the storyteller Archives - Page 2 of 9

Awesome Writing Moments

April 8, 2017April 8, 2017 Laura Highcove

I am a discovery writer. When I was young I would sit down with nothing but a vague idea and the world and characters would pop out as I wrote. Now that I’m older, and have more skill, I tend to have some of the story itself planned out, maybe vague ideas for the world and characters before I start, but for the most part I can’t plan too much or I flounder.

And I love being a discovery writer because of how those ideas seem to come from nowhere. I get ideas for stories from all over the place, but when I am in the process of writing, I just write my characters doing things or stuff about the world and that random stuff turns out to be super important later in the story. It basically feels like magic, like my brain is working on a higher level and puts things together without me realizing it. Moments like these are always awesome writing moments.

For example: I had Tabitha like apples. I’m pretty sure it started out that way because her kingdom is always in autumn, and apples are a fall crop. Later I realized the apples were part of a very important plot point.

It is this ability for my mind to make these connections that gives me a lot of comfort when I’m writing and feel like I have no idea where I’m going. I’ve learned to trust myself. One of my mantras is: “There is a way all of this will make sense, I just have to find it.”

My Stories

April 1, 2017April 1, 2017 Laura Highcove

So I have been writing for …well my entire life. This is the list of stories I have “finished”, in that they contain a beginning, middle, and end. Not a huge list, but then most of my early years I spent bouncing from one project to another so very few of them ever were finished. Since I’m matured as a writer, I have a better track record of finishing.

Silverfire: Technically a set of stories (not just one boo) about a silver fox who rescues a kingdom. Other characters include Brightfire and Redfire. They were all, likely no more than a few thousand words and very rough, but they had endings. The idea came from Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, in which I was rather infatuated in my younger years. This story did evolve with me a bit and I have a much more current version of it started but the concept is so simple really just a trunk novel. However, Silverfire holds a special place in my heart and I’d love to use her in a novel some day. (Though probably with a name change.)

Gryphons, Gryfalcons, and Makkar: The story of a gryffin princess who finds allies in gryfalcons, and enemies in the makkar. A milestone in my career, this story was over 100 pages (in Microsoft Word). I was very proud. Again, trunk novel, but the main character Wirith’s name pops up when I need a name for a gryffin in other stories. This idea came from Mercedes Lackey’s The Black Gryphon trilogy.

Warehouse: A girl with powers ends up in a house where children with powers are raised and must unravel the mystery of why they exist. Totally ripped off from X-men. I tried fixing it once, but it’s a trunk novel.

Demonslayer: A woman with amnesia finds out she was trained by a group who are the last line of defense against demons, and that group has been wiped out. This story marks my first fully fleshed out world, and important first step into being a high fantasy writer. I have other novels and stories and characters planned in this world. However, the story is still rather immature and needs a complete rewrite, especially considering it’s only 23k. (Man, it felt really long when I wrote it.) This was influenced by a book google helped me to remember, Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon.

Blessings of the Nerial: A little faith never hurt anyone, but it’s about to start. Wrote during NaNo one year, and I’m not positive if there were any strong influences for this one. I really like the concept but I don’t actually like the main character …so if I were going to rewrite it, it would need an overhaul.

Shifting Winds: Angelica is a princess who lives life the way she wants, until she’s kidnapped by a demon. I love this story, but something is fundamentally broken in it, and I don’t have the skill to fix it. Inspiration for this story came from a mini series that played in a Harvest Moon video game. Bizarre right?

The Colors Of: Environment was ruined in a war and computers are designed to look like animals. This story was inspired by a Pokemon fan fic I wrote back in my fan fic days …so yeah. It took on a decent life of it’s own since then. I’d love to clean it up some day.

The Asir/Vanir War (12k): Loki leads a group a vanir to Asgard in order to stop the war raging on Midgard. Meant to be a prequel to a story I haven’t finished. This is a short story (fantasy short story), but it is clean and polished, and thus it gets to be on this list. I’ve loved Norse mythology for a long time. I wrote this before the whole Marvel/Loki/Tom Hiddleston thing.

The Storyteller: Once upon a time there was a prince. She was a girl. My first complete and polished novel. I’ve been working on the sequel.

Commission of Tabitha

March 11, 2017March 11, 2017 Laura Highcove

This is a picture I had commissioned of Tabitha from my novel, The Storyteller. I love it tons. Not really much else to say about it. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

If you want more information on Tabitha,
you can click here to get the first chapter of her story.

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

Working up to NaNoWriMo

October 30, 2016October 30, 2016 Laura Highcove

I did several prompts this past week, and then thought that maybe I should work on actually writing a large number of words a day. In the past I’ve been able to reliably bang out 1000-1500 words in an hour, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in output mode and not revision mode.

So I decided to work on the short story I had a vague idea about involving Cobalt and Archer. It takes place only a few days after the end of the Storyteller and involves them going to and also going to fix . It ended up being a good thing I did a little practice before NaNoWriMo starts this Tuesday.

Firstly, I had trouble producing words so I had a few days of reminding myself how to push forward through the resistance, as well as remembering the feel of how I get to the place where words flow.

Secondly, it helped me organize some of the fallout from The Storyteller. While that won’t be in The Huntsman, it’s still helpful to have it written out. I’m one of those authors who doesn’t know what I think until I write it down. I can plan all day long, but when I write, I think about it a different way and all the details flow into my brain. Most of the time it kills whatever my plan is and it’s glorious.

I am actually nervous about NaNoWriMo for the first time in several years since I am challenging myself to write 90k words in the month instead of the usual 50k. 50k just became to easy for me and I’ve had no challenge the past few years. Not to say getting out 50k words wasn’t helpful, because it certainly was. It will just be interesting to see if it’s actually possible for me to pop out an entire rough draft in a month, as opposed to it taking two months.

Still no more responses from agents. It only occurs to me now that I don’t know what the procedure is around announcing agent representation. When I (hopefully) find that lucky agent who loves my book, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it public right away. It might be that that only pertains to getting picked up by an editor. Either way, I’ll be sure to post about it as soon as I can.

Agents and Prompts

October 23, 2016October 23, 2016 Laura Highcove

I’ve been a little lackadaisical about my blog posts, and that’s because my writing has been lackadaisical. My novel is out with beta readers for the final polish and I generally get a little ‘omg, what do I do with my hands?’ when I don’t have a clear writing goal.

Last week I researched my first batch of agents, wrote my query letters and synopses (of different lengths), and put it all together to send out my query letters. But since it was the first time I’ve done this particular task, I backtracked to check things three or four times in an attempt to give each agent as close to what they wanted in a query letter as possible. I even made an excel sheet to organize.

I got my first form rejection letter by the next day. It was faster than I was expecting. I celebrated it as the beginning of my ‘writer’s school of hard knocks’, but at the same time, I thought I would be more upset about the rejection itself. Perhaps the time listening to Gabriela and reading articles on how rejection is never personal, that agents reject manuscripts for all sorts of reasons, actually sunk in. Agents all have their preferences. I just have to find that agent whose specific preferences line up with what I wrote.

As for straight up writing, I have close to 2k words on a new story, but at the same time I struggled with the idea of starting a new project when I know I’m going to be writing The Huntsman for NaNoWriMo. The solution finally hit me Friday night. I pulled out ‘The 3A.M. Epiphany’ on Saturday morning and did the next writing prompt in the book.

Prompts are an excellent way to write without having to have a project. And the prompt gave me a great idea for a unique pov that I may use in The Huntsman. I played around with pov in The Storyteller and it was rather enjoyable. So I want to keep that up. I think I may like playing with weird povs. Maybe it will become one of my things?

So the writing life is still going well. Every time I worry that I won’t be picked up by an agent, I remind myself why I write in the first place. I’d love to get my stories out there to share my friends and their worlds with other people, but I’ll keep writing even if I’m the only one who reads about them.

Extra time to Write

September 18, 2016September 18, 2016 Laura Highcove

Starting in September I now have my weekday afternoons to work on my writing. I knew it would be an extra four hours a day, but I don’t think I quite understood how much time that was when I made my plan the other week. Which is a good thing, because working through the fight scenes and the prose ended up taking longer than I expected.

It’s not that the work is harder than I thought it would be, just more tedious. The book is over 100k words. Even if all you’re doing is reading the book, that takes a while to get through. Though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in going through and fixing the ugly bits that I’ve been ignoring up until now. This novel is more complete than any other novel I’ve ever written, and it’ll only get more so. It’s very exciting.

I also did some looking into agents, which was a little intimidating. Partially because of the idea that I am actually going to start submitted before long, and partially because I realized I am going to have to write a synopsis. A synopsis is basically taking my book and boiling it down to two pages. Or one paragraph. I started working on it, just jotting down the main plot points and I already have way too much, and I’m only halfway through the book. I decided to put it aside until a little later.

For now I’m going to keep working like my plan is perfect and infallible. When October hits I’ll reevaluate where I am.

Getting Ready for a New Draft

August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 Laura Highcove

This past week I spent most of my time going through and making changes brought about by feedback from my beta readers. So there were a lot of non-connected pieces that I worked on, but I do feel like I’m moving forward well.

I think my plan after this is to finish making a few minor changes and then I’m going to shift to the next draft number, meaning I will go through and read, smooth, and make a whole new set of notes.

Back from Beta Readers

July 30, 2016July 30, 2016 Laura Highcove

So this past week was a delightful collection of both wonderful and completely horrid moments. As you may have guessed, I got my story back from my beta readers! It ultimately ended up going pretty much as well as can be expected from sending your baby out into the world for the first time. All of the comments were positive or the helpful kind of critique.

However, there was a misunderstanding about part of the story, and the comments regarding that section left me in three days of misery. Both beta readers jumped to the same conclusion and since it was an emotionally charged scene, it left a rather deep emotional impression on them that was not what I was going for. It took some dwelling on comments and reading between the lines to figure out that they had reached a conclusion that was not the one for which I was aiming.

Once I figured out the misunderstanding and had talks with the both of them, things turned out much better and all of the critique they gave me was entirely manageable. I mean, sure I’d love for it to have already been perfect, but then making mistakes is how you learn.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a person besides my alpha reader husband, read through a whole story of mine, and it was an amazing experience. One of my beta readers had trouble with names, since different characters call each other different names. It didn’t occur to me, since I live with these characters. The other was much more in tune to how information was parsed out to the reader, pointing out places I had done it well and places I had done it poorly. After reading the comments and seeing the way both of the beta reader’s minds worked through the story I feel like I was able to see the story in a new light.

Anticipation

July 24, 2016July 24, 2016 Laura Highcove

I spent last week working through some things with my story, ‘The Colors Of’. It started off as a pokemon fan fiction back when the first pokemon movie came out in 1998. It has changed a lot since then. I spent some time on brushing off the world building. It is set on a planet that was ravaged by war, such that the world started to turn metallic and the only animals are computers that are built to look and act like animals, some of which serve people, and some of which have escaped into the wild. The story is about what it takes for people to survive in this world.

However, I knew I was only going to work on that long enough to get back my story from my beta readers, and the first of those came in this week. I’m scared, but I’m trying to convince myself to be excited too. Hopefully this will help me to get a better insight on how others see my story and thus be able to improve the book. Also, chalk it up to a new experience. This is the first time someone who is not my husband has gotten to see one of my stories in its entirety. (Unless you count the really bad version of Shifting Winds, which technically didn’t have an ending, I just didn’t know it at the time.)

I’m not sure what I am expecting. I know points of the book are weak. I know some of the prose is messy. I think I’m more scared to find out about things that are wrong that I don’t know about yet, that I may not be able to fix? I’m not sure if that’s possible, for something to be unfixable, but then most of the time we worry about inane things anyway.