had, she told me to read it again, because she had only just finished reading it herself, and so there was no way I had read it that fast.

My love of writing came in fourth grade.

The assignment for the class was an illustrated storybook about a cute, furry creature who has a problem, in the form of a bad guy, and then solves it. My protagonist (not that I knew that word back then) was dutiful Cottontail, a female rabbit who was out picking clover for dinner when she ran into the antagonist, a bear. There was an ensuing chase and refuge in an underground hidey place, far from home.

The next day Cottontail decided that if she was going to get home, she had to deal with the bear. A plan hatched, she let the bear chase her to the edge of a cliff, where she jumped out of the way of his charge and he fell off the cliff and into the lake below where he drowned. Unsure as I was at the age of six on the spelling of ‘drowned’, I went to my teacher, Mrs. Ligon to ask.

She read over my story and praised me for my creative ending, in not just having Cottontail and a bear randomly become friends as many of my classmates were doing with their stories. That little bit of praise stuck with me, and I have been writing ever since.

Frozen

Laura Highcove

So on Tuesday I walked into the back room of Fun N Games, now newly moved to University Mall, where we hold our weekly D&D session. Gloves immediately stood up, pointed at me, and said ‘You have to go see Frozen.’ Now if you know Gloves, you will know that this is very odd behavior for him, as he is the type of guy who is perfectly happy in his own opinions, but for the most part does not try to impart them on other people. Therefore, my husband and I knew that this sort of declaration warranted attention.

We proceeded to talk about how the commercials and advertising for the movie were horrible, or at least did not make me excited about going to see the movie, which is the point of advertising. At that moment of the conversation with Gloves, I knew two things: One: Frozen was based on ‘The Snow Queen’ fairy tale, and they had both an annoying snowman mascot AND another hoofed animal acting like a dog (A la Tangled) which is a pet peeve of mine, as I actually work with horses.

Then Blake brought up the fact that he had read a review that said the reviewer basically could not say anything about the movie, because it was all a spoiler. I thought about that for a moment. It’s a rather tall order. It also would explain why there was nothing other than joke scenes in the commercials, in addition to a line from the main!? character saying ‘That’s not a blizzard, that’s my sister’, which did not actually occur in the movie. Spoiler!?

After seeing the movie, I can understand why they decided that pretty much, the movie is a spoiler for the movie. I will now proceed to explain why I think the marketing was done the way it was, which is in fact spoiler. If you haven’t seen the movie, go patronize it with money. If you have, you have no worry of spoilers.

Reasons the commercials were horrible:

1) They did not want to show Anna in princess garb, that cut out a large portion of scenes at the beginning.
2) They wanted you to think Elsa was the villain and there are no real villainy scenes with Elsa, because she’s not a villain.
3) They couldn’t show the actual villain, because unlike most Disney movies, who the villain was is actually a surprise. And most of the rest of the time he’s on camera, he’s singing or with Anna in princess garb.

However, I was really happy with the way I feel they played with tropes in this movie. Elsa became a queen and then went rogue (not villain, but still rogue). The trope being Disney Queens are evil.

Also, I have a thing for fairy tail characters who know (to some extent) that they exist in a fairy tale world. (My top two favorite books ever are examples of this, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones and The Fairy Godmother by Mercades Lackey) When they say ‘a supreme act of love’ and everyone goes right to ‘true love’s kiss’. (It’s a theme in ABC (owned by Disney)’s Once Upon A Time, which is also wonderful, go see it.)

Then there is Anna, who is an action girl, ready to go out there and deal with life on her terms, then becomes a damsel in distress. Sadface. They rush her back to the castle only to find out her ‘true love’ Hans is the villain at which point we assume she needs Khristoff to save her … only then she sacrifices herself for Elsa, which causes her to save herself! A wonderful break from normal fairy taleing, even if it makes Khristoff a rather handsome ancillary character.

So both girls had wonderful character development, the snowman ended up being rather perfect, and now the Internets have someone to pair Jack Frost with. Plus, the ice palace was rather spectacular.

NaNoWriMo 2013

Laura Highcove

http://nanowrimo.org/participants/pyropawz

So another successful NaNoWriMo. Much easier this year since my goal was not actually to complete NaNoWriMo, but to finish my entire novel, Shifting Winds, by the end of the year. I have my wordcount 50,921 from just this month. The novel right now clocks in at 116,414, though it’s still not finished. I am having some issues with the very ending section and how things come together, so working that out will be my December.

Thor: The Dark World

Laura Highcove

Last week when Thor: The Dark World came out, my husband and I took our date night out to see it. He, because it was a super hero movie, me because of Loki. Don’t judge me. The movie’s premise worked really good. There always needs to be some sort of explanation of why, when a world rending evil is lurking in a world where the Avengers exist, that the Avengers all (or part of at least) don’t just swoop in to save the day. This movie handled that by having the only proof of it happening unknown until things were really rocking, oh and having most of it take place in other worlds where mere humans can’t go.

Did I mention spoilers? I’m mentioning spoilers now. Open movie, cleaning up stuff from the last movie until new threat from unknown and ‘thought long gone’ source. Way to get Thor off his lazy, saving the nine worlds butt, and back to his ‘girlfriend. I guess the movie is technically named after him, so I accept that he must be part of the movie. But Loki! In Jail! With Books! >.> I am also super happy that they finally really showed what Frigg(a) could do.

Truthfully at the end of the movie I simply sat back and thought to myself ‘This movie gave me everything it was that I wanted, without even really knowing that I wanted it.’

Updating the site

Laura Highcove

So almost a year ago, I spent a large part of the beginning of my vacation in Williamsburg, working on creating a gallery page of old pictures I had of characters in php. It worked wonderfully, but apparently between working on it, and loading it up again a week later, the version of MySql changed and the page no longer worked. I had no idea why at the time. Now I have it up again, and so there are now links to them under The Gallery.