Time, time, time

Laura Highcove

This post will be rather similar to my newsletter that’s going out tomorrow, since most of what’s going on in my writing life is what I’d put in my newsletter. I also talked a bit about the stresses of the pandemic, but I won’t discuss that here.

The Law of the Prince Charming is being posted on Wattpad on a MWF update schedule. The text along with a video of me reading said text. (I’m getting better at reading as I go, I think.) I’ve been keeping up well with that and it’s actually sort of fun to do, even if the reading, editing, and posting takes a decent amount of time.

I finally have my list of things that need to be fixed in the Huntsman. I think the first order of business is the timeline I’ve been trying to get around to making since …forever. I have all sorts of notes in these manuscripts that refer to an unknown amount of time passing.

I have no idea how long this timeline may or may not take, but for now I think I’ll give myself a week and see what happens. Man, I really should’ve made a list of all the events I need on the timeline. Yeah, that would’ve been smart. :/

After that I’ll probably dive into the actual list and start checking things off as I can. One of my alpha readers has gotten slammed at work due to covid-19 and so I’m not sure he’ll even get around to reading the Wizard. Have to play that one by ear.

Anyway, timeline.

The World is Ending and I’m Cleaning Stalls

Laura Highcove

Friday March 20, 2020

I post the new scene of LotPC and go to work. Coworker reminds me of a conversation from weeks ago when I said my memoir should be called “The World is Ending and I’m Cleaning Stalls”. I wonder if this means my psychic powers are developing. At lunch the hubby and I realize there are some things we need from the store, so we plan to go as per normal on Fridays.

The grocery store has about the same number of people in it. There are a number of people (I have no idea how to say they were Asian without it being prejudice) wearing facemasks. I understand, of course, having watched as much anime as I have that at least in Japan, it’s far more common in normal circumstances than it is here. Seeing it here seems perfectly normal to me. I am certainly within six feet of people at times but I am so hyper aware of it. I am conscious of not touching anything I’m not taking home.

There is still no potatoes, toilet paper, paper towels, dried grains, pasta, or frozen veg. They have clearly restocked though, because when I say “no” there are like one or two pieces here and there. Except the toilet paper, which annoys me greatly because of my looming period.

On the way home we stop at Wendy’s to get dinner. We were planning to take it home, but when we arrive we see that there is no other option. There are signs proclaiming “carry-out only”. The chairs in the dining room are stacked up. There are no lids or straws or ketchup out, we have to ask for them. The drink machine closest to the register is out of almost everything. We take our food home.

The rest of the night is per usual, watching youtube/netflix/vrv.

It’s Been a Week

Laura Highcove

Thursday, March 12, 2020: Not the first I’d heard of Covid-19, but certainly when it was clear that it hadn’t been contained. It was spreading, a lot, and there were rumors of things shutting down. Two days after my birthday. In retrospect I’m glad I was able to celebrate that before all this.

Friday, March 13, 2020: Verified rumors that things would very likely be shutting down. It started to become more real, but only just. I make the decision to start posting my novel, the Law of the Prince Charming. I mean if people are going to be stuck inside anyway …

Saturday, March 14, 2020: Still business as usual for me. Had my riding lesson at the barn, it went well. Went out to lunch for Pie Day at the local Your Pie. It was delicious, there were lots of people there. After lunch made a peanut butter pie and went to Pie Day at the barn as is tradition. We ate pie, and chatted. Virginia Tech had extended Spring Break by a week and was moving all classes to online for the rest of the school year. That’s the point at which it became real to me. Tech doesn’t close. I went there, and slugged to school through snow and storms and everything else. Tech doesn’t close. But it had. That’s the moment when this became real to me.

Sunday, March 15, 2020: The people across the street have a moving van. Possibly a Tech student decided to go home after the college made it’s changes. The hubby and I go to BDubs for dinner. We want to continue to support businesses if the college kids are going to leave town. There are a decent number of people there. Service is great, food is great, we take home leftovers.

Monday, March 16, 2020: Public schools are closed. Assemblies of more than 100 people are banned. There are other things. I’m questioned on why I’m giving my book away for free. An acquaintance is pissed off that we simply “gave up” our right to assembly. I wonder what they expected people to do? Riot in the streets? I go home after work and cry for a half hour and then nap for an hour. Then I get things done. I’m going to keep to my writing schedule, no reason to not. Ireland closed all bars the day before St. Patrick’s Day.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020: Our feed room a the barn is stuffed full. Concerns about a possible hoarding of horse feed, or a lack of supply at some point. My manager at the barn stays home to take care of her two boys who are out of school. I do barn chores with my coworker. I go home and work on my writing.

Thursday, March 19, 2020: My weekly D&D campaign finds out that one of our member’s roommates has gotten sick. Don’t know what it is yet, but we cancel the session. I am feeling the beginnings of cabin fever. Find out the roommate’s coworkers had traveled to areas affected by Covid-19. He is considered a “low” priority by the local hospital and sent home to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Friday, March 20, 2020: Today: All-in-all, my life has changed very little in terms of actual schedule. I work at a horse barn in the mornings, and horses don’t stop eating or pooping because there’s a pandemic. Some lessons have been canceled, others have continued. Long term effects of social distancing on this business in particular is unknown. There’s a lot that’s unknown.


I’ve posted the third scene of my novel on Wattpad. Some people have been reading it, friends I would assume. I’m going to keep putting it out.


Concerns over travel plans months down the line are now surfacing. We had, literally two weeks before this all really started, put in our payment for the Wxr Cruise. It would suck to lose that money.


I am stressed, a low level sense of worry that is making my depression worse. My period is two days “late”. I’m not on a rigid schedule anyway, so this is not unusual, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the stress is effecting it as well.


All anyone’s talking about online is Covid-19. How to deal with it, what they’re doing, what the world looks like without people in it. I saw a picture of the Bellagio in Las Vegas dark. I’ve seen pictures of clear water in the Venice canals. Of wildlife moving into the cities that have been temporarily abandoned. There are stories of people helping. Stories of governments bailing out their citizens. Not in America, but in other places.


There is fear along with the hope that perhaps, somehow, this could change things in the world. I mean it already has, but I mean that the good things it creates will somehow take root, real change made, a new outlook on how the world works during the 18-months they’re predicting before we get a vaccine.


It’s been a week.

The Law of the Prince Charming on Wattpad

Laura Highcove

Another week, another journal post. And this one’s a bit more exciting than normal. Firstly because last week I threw the Wizard at my Alpha readers, and then took a week off of writing to get my website moved over to a new home. There are likely still some broken links, but it’s working for the most part. Many thanks to my friend Matt for having hosted my site on his server since …well forever.

On top of that, this weekend I decided with the swathes of people stuck inside for Corvid-19, that I would be going ahead and posting The Law of the Prince Charming to wattpad. This was always the plan eventually if I didn’t find an agent, but I had planned on waiting until I at least had draft 0 of the Wizard done. And then we ended up in a pandemic. Like I said above, this just happens to be a time when an unprecedented number of eyes will be searching for entertainment, so I might as well put mine out there to be found.

I did decide, after some research, that I will be posting each scene separately on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, which means the story will come out slower than when I was planning to put out a chapter a week, but not by much. This will also allow people who’d prefer the more frequent update schedule to have that. And someone who will only read every once and a while will still have plenty to read when they get there.

I choose wattpad for two main reasons, one it has a lot of features which make posting this story easier and more appealing to me. And two, and more importantly, it is possible for people I don’t know to stumble on it more easily than if it were just on my website. Thank you for your support in reading this, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

Review: Black Leviathan

Laura Highcove

My Review of Black Leviathan by Bernd Perplies

My summary: Dragon hunters go out on flying ships to fight and kill dragons, which provide most of the food and clothing to the people of the Cloudmere.

Why I picked up this book: I think I saw it featured in one of Tor.com’s newsletters. I read the back cover copy and thought it looked good.

What I knew going in: It’s a retelling of Moby Dick, but set in a fantasy world with dragons. Also, it was written in German and then translated into English by Lucy Van Clee.

My response: The language was very simple, but that may be a result of it being translated from a different language where the rhythm of language is just different. I found myself pulled along following Lian’s story and the world was very beautifully pulled together.

I was a little less than impressed with the ending, which felt like it was a lot of ‘oh, this is happening because of destiny.’ When there wasn’t really much of a focus on destiny before that point. It almost felt like the book was about to be over and he needed to wrap everything up. There were also a lot of questions that simply got left at the end of the book, which would’ve been fine if there was a sequel, but as far as I can tell there isn’t. Right now I’m just looking at it as there’s enough answered for the book to be over, and enough unanswered that you know the characters are going to go out and have more adventures.

Do I recommend this book?: If you’re going to be upset by a less than stellar ending, then avoid it, but if you’re okay with a wonderful ride of a book and wonderful world-building then I do recommend it.

Slow and Steady

Laura Highcove

It’s the final push to getting the Wizard ready for an alpha read. My goal had been to have a completed draft 0, but I didn’t quite manage that, so I’m making what I have as readable as possible so I can get it to my alpha readers to encourage some discussion.

My husband has also been running a D&D campaign set in the Storyteller universe, which is letting us explore some of the aspects of the world that I purposely tried to avoid in the books. There will be a post with more detail on that at a later date. I have to still figure out how many spoilers would be involved in putting that all out there.

Other than that, it’s just been slow and steady work. These posts tend to either be talking about my depression challenges or my just plugging away at my writing. Would be nice if there was more excitement to it, but I’ll take the slow and steady work over the depression any day.

Writing My Way Through

Laura Highcove

So I’m a little late on this journal entry, as, well I just haven’t gotten back into the habit of biweekly updates yet. So here’s my update:

Doing well on getting my daily word count of at least 1k words. There’s also been some revision in there so I don’t have the straight up word count that would suggest, but I’m happy with my progress. I wrote a whole bunch of scenes that really pushed things forward, and plenty of scenes where I just stared at the screen for a while because nothing was happening.

I have, since this week, gone back to the beginning to smooth out the story a bit because I’m unclear about a few things. My story is coming out even more fractured than it was for LotDK, and so I’m having a harder time holding it together in my head. Smoothing is the only option for that, even if I lose the straight up word count I would otherwise get. I’m also supposed to have my rough draft done by the end of this week before spending two weeks smoothing. That is a long shot unless some idea just completely overwhelms me. I don’t have an ending yet. I tried writing a bit of it but I’m just not far enough in the story yet.

I suppose in the future during the planning phase, I should interlace word output with smoothing, because that’s really what ends up happening anyway. So the plan is to finish smoothing, pour out some more words, rise and repeat until my March Alpha Read. I’ll certainly have something to show them, even if I don’t exactly have an ending yet. And technically I can still write the ending while they’re reading the first bit. 😀

Writing the Storyteller

Laura Highcove

So last week I finished up my read through and wrote out my list of everything major point that still needed to be written in both the Huntsman and the Wizard. Creating the list ended up only taking two days instead of the week I had allotted to it, so I started writing out some scenes that needed to be changed. I’m giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day. Most days so far I’ve ended up writing more than that anyway, but I don’t want the number of words to discourage me too much. I’d rather get consistent words.

Probably get a chapter done a day for about a week and then I’ll just try and write as many of these scenes as possible. When I write new scenes like this I generally end up with something good eventually. Maybe not every scene, but as a discovery writer, discovery writing is where I really shine.

Nanowrimo style for a month now, so I’m excited about what’s going to come out even though I have no idea, but after this I SHOULD have an idea of what the ending will be. This is about when I need to know where I’m going. Then I sort of work in from both sides until I figure out the middle …like a sandwich? Something like that.

The Year 2020

Laura Highcove

The first journal entry of the new year! Things were crazy at the end of the last year. Crazy! And now I want to get back to a normal. Not the same normal as before, since that’s impossible with my new houseplants and YouTube channel, but a new normal that I can be happy with.

So basically I “forgot” about writing for about three months and even now I’m having a little trouble getting back into it. I can give you all the reasons why I think this is, but after I wrote that long tyraid, I did what I normally do in a situation like this. I created a list!

This list is all the things I need to do to basically finish the Storyteller trilogy.

*Smooth what I have written
*Write the rest of the Wizard, draft 0
*Alpha read
*Fix major plot point through two books
*Fix minor points through two books
*Beta read
*Fix any problems
*Two-three final passes

Man, it looks so easy when it’s just a list like that. But once I had that list, I went through and guesstimated how long each step would take.

So I currently have seven more chapters to smooth. I’m going to give myself one week for that. I think that’s pushing it a bit, but it might just force me to get it done and over with. It’s not important that it’s perfect yet. *Jan 13-19*

Then I need to write the rest of the wizard. So I think what I need to do is once I’ve smoothed it, I’ll do another one of those “outlines” where I go through and outline what I have, then get ideas of where I wanted to go and scenes I still need to write. And write a list of all the things I want to have happen. Including the ending. *Jan 20-26*

Then I need to write them. I’d like to give myself a month, do a Nanowrimo type deal. *Jan 27-Feb 23*

Then I’ll need to smooth, maybe two weeks. *Feb 24-Mar 8*

Then I send out the Wizard for alpha reading. Hopefully they can get it done in a month. *Mar 9 – Apr 5*

When I get it back, go through the list, then go through myself and write down everything! *Apr 6 30- Apr 19*
-scenes that still need to be written/finished
-plot holes
-details to be done
-medium things
-minor things
-naming crap

Then I need to fix these problems. This is going to be the hardest to figure out the time-line of. For right now I’m giving myself a month. This will likely change. I’ll reevaluate the time-line when I get to the step above. *Apr 20- May 17*

Beta read: See, again, if it can be done in a month. *May 18- Jun 14*

Fix any problems, make a final list: one week *Jun15- 21*

Two-three final passes: ~month min *Jun22- July19*

Whenever I do one of these schedules, I’m reminded about *why* it takes so long to write a book. There’s just so many steps and there’s only so fast you can go over this many words. Still, I now have my goal set up in front of me. When I finish it this time, I can finally play Kingdom Hearts 3. :p

Still on Track

Laura Highcove

Okay, so it’s October 17 (when I’m writing this, not when I’m posting it) Meaning I have exactly two weeks and one day until Nanowrimo starts. I got a little behind with all the traveling I needed to do for weddings the past two weekends while on one of the hardest parts of the story, a very important fight/turning point scene.

I have now, gotten past that scene and am into the final push to the climax. There are seven chapters left. Which means a chapter every two days if I’m to finish on time. Not ideal, but I am going to get this done.

I feel like I should have more to write for this post, but a lot of what I’ve been doing has been traveling, so while it’s a lot of stuff, it’s not really good material for a blog post.

I have also started a youtube channel where I talk about the plants (mostly succulents) that I have. It’s a fun little side project for me because, well I love showing off my plants in case you’re interested in that.

Other than that, it’s a countdown to Nanowrimo, which is exciting, as I hope to finish the draft of the Wizard, or at least get about 50k words farther with it.