Tag: alpha read

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.

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.

Finally Back to Productive

Laura Highcove


Got back from my vacation in Williamsburg and had a ton of fun. This was Argon’s first time going to the condo, but as expected he spent maybe an hour slinking around before he was perfectly fine. I played a lot of Hyrule Warriors, went to Busch Gardens, bought clothes, ate food, and ended up writing a decent amount while I was at it.

I also used the vacation as a reset point for my writing. I didn’t record how much writing I did while on vacation. I just ended up with 8k words written on my phone by the end of the week. But when I got home, I just accepted that I was back on schedule, and I split my time between two stories: Blessings of the Neriel, which I realized I needed to keep restarting from the beginning because my characters weren’t solid enough, and a new story I started during vacation that I ended up tossing aside because the idea isn’t developed enough yet. (Oddly enough, the characters are there, the story just isn’t.) And I ended up working more on a story I had started a while ago, with the working title: Kirin.

As such I’ve been getting work done while I’m waiting for my alpha readers on the Huntsman. I keep having an urge to work on it, but I’d like to 1) wait until the alpha feedback is back and 2) read the short stories my husband wrote in the Storyteller world for Nanowrimo, but we’re having some trouble getting that formatted right so I can read it. I might lose patience before July and start working on it anyway, but for now I’m just happy to be writing again.

30 min

Laura Highcove

So it’s been a little longer than two weeks like I said, but I needed a little longer to get myself back together than I thought I would. I went through a really rough bit and I’m still climbing out of the hole on the other side.

Long story short, I found out Nickel has cancer and I hid from my depression by binging 13 seasons of Supernatural and ignoring the rest of my life. If you’d like the full story and the lesson I’ve taken away from it, you can sign up for my newsletter, since I’m not going to go into those details on the open Internet.

I did manage to get the alpha of the Huntsman up and I went to Otakon this past weekend. I even managed to have a pretty good time at the con and a great discussion with my husband about the Huntsman during the easiest (no traffic) trip back from Baltimore we’ve ever had.

Still struggling with the lingers of the habits I formed over the past two months, and so right now I’m rereading some old stories I’ve written, writing some on a new story and thinking through the ideas I got from my husband during our talk. I need to get back into the habit of writing. Motivation is low. Right now I’m going to be happy to spend 30 minutes a day writing new prose. I might check in more often for a bit so I can keep up with my goals.

Before the Shift

Laura Highcove

Didn’t quite make my goal of getting through Gabir’s turning point by Sunday, but I was pretty close. I had it done by Tuesday. All things considered, this first part of the story is starting to come together. However, this is the point at which the story really starts to fall apart. I have ideas of what I want to have happen, and some of them aren’t working, some of them feel forced, and others just aren’t good.

Part of what I want to get out of the alpha read is feedback and even suggestions for the story. At the same time, I feel rather icky with the idea of sending it out in this state. (Even to people I trust.) The Law of the Prince Charming’s story was solid all the way through before anyone but my husband saw it.

A few things happened since my last post. The Show Team is back from Nationals (they did very well) so I am currently enjoying my first full day off in two and a half weeks. However, two weeks ago Nickel, one of my cats, started having a health issue and while I don’t have a solid answer as to what’s wrong, the possibilities are rough. As such, I haven’t been in an entirely good mental state. I haven’t been able to go ‘head down’ on my story like I was planning once the Show Team was back. Nickel has an appointment with a specialist next week, and depending on the answers (or lack thereof) I’m not sure how things will be going forward.

I’ve been trying to get as much done as I can before the possible shift in my reality. But even on a good day it’s hard to slog through the story when nothing feels like it is coming together. Maybe I really do just need this feedback. While I was able to write the Law of the Prince Charming almost entirely off my own ideas, it’s a book two and I have even less skill with this than I have with ending a book. Maybe a little outside influence is exactly what I need.

Pushing Through the Huntsman

Laura Highcove

Things are a little rough right now. I’m in the middle of working the barn 7 days a week (with one coworker) for two and a half weeks. I’ve done a pretty good job of losing track of what day it is, and I’ve been grumpy, tired, and watching a lot of Supernatural.

As such, I’ve gotten very little writing done. But not none, because I like writing and I want to write. I made a bit of a breakthrough a week ago with the order of some scenes in a few chapters, and then hit the wall of the most underdeveloped part of the story. My brain’s a little lacking in the “organizing the overall plan” space right now, so it’s probably harder than it should be.

But, as you may have seen in my newsletter, my plan is to have some alpha readers look at the Huntsman at the end of July. Last time I had my hubby read it. He was able to give me some very good advice that cleaned up a lot of things and I’m hoping this time will do the same. It would probably really help for me to have writer friends who are willing to do critiques, but I’m not strong at making friends.

I still have work through this weekend, and then I’ll be back to my regular schedule. It’ll probably take me a day or so to get back into the swing of things, but after that the plan is to plow ahead full speed and get the Huntsman as ready as I can make it. Right now I have 11ish chapters left. (41k words) Things are rather haphazard at the end of the story, so I can’t really count on those to be anywhere near the same amount of words or work to bring them up to snuff.

My first job will be organizing the scenes I have written into a workable order, sight right now they’re mostly scenes I wrote totally independently of each other, all stuck into the same part of the story. Then I need to make sure all of the elements I need are in there, and then smooth it out a bit. That, of course, being the least important bit, since my alpha readers will know it’s a little rough. I actually left notes in the story when I had my hubby read it to warn him at two distinct points when the amount of polish took a moderate, then severe nosedive. He still got through it enough to help me out.

Anyway, so measurable goal: By the end of next Sunday I will organize though Gabir’s turning point, which is approximately three chapters. All scenes need to be orange, which means all of the elements are in the scene, even if it’s not perfectly readable.

Getting through February

Laura Highcove

I have 15k words on Blessings of the Nerial, though some of that was in trying to figure out which pov I was going to end up using on the story. Most of it was useful prose though. I like the idea of this story, but the world-building is giving me trouble. I believe I’m thinking about it too much at too early a stage though. I’m going to try and just push through for the rest of the week, and do whatever and tighten it up later. Either way, I got my goal.

My goals of writing four descriptions and doing some deep reading fell a bit more flat. I did post one description. (From the world of Blessings of the Nerial.) and I did some deep reading on the first chapter of Six of Crows by Leah Bardugo because I love how she introduces her two main characters in that book. No excuse, I just let them fall by the way-side.

I also worked on getting my short story, The Aesir-Vanir War promoted and out there. If you’re a member of my newsletter, you should already have part one in your inbox. If not, you can sign up to start getting it any time. I’m excited to get something new out into the universe, and something complete at that. Makes me wish I was a little better at writing short pieces.

By the end of this week I am planning on having The Huntsman back from its alpha read, at which point I’ll probably be diving head-first back into that. I’ve been a little encouraged by articles I’ve read that talk about how hard the second book in a series is to write, in general. Though most of them talk about doing it once you find an agent/have sold the first one and so then you’re under pressure. None of that for me yet, but I love this story and want to complete the trilogy. For now I’ll just be happy that I don’t yet have any kind of deadline besides those imposed on myself. I’m hoping that completing this series will just be a wonderful learning experience.

Anyway, I’ll be reading over the comments I get back, and likely doing some discussions with my hubby. What he says will have a large impact on what my next step with the story is, so I can’t really make a plan for that yet. It will be interesting for me to see, however, if my focus and feeling of purpose come back when I’m back to having that *one* story to work on. I’ve been feeling a little ‘all over the place’ since I stopped working on the Huntsman. Though it’s possible it’s also because it was February, which is just not a pleasant month in general. Yay for March!