Review: Dreaming Death

Laura Highcove

My Review of Dreaming Death by J. Kathleen Cheney

My summary: Shironne is able a very powerful sensitive, someone who can feel the emotions of others, and those powers have left her blind. She is able to tap into the dreams of someone in the city who experiences people’s deaths but can’t remember them afterward. She works with the army to use what she sees to help solve the murders.

Why I picked up this book: I actually don’t remember. I must’ve heard about it somewhere.

What I knew going in: I read the first chapter before purchasing the book because I wasn’t as convinced about it as other books I’ve bought. I found the main characters very comforting, and I liked how the author portrayed her pov when she is blind.

My response: Another very rough beginning to a book. This time it was because of an immense amount of world-building info dumps. I loved the main character Shironne, and loved being in her pov, but we very quickly shift to Mikael’s pov, as a member of the army, and the Family, and one race but looks a lot like another, and all of the people he works with and their races and connections and backstories. I found myself slogging through information about which I cared very little.

Once the two main characters meet, the story is a lot more enjoyable. The characters are all written very well and feel real and distinctive. I didn’t have trouble remembering who was who (though I threw what race everyone was out the window.) except one guy who had a name that kept making me think he was a girl whenever I read it.

The plot was sufficiently intriguing and satisfying at the end. It will be interesting to see if future books will be past the fact that the female lead is still 17 for four months so she can’t have any sort of relationship with the male lead because she is a CHILD. (I very much felt like that word was being said in all caps ever time it came up.) I almost feel like I want to read the next book just so the world building I managed to get through doesn’t go to waste. (Don’t get me wrong, the world building is very intriguing, it was just not presented well.)

Do I recommend this book?: Sure. I enjoyed it well enough. It was a rather good mystery, and the world is intriguing, and once the main characters meet, they’re very cute together.

What is My Greater Goal?

Laura Highcove

I started Camp Nanowrimo at the beginning of this month with a goal of 700 words a day, and actually challenged myself to get the typical 1,667 words required to win Nanowrimo Proper, on the days I had time. Turns out that was most days in the first week and a half. I had 14,871 words before I went to a horse show this past weekend, which created four days of no time for writing.

I had great success due to, before the month started, prepping by making a list of all of the scenes, situations I still needed for my novel. Each day I would take one or somtiems two if it was short, and write it.

Now on the other side of the horse show, I’ve found that I lost some of my momentum, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s due to taking so many days off writing, or if I need to revise for a bit to organize what I have and find the path forward.

I wrote 700 words yesterday and today, but I am planning to sit down and try and organize the scenes I have written and expand my list with other scenes that I will need. Once that’s done we’ll see if my momentum comes back. Getting my goal of 20k words is not going to be a challenge, so I’m just going to push forward with however much I can get done each day and not drive myself crazy.

I’ve also been inspired by a facebook post from Gabriela of diymfa.com and as such, I’m adding a little more to my journal posts. Gabriela posed three questions as a weekly check-in. The first two I already ascribe to: “What have you accomplished this week?” and “What’s on deck for next week?” But the question she posed that got me thinking was: “How do these activities serve your greater purpose?”

For the most part, I figure my answer to that last question is “So I can finish my book.” But I think that might be a little too broad. The same way as answering: “So I can become a published author.” That’s all well and good as a goal, but there are tons of smaller steps that need to happen.

I sat down to think about what my goal is for right now with this book. I feel like finishing the book is still a ways off, so I came up with a more specific goal: “To write all the scenes that need to be written to give myself a draft 0.” After that’s done, the goal will be to turn what I have written into a rough draft (which is what can be read by a beta reader.) I hope to have that first goal of a draft 0 done by the end of this month.

Review: Assassin’s Apprentice

Laura Highcove

My Review of Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

My summary: The bastard son of the crown prince is dropped off at the palace, causing said crown prince to give up the throne, and the bastard son is then trained as an assassin.

Why I picked up this book: Because everyone keeps *raving* about Robin Hobb and this series, so I figured ‘Sure, why not?’.

What I knew going in: Bought it on reputation alone. Yep, still doing that.

My response: Really a rather rough beginning. I had a hard time connecting with the character at all up until he meets Chade. After that the main character gets a bit of a personality and starts forming actual relationships with people. It certainly went a few places I didn’t think it was going to go, but managed to pull it off rather well.

The scene on the tower with Smithy made me cry.

As a writer I was impressed with the way she used exposition to move us past many boring bits, like learning things, while still having it feel believable that the main character had learned some certain skill that he uses later. I was also a little surprised by how the book would not mention a character for chapters, then use them again with little to no context, but for the most part I was still able to remember who they were.

Do I recommend this book?: Yes, very satisfying book, even if it takes a bit to get started. I’m interested to see where it goes from here, even if that means another two or three trilogies after this one.

Never Give Up

Laura Highcove

Okay, so bear with me for a minute, I’m going to talk about professional wrestling. John Cena is a professional wrestler who has been a top guy in the company for many years. He has recently been on TV less because he is off doing other things like making movies, as such he missed out on getting a match at the upcoming Wrestlemania.

Cena’s storyline (because wrestling is scripted) had him repeatedly fail in attempts over the past few months to earn himself a match at Wrestlemania, but true to his catch phrase he has refused to give up. When he was unable to earn a match through tournament competition he began attempts to call out the Undertaker (an older, but super popular, wrestler who *should* be retired but often shows up for Wrestlemania). For four shows, Cena has come out into the ring and called out the Undertaker before getting the crowd to cheer for how much they would love to see the Undertaker again.

And every week the Undertaker has refused to show up or acknowledge this call out, yet despite this failure, Cena comes out the next show and tries again. What I liked about the Cena storyline is that he tried winning his way into a match at Wrestlemania and when he failed at that, he went and tried another way by calling out the Undertaker. And despite the Undertaker’s apparent apathy for Cena’s call-outs, Cena went out on four different shows and repeated a similar plea.

I think it’s important sometimes to remember it’s not about just throwing yourself at a problem over and over. It’s about having a goal and working toward that goal in an intelligent way. I want an agent, and while I am querying, I am also working on improving my book’s pitch. I am also writing another book because perhaps The Law of the Prince Charming will not be the first of my books to be published. I am also continuing to learn more skills, put my writing process to the test and help it evolve. I might even, at some point, stop pursuing traditional publishing and look at self-publishing. There are lots of different paths I can take to the eventual goal of getting a book out there in the world.

Now the Cena-Taker match happened (because wrestling is scripted) and ended up being what’s called a squash match, ie, Undertaker won decisively, very fast. Now Cena’s goal was not to get beat, but he did get the match he wanted, but he strove for it all the same. I know all I can do with my writing is keep moving forward by continuing to learn and remaining flexible. So if you have a goal, aim for it, but don’t be so focused on it that you don’t see other paths that will lead you toward your goal. And who knows, it might not end up looking like what you were expecting, but it could be even better.

Review: The Diabolic

Laura Highcove

My Review of The Diabolic by S.J. Kincaid

My summary: Diabolics are genetically-created super-humans who are created to act as bodyguards to the rich. Nemesis has sworn to protect Sidonia, heir to the galactic senate. Only now the power-mad Emperor has summoned Sidonia into his court, and Nemesis must go in Sidonia’s place in order to keep her safe.

Why I picked up this book: It was suggested on Writing Excuses a while back, and I thought it sounded super interesting with SF elements as well as romance.

What I knew going in: Mostly what it says on the back of the book.

My response: I really liked the world building in this book. People living in space who then decided to worship the sun and stop teaching science, so they only have technology as long as the machines that produce and repair it keep working. They even have chat rooms with remote controlled avatars for communicating over long distances and nano-machines that can change everything about your appearance. Some fun ideas that really sparked my own creativity.
The plot wasn’t amazing, but it was satisfying. It was rather obvious that the love interest was not insane, and the antagonists are just through and through evil, but I liked how Nemesis worked through not believing she was human to believing she was capable of love. Also, the body count was really high in this book, but while it felt odd, I was not bothered by it.

Do I recommend this book?: Yes. I think it was an overall entertaining read, and I throughly enjoyed the world building.

April, the Most Productive of Months

Laura Highcove

At the beginning of last week I got a new shipment of books. Reading and I have a strange relationship. I love reading, but not only do I have a hard time attributing something so fun to something I need to do for my writing career (and thus make time for it), but when I read a book, I am generally obsessed with finishing it to the detriment of all else.

As such, I have actually avoided reading in the past, because it ‘distracts’ me from writing. Now that is silly, because in order to become a better writer, I need to read. I managed to convince myself of that enough that I read four of the five books already. (I have reviews written that will go up in the next few weeks.) However, this did cut into my writing time so while I progressed with the Huntsman, it was less than I usually do.

That brings me to my next topic. During April (Which started yesterday for you reading this, but I am writing this on March 31.), I am taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo for the first time. I was a rather religious participate of NaNoWriMo (the original) until this past year when I was in the middle of a writing project I couldn’t put off. As such I didn’t get my NaNoWriMo fix for the year and since a friend set up a cabin, I thought it might be fun to give this a try.

Unlike NaNoWriMo, Camp NaNoWriMo allows you to set your own goal and then attempt to accomplish it during the month of April. (And it can be counted in word, hours, minutes, lines, or pages.) Now I’ve been playing around with the ‘rules’ of NaNoWriMo for years. And while I always hit what I consider the ‘main’ rule (the words I authenticate are written in the month of November), the idea of giving myself my own goals is not outside of my comfort zone.

Two years ago when I had just started the Huntsman, and I gave myself the lofty goal of 90k words for NaNoWriMo. My expectation was to burn through the rough draft like I had The Law of the Prince Charming two years before that. I failed.

But of course that didn’t mean I gave up. It just took me two years to come to grips with the fact that this book won’t be as quick and easy as the first one, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. At the same time, I want to push forward this dreaded ‘muddle in the middle’ that I always have trouble with.

So I’m going to use Camp NaNoWriMo to help with that. I’ve been wibbling back and forth about what kind of goal to give myself. I’m not sure I can realistically expect to make 50k words since my weekends are spoken for all month. So I’m going to go with 20k words which is less than 700 words a day, and hopefully a number I can keep up since there will be days where I simply can’t write.

I spent part of this morning writing out a list of scenes I need to write, so hopefully I’ll just be able to bang those out. Either way, I’ll have more words written by the end of the month than I have now.

I am also participating in #WIPjoy again. Those posts will be going up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds starting today, so you’ll get some more tidbits about the Huntsman if you’re so inclined.

And this month brings the last four parts of The Aesir-Vanir War short story that has been going since the beginning of March.

It’s going to be a productive month whether I like it or not.

Becoming More Myself

Laura Highcove

So I started writing a blog post for this week about a month ago. I came back to it a few times and edited it, but it was never quite feeling right. I talked through it with my husband to no avail and last night I realized what the problem was. The post was too much of a rant, me complaining about the world and my own opinion of how things ‘should be’. And when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that that’s just not my style. The whole reason I have such a problem with writing blog posts in the first place is because I don’t feel comfortable stating my opinions as ‘right’.

And I’ve struggled a bit with the idea that I’m only careful with putting my opinions out there because I’m a woman and yada yada. But that’s the same trap I found myself falling into for those years when I thought I wasn’t female enough. I was listening to people ‘out there’ tell me how I should react to the world around me. I thought because I don’t like jewelry, or bags, or makeup that I wasn’t female enough. It actually got worse with the “me too” movement because suddenly there were more opinions out there about what women should do or be like. At a certain point, I finally had to decide: ‘screw that’.

I think I’m finally making that same kind of distinction here. I write my journal entries that are basically just that, journal entries, because I want people to be able to read about the struggles I have in my every day life, see how I deal with them, and perhaps find something that will help them in their own lives. Giving my opinion on how people should deal with their feelings (that’s what the failed blog post was about) was outside of that. I don’t want to tell people how they can have a better relationship with their own feelings. I’d rather show them my own relationship with myself and my feelings and let people draw their on conclusions.

And finding that this is part of who I am has been a lot of trial and error in learning to distinguish between when something is hard vs when something feels wrong. I could never begin to tell anyone else how to differentiate that for themselves. The closest I’ve come is a set of posts I wrote a while ago that talk about feel and awareness.

Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

Though even in these posts I focus mostly on the process I used with a few suggestions of how it could work for someone else. These are the types of posts I like to write, I guess I just needed the reminder. Now I just need to wait until the next thing goes wrong in my life so I can talk about how I respond to it. Shouldn’t be too long.

Lack of Motivation

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I have been suffering recently with a lack of motivation. Ever since I put the Huntsman in my hubby’s hands for an alpha read, I’ve been struggling to find another project that interests me as much. I was working on the rough drafts of two other novel ideas that sort of fizzled. I tried doing some prompts, but those ended up just flopping around and not feeling very effective. I also wrangled an idea for a short story where I tried to outline it before writing it, but I ended up with a story where none of the characters feel like characters.

There were brief moments for each of these that felt exciting. But it’s like the sparks that jump out from the fire. They burn brightly, and you wonder for a moment if they’ll really catch fire, but instead the light fades, leaving you with only a tiny sooty reminder that there was anything there at all.

This worries me. If I’m going to make a career at this, I should be able to sit down and write that needs to be written. What happens when I pitch a book idea to my eventual agent, and they get all excited about it, and then I get into this same situation where I can’t write it? What if more of my projects fizzle than catch fire?

Am I really getting better at this writing thing? Because I feel like my skill with actual writing may be growing, but at the same time I’m losing access to the things that used to come so easily. What good is it for me to be able to write a beautiful sentence, or have all my plot points in a row if I can’t come up with an interesting concept that can carry a book or a character that feels real?

I did, however, get the Huntsman back at the beginning of last week and I was finally able to sit down with my hubby and hammer out some plot points that should help with my muddled middle. I’m so still in love with this project, and though it still needs some serious work, I’m feeling much better about it.

I’ve also gone a long way toward accepting that writing a sequel really is that much harder than writing book one, so I’m feeling less bad about my ‘lack of progress’ on this book. It’s going to take however long it’s going to take, as annoying as that is, but I want this book. I want to keep following these characters and I want to know what happens.

It’s also the third week of the short story I’m publishing through my newsletter about a young Loki and a war between men and gods. If you’d like to read it, you can sign up here.

Still having doubts, still moving forward.

Review: The Broken Earth Trilogy

Laura Highcove

My Review of The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Since I am writing a review of the entire series, there will be spoilers from here on out. This is your warning.

My summary: In a world where some people (called oroenes) can control the earth but are reviled for it, a mother searches for her daughter, taken by her husband after he kills their son for having this power. Also, the earth is broken, and can only be fixed by catching the moon and putting it back in orbit with the earth.

Why I picked up this trilogy: I’ve heard tons of great things about it, including it winning a Hugo. I’ve had several friends who throughly enjoyed it.

What I knew going in: Very little. I actually didn’t even read the back-cover copy. I bought it based on reputation alone.

My response: This is a very odd review for me. If I had known what this trilogy was like and the themes of it before I picked it up, I never would have. However, the writing was beautiful, and the first book was just interesting enough that since I already owned the trilogy, I started reading the second. The second book took me two months to read, not something that *ever* happens to me. Usually I finish a book in a few days or I never pick it up again. I finished the last book because I figured I might as well.

My problems with the themes in this book:

1) Essun loses two children, and while I knew intellectually that I should care and understand about the pain this causes a person, I didn’t. I don’t have experience with the parent-child relationship that is fairly standard in society.

2) This book delves deeply into the ugliness created in people based on fear (whether justified or not) and the resulting anger and hatred. I get enough of this watching the world every day, and I actively avoid books that focus on this because my reading tends to be escapism.

Despite that, the writing and world building were amazing and beautiful enough to pull me along despite my flat out dislike of the main themes and lack of connection to the characters. Not even Rothfuss’ Kingslayer series could manage that. (And man that world and his writing are beautiful.) I have marked places where I want to go back and review her writing. She also did beautiful things with the merging of magic and technology, which is something I am coming to see as a recurring theme in my own books. I am glad she, and many other authors, are paving the way for this type of book in general.

The onyx says, in its ponderous, wordless way: Execute Y/N?

Do I recommend this series?: If you’ve read my review, without having read the books, you likely have enough information about the themes to decide whether this is a book you would enjoy. They are good books, I just didn’t like them and I’m not arrogant enough to consider the fact that my not liking a book means it’s bad. However, I won’t be recommending these books unless it’s an example for writers.

Gryffins: Oh God There’s More

Laura Highcove

Yes, this is the last installment of my collection of gryffins. For now …

Gryffins in Plush

My collection of gryffin stuffed animals, because of course I have some to snuggle with.

The biggest gryphon (back left) is actually a puppet my mother bought for me. The one with the wild eyes (back right) I saw at a store one day. The one that looks like it has a cutie mark (front right) is from Busch Gardens where they have the griffon roller coaster*. There is also the gryphon plush I bought for World of Warcraft (front middle) that came with an in-game pet (I just never got a screen-shot of while I was still playing the game.) The round one (front left) is a limited edition griffin from Squishables. I actually missed the first run of them and only managed to grab one from the second (and final) run.

*More on this later. 😀

Gryffins in Cards

Magic the Gathering has a good and fairly constant set of griffin cards that come out. While I don’t have all of them (I’ve kinda fallen off on keeping up with the sets.) I do have a good number of them. I even have some that aren’t considered griffin cards, but that have griffins features in the art.




Other Gryffins

I also have a mug. It is also from the Griffin roller coaster in Bush Gardens like the plush.

And this gryffin sconce was made by a local artist. It sits just above my bed. Yes, the colors don’t really go with the wall color, but there you have it.

Gryffin Sightings

And here are examples of gryffin sightings in the wild.

This is the rollar coaster from which come the gryffon plushie and mug. It is at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and is my favorite rollar coaster because if you get in the front row, you really feel like you’re flying.

This is a bar I passed by while in Las Vegas. I don’t drink, however, I had to record my #gryffinsighting.

And there you have it. That is my collection of gryffin-related items. Thanks for putting up with a bit of my insanity.