Tag: productivity

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.

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.

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

2018 Timesheet

Laura Highcove

So one of my long term projects for this year was an excel spreadsheet that I recorded the hours I spent toward my writing career. I’ve heard the advice over and over that if you want to be a writer you need to treat it like a job. So one of the things I decided was that I needed to spend 20 hours a week on my writing. The spreadsheet was to help me track when I’ve done that. It also helped with the times when I felt like I haven’t spent enough time writing, since if I have the actual numbers, then I know. And when they’re low, I knew I needed to spend more time on it. Plus I love organized data.

I was still getting used to the idea and figuring out which things I was going to keep track of. By the end of January I settled on the basic DIY MFA sections of Writing, Reading, and Community with several subsections, and here’s the summary for the year:

Feb-April I was super on point, with hitting my 80 hours a month (20 hours a week) goal, with a solid 50% spent toward writing and ~25% ish toward the other two.

I was on vacation the first week of May and while I did some writing, I did not track the hours. The middle two weeks were less than productive due to making up hours over the weekend and then some depression.

June-August were Nationals as well as the beginnings of Nickel getting sick. I’m not really surprised that my hours plummeted. It was probably one of the worst periods of consistent depression I’ve ever had. I’m actually proud I got as much done as I did.

Sept and October are a little nuts. That is almost entirely due to the Writing Excuses Cruise. I chose to count the entirety of the time spent on the cruise on my timesheet, since I was technically there for my writing, but I didn’t want to spend time nickel and diming each little thing I did. This encouraged me to add an ‘event’ section to next year’s timesheet for things like writing retreats and conferences. Anyway, that retreat lit a fire under my butt for the next month to get the Huntsman draft done and do some heavy rewriting.

My November hours were curious to me, because I did NaNo, and I did it very well, but I had a sad dearth of hours. I think that since I had given myself the NaNo my goal, as soon as I had the words needed, I didn’t really push myself to do anything else. Two of my weeks were nothing but writing. Something to keep in mind for next year. Perhaps there’s a place between 50k and 90k that I can hit without burning out, or perhaps I just need to give myself two goals for November. There was also Thanksgiving travel, of course.

December was going great until my cat Copper got sick and had to be hospitalized for three days. That really killed the week. She ended up being fine, a known issue that likely flared up due to the stress of the new cat. I also did nothing while traveling for Christmas. Sort of sad to end the year on a down-swing, but such is life.

After looking this over, I’ve decided to take into account vacation time and ‘rest’ days (for sickness or depression) so that I don’t just look at my lack of hours and feel bad. I also noticed that overall, I am not happy with the lack of time spent on reading and analyzing what I read. I might give myself some sort of goal there.

I’m super excited to see what next year will bring. I already have the new timesheet made up, with some cool excel tricks to make the sheet itself less time consuming. Yay data!

Feeling Productive

Laura Highcove

From the past several posts, you can probably see that things have been rough for a while. Yep, it was. And I kept going because, well there wasn’t any other option in my opinion. I can only hide under the desk for so long before writing calls me back.

And these past two weeks I’ve really been tearing it up, writing-wise. Part of its is inspiration from the Wxr cruise. Another part is I am rewriting the Law of the Prince Charming to change the tense because I realized it worked better. And part is giving myself the goal of having an actual rough draft of the Huntsman finished before NaNo so I can start in on the Wizard. But I’ve put in more total hours this past week than I have in any previous week this year, and I still didn’t record a lot of the reading I was did. (Reading is still hard for me to chalk up toward career time, even if I am paying attention as a writer too.)

So I’m feeling very productive, and that is a nice place to be in. The plan is to carry the momentum forward. I have a list of the scenes I still need to write for the Huntsman, and I’m hoping to get those done in time to do a smoothing pass before November. I am trying to kick up the speed at which I am rewriting the Law of the Prince Charming. I seem to be at about 2 chapters a week, but even in just changing the tense of the words I already have written, it’s taking far longer than I expected. I also have an idea for another story that is literally trying to chew its way out of my head. Not sure if this is just a result of my anxiousness about trying to get the Huntsman done, or if the idea really warrants some attention. Either way, I’ll be doing a lot of writing for a while.

Quick pitch: “Dragons ride the elemental storms and Ryo was trained to fight both.” Yeah, I wrote it just now. It’ll be better when I spend time on it.

WXR 2018: Finding My Tribe

Laura Highcove

I started listening to Writing Excuses at the end of season nine, so 2014. And after getting part way into season 10, I went back and listened to the archives. All of them. I found out about the cruise in 2016, and I applied for the scholarship for the past two years, but finally saved up enough money to go this year. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I hung around on the Google group where everyone was talking for months ahead of time. I picked my roommate, Morgan, because she wrote fantasy and didn’t snore.

But it wasn’t until the Saturday when I flew into Houston that the people-interactions really started. I met Eric in the airport using the Discord app everyone was on for conversing on the cruise. Then, since Morgan’s flight was delayed, (There was rough weather, most people got delayed.) Eric and I met up with Michelle and we all shared an Uber to the hotel. Both of them had been on the cruise before, and Michelle let me tag along into the group of people she knew as soon as we got to the hotel. Everyone seemed really nice and entirely non-threatening.

After picking up registration bags, we went behind the waterfall where they had swag for us. I went up to a table with books on it, because of course I did, and the person behind the table began to describe the books. I had to reboot because the voice that was speaking was Dan Wells, and I was entirely unprepared to hear that voice in a non-podcast situation. Then Howard Taylor said something from the table beside him, which furthered the surrealism, and I had to ask Dan to repeat himself because I hadn’t heard what he actually said. He was very nice about it, which bolstered my confidence further, so when I turned and saw Mary Robinette Kowal at a third table, and walked over and asked if she could also speak for me to complete the blowing of my mind. She acquiesced.

I managed to work through the “getting to know you” sheet where you get people to sign your paper based on something about them, like what genre they write or what their job is, by actually talking to people. Though, in truth, I was given a task, and I am good at task completion. But it was also a very comfortable situation. Then those of us who went on the NASA tour further bonded by living through the torrential downpour on our cart train that had no sides.

That night was the cocktail reception, and oddly enough, I settled right into talking with people. Part of it was by that time I had bonded with my roommate, and I’m always braver when I have someone I know around, and part of it was that I sat at a table and almost everyone was a genre writer. Even if I do attend other writing events, I rarely find genre writers, and if I do, they’re all YA. (Not that I have anything against YA. I just feel like I never find adult fantasy writers.) So again, it felt a little surreal to ask what everyone was writing and have so many of them be my same genre.

At this point I was still rather intimidated by the hosts, but I still managed to get my books signed and to ask them to hug my stuffed animal gryffin (That I’ve had all the people who are important in/to my life hug). It was also the first time I was able to meet Brandon Sanderson. I cried a bit, I’ll admit it, but he was perfectly accommodating, and he signed my book and took a picture with me grinning like a silly fangirl. My one regret about the whole situation was that I was simply too overwhelmed to approach him as a writer. It doesn’t help that he wasn’t on the cruise, so while I got to see Mary Robinette, Howard, and Dan as real people, he’s still Brandon Sanderson. At least for now.

The introduction/instruction speech that came at the end of the reception really helped to settle things in my mind, and solidify the feel of what to expect from the cruise. All of the instructors and the helpful team were introduced, as well as the rules for how to treat each other. I know the Wxr hosts have always been pretty big on making a space safe for everyone there, and I was really starting to feel that.

The next day we got on the boat and that’s when things finally started to settle a bit in my mind. All of the Wxrers had red badges that hung from our necks, meaning we could spot each other through the, well frankly, massive crowd of muggles who were on the cruise as well. The classes were simply amazing, though that’s fodder for another post. We all ate dinner together rotating tables so we got to meet other people, as well as the hosts. Morgan and I sat with Dan, Howard, and Mary Robinette on various nights.

And I found the most amazing thing happening. I was interacting with people. People I didn’t know very well, but it was like that red badge was magic. As soon as I saw it, I would meet the other person’s gaze and wave, and they would do the same. Or I could just walk up and start a conversation. We were able to just be comfortable around each other, as people, because we had been brought together by this cruise.

I am not normally one to join in or participate in conversations. I like being on the sidelines, listening to other people say interesting things, but never feeling like I have anything to add to most conversations. And if I do, it’s usually a quick comment and then over. Only at the dinner table, I found so many people with topics they wanted to discuss that were interesting and that I had something to say about. One night I started talking about Supernatural and fan fiction, and I realized almost halfway through the night that I was actually having a good time participating in a conversation. That I had things to say, that these were topics in which I was interested. I have never before had such an actual lengthy conversation with people in a group setting like this, not even among my friends.

I also hopped into a discussion on magic system creation where I felt emboldened to add some to the conversation. And I jumped into a quickly created critique group that all looked at the part of my story, I’ve been trying to fix forever and thought was “okay”, and told me it still didn’t work. And I felt safe getting that feedback, and glad that they were willing to say something.

I had, for the first time, actually found my tribe. So much so that I cried when it was time to leave the boat. After my flight landed in Atlanta I found myself looking through the crowds for red badges and being sad when I remembered I wouldn’t be seeing any. I clung to Discord, that last connection I had to them, and I mourned not being on the cruise anymore.

For the first time I really understood Daisy’s reaction in Agents of SHIELD, after she’s freed from Hive’s control, and she throws herself at him again, begging for him to let her back in. I felt like I had been removed from a situation that felt so right for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t sure what to do without it. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, and maybe I’m not. But I know I need to figure out a way to be able to go on the cruise again next year. And for now, I’m very grateful for Discord and for everyone involved with putting on and attending this cruise.

There is a Way this Makes Sense

Laura Highcove

It’s funny, even though I know the only way I’m going to get past this stuck spot in the Huntsman is to keep writing, and even though this persistence has always worked in the past, I still find myself dreading the idea of working on my story. Being human is such a funny thing. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the present and somehow think things have always been terrible, and always will be terrible, but then if it’s going well we worry about how that will change for the worse.

It’s all a matter of perceptive. I’m really no more stuck with this book than I have been in the past. And truthfully, I’m farther along than I ever have been. I’m starting to figure out some things, but IDEAS! are easy, and bringing them together to make sense for the end of a book is hard. I always get stuck at this point of the book, and have for a number of trunk novels that never got finished. The Law of the Prince Charming, while not the first book I managed to power through, is one of very few. And it took six months of agony before I basically just popped out the second half of the book.

It’s been longer for this one, and I figure the reason is I just haven’t found that thing, that bit that ties it all together. It’s out there somewhere. I know it is. A thing I try to tell myself in times like this is: “There is a way that all of this (my story) makes sense.” That doesn’t mean things won’t have to change or shift around, but there is a second half of this book that is beautiful and wonderful and makes sense. I just have to tap into it …by continuing to write until I get past this stuck spot. Blargh. I mean: I know I can do it!

Keep Making Goals

Laura Highcove

Two weeks ago I went back to revise the Huntsman from the beginning, going much deeper than I usually do. I’ve been forcing myself to fix the issues and adding the descriptions I have marked for ‘later’. I don’t think any of the changes have seriously effected the story, but then that was why it was safe to leave them for later in the first place. However, I did this because now, the point at which I’m ready for alpha readers is coming into focus. ~cringe~ As such, the story will need to be as readable as possible for someone who is not me.

Now of course I don’t have the middle of the book solidified, and gosh darnit I still don’t know what I’m going to do with Tabitha. It has been very helpful to have The Law of the Prince Charming under my belt. It is good and it is done so I can convince myself that if I could complete that book, then I can complete this one. You know, eventually. I give myself goals only to realize a few days later they’re unobtainable. And the timeline to finish the book keeps stretching out into “someday”.

I wanted to try and get a pass of the story done before June 21, because that’s when the show team is leaving for Nationals, and I’ll be working full time + weekends while they’re gone. That means it’s unlikely I’ll be spending much, if any, time on my writing. While I realized about three days into that goal that I wasn’t going to reach it, I have been ridiculously productive this week. This is particularly helpful since I’ve had a string of less than productive weeks and I’ve been feeling crappy about that.

I’m not sure yet if I should attribute this surge of productivity to the fact that I restarted my yoga habit, or just the fact that I sat down and had a reset at the beginning of this month. For right now, I don’t think it matters. Productive is productive, and as time goes on I’ll evaluate and reassess. And then I’m sure I’ll turn it all into a post, because that’s what I do.