Tag: writing

Back to Writing

Laura Highcove

My writing the past two weeks has focused rather heavily on the Blessings of the Neriel. Most of what I’ve done is pushing through what I had written and smoothed out some of the scenes where I had too many different versions to know what my characters were actually doing. I also finally wrote out a character list, because for some reason that story I just didn’t really have all of my characters consistently named. Only the main character, I’ve always known what her name was.

I’m also doing an experiment with my hubby. I have a story I’ve always wanted to finish called Jeremy Five-five. I posted a Chapter 1 of it to my newsletter …last year? Omg was it just last year? …

Anyway, this story is about Jeremy, who is sent to an Academy where the students take part in a video game that allows them to fight each other, only this video game is there to mask the fact that there is magic in the world, in which Jeremy is well-trained, only has sworn off using.

This story, predictably, has a lot of fight scenes. And while I’ve gotten better at them, I’m not convinced I can provide the nuance in the choreography to make the emotional beats land properly. As such, my hubby, who is good at fight choreography, is helping and he’s just gotten back to me with the first set of ‘bullet points’ for the fight so I can take them and turn them into an actual fight.

I also gave myself a bit of a break from the Wizard after Nano, and I’m now getting back to a place where I want to pick it up again. I would like to get through the rest of the smoothing in Blessings of the Neriel first, but that will likely be happening soon. At this point I don’t even remember all of what I wrote, so it’ll be interesting when I dive back in.

Either way, Nanowrimo really did kick me back into my writing habit, and I’m glad that it did.

End of the Year

Laura Highcove

So I have been having a hard time getting back into the habit of these journal entries, but I really want to. Not for all of you necessarily, but because they help me focus, plan, and …why isn’t goal a verb? Even goaling isn’t. Making a goal. Planning a goal. Bah, I’m annoyed by that the same way I am that there’s no word for shaking your head.

But I digress. Last week was the end of NaNoWriMo for one of the …most eventful years of my life. I finished my 50k words. I had been debating authenticating them because of all of the rules I had made up for what I was counting as words for this year. Only the website has changed such that as soon as you put in 50k words as your word count total, you’ve won. Maybe it’s for the best. I did the work, and that’s really the important bit.

And the Wizard still isn’t finish, but it’s so much closer than it was. And I’ve decided I’m taking the month off, or at least a few weeks to just let it settle. Then in January I’ll start organizing what I have and see what’s still missing.

I’ve also been working a bit on the story and characters for Blessings of the Neriel, which has been fun. I’d really like to work on this story next, but I do want to finish the Storyteller Trilogy first.

Breaking the Rules of NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Friday and Saturday each gave me a ridiculous upheaval to my reality and I’m still reeling a bit.

Destiel

First, and the one you likely don’t know/care about, is that on Friday I saw the gay relationship of two characters on the long-running show Supernatural Dean and Castiel actually canonized. Like legit. Not like the subtext for the last twelve years that, while amazingly obvious, was still subtext. It was an amazing moment that made me cuss out loud because I never thought I’d see it. And there are still episodes left in the show.

POTUS

Then on Saturday Biden won the presidency. I cried for about a half hour in relief. And I know this doesn’t fix anything, and there are still problems, but right now I’ll settle for it not getting any worse for a bit.

NaNoWriMo

And around all of that, I’m still working my way through NaNoWriMo and I will tell you that I am playing faster and looser with the rules than I ever have simply because it’s necessary. I am doing everything I possibly can to make it the easiest and most productive experience possible. Partially because of mental health issues (which come in no small part to everything that’s been/going on.) and partially because my process has changed so dramatically over the years.


The past few years I’ve had difficulty/gotten stuck in NaNo because what I had written wasn’t organized and thought through yet, thus I couldn’t see the way forward. When trying to pound out words, I write things out of order, I write scenes multiple times with different focuses, everything just comes out into a huge pile. And editing makes it very hard to keep track of word count.


So this year I just said ‘screw it’. I write what I write and count those words, and then I edit those words: copy/paste, write more, delete even more, all to get a working scene, and I count those words as well. Is it to the law of NaNo? Absolutely not. But it’s following the spirit of Nano, which has always been to get you writing. I gave myself permission to do what I needed to do in order to be as productive as I can be AND free myself from the guilt of not following the letter of NaNo. And maybe I won’t verify my story at the end, maybe I will. But either way, I will have more of my story written, and that’s what matters.

Working Toward Productivity

Laura Highcove

As per usual, I come back with a reset post after a time away. Not even blaming myself for this anymore. This year has been such that blaming myself would just be not only unproductive, but downright cruel. I’ve been struggling for months with the balance between self care and productivity. Luckily I have people and activities in my life that bring me joy and I’ve been focusing on them.


I think I’m to a point now where I want to try keeping track of what I get done in my time-sheet again. I pulled the old dusty file open (it was still sitting on my desktop) and saw that I had stopped tracking hours after April. Not entirely surprising, and probably good for my mental health. It has been so weird looking back, and actually really weird looking forward.
I go to the Kroger every week for grocery shopping and I look around at all the people in their face masks and just keep thinking ‘this is my life now’. Because it is. Even if we get to the point where the virus is under control and we have a vaccine available (that works?), it is still forever a part of the world’s ecosystem just like the flu. Our lives going forward will be (and already are in a lot of cases) be defined by this.


As such, we are slowly learning to function in this world, which is what I’m still struggling to do. It’s not easy, not even going to lie. Self care is very very important and as such I made a super important change to my time-sheet. I switched the ‘write’ tag to ‘create’ and ‘read’ to ‘ingest’. Because I want to encourage myself to do what I need to to be happy. Create can include writing, of course, but also filming for my YouTube channel, or even working on my cross-stitch, just putting some sort of visible product into the world. Ingest includes reading, watching TV shows, and working with my horses. Experiences that enrich my soul and give me a reason to keep going.
I also have a straight up self care tag.


Not sure how this is going to go, but I’m going to aim for 15 hours in the coming week. Just to see what happens. Right now I’m feeling encouraged, which is certainly a good place to start from. Especially since I wrote this post in the middle of the list of things I wanted to do today. Now back to that task.

Still Writing

Laura Highcove

Starting off this post with a reminder to be kind to yourself during the pandemic. This article was written at the end of March but it still applies. Now back to your normally scheduled post.

So my writing life has mostly gotten back to normal. I’ve been posting my chapters of the Law of the Prince Charming, which is continuing to do well. That is actually getting really close to the end. I think there’s a bit more than a month left.

I’m still pushing through the Huntsman. I’ve hit the chapters that have the timeline issues now. That’s a lot of fun to figure out. Not really, but it has to be done and I am figuring some of them out. Not that far from the end which is great.

The plan right now is to finish this pass, and then do a pass that is nothing but writing a list of everything that needs to be fixed/changed. I love lists, so this is quite fun for me. Once I have that list I’ll (probably) have a better idea of how long it will be until there’s a ready draft.

I’ve also gone back to Blessings of the Neriel and starting piecing together the scenes I’ve written. I figure since The Law of the Prince Charming is out there, the likelihood of it doing well enough that a traditional publisher will want to pick it up is rather low. As such I need to be working on whatever my next project is while I’m finishing up the Storyteller trilogy, and as of right now I’ve picked Blessings of the Neriel. I’d really like this book to be a standalone, mostly because I’m not interested in working through another trilogy right now. I have so many different ideas that I’d rather get to more of them than spend the extra time on the same idea.

Hope everything’s going great for you.

Time, time, time

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.

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.

Writing My Way Through

Laura Highcove

So I’m a little late on this journal entry, as, well I just haven’t gotten back into the habit of biweekly updates yet. So here’s my update:

Doing well on getting my daily word count of at least 1k words. There’s also been some revision in there so I don’t have the straight up word count that would suggest, but I’m happy with my progress. I wrote a whole bunch of scenes that really pushed things forward, and plenty of scenes where I just stared at the screen for a while because nothing was happening.

I have, since this week, gone back to the beginning to smooth out the story a bit because I’m unclear about a few things. My story is coming out even more fractured than it was for LotDK, and so I’m having a harder time holding it together in my head. Smoothing is the only option for that, even if I lose the straight up word count I would otherwise get. I’m also supposed to have my rough draft done by the end of this week before spending two weeks smoothing. That is a long shot unless some idea just completely overwhelms me. I don’t have an ending yet. I tried writing a bit of it but I’m just not far enough in the story yet.

I suppose in the future during the planning phase, I should interlace word output with smoothing, because that’s really what ends up happening anyway. So the plan is to finish smoothing, pour out some more words, rise and repeat until my March Alpha Read. I’ll certainly have something to show them, even if I don’t exactly have an ending yet. And technically I can still write the ending while they’re reading the first bit. 😀

Writing the Storyteller

Laura Highcove

So last week I finished up my read through and wrote out my list of everything major point that still needed to be written in both the Huntsman and the Wizard. Creating the list ended up only taking two days instead of the week I had allotted to it, so I started writing out some scenes that needed to be changed. I’m giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day. Most days so far I’ve ended up writing more than that anyway, but I don’t want the number of words to discourage me too much. I’d rather get consistent words.

Probably get a chapter done a day for about a week and then I’ll just try and write as many of these scenes as possible. When I write new scenes like this I generally end up with something good eventually. Maybe not every scene, but as a discovery writer, discovery writing is where I really shine.

Nanowrimo style for a month now, so I’m excited about what’s going to come out even though I have no idea, but after this I SHOULD have an idea of what the ending will be. This is about when I need to know where I’m going. Then I sort of work in from both sides until I figure out the middle …like a sandwich? Something like that.

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