Tag: the huntsman

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!

Put in the Work

Laura Highcove

Trying to write a new story hasn’t really worked out. I’m just not excited enough about any of my new ideas. I wrote on one for a few days, got words out, but just didn’t feel any excitement about where it was going. As such I went back to do a revision pass on the Huntsman while taking into account the notes my husband left and the conversation we had on the way back from Baltimore. Even that’s not going particularly well, but it’s at least better.

I’m trying to lean very heavily on this article that I luckily read last week. So at least I’m still moving forward. I got a good amount of hours logged compared to the last three weeks, so I’m celebrating that win. Or trying to.

I still feel like I’m whining, which is something I try to avoid doing, but I’m also not going to lie and pretend everything is okay. That’s part of what got me into trouble the past two months.

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.

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.

Letting my Characters Go

Laura Highcove

I did a few smoothing passes on the Huntsman, each focusing on one of the main trio: Gabir, Tabitha, then Wildrose. I was able to push what I had written a little further with each pass.

Wildrose’s storyline is the one that needs the most work right now. I know where I need/want him to be at the end of this book, but he still has a large number of steps to get there. This is after I admitted to myself that the way I *wanted* him to get from here to there wasn’t going to work. I think the past two weeks I’ve repeated: “No, it doesn’t fit with my plan, but it’s what the character would do.” sooooooo many times.

Whenever I get stuck, like sit and stare at my computer screen for ten minutes without typing, stuck, it’s generally because I’m trying to force a character to do what I ‘need’ them to. (And I don’t always realize this right away.) When I release that expectation, they go off on their merry way, and while I have no idea if it will tie back into what I already have, it is much more natural and enjoyable.

I also made a list of the scenes that still need to be written. Not nearly as long as it was last time I did it which is encouraging. I wrote out two or three of those scenes and revised a few that I had previously written but needed to be updated. I had a few new things pop out that very possibly could lead somewhere nice in the way of tying things together. Still worried that I have too much going on, but I figure I’ll never figure out what’s the most important if I don’t write everything first.

Resetting

Laura Highcove

I came off of last week being on vacation where I really didn’t do much, if any writing. I came back and got back to work as I should finishing up rewriting a few Gabir scenes and then restarting the story to focus on Tabitha’s storyline. I put in a good number of hours through the week. Since I had last week off for Williamsburg, I agreed to work this weekend to give my coworker a nice long weekend. Oddly enough, despite that, Saturday I still got a lot done, and it wasn’t until Sunday that the extra barn work started dragging me down such that I told myself I needed to not push the writing too hard and just recover.

It’s a shame to lose the momentum I had, but I’ll get back to it tomorrow. I want to try and have Tabitha’s scenes done by June 3rd. I had to do a bit of a recheck into myself because I realized I was not enjoying the story because I was so focused on whether or not the story was technically ‘good’. One of the things I realize from writing this journal is that I keep having to come back to the same realizations, because it’s so easy to get caught up in life and goals and expectations that I lose focus on what’s important. Then I have to not beat myself up for having forgotten, because it’s just another one of those things. Every once and a while I just need to stop and reset by reminding myself of what’s important. And the ability to realize I need to do that is one of the most important skills I’ve learned. Anyway, I am back to feeling like I am making progress as I focus on writing a story I enjoy. Cause who cares if it’s technically ‘good’ if I hate it?

I’ve now pushed to the end of what I have so far for Tabitha, so I’m going to shift over to Wildrose and smooth through his scenes and see what comes out the other side. I’d like to get that done by the end of the week at the latest, and start trying to weave more Tabitha/Wildrose storylines together to catch up to where Gabir is. (By the end of the *next* week.)

It’s Vacation Time Again

Laura Highcove

So Camp Nanowrimo was both a success and not. I easily passed my word count goal of 20k. I validated with 30k, but I didn’t finish writing all the scenes I needed in the Huntsman. I did a lot of new ones, and then I went back and rewrote a number of scenes. I am certainly further than I was at the beginning of the April, but certainly not as far as I would’ve liked to be. Of course ‘doneness’ of a novel is not an easy thing to calculate, so it’s more like, my goal of having a draft 0 done has still not been reached.

I’m still moving forward, I’m still making progress, but I really want to hit some sort of milestone. Something I can point to and say, ‘I’ve finished x.’ I mean I gave myself a reward for reaching my goal in Camp Nanowrimo, but I feel like that was a milestone for Camp Nanowrimo, and not necessarily my book.

Of course this week I’m on vacation and I’m trying to give myself a break from having to work on Huntsman. I generally write for an hour or so in the mornings even when I’m on vacation because I love writing. I just don’t give myself any time or word count goals. I write for as long as I want to, on whatever project I want to. (I spent this morning on a scene from Blessings of the Nerial.)

I’m hoping that this more lax structure will help me to gather myself and be ready to move forward again once vacation is over. Short post, I’m on vacation.

What is My Greater Goal?

Laura Highcove

I started Camp Nanowrimo at the beginning of this month with a goal of 700 words a day, and actually challenged myself to get the typical 1,667 words required to win Nanowrimo Proper, on the days I had time. Turns out that was most days in the first week and a half. I had 14,871 words before I went to a horse show this past weekend, which created four days of no time for writing.

I had great success due to, before the month started, prepping by making a list of all of the scenes, situations I still needed for my novel. Each day I would take one or somtiems two if it was short, and write it.

Now on the other side of the horse show, I’ve found that I lost some of my momentum, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s due to taking so many days off writing, or if I need to revise for a bit to organize what I have and find the path forward.

I wrote 700 words yesterday and today, but I am planning to sit down and try and organize the scenes I have written and expand my list with other scenes that I will need. Once that’s done we’ll see if my momentum comes back. Getting my goal of 20k words is not going to be a challenge, so I’m just going to push forward with however much I can get done each day and not drive myself crazy.

I’ve also been inspired by a facebook post from Gabriela of diymfa.com and as such, I’m adding a little more to my journal posts. Gabriela posed three questions as a weekly check-in. The first two I already ascribe to: “What have you accomplished this week?” and “What’s on deck for next week?” But the question she posed that got me thinking was: “How do these activities serve your greater purpose?”

For the most part, I figure my answer to that last question is “So I can finish my book.” But I think that might be a little too broad. The same way as answering: “So I can become a published author.” That’s all well and good as a goal, but there are tons of smaller steps that need to happen.

I sat down to think about what my goal is for right now with this book. I feel like finishing the book is still a ways off, so I came up with a more specific goal: “To write all the scenes that need to be written to give myself a draft 0.” After that’s done, the goal will be to turn what I have written into a rough draft (which is what can be read by a beta reader.) I hope to have that first goal of a draft 0 done by the end of this month.