Tag: jeremy five-five

The Christmas Break

Laura Highcove

It occurred to me earlier this week that I generally have a vacation around Christmas. Since we’re not going anywhere because of THE PANDEMIC, basically it’s been business as usual, which means the same work schedule as normal. Then I decided, screw that, I don’t have do anything! So I just played fast and loose with my schedule for a few days. In fact I clocked in 15.6 hours on a new game that I bought yesterday morning, in the first day. Excessive, but fun!

As for my writing, I’ve been jumping between Blessings of the Neriel and Jeremy Five-five, since my husband and I are trying out something new with the fight scenes. BotN I’ve been smoothing out pretty hard. Getting a few previously all over the place scenes much more focused, and trying to figure out where I’m going to go from here. I think I have a pretty decent idea, I just have to write it. J55 (which is my new favorite abbreviation for a story) is a story that I absolutely love and I want to write, but the plethora of fight scenes was really a problem for me. This is what I get growing up on shounen anime. My husband got back to me with the first set of bullet points for the first fight we tried, and it still wasn’t easy to write, but now that the rough draft of it is done, I’m hoping it will clean up nicely later. The one we did first was also a short fight, and there are some longer, far more important ones coming up. It’ll be a lot of fun.

I still haven’t gotten back to the Wizard. But my lackadaisical attitude around my writing this week didn’t really lend itself to diving back into that anyway. I want to at least touch base with it tomorrow, though technically the month break isn’t over until next weekend. We’ll see. This is the home stretch, the hard part, and I refuse to give up. I totally get the thing now that writers say about getting distracted by shiny new stories because the one you’re working on has lost it’s mystery. I basically know what I have to do with the Wizard, I just need to write it, and that’s not new and fun, even though I’m sure I’ll still discover new things about this story before it’s all over.

Thanks for continuing to root for me. You’re awesome.

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.

Remembering the Process

Laura Highcove

Now as you may or may not remember, The Storyteller is currently in my husband’s hands for alpha reading right now.

I made the decision to work on Jeremy Five-five, but I talked myself out of that after a bit, then I wandered through working on Blessings of the Nerial and to some background work on The Storyteller.

It took me until just recently to figure out why I was having such a hard time focusing on a project.

Firstly, I didn’t give myself a goal. I need to know, at least, what I am trying to accomplish in order to stay focused.

Secondly, I was attempting to work around my process. I know that my process is discovery writing, and that I have to discovery write multiple versions, and go back and tweak until I finally get an ending at which point I can actually start pulling the story together.

This is the step I am at with The Storyteller. It is not the point I am at with any of my other stories. However, I did attempt to start pulling Jeremy Five-five together and it was working out very poorly for me, then the same thing happened with Blessing of the Nerial.

This is just another of those reminders life likes to throw at me, that when things get super hard I need to take a step back and figure out why. I usually figure out that I am working against myself instead of with myself. I can’t pull a story together until I have discovery written to the end. Otherwise it’s like trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, and some pieces from other puzzles.

So now I am back on Jeremy Five-five, with the plan to write toward the end. I am also giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day through the 29th. At that point my husband has to give me back The Storyteller and then we’ll see what wonderful mistakes I can make and learn from then!

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.