Today

Laura Highcove

What happened: I took Tori to put her in the cage walker. She refused. Many. Times. I took her to do a send and receive and Sue ran over yelling that I can’t work her that hard or she’ll get too stressed and lose the baby. I took her to hose her off and walk her to cool her down. She kept walking faster than I did. I got a chain shank and we did showmanship until she started stopping when I did.

What I made it mean: Tori wouldn’t get in the cage walker because she didn’t trust me enough because I’m not a good enough trainer. I responded to her “misbehaving” with more poor trainering and I’m never going to be a good trainer because I never do anything right. I probably already made her lose her baby anyway, so I’ve ruined that. I’m just always surrounded by people who know what they’re doing because they’ve been doing this so much longer than I have, so I can never be right. And even the showmanship that I did wasn’t good, it was all higglty pigglty. Tori keeps overrunning me, but she’s perfectly happy to have me just push her back over and over, and since she’s doing that without a fuss I can’t escalate, I just do it all over and over and I never seem to get it right. Even when I finally do put her away I feel like I was just saying she was ‘good enough’ so that I could go have dinner and be done with my day.

And now I release what happened, and what I made it mean. It’s in the past and has no effect on me anymore.

Casual Vacancy

Laura Highcove

So this is the ‘other’ book written by JK Rowling. I wasn’t really interested in ever reading it. It wasn’t Harry Potter and it didn’t sound like a fantasy, so why bother? Then I heard from Morgan that it was apparently a really good book. She said that all of the characters are unlikable, and yet you want to keep reading anyway. That caught my interest, because if the characters are unlikable, then the story must be something amazing. So I downloaded it on my Kindle, and gave it a shot.

I saw immediately why it’s such a popular book. The woman is a wordsmith like I have rarely seen. I don’t remember this level of craft in the Harry Potter books, but perhaps she just stuck with a particular style throughout those and tried something new in this one. Reading her words was like sailing down a smooth, crystal blue river that is lined with the most luscious garden. Now the plot might be good too, I didn’t get far enough into it to really form an opinion.

That being said, I will not be finishing the book. I think I got about 30% into it (says my Kindle) and the unlikable characters are just too much for me. I don’t read to stare into the blackness of the human soul. Probably why I hated so much reading books for school; all they care about is blackness of souls. I read (and write) fantasy. I want my characters to be heroic on top of their humanity. I don’t want to be wishing I could punch every character in the nose through the pages of the book. I want to read to enjoy myself and root for the main characters. Heck, I even like my villains to be affable. But I certainly will be going back to it on occasion to review the art she made out of those words.

Day After My Birthday

Laura Highcove

Yesterday was a lot of fun. Matthew and I went to Applebee’s for my birthday lunch and I ordered myself a frozen strawberry lemonade. (I know, we’re such big spenders!) I finally started making some headway on my story (but more on that in a later post) and then had a great session in Matthew’s campaign The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin

Then this morning the stupid Daylight Savings Time hit me. Blah. It was still a good day, I was just super tired. Then I came in for lunch and was delighted to remember Matthew had made Egg Salad for me the day before. Joy~ It totally revived me for the second half of the day. And now I’ve gotten a few things that were on my ‘to do’ list finally done. Yay for accomplishment.

So, Florida

Laura Highcove

So for those of you who don’t know, I have temporarily relocated myself and the important pieces of my life (namely my computer, my husband, and my cats and horse inthatorder!) to Myakka City, Florida in order to intern for six months in the breeding program of one of the top horse breeders in the country, Sue Schembri.

I (and pieces) arrived in Florida on January 2, 2013 and proceeded to move into the lovely, snug little apartment and subsequently got my butt handed to me. Things move very quickly here, and I wasn’t really ready for it. Now no one was mean about it, it’s just the speed of how things work. I am just really grateful I got here before breeding season really starts ramping up in February, because I was able to get my feet under me first.

It took me over two weeks to learn to recognize all the horses and over a month to get to the point where I know most of the routine things enough to do them under stress. Next will be learning some of the more obscure things! Yay!

No NaNo

Laura Highcove

So I got about halfway through the month of November, having no trouble keeping up with my word count when it hit me, that NaNoWriMo isn’t for me anymore. NaNoWriMo gets people who have not been working on that novel that they want to publish, to sit down and actually write. Well I realized that I actually had to stop working on the story I had been working on to do NaNoWriMo, which ended up being a story that I have little to no interest in because I’ve already started all of my good story ideas. So I officially quit NaNoWriMo, by telling the people that knew I was doing it, that I wasn’t anymore, and I went back to working on Shifting Winds.

And this isn’t to say that I like NaNoWriMo any less. I think it’s an amazing program that I will continue to support and may participate in again, but it’s for those people who need that push to get off their butts and write, and that’s no longer me. It helped me in the years I did participate. Now I’m to the point where I can write, so I need to work on turning my writing into the polished product it needs to be, and that is not the point of NaNoWriMo.

Nanoing

Laura Highcove

So it’s 8 days into NaNoWriMo for this year, and I am regretting my choice of story. The premise really was rather stupid, but at the same time I seem to be able to hammer out the words I need a lot more easily than I have in the past. Luckily, I guess, is the fact that this story happens in the same universe as one of my other more favorite stories, and thus whatever I write in this, even if most of it ends up being trash, can do a lot to flesh out that universe. My ideas do tend to flow the best when I’m actually writing as opposed to just sitting around thinking (not that I don’t have ideas that way too, sometimes) so I’m just going to hit all the important points and see what comes out of it. I have no doubt I’ll get my 50k words, but don’t ever expect to see Jeremy five-five as its own story.

Pegasus Knights

Laura Highcove

When I was still in college, so a million years ago, I had no idea what Warhammmer was. BUT! I saw a set of Britonnian Pegasus Knights. They were horsies with wings, and being the creative type, I bought them. I had no idea what I was doing and thus at the time only managed to paint one white, one black, and one red.

After the timeskip, when my husband and I moved back to Blacksburg, I became interested in minis again. Mostly because our D&D default had shifted to using miniatures, and having a unique mini for ones character was popular.

Enough backstory. I grabbed the unfinished pegasus knights, simple greened most of the paint off of them, and painted them again.

It was only after I ‘finished’ the minis that I found the old box I had bought back in college that had some shields that I never put on. I’m not entirely upset about that. With all the other minis I have to do, I don’t have time to go back right now. Maybe someday.

Notes: These pegasus are colored for three chymera (pegasus with horns) from one of my stories. The white is Prism, the red is her father Fleetfoot, and the purple is Nightwind. Prism and Fleetfoot’s barding is the same color because they come from the same manor. Nightwind is from another.

Loki

Laura Highcove

I actually don’t know what first sparked my interest in Norse mythology. I remember already knowing a bit when I first played Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth (for the PSP, not the PS1) But I didn’t really start researching it until after I saw a mostly obscure anime called Ragnarok many many years ago. I only watched a few episodes of it, but while the characters interested me, the story did not and I walked away from it going: “I can do that better.”

Loki interested me from the beginning, as he is, I feel, the character around which the entire mythology rotates. I have read a lot of different opinions on him, from him just being a harmless jokester to evil incarnate.

When the Thor movie was coming out I knew nothing about it. I really didn’t want to see it because I figured it would effect my own vision of Norse mythology too much, and Thor was not a comic book hero in which I was ever interested. I’m not sure why I changed my mind, (Maybe cause Thor’s actor was cute, no lie) but when I started it up and saw “Thor’s brother” I wasn’t sure at first who it was. Odin has lots of sons after all. (In mythology anyway.) It wasn’t until I heard the character called “Silvertongue” that it actually clicked.

And I remember feeling a sense of dread. It is so easy to make Loki the villain, and I figured that was what was going to happen in this movie as well. I was so happy at the thought and care that went into Loki’s progression from good to evil. The depth and humanity of it, well I can understand why he has such a following (handsome, talented actors aside). I don’t watch that movie for Thor. Thor can shove it. I don’t believe his change in attitude for a moment when compared to the anguish that Loki had to endure and the decisions he had to make.

Though part of me is still upset, because now I feel like I have to share Loki with the rest of the world. Some of them who don’t know anything about the mythology or the character beyond what was in that movie. It worries me mostly because of the story I am trying to write that uses Loki as one of the main characters. It will probably be tainted by those movies, but I guess I won’t let that keep me from nurturing my own version of Loki. And maybe one day, someone else will like my version of Loki as well.

Bowser

Laura Highcove

A few months ago, the other game store in town went out of business and had a sale. That was when I saw this monster turtle mini from a set called Warmachine. I snatched it up with the idea of painting it as Bowser. Despite my enthusiasm, however, it took me until now to actually paint it. I painted the whole thing in one afternoon. Took me around four or five hours all told (sans the spray paint base which I did a while ago) and it turned out rather well. I know I could have done some modding to add hair and horns, but I decided against that. I don’t really like modeling stuff yet, probably cause I’m kinda bad at it. Anyway, results: