Tag: writing

Continuing the Smoothing

Laura Highcove

Nothing much of interest going on this week. I’m still working through the story in the same method as I mentioned last week, though I am a good deal further than I expected to be. Bluebeard was quick and easy, which was not a surprise, but the Headquarters section also went very smoothly except for the scene here that has always given me trouble. When I talk about the writing of this book after it comes out, I will certainly talk about how important this scene is, and how dang-blasted hard it was to write.

I started the King Arthur tale midday on Saturday and I’m already aware of how not smoothly this tale is going to go. But it is the newest part of this story (writing wise) and thus the most raw. Even the climactic final battle and denouement were written prior to this section. However, I can start to see the story behind me actually smoothing out, which is a great feeling. Still needs work, but it is better.

I’m hoping two weeks will give me enough time to smooth out this tale. I’m still hoping to get started on my fights starting in April, and that will be a whole new adventure.

The Need to Expand

Laura Highcove

So I spent most of this week on the Cinderella tale. I managed to rework some of the story and found I really needed to expand the whole ending. I always thought my writing style was pretty superfluous, because I’m so good at stretching things to get to word count when word count is my goal. But I seem to have more cases where I have clearly not written enough, or I have skipped over describing things that are rather necessary in my haste to get to …somewhere.

I’m not exactly sure what causes this phenomenon. I suppose they could be parts that I think are boring. Like when you have a scene in a TV show that you know only exists to create a baseline. The scene is not always entertaining on it’s own, but if you don’t have that baseline, then it’s not as impactful when things go sideways.

So to that end (the need to expand sections) I have been having a bit of stress. Writing new words means they’re rough and choppy and in general make me feel like I’ve taken a step backward instead of forward.

I also suck at scene changes. Getting into a scene and getting out of a scene, so I am planning on pulling out a lot of my collection of books and reading how people do scene changes so I can gain some skill in that.

I ended up not doing the shoehorning method with orange issues that I said I was going to do last week, mostly because the story ended up not needing showhorning, but reordering and smoothing. Of course that means it took far longer than I was expecting. The Cinderella tale took the entire week and it needed a medium amount of work. Now I’m on my way to Bluebeard, which I think is the most together of all the tale sections, so it might not take the whole week. Headquarters is probably similar to Cinderella, but Arthur …Arthur is going to take some serious work.

So new goal is to see if I can smooth Bluebeard in less than a week.

Colorizing Comments

Laura Highcove

So the plan I made last week ended up not working quite the way I thought it would. The idea of there being major, medium, and minor issues and such just did not work for me. I found it easier to compartmentalize the issues by making comments and coloring them (Yay Scrivener!) as follows:

Where I needed to go outside of the current tale in order to fix a plot hole or add some foreshadowing, I colored comments red.

Then plot holes and foreshadowing needed within a tale were colored orange.

Small issues like not liking a description or needing more detail I marked with yellow.

Once I had this list, I tackled the red issues first, as that required the most jumping around to different parts of the story, as well as, in a few instances, figuring out *where* I was going to put the foreshadowing. In all of these cases, I basically shoehorned in the necessary comment/description, which will need to be smoothed in on next revision.

As of now, I have all but two red issues resolved. It went a lot more quickly than I thought it would.

The plan for this week is to now go through the story and start working on the orange issues. I am going to follow the same shoehorning method as with the red issues. I am hoping it won’t take more than a week.

After the orange issues are done, I’m going to do a read through/smoothing pass and see if I come out the other side with fewer issues.

Picking Jeremy Five-five

Laura Highcove

So now that The Storyteller is out for it’s alpha read, I had to decide what I was going to do in the meantime. I actually spent a day making a chart for all the stories I have written. I recorded how far I am in them (most of them have far less word count than I thought) and what about each story makes me want to write it.

I decided on a story with the working title: Jeremy Five-Five. This story has a bit of an interesting backstory. I started it for NaNoWriMo one year. While I was writing it, I wasn’t really into it. My problem was that my main character (Jeremy) kept flipping back and forth between wanting to hide in the background and having nothing to do with the game being played by his classmates, and getting super pissed off when they were playing it poorly and I was having a hard time understanding where he was coming from. So I decided to stop working on it, and instead go back to working on Shifting Winds.

When I went back to read Jeremy Five-five later, I realized that what I had written was really good, and I was able to figure out what Jeremy’s motivation. The back and forth of the apathy and anger actually works for his character. I pushed forward on it a bit, created a new draft and then it had been sitting there when I got more serious about my writing and worked on Shifting Winds and then The Storyteller.

Now I’m back to it in the drafting phase. I’m just plowing forward on word count, and Jeremy continues to be a bugger and a half to write. I just can’t seem to pin him down, but at the same time I’m drawn to him like the other characters in the story seem to be. There’s something about him that is peaking out and I need to figure out what it is so he can really shine.

The Storyteller Revision is Done!

Laura Highcove

I officially reached my goal of finishing my revision pass of the Storyteller. This is Draft 6, and it has now been sent to the hubby for an alpha read, which means that is off my plate for at least two months.

Finishing up a draft and shifting to something else is always a weird time for me. I keep feeling like I should be doing something with the story and I have to remind myself that not only do I not have to, I’m not allowed to. It has to sit, after all, so I can go back to it with fresh eyes.

How am I feeling about the story thus far? Pretty darn good. Very good about the first half, and okay about the second half. It’s newer than the first half so it’s still rather rough.

And there’s one character that I haven’t decided what to do with at the end of the book. He might be there or he might just disappear until book two. I feel like I should keep him in, it just means the final fight has seven people in it, and that is a lot of bodies to keep track of. I’ll just wait for the alpha feedback.

For now, I’m working on cranking out words on a new story, though I’m not planning on working on it hard enough to have it done in the next two months. Part of the reason for that is I’m sick right now and being sick does not make me want to commit to 90k words in two months. (It is also why I didn’t get this post up yesterday.) We’ll see what happens when I get better.

But anyway, I’ll be off celebrating finishing my revision by replaying Twilight Princess.

Year In Review

Laura Highcove

I just read through a post by Brandon Sanderson, which was extremely long, and was basically an overview of what he got done this year.

It gave me a few moments of panic and self-doubt. He’s turning 40 this year and has already been publishing books for 20 years. It’s easy for me to regret that I’m not further along than I am with my writing career. I mean I have been writing since the second grade. I wish I had realized earlier what I could do with that. Or that, at least, I had put a little more focus and discipline into it.

But then who knows what my world would look like if I had. I’d like to assume I would still be in a good place, but who knows what turn my depression may have taken had I not ended up at Advantage Ranch. I might not have gained the mental fortitude to get through the process of writing a book, and so I would have ended up writing my whole life without ever being able to stay with something long enough to make it good.

And, because I like making lists, here’s what I accomplished this year in the Storyteller:

I spent January through June working on the first revision pass of The Storyteller. It taught me a lot about my process and even ended up spitting out an improved rough draft.

I then took a month off. It was good to do, and I struggled a lot with what to write about on my blog when I wasn’t talking about what writing I was doing.

At the beginning of July I made a new plan to read through my story and add notes about everything that needed to be tweaked and changed without actually doing any of the changes yet. I was a little overwhelmed by how much I felt like wasn’t done. I had to do a lot of self encouragement during this time (and it helped that I went to Writer’s Digest in the middle for support from other writers)

The end of July and beginning of August was a lot of travel for Otakon, Writer’s Digest, and then a horse show in Florida. It really wiped me out. I got back on track by using Dungeons & Dragons to flesh out my character and their fighting styles.

At the beginning of September I refocused my plan. The plan only lasted two weeks until I decided part of my process is repeatedly going back to the beginning of my book to clean it up. So I stopped trying to fight it, and embraced it instead.

So I got through my revision of the first half of the book, and made the plan to completely rewrite the second half of the book during NaNoWriMo. I did that and I spent up until today putting what I wrote in order and ironing it out.

The plan from here is to go over the story once more and make sure everything is ironed down before I give it over to my husband on the first of the year for an alpha read. My husband is great at plot and pacing, so that should help to tell me what I’ll need to do next.

NaNoWriMo Still

Laura Highcove

So NaNoWriMo is going well. Pounding out words has never been the problem for me. Right now I am drifting back and forth between thinking that the Arthur tale and what it provides for the characters and their development is a great idea, and thinking it’s stupid and that it doesn’t fit with the story as a whole.

Such is the life of a writer.

I’m also getting a little bit of mentoring surrounding the POV challenges I have for this story. It means some more research, but for right now I’m still focusing on getting the story hammered out, then I can worry about how it’s told later.

Outside of my writing my husband made some slow cooker pork for tacos that was wonderful. I started learning about bending and suppling my horse on the ground. And I played some Hyrule Warriors last night for the first time in a long time.

Researching Arthurian Legend

Laura Highcove

So today I’ve done a bit of research on Arthurian Legend. The first part of the second half of The Storyteller, I’m sending Tabitha into The King Arthur tale.

Before this I knew the basics of this myth like most people:

There was a king named Arthur. He had a special sword called Excalibur that he got out of a stone or a lake, depending on who you ask. He had a wizard mentor named Merlin. He has a group of knights and a round table. He has a wife Guenevere who is also in love with one of his knights, Lancelot and that got everyone into a lot of trouble.

Places I have seen the Arthur Legend:

The Sword in the Stone by Disney, with adorable little Wart and old man Merlin who taught him everything important.

I saw a live action movie one time that may have been based on the book The Mists of Avalon (which I haven’t read) that focused more on Morgan le Fay. I don’t remember much of it except that she was tricked into sleeping with her half-brother, Arthur.

The BBC series Merlin, which toward the end used the less than happy ending to the Arthur story, ie Arthur getting mortally wounded by Mordred and then “disappearing”, but oh hey it might come back some day. (Argh, I don’t care how ‘faithful’ that ending was, I was so unhappy.)

New things I discovered:

Excalibur actually came out of the lake. There was a lady there who took care of it, and she and Merlin had a thing.

The sword that Arthur pulled out of the stone was not Excalibur.

There is apparently a lot of illicit sex going on among the peoples of this mythology. Arthur’s father slept with a married woman to get Arthur. Arthur slept with his half-sister Morgan and/or Morgause and sired the person who would kill him, Mordred. And some of his knights got naughty as well (Besides Lancelot).

Chivalry was a super big thing, but most things involving Courtly Love eventually just turned into illicit sex.

and …

I’m not sure how I’ll use this information for my story yet, but it was only an hour or so of research. Just enough to get me the basics. I think my main issue is that there are a lot of people in the Arthurian Legend, and if I’m keeping with calling people by their roles instead of their names, it gets a lot more complicated when there are all those knights. We’ll have to see what I come up with.

Writer Igniter Con

Laura Highcove

So this past weekend I went to the first ever Writer Igniter Con put on by Gabriela Pereira the instigator of DIYMFA. The best part was it was all online, so I didn’t have to travel beyond my couch.

Day One
The conference started on time and the digital conference room we were in was really a nice format with slides in the middle and a chat to the side so everyone could interact and ask questions without interrupting the presenter.
We had sessions on making a great outline, seven easy steps to a better novel, a guide to the first five pages of a story, and one on rocking your revisions. Some of the information was a refresher since I’ve taken the DIYMFA101 course before, but it’s always good to be reminded of the basics and I also got a lot of new tips since at DIYMFA they are always striving to make their content better.

First Page Critiques
There were also a chance for attendees to submit the first page of their manuscript anonymously and have some agents give a critique on it.
When we got to my first page, I was so glad there was a computer in front of me instead of real people. I could be as embarrassed as I needed to be about my page being read out loud. It actually went over pretty well with the agents. Much better than I was expecting, which felt super good.

Day Two
The second day dealt with the business side of writing more than the craft.
There was a session on copyright law which talked about how copyright works for authors, as well as a bit of advice on contract law, for those contracts we all hope to sign one day. It was a dense class, but had a lot of good information.
There were also sessions for marketing and social media, how to write a proposal, and an open panel where we could ask the presenters anything we wanted.

Meeting new People
And, of course, one of the best things about writing conferences is meeting new people. I am always on the look out for new writing friends and I even found two fantasy writers to exchange emails with.

And Beyond
With fresh encouragement and new techniques on the brain, courtesy of WICon, I am preparing for NaNoWriMo. I finished a revision pass of the first half of The Storyteller, which is now clocking in at about 50k words. During November, I will be writing the second half of the book from scratch, since I am still struggling there. I am hoping for a little ‘pantser’ magic to get some good stuff on the page that I can then revise into the second half of the book I need.

My Unicorn Horn

Laura Highcove

Much better progress this week. Got through two and a half chapters, though one of the chapters was rather short, I was still able to reach my goal which is great! I have started setting my timer again when I begin to write. Something about the numbers actually counting down with the threat of an alarm at the end adds a sense of urgency.

I also wanted to make sure that I don’t always just make this blog a grocery list of what I’ve done or haven’t done. Sometimes that’s all I’m in the mood for, but this week I wanted to share a little bit about me with everyone.

Ever since I was young, I’ve had a bump on my forehead. It’s a harmless little thing, but people notice it from time to time and ask me if I bumped my head. I got a little tired of telling them that, no, I just have a lump on my head (I know, it sounds so pleasant, right?), so I began telling people that it is where my unicorn horn is growing. That tends to give people a laugh.

When I read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, the thing that stuck with me the most from that book was when he claimed that writing is like telepathy. I feel like writing a book is all about the author taking what the story looks like in their minds and transferring it into the mind of their reader.

That is what makes me want to be an author, as opposed to just a writer. Someday, someone else will give my ideas real estate in their heads and, just maybe, they’ll care about my characters and stories like I do.

So now, when I get my first book published, that’s when my own psychic powers will have developed, and that’s when I’ll tell people that my unicorn horn is fully grown.

Next week was two more chapters, but I want to see if I can get the last three done so I can spend the last week of October planning, and then I can spend NaNoWriMo pounding out another 50k words to see if I can get the second half of my book out of them.