Tag: the storyteller

September Goals

Laura Highcove

I sat down to figure out what it is I have to do in order to finish the Storyteller trilogy. It was kinda a big (huge) long list that I of course had to break down into smaller steps in order to keep from driving myself insane. The basic gist of it is, however, to first finish reading through the Huntsman and writing down all of the major issues that I want to/need to address both in this book and the Wizard. Then I will do the same with the part of the Wizard I have written along with a list of everything I wanted the trilogy to do and loose ends for every character.

I can then sort though this list and look for the items that will make the biggest waves and start there. I’ll shoehorn in what I can, all while November gets ever closer. Once November and NaNoWriMo hit, I will pour myself into finishing the Wizard draft. Right now the Wizard is at 56k words, so maybe about half the book …ish. So 50k words for NaNo should get me to the end, or at least pretty close.

Of course my productivity has been rather low so the idea of doing NaNo right now is pretty intimidating. But part of sitting down and writing out everything I needed to do in order to get the trilogy done and approximate times of how long each step would take reminded me once again how long it actually takes to write a book. As such, I am kicking myself in the butt to move forward because despite appearances, I do actually want to get these books done.

So for right now, I’m reading through the Huntsman and making my list. My goal is to have it done by the end of next week.

Also, if you haven’t read The Law of the Prince Charming yet, it is completely posted here for free. Check it out. More views and comments certainly don’t hurt the motivation factor.

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.

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

New Title for The Storyteller

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

For those of you who have been around for a while, you know I have a novel called The Storyteller. I never spend all that much time coming up with titles for my books. They’ve always just been a way for me to label my files and refer to them when I talk to my husband.

The Storyteller is the first novel that I have actually finished and polished to this level, so my mentor suggested keeping my mind open to ideas for a different title. It occurred to me that maybe I should think of a better title. They said on the Writing Excuses Podcast once that when you’re pitching your book to potential readers, you want to be able to grab their interest with the title of the book. Well The Storyteller isn’t really a title that jumps up and grabs attention. That’s why I decided to change the name to The Law of the Prince Charming. Overall, I think it captures the feel of the book as well as perhaps being better at grabbing people’s interest.

So I made a new cover picture for my facebook page. The ‘Sign Up’ button is a link to my Newsletter where you can get the first chapter of The Law of the Prince Charming.

As for my writing these past two weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of back and forth. I finished the rough draft of The Huntsman (still the working title) which means I have my beginning middle and end. I decided that it would be a good idea for me to start working on the third book (working title: The Wizard) instead of going through and polishing it all the way up first. That’s mostly because, as a discovery writer, I am still developing the ideas for these two books. I know mostly where everything is going, but there are a few pieces that I need to tie everything together and I haven’t been able to pull them out of my brain yet.

So I’ve been going back and forth between writing 1500 words a day into The Wizard, and revising my way through The Huntsman. And the story ideas are already starting to tighten up. I even went back and wrote a character (albeit, rather minor) out of The Law of the Prince Charming; giving his part to a different character that ends up working better. It’s a bit of a blessing that I can still go back and tweak things in that first book.

My goal for the next two weeks is to revise through the halfway point of The Huntsman. And get another 10k words down for The Wizard. My process seems to rely heavily on the back and forth from new material to revising the early stuff, so I’m going to see how well it works for the next two weeks.

The Wildroses are in Bloom

Laura Highcove

It’s that time of year when the wildroses around the farm come into bloom and the gentle smell permeates the air. And they always make me think of my Wildrose.

Wildrose © Laura Highcove

Like Tabitha I had a commission of Wildrose done as well. He is a wizard who was raised by gryffins, and he is part of the most effective Storyteller team the Guild has.


Wildrose © Laura Highcove

If you want to know more about Wildrose, you can click here
to get the first chapter of The Storyteller and meet him for yourself.

If you want more information on the artist, you can find it here.

A Challenge Overcome

Laura Highcove

I’ve overcome a number of challenges as a writer. One would be the act of completing a novel, which is impressive, but was my answer for the ‘a dream achieved’ post, so it would be cheating to use it again.

I have lots of little challenges that I have overcome and even more that I have to keep overcoming, like doubt and a lack of time. But I think the most important thing is to acknowledge the challenges as I conquer them (big and small) and then look forward to the next one.

The challenge I am involved in right now is writing The Huntsman, the sequel to The Storyteller, and it has been difficult. I’ve read from some authors how each book can be a completely different type of beast to tackle, but somehow I had assumed that my process would be at least similar. The Storyteller, I wrote pretty linearly in two months, revised for a year, rewrote the second half of the book, revised for another year and I had a novel.

The Huntsman I have been jumping around all over the place since November of last year. I have rewritten scenes from scratch three or four times, and I still don’t have my ending written out yet. (I have an idea what it is at least.)

Now I can at least look at The Storyteller and remind myself that yes, I really can do this, so that helps with the doubt. At the same time I was hoping to be one of those efficient writers who doesn’t take years to put out each book. And maybe one day I will be. Right now, I’m still focusing on overcoming my current challenge.

Researching

Laura Highcove

I really don’t like research. I wouldn’t say that I write fantasy because I dislike researching the real world, but I don’t doubt that it’s a bit of a factor. The amount of time and effort that can go into minute details that may only come up once, but to which people will latch because of human’s intense desire to be right and/or prove other people wrong. The more stuff I just make up, the less things people can point at and tell me I’m wrong.

However, technically the Storyteller came about because I was doing “research” into fairy tales. And by research I mean I was reading obscure fairy tales. I landed on The Little Wildrose and realized the eagle could be a gryffin, and that was the last spark I needed in order to jump start that book.

I have found some other things that I enjoyed researching. I love reading about Norse Mythology, whether or not the novel I did that research for becomes more than a trunk novel. I have also looked into sociopaths because I find that particular mental affliction interesting as someone who is entirely too sensitive of the emotions of others. And recently I have become interested in mushrooms for a world I’m playing around with that has no sun. Not super deep into that one yet.

There have been story ideas that I’ve ignored because the research I would need to do in order to write the book seems too tedious. I think the big thing is finding something I’m interested in enough to be willing to put in the time.

My Beta Readers

Laura Highcove

So with The Storyteller, I had my first real set of beta readers. It was the first time I ever had a complete book to hand to anyone. I was really happy with the people who agreed to beta read my book and it was a tong of fun to be able to see each of their personalities reflected in the notes they gave me.

Overall it was a wonderful learning experience and I am so grateful for each and every one of them. The feedback I got back was really invaluable. And I know how time intensive it is to read a novel, but they did that as well as giving me feedback on it. I love them all.

Dedication Page

Laura Highcove

I like the prompts I’ve been using this month for these posts because many of them make me think about things that I didn’t think about before.

The dedication page is one of those. I feel like a dedication page is really dedicated to the person/people who meant the most to you during the writing of the book. So much so that you want to dedicate the book and the idea of the book to them. If I was entirely truthful, I would dedicate The Storyteller to myself, just because of what it means to me as a book. I’m not sure that any other story I write will mean quite this much to me. But I’m pretty sure dedicating a book to yourself is like thanking yourself in an acceptance speech, bad form.

Then I had the idea of what I really want the dedication of this book to be:

To Abigail

For everything you have suffered.

It could be a rather massive spoiler, but because of the nature of this book, I think it is the most appropriate dedication I could come up with. Even if it is bad form.

Kill Your Darlings

Laura Highcove

It is a common phrase said to writers, to ‘Kill Your Darlings’. Basically what it means is that sometimes a writer writes something that they just love. A character, a scene, a line that is just amazing. Only that thing either doesn’t improve the story, or in some cases, drags it down. Only the writer doesn’t want to get rid of it because it’s just so cool. This makes it hard to admit to yourself that you need to get rid of it.

I had (at least) one such darling in The Storyteller. Tabitha is going into the Huntsman’s castle to look for the sword. In the first version of the story it read like this:

Tabitha marched toward the castle doors. They opened easily at her touch. She did not let herself hesitate on entering the magical castle. The doors thudded shut behind her.

“Should we have warned him about the demons?” the Man in Black asked, glancing at the Wizard.

“He didn’t ask.”

I even got positive feedback from early readers about those last two lines. And I loved them. And those darlings stuck around until Draft 9 when I finally admitted to myself (because I knew before that, but I was clinging to those lines) that for the rest of the book the narrator sticks right on top of Tabitha, and having any narration when Tabitha is not in the room just doesn’t work. On top of that, while it’s a nice sting, that information is not necessary. Tabitha runs into a demon in the next scene.

It still hurt to delete those words though.