Tag: nanowrimo

Gabir’s Arc (Aug 14 – 27, 2017)

Laura Highcove

So these past few weeks were rather busy. After Otakon I spent a few days with my husband’s family and I got a good amount of writing done in the mornings. I got my Scrivener outline done and started to fill in the scenes that involved Gabir.

On Thursday the 17th I went up to New York City for Writer’s Digest Conference. Had a lot of great stuff happen there, from the panels, to seeing other DIY MFA people, and the Pitch Slam (speed dating for authors and agents). I’m working on a post for what happened at the conference that will be posted later. I am going to be putting the details of the pitch slam in my newsletter so sign up for that if you haven’t already if you’re interested in hearing more about it.

I had a great time overall, but I neglected to remember/predict how hard I would crash on getting home. After being gone from home for almost two weeks I needed decompression/organization time. I barely worked on any writing until Friday which means I didn’t finish Gabir’s arc. On the other hand, my house looks beautiful. 😀

The plan is to finish up Gabir’s arc and then move on to Wildrose’s arc.

As a side note: During the drive, my hubby pointed out that my numbers for how much I planned on writing for NaNoWriMo were wrong. I had gone back and forth on how much I was planning to write and when, and I think I just got my numbers crossed. (I have a math minor but that doesn’t mean I’m good at it, just that I know more math exists than most people.) Here are the actual, correct numbers:

26 days (since I’m taking Fridays off) x 2.5k a day = 65k total

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Last year I realized that NaNoWriMo was too easy for me. I have participated every year since 2008, and have won every year but two. This year I decided to give myself a new challenge, 90,000 words. Not quite double the original goal, but actual novel length. I went into NaNoWriMo with the first anticipation I’d had in years. I failed to reach my goal. But it’s not about the failure, but about analyzing the why and learning what I can from it.

Why did I fail?

1) I started out with a goal of 3,000 words a day. Then I reached my first Friday and had no time for writing (due to my normal schedule, I just didn’t take it into account.) I caught up Saturday by writing 6,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day, and that burned me out. I changed my daily goal to 3,500 with no writing needed on Fridays. I couldn’t keep this up either.

2) This story came out in a way I was not used to. That being: I wrote scenes out of order, and multiple times before I wrote something that moved the story forward. I don’t know if this was caused by my sudden need for such a large amount of words, the fact that this was a sequel, that I’ve learned so much craft in the two years since I wrote The Storyteller, or something else entirely. Either way, the result is that my forward momentum kept coming to a screeching halt, and while I could produce words, I wasn’t actually moving the story.

3) Politics. I’m actually not kidding. Despite your opinion about who should’ve won or why, the amount of anger and hate that existed on the Internet in the days following the election wrecked me emotionally. I had to abandon Facebook completely.

What did I learn?

1) While 1667 words a day is pretty easy, 3,500 is not. I believe it might be because writing this much didn’t give me enough time in between to think about my story and live my life. I felt very dry, creatively. In the third week I backed off the schedule I had set for myself for a few days and after a few days the ideas started flowing again. So what I learned is I should try something closer to 2,000 words a day for a while.

2) I am a multi-drafter. For those who haven’t read my blog previously, I know that one part of my process is that I write, go back and rewrite from the beginning and go a little further into the story, then go back and repeat. While somehow I managed to plow right through the Storyteller two years ago, that did not work this time. So I also learned that I need to let myself stop an reassess when I need to, otherwise I end up just spinning my wheels.

3) I also learned I should’ve removed myself from the toxic environment online more quickly. As much as I wanted to support the people who were scared, my emotional well being is more important.

Getting Back Up to Speed

Laura Highcove

Yep, Nano has kicked my butt this year. I got into a spiral of self-doubt and since my schedule was all screwed up because of the holiday I really didn’t get anything done besides grouping the multiple versions of scenes into separate files.

As soon as I got home and was able to organize my space (I swear, I must be the most organized discovery writer in existence.) all the ideas started flowing again. I’ve been able to make some good progress on some scenes I wrote a few versions of already, but now I’m getting it to the way I want it to be.

My plan right now is to continue organizing and rewriting what I have this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be ready to go forward a bit more. I’d like to get to 70k words by the end of NaNo (Just to say I did.) though I’ve likely written more words than my ending word count will suggest. It’s hard to count words on rewrites because I take chunks of previously written words along with completely new writing.

I’m disappointed that I’m not going to reach the goal I gave myself, but then I knew it was a rather lofty goal. I’m going to finish out the month strong, and there’ll be a post coming next weekend on reflections of the month and what I’ve learned.

NaNo Speedbump

Laura Highcove

I met and passed the 50k NaNoWriMo goal. The problem I’m finding myself in now, is that I had to stop and organize what I’d written. I had no idea what had happened because I was writing scenes multiple times (yay discovery writer). Organization takes time away from producing words. And with my brother’s wedding and the holiday coming up, it would be hard enough to write 3.5k words a day, much less spend an hour or two reorganizing as well.

So I took a step back to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish this month. I could put out the words, that’s not a problem. But my goal is to write the sequel to The Storyteller and the less organized my writing, the slower my forward progress. Right now I have two or three versions of most of the scenes with only a vague idea of which one is the one I’ll keep.

I realized I was wasting too much time rewriting scenes. I am learning so much from this month, but I can feel that I’m not being efficient by pounding out words, so I’m stopping, reassessing, and reorganizing. Hopefully in a day or two I’ll have a new plan for how many more words I need to get done, and then I can plow ahead.

Starting NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I am now several days into NaNo and it is kicking my butt. This feels more like I remember my first NaNos, when it was a struggle to come up with 1667 words in a day. This month I started off doing 3k a day to reach my goal of 90k for the month. I’m pretty sure that I will never get many words on Fridays, since I work 7:30-5:30 and Friday night is when the hubby and I go grocery shopping, so the whole day is pretty much gone. The plan was to make up Friday’s words on Saturday, like I have in the past. Writing 6k words in a day ruined me pretty hard. This morning (Sunday) it took me three hours to get 1700 words.

I had to shift my approach. I decided I won’t expect any words on Fridays and divied those words to the other days. So now my goal is 3500, six days a week. Am I pushing myself past what is comfortable? Heck yeah, but I can do it for a month, and I have a good reward waiting for myself.

The Huntsman is probably the one story I have the most ‘outline’ for before I started writing it. Mostly because as I was finishing The Storyteller, I filled my head with all the things that needed to happen in the next book(s). As such, my writing process has shifted to a ‘stitcher’, super hard on this book. I am writing scenes in completely random order, as the ideas come to me, because if I don’t write them down then I will forget them. The idea is after I write it all, I will go back to order and smooth it out. This is not entirely dissimilar to my normal writing style, there will just be far more stitching required.

I am having to constantly remind myself that the important thing right now is to get through the words. Get through the story. It’s all there, even if it’s not organized right now. It has been a real struggle.

Working up to NaNoWriMo

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.

Next Step

Laura Highcove

I typed a blog post on Saturday saying that I had a plan to finish smoothing the rest of my novel by my deadline of Friday. I let the post sit until Sunday, as I usually do, before posting. In that time I finished smoothing the rest of the novel and sent it out to my beta readers. As such, my plan is finished before the post had time to enter the world. Yay to me.

Then I researched agents who will be at the James River Writer’s Conference that I’m going to this weekend. That didn’t take too much time. I also went to the bookstore to try and find some Arabian fairy tales, but that didn’t work. So now I’m a little lost. I don’t want to start on a new project right before NaNoWriMo. At the same time, I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t spend time on writing. I figure maybe I should just sit down and write and see what happens. I am a discovery writer after all.

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.

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.