Pushing Through

Laura Highcove

After the last post, I feel like I should update you on the two big upheavals in my reality.
1) Supernatural’s final episode was complete and utter trash.
2) Trump is refusing to concede to Biden and he’s encouraging his ‘followers’ in the belief that he was cheated out of the election.

Neither of these come as a surprise, but I’m still very upset about both.

That being said, I had a great vacation in Williamsburg. Went to see family briefly, went to a number of nurseries, hung out and had great food with my husband, and got a new video game that I haven’t had time to play since I got back.

Writing has been rough. I kept up with my word count in Williamsburg, but I’m at the point where I have to wrap up everything beautifully. I have to tie up all the loose ends and make it satisfying and once again I’m stuck in the my dead zone, (from the halfway point of the book until the 3/4 mark). I suppose the only thing I can do now is just go write the ending in more detail and hope that at some point I’ll figure out how to get there. It’s already 6pm today and I only have half my words. I wanna put it off for tomorrow but I know it’ll just be worse. Sigh. Just have to keep pushing.

Breaking the Rules of NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Friday and Saturday each gave me a ridiculous upheaval to my reality and I’m still reeling a bit.

Destiel

First, and the one you likely don’t know/care about, is that on Friday I saw the gay relationship of two characters on the long-running show Supernatural Dean and Castiel actually canonized. Like legit. Not like the subtext for the last twelve years that, while amazingly obvious, was still subtext. It was an amazing moment that made me cuss out loud because I never thought I’d see it. And there are still episodes left in the show.

POTUS

Then on Saturday Biden won the presidency. I cried for about a half hour in relief. And I know this doesn’t fix anything, and there are still problems, but right now I’ll settle for it not getting any worse for a bit.

NaNoWriMo

And around all of that, I’m still working my way through NaNoWriMo and I will tell you that I am playing faster and looser with the rules than I ever have simply because it’s necessary. I am doing everything I possibly can to make it the easiest and most productive experience possible. Partially because of mental health issues (which come in no small part to everything that’s been/going on.) and partially because my process has changed so dramatically over the years.


The past few years I’ve had difficulty/gotten stuck in NaNo because what I had written wasn’t organized and thought through yet, thus I couldn’t see the way forward. When trying to pound out words, I write things out of order, I write scenes multiple times with different focuses, everything just comes out into a huge pile. And editing makes it very hard to keep track of word count.


So this year I just said ‘screw it’. I write what I write and count those words, and then I edit those words: copy/paste, write more, delete even more, all to get a working scene, and I count those words as well. Is it to the law of NaNo? Absolutely not. But it’s following the spirit of Nano, which has always been to get you writing. I gave myself permission to do what I needed to do in order to be as productive as I can be AND free myself from the guilt of not following the letter of NaNo. And maybe I won’t verify my story at the end, maybe I will. But either way, I will have more of my story written, and that’s what matters.

My NaNo Pep Talk

Laura Highcove

Okay, so yes it’s scary. Terrifying even that I might not be able to come up with an ending, or a good ending. But all I need to do is write. Write, spend time with the characters. Ask them what they’re doing and see what they say. They’re all established pretty well by now so they should be able to answer. At the end of this month you’ll either have an ending, or you’ll have 50k words getting you closer. And yes, that includes this because the mental game of writing is also important in the writing process. So just write.

Falling into NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Hey, thanks so much for stopping by and checking on how I’m doing. It’s officially fall and we had a great one this year. Two weeks of high 60s, low 70s with 40s overnight. All with the gradual shifting of the trees to their autumnal colors. Beautiful!


So bringing you up to speed, I attended SiWC for the first time. Luckily it was all online, because I’m not sure I would go all the way to California for a conference, even without covid. This was the official alternate meeting place for the displaced Writing Excuses Cruise. Not getting to go on the cruise this year was one of the bigger disappointments, but thankfully I was able to get a little bit of the Wxr Cruise feel around the SiWC.


I attended some Wxr events in the week leading up to the start of the conference itself. Thursday was an all day masterclass, then Fri-Sun were the conference workshops. I learned about plotting, conflict, decolonization, word choice, social media, and endings just to name a few. I’m going to be sorting through that information for a while yet, I’m sure.


And now that October is almost over, it’s time to look ahead to NaNoWriMo! This year has really been rough for writing. Covid simply killed my motivation for several months, and I’ve been working my way back up. This year I’m looking forward to NaNo as a way to just get through the rest of the rough draft for the end of The Storyteller Trilogy so it can be complete. Not only does it mean I’ll finally get to know what happens, but I want to help these characters finish their journey, AND I want to move on to the next project.


I’m also making the shift to a journal entry a week. Every two weeks made it hard for me to remember. Plus, I use these journal entries mostly to reevaluate where I am in my writing and to reset goals if needed, and truthfully, I probably need that weekly right now.

September Goals

Laura Highcove

I sat down to figure out what it is I have to do in order to finish the Storyteller trilogy. It was kinda a big (huge) long list that I of course had to break down into smaller steps in order to keep from driving myself insane. The basic gist of it is, however, to first finish reading through the Huntsman and writing down all of the major issues that I want to/need to address both in this book and the Wizard. Then I will do the same with the part of the Wizard I have written along with a list of everything I wanted the trilogy to do and loose ends for every character.

I can then sort though this list and look for the items that will make the biggest waves and start there. I’ll shoehorn in what I can, all while November gets ever closer. Once November and NaNoWriMo hit, I will pour myself into finishing the Wizard draft. Right now the Wizard is at 56k words, so maybe about half the book …ish. So 50k words for NaNo should get me to the end, or at least pretty close.

Of course my productivity has been rather low so the idea of doing NaNo right now is pretty intimidating. But part of sitting down and writing out everything I needed to do in order to get the trilogy done and approximate times of how long each step would take reminded me once again how long it actually takes to write a book. As such, I am kicking myself in the butt to move forward because despite appearances, I do actually want to get these books done.

So for right now, I’m reading through the Huntsman and making my list. My goal is to have it done by the end of next week.

Also, if you haven’t read The Law of the Prince Charming yet, it is completely posted here for free. Check it out. More views and comments certainly don’t hurt the motivation factor.

Working Toward Productivity

Laura Highcove

As per usual, I come back with a reset post after a time away. Not even blaming myself for this anymore. This year has been such that blaming myself would just be not only unproductive, but downright cruel. I’ve been struggling for months with the balance between self care and productivity. Luckily I have people and activities in my life that bring me joy and I’ve been focusing on them.


I think I’m to a point now where I want to try keeping track of what I get done in my time-sheet again. I pulled the old dusty file open (it was still sitting on my desktop) and saw that I had stopped tracking hours after April. Not entirely surprising, and probably good for my mental health. It has been so weird looking back, and actually really weird looking forward.
I go to the Kroger every week for grocery shopping and I look around at all the people in their face masks and just keep thinking ‘this is my life now’. Because it is. Even if we get to the point where the virus is under control and we have a vaccine available (that works?), it is still forever a part of the world’s ecosystem just like the flu. Our lives going forward will be (and already are in a lot of cases) be defined by this.


As such, we are slowly learning to function in this world, which is what I’m still struggling to do. It’s not easy, not even going to lie. Self care is very very important and as such I made a super important change to my time-sheet. I switched the ‘write’ tag to ‘create’ and ‘read’ to ‘ingest’. Because I want to encourage myself to do what I need to to be happy. Create can include writing, of course, but also filming for my YouTube channel, or even working on my cross-stitch, just putting some sort of visible product into the world. Ingest includes reading, watching TV shows, and working with my horses. Experiences that enrich my soul and give me a reason to keep going.
I also have a straight up self care tag.


Not sure how this is going to go, but I’m going to aim for 15 hours in the coming week. Just to see what happens. Right now I’m feeling encouraged, which is certainly a good place to start from. Especially since I wrote this post in the middle of the list of things I wanted to do today. Now back to that task.

Still Writing

Laura Highcove

Starting off this post with a reminder to be kind to yourself during the pandemic. This article was written at the end of March but it still applies. Now back to your normally scheduled post.

So my writing life has mostly gotten back to normal. I’ve been posting my chapters of the Law of the Prince Charming, which is continuing to do well. That is actually getting really close to the end. I think there’s a bit more than a month left.

I’m still pushing through the Huntsman. I’ve hit the chapters that have the timeline issues now. That’s a lot of fun to figure out. Not really, but it has to be done and I am figuring some of them out. Not that far from the end which is great.

The plan right now is to finish this pass, and then do a pass that is nothing but writing a list of everything that needs to be fixed/changed. I love lists, so this is quite fun for me. Once I have that list I’ll (probably) have a better idea of how long it will be until there’s a ready draft.

I’ve also gone back to Blessings of the Neriel and starting piecing together the scenes I’ve written. I figure since The Law of the Prince Charming is out there, the likelihood of it doing well enough that a traditional publisher will want to pick it up is rather low. As such I need to be working on whatever my next project is while I’m finishing up the Storyteller trilogy, and as of right now I’ve picked Blessings of the Neriel. I’d really like this book to be a standalone, mostly because I’m not interested in working through another trilogy right now. I have so many different ideas that I’d rather get to more of them than spend the extra time on the same idea.

Hope everything’s going great for you.

Time Has No Meaning

Laura Highcove

It’s almost June and I really can’t believe it. March took so long and now it’s going super fast. My husband and I went on a vacation to a family condo and now I’m back to my regular schedule, well as regular as it ever is.

I’m still getting up my Law of the Prince Charming scenes three days a week, along with the accompanying video. I’m super proud about the fact that I haven’t missed an update yet. If you haven’t checked that out yet, here’s a link. We’re less than a month out from the halfway point of the book. It feels a little weird. I’ve been living with this book for so long, as well as working on second two books of the trilogy, that I often forget that it’s actually out there in the world for people to read. But then that was always my goal, having people read, and hopefully enjoy, what I write.

I didn’t make a ton of progress on the Huntsman. What little I did on vacation got lost when my USB drive got corrupted. The hubby’s still trying to see if he can fix it, but I’m assuming the work is lost. I’d like to work on this a little more than I have been because it occurs to me that eventually the LotPC will eventually finish posting, and if it does gain a whole bunch of readers, they’ll want the second book and it’s certainly not ready to be published yet. So I should have some sort of goal toward getting it done around Septemberish when the LotPC will be done posting.

But I have 26 more chapters in the Huntsman. At a chapter a week that still puts me into November, and this is nowhere near the final draft. If I want to get this done this year, I’m going to have to put in some work. Well I suppose there are two options. I can panic at the amount of work and give up, or I can start working toward getting it finished. For now I’m going to choose option number two.

Being Gentle with Myself

Laura Highcove

Man, living through history is hard. Yesterday Georgia started to reopen. The general consensus is “are you f-ing stupid?”. Also, last night the store had toilet paper. Yay!

In regards to my writing, which is why you’re really here, I have been doing far better. I am giving myself less hassle for not being productive and I’m actually ending up more productive. How productive, I’m not sure since I stopped using my timesheet, but I am getting done what needs to get done and that’s the important thing. I am still moving through the Huntsman and enjoying the revision step as much as I always do. I am doing a last pass through the Law of the Prince Charming before videoing my reading each scene and posting that video along with the text on Wattpad for public consumption.

I am keeping up with my Stories & Succulent YouTube Plant Channel’s update schedule. I am also now on board with diymfa.com for writing a new series of posts on Writer’s Intuition the first of which will go up in June. All in addition to working at the barn in the mornings, keeping the house clean, and caring for a sick fish. (He’s doing fine, but I’m doing daily water changes right now.)

It’s a lot of stuff, but like I said, because I’ve been giving myself less hassle about it, things have been going pretty smoothly. I have no end goal for finishing the Huntsman, not that I’m going to let it go on forever, but right now I’m just going with the flow. I’ve also been playing video games, watching lots of Asian Shows, and caring for my plants. In general I’m just being gentle with myself. It’s an easy trap to get into right now that there’s so much free time and that I should be super productive as a result, but living during a pandemic on this scale is stressful. Low-key, all the time, you can’t get away from it, death is actually an option, stressful. Do what you can and take care of yourself. I’ll say it as many times as I need to.

Self Care

Laura Highcove

I wrote a big long post talking about what I needed to do, and the new plan I was going to enact, and then I sat back and thought about it. I think pushing myself too hard right now is just a bad idea. I’ve been low level stressed since this whole pandemic thing started and it’s just …it just is. There’s no getting away from it and sure, I could beat myself up for not being productive right now, but why? Why have we let this country tell us we’re only worthwhile if we’re producing?

I’m going to work on the Huntsman at least some every day. I’m not setting any kind of goal or limit except to take it out and type at least one word. And then I’m going to enjoy my plants, and straighten my house, and watch netflix, and play minecraft, and whatever else I want to take care of myself during this.

I hope you do what you need to and that includes taking care of yourself too.