Tag: blessings of the neriel

The Christmas Break

Laura Highcove

It occurred to me earlier this week that I generally have a vacation around Christmas. Since we’re not going anywhere because of THE PANDEMIC, basically it’s been business as usual, which means the same work schedule as normal. Then I decided, screw that, I don’t have do anything! So I just played fast and loose with my schedule for a few days. In fact I clocked in 15.6 hours on a new game that I bought yesterday morning, in the first day. Excessive, but fun!

As for my writing, I’ve been jumping between Blessings of the Neriel and Jeremy Five-five, since my husband and I are trying out something new with the fight scenes. BotN I’ve been smoothing out pretty hard. Getting a few previously all over the place scenes much more focused, and trying to figure out where I’m going to go from here. I think I have a pretty decent idea, I just have to write it. J55 (which is my new favorite abbreviation for a story) is a story that I absolutely love and I want to write, but the plethora of fight scenes was really a problem for me. This is what I get growing up on shounen anime. My husband got back to me with the first set of bullet points for the first fight we tried, and it still wasn’t easy to write, but now that the rough draft of it is done, I’m hoping it will clean up nicely later. The one we did first was also a short fight, and there are some longer, far more important ones coming up. It’ll be a lot of fun.

I still haven’t gotten back to the Wizard. But my lackadaisical attitude around my writing this week didn’t really lend itself to diving back into that anyway. I want to at least touch base with it tomorrow, though technically the month break isn’t over until next weekend. We’ll see. This is the home stretch, the hard part, and I refuse to give up. I totally get the thing now that writers say about getting distracted by shiny new stories because the one you’re working on has lost it’s mystery. I basically know what I have to do with the Wizard, I just need to write it, and that’s not new and fun, even though I’m sure I’ll still discover new things about this story before it’s all over.

Thanks for continuing to root for me. You’re awesome.

Back to Writing

Laura Highcove

My writing the past two weeks has focused rather heavily on the Blessings of the Neriel. Most of what I’ve done is pushing through what I had written and smoothed out some of the scenes where I had too many different versions to know what my characters were actually doing. I also finally wrote out a character list, because for some reason that story I just didn’t really have all of my characters consistently named. Only the main character, I’ve always known what her name was.

I’m also doing an experiment with my hubby. I have a story I’ve always wanted to finish called Jeremy Five-five. I posted a Chapter 1 of it to my newsletter …last year? Omg was it just last year? …

Anyway, this story is about Jeremy, who is sent to an Academy where the students take part in a video game that allows them to fight each other, only this video game is there to mask the fact that there is magic in the world, in which Jeremy is well-trained, only has sworn off using.

This story, predictably, has a lot of fight scenes. And while I’ve gotten better at them, I’m not convinced I can provide the nuance in the choreography to make the emotional beats land properly. As such, my hubby, who is good at fight choreography, is helping and he’s just gotten back to me with the first set of ‘bullet points’ for the fight so I can take them and turn them into an actual fight.

I also gave myself a bit of a break from the Wizard after Nano, and I’m now getting back to a place where I want to pick it up again. I would like to get through the rest of the smoothing in Blessings of the Neriel first, but that will likely be happening soon. At this point I don’t even remember all of what I wrote, so it’ll be interesting when I dive back in.

Either way, Nanowrimo really did kick me back into my writing habit, and I’m glad that it did.

End of the Year

Laura Highcove

So I have been having a hard time getting back into the habit of these journal entries, but I really want to. Not for all of you necessarily, but because they help me focus, plan, and …why isn’t goal a verb? Even goaling isn’t. Making a goal. Planning a goal. Bah, I’m annoyed by that the same way I am that there’s no word for shaking your head.

But I digress. Last week was the end of NaNoWriMo for one of the …most eventful years of my life. I finished my 50k words. I had been debating authenticating them because of all of the rules I had made up for what I was counting as words for this year. Only the website has changed such that as soon as you put in 50k words as your word count total, you’ve won. Maybe it’s for the best. I did the work, and that’s really the important bit.

And the Wizard still isn’t finish, but it’s so much closer than it was. And I’ve decided I’m taking the month off, or at least a few weeks to just let it settle. Then in January I’ll start organizing what I have and see what’s still missing.

I’ve also been working a bit on the story and characters for Blessings of the Neriel, which has been fun. I’d really like to work on this story next, but I do want to finish the Storyteller Trilogy first.

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.

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.