the law of the prince charming Archives

Making Plans

December 4, 2022December 4, 2022 Laura Highcove

So I know a lot of you have been waiting for an update. Sorry about that, got a little distracted by things. I had to play the new Pokemon game after all. My husband and I managed to beat it in eight days, but we had some nice vacation time in there that really helped. I had Violet for anyone who was interested. Poor game was pushed out way too early, which is a shame because it’s such a good game despite all that, so it would’ve been so amazing if it were polished.

Also just finished 1899, a new show on Netflix, and I’ll be putting up a review for before too long. Short answer: Really enjoyed it.

And even with all that, I’ve been working my way through my BotN Draft 0, figuring out what things still need to be fixed to get a solid rough draft out of it. The beginning of the story is so polished so there’s not much to do there. The end will need a lot of work I’m sure, but I think I have a good structure.

For those of you who have been asking, yes, I am still going to be putting up Chapter 1 of BotN for your reading pleasure. I just want to get through this pass and make sure there shouldn’t be any major changes in chapter 1. I don’t think there will be, but such is the life of an artist. I’m going to tentatively say look for it at the beginning of next year.

I am also looking into restarting my visual novel adaptation of The Law of the Prince Charming. In case you forgot, you can go read it in full (or have me read it to you) here. Or you can wait and see when I get that up and running. My idea its to use some AI art, but I’m not sure how well that will work for consistent characters. If anyone has any experience with AI generated art and/or has any suggestions let me know.

Time Has No Meaning

May 24, 2020May 24, 2020 Laura Highcove

It’s almost June and I really can’t believe it. March took so long and now it’s going super fast. My husband and I went on a vacation to a family condo and now I’m back to my regular schedule, well as regular as it ever is.

I’m still getting up my Law of the Prince Charming scenes three days a week, along with the accompanying video. I’m super proud about the fact that I haven’t missed an update yet. If you haven’t checked that out yet, here’s a link. We’re less than a month out from the halfway point of the book. It feels a little weird. I’ve been living with this book for so long, as well as working on second two books of the trilogy, that I often forget that it’s actually out there in the world for people to read. But then that was always my goal, having people read, and hopefully enjoy, what I write.

I didn’t make a ton of progress on the Huntsman. What little I did on vacation got lost when my USB drive got corrupted. The hubby’s still trying to see if he can fix it, but I’m assuming the work is lost. I’d like to work on this a little more than I have been because it occurs to me that eventually the LotPC will eventually finish posting, and if it does gain a whole bunch of readers, they’ll want the second book and it’s certainly not ready to be published yet. So I should have some sort of goal toward getting it done around Septemberish when the LotPC will be done posting.

But I have 26 more chapters in the Huntsman. At a chapter a week that still puts me into November, and this is nowhere near the final draft. If I want to get this done this year, I’m going to have to put in some work. Well I suppose there are two options. I can panic at the amount of work and give up, or I can start working toward getting it finished. For now I’m going to choose option number two.

Being Gentle with Myself

April 26, 2020April 26, 2020 Laura Highcove

Man, living through history is hard. Yesterday Georgia started to reopen. The general consensus is “are you f-ing stupid?”. Also, last night the store had toilet paper. Yay!

In regards to my writing, which is why you’re really here, I have been doing far better. I am giving myself less hassle for not being productive and I’m actually ending up more productive. How productive, I’m not sure since I stopped using my timesheet, but I am getting done what needs to get done and that’s the important thing. I am still moving through the Huntsman and enjoying the revision step as much as I always do. I am doing a last pass through the Law of the Prince Charming before videoing my reading each scene and posting that video along with the text on Wattpad for public consumption.

I am keeping up with my Stories & Succulent YouTube Plant Channel’s update schedule. I am also now on board with diymfa.com for writing a new series of posts on Writer’s Intuition the first of which will go up in June. All in addition to working at the barn in the mornings, keeping the house clean, and caring for a sick fish. (He’s doing fine, but I’m doing daily water changes right now.)

It’s a lot of stuff, but like I said, because I’ve been giving myself less hassle about it, things have been going pretty smoothly. I have no end goal for finishing the Huntsman, not that I’m going to let it go on forever, but right now I’m just going with the flow. I’ve also been playing video games, watching lots of Asian Shows, and caring for my plants. In general I’m just being gentle with myself. It’s an easy trap to get into right now that there’s so much free time and that I should be super productive as a result, but living during a pandemic on this scale is stressful. Low-key, all the time, you can’t get away from it, death is actually an option, stressful. Do what you can and take care of yourself. I’ll say it as many times as I need to.

Time, time, time

March 30, 2020March 30, 2020 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 Law of the Prince Charming on Wattpad

March 17, 2020March 17, 2020 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.

The Year 2020

January 12, 2020March 12, 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

January 6, 2019January 6, 2019 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

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018 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.

Before the Shift

July 16, 2018July 16, 2018 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.