Tag: process

How Baldur’s Gate 3 Changed my Life

Laura Highcove

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an amazing game, I don’t think that’s really in debate within the gaming community. But I’ve played a lot of video games, and some of them were even very good. I mean I finished Tears of the Kingdom earlier this year and that was pretty wow. But for a video game, or any other source of media for that matter, to change my life is a high bar.

Talking just straight game-play, BG3 is a masterpiece that breaks new ground and then smashes it to bits with a hammer. The ability to play through the story basically any way you want to, to have your decisions have a lasting effect on events, people, and the world is just ‘mimics brain exploding complete with sound effects’.

None of which would matter if the story you were playing through wasn’t any good. I’m a writer. Story is important to me. I want my horizons stretched, I want surprising, yet inevitable, I want characters that I care about. That game gave me all of this. It also gave me something I didn’t know I wanted, which was to questions my choices, to agonize over decisions, to make mistakes. That is something that no other game has really ever let me experience, or at least not to nearly this extent.

The wildly divergent paths you can take also allows for another unique opportunity, besides just experiencing things differently, it also allows you to see, for the first time what a person’s response would be to different inputs in the exact same situation, allowing you to experience more story/reactions/emotion than would otherwise be possible.

It’s likely no surprise that I identify female and am head over heels for Astarion. But before my mind had really grocked the insane branching paths that were possible through different dialogue choices, I had gone through a good portion of my first play-through, choosing options and getting responses. On a second play through, I knew to dig deeper into the different options, and some of the responses gave such nuance to some of the things Astarion actually said.

As a writer it is impossible (and really, not advisable) to have a character to say everything they’re feeling. If they are even aware of all their feelings in the first place, it’s still just not efficient. But the ability to see deeper into dialogue and motivation by being able to look through the branching dialogue paths was just amazing. I’ve romanced Astarion in two different play-throughs, and both of them felt completely unique.

The branching story lines also allow each character to be that much more developed as a person, and not just a character in a particular story. Shadowheart can kill or spare the Nightsong. Astarion can complete the ritual or not. Lae’zel can remain brain-washed by her cult leader. Wyll can break from his patron. Gale can blow up the world. Karlach, well she’s a sweet cinnamon roll and would never do anything to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.

Normally we don’t get the chance to see characters go down these different paths, and it made the characters that much more real (as well as increasing the game’s re-playability) because there isn’t just one ‘right’ path. (Except making sure Karlach’s engine is fixed so she can touch people again.)
All this to say that my expectation of games is forever changed. There will always be something in the back of my head resenting the ‘movie’ style video game story. Whether or not anyone will ever hit anything close to it again, who knows? But now the meta has been changed.

In addition, because of this variability of people’s motivations and actions and such, I have a new appreciation for heroes who are not 100% good. I mean you get anti-heros in stories, but there’s still only that one path. I have been so inspired by the story and the characters in this game that I have written over 90k words of fan fiction, and by allowing myself to write around and be influenced by story and dialogue I did not write, I have felt myself stretching, growing, and changing as a writer.

And I will forever be a fan of this game and the people who put it together with such dedication and love.

Goals Achieved

Laura Highcove

Since my last blog post, I have achieved my specific, measurable goals! I have started doing 5 minutes of stillness before my yoga and I have been going down to my basement and actually working on writing for an hour, both of these six days a week. I was just going to do them every day, since I don’t have a job right now, but I ended up just giving myself Sundays off to sleep in and blah. I was also having real trouble sleeping for a while that has only just started to fix itself.

But either way, new goals are a success! I am going to keep up with them before I try and add anything new, especially since I’m not getting to the end of my revision of BotN, which means it’s going to be more of an emotional load to edit, and I don’t want to do that AND try and increase my time spent at the same time. But, making downstairs a working zone really has worked, and for the first time in …well ever, I actually have mornings open, which is when I am able to focus the best.

That may change when I get a job again, but for now I’m enjoying it and trying to solidify the habit so that if I have to start writing in the afternoon or evening, I can still keep it up. My goals remain the same, 1 hour writing and yoga/stillness 6 days a week. If I get through another week or so with this, I’ll think about increasing my goals.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2022

Laura Highcove

Here I am, five days away from NaNoWriMo, and for the first time, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Usually by this point I know definitively whether I will or will not be participating and what I will be doing as my project and what my goal(s) is/are. Those sometimes differ from the “rules” of Nano, but I make it work for me, and I stick to the rules I set up for myself.


This year I am at the end of Draft 0. So close that using Nano to finish it would be a waste, but far enough that I’m not convinced I’ll be ready to move onto another project. Add to that the wrinkle that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are coming out on November 18th, and let’s be honest, if I get any real work done in the month after that game comes out I will be very surprised.


The plan right now is, Nano or not, to get Draft 0 of this book finished and then turn it into a First Draft which can be beta read. The current word count is 97k. That does include some notes and such.


And I just went and made an outline (omg discovery writer writing an outline!!!) of what needs to happen from where I am to the end and I think it actually makes sense. I was rather surprised at how well it all came out. It took me forever to get a handle on this story and the characters, and I think I managed it. So now I just have to write the scenes I don’t have yet. It’s close enough to the end that I don’t think there will be many surprises, at least not big ones. (Please, please no huge surprises that require a reworking of the entire book.)


Now the question is, “Do I think I can get this written in a week?”


I think it’s possible assuming none of these scenes just wipe me out emotionally. I had a scene with Jen that I just finished that did that. Hard to write but totally necessary. There might be a few, but with a week to do it …of course I have lost all sense of chapter breaks after Chapter 12. Truthfully, the chapter breaks in this book suck in the first place, but I digress. This made it hard to plan out the rest of my schedule based on chapters. So I had to do it scene by scene, and let me tell you, judging how long it will take to write a scene from just a few sentences of ‘this is what’s going to happen in this scene’ is not a skill I have yet. If I push hard, I can get Draft 0 done by November.


Then I suppose the idea for the first half of November, not necessarily Nano, would be to read through and write down allll the plot holes, and try and get those finished before Pokemon comes out. Would be nice to be able to throw out the story to my beta readers when it’s time to play Pokemon. Let’s see.

[SGC Week 4.5] Finding Eira

Laura Highcove

This week got away from me a little bit. I had some doctor things going on, all good, but necessary and requiring time and attention. The SGC call on Monday was talking about agents and querying and so while there were no cool breakthroughs with my story, I started getting back into the idea of being able to query again. Obviously I still need to finish this book, which likely won’t happen by the end of the course as I’d planned because I had such a huge shift in Eira that I needed to start over. But that is my process. Trying to force myself to keep going when I don’t have what I’ve already written to a certain point doesn’t work, and I’ve proved that to myself enough times through failure that I’m starting to accept it.

That being said, I am much happier with the beginning of the story now. Eira and I are still working through some things where I think I want her to care about people more than she actually does, but there isn’t no care there, which is what I was always the most scared of. And I got really good feedback this Thursday from my group when I gave them the first chapter and a half (rewritten, though they’d never read the old version). I mean there was the fact that what I’d given them before was very ‘rough draft’ and this was far more polished, but I was surprised by how well they responded to it.

I had my first moment of real ‘impostor syndrome’ where they were praising things I’d done and I’m just going ‘I have no idea how this story plays out’ and ‘I don’t know how to carry that theme through the whole book’, but the encouragement was nice and, well, encouraging. And I do still feel like I’m making progress, and that’s the whole point. Right now I’m just going to keep going and when the SGC is over in two weeks, I’m going to reassess where I am and how quickly I think I can finish this book. I got very close to the end before I restarted this time, so I think finishing draft 0 isn’t too far off. Then it’s just a matter of finding out how many huge plot holes I have to fill.

Goal for this week is to keep rewriting a scene or two a day. Some are easier than others, it’s really not an exact science, so it’s more that I work for at least a half hour each day. Usually I go a bit over. Also, read my group’s submissions. Since it’s so late in the week that’s all I have. Hopefully I’ll get my next post up closer to the day I had planned.

[SGC Week 3] The Epiphany

Laura Highcove

I have been trying, when doing these blog posts, to write about what has happened with my writing/life in the past week, which means before Monday. But I was sick this week, the blog post got delayed, and on Monday I had an epiphany. Prior to Monday I am working my way into the ending climax part of the story, and some pieces of that are coming together, but Eira was still…not right.

So I have been writing Blessings of the Neriel for a while now and I have never really gotten Eira, the main character,’s personality down. I’m still writing the book because that’s how I work. I write until I find out what I’m supposed to learn about the story and then I go back and fix it. It was taking a long time with Eira, or really, not so much. See, I had a period where I thought Eira might need to be a narcissist or a sociopath, but on researching it, one of the main traits is a lack of empathy. They literally cannot care about someone emotionally. And so much of the heart of what I write is about emotions and how people connect with each other this was just not an option. I couldn’t have a main character who cannot feel emotions, so I pushed it away.

But the writing exercise we did on Monday’s SGC writing class was ‘What does your character want’, and then exploring that like what’s in their way and what are the risks/consequences of going for it and for failing to get it. So I started writing and it was pretty easy to see that when I was forced to think about her motivation in those terms, that the only thing she cared about was getting back to her former glory by any means necessary. So she’s doing all this stuff that seems ‘good’, but for entirely selfish reasons. She just wants to be awesome again.

And that upset me, cause I’m back in the ‘well she doesn’t care about anyone’ space. I cried as I explained it to the group. I was encouraged to read some books with antihero protagonists, and to look a bit more into narcissism. I will tell you, one of the problems with looking narcissism on the Internet is that most of it is for people who know/love/interact with a narcissist, and how to keep from being taken advantage of or losing yourself in their narcissism. This is important, to be sure, but most of the first results do not talk about what it’s like to be a narcissist from their point of view. I suppose because a narcissist wouldn’t care to look up ‘am I a narcissist and what do I do about it’?

But I did find one thing that gave me hope, a quote from this article.

Both past and current life circumstances can evoke multiple features, but may not necessarily be an ingrained part of who someone is (their personality).

A broad, general example of this would be someone who experiences a season of financial hardship after years of financial wealth. They may be preoccupied with fantasies of the wealth and power they used to have. They may also feel superior to others, become envious of those who are wealthy, and tend to gravitate toward people who make them feel important. This individual may present with features of NPD, but these features are connected to their circumstances and not necessarily their personality.

In other words, just because a person may possess features of NPD, does not mean they don’t have the ability to love. However, it is quite possible that their capacity to love may be limited.

Which basically describes Eira’s situation. She was top of the world, loved, praised, talented and then it was all taken away from her. So she could present with bits of NPD without the undesirable (to me the author) complete lack of empathy. Obviously I’ll need to do more research, not that I think if I portray narcissists incorrectly they’ll be all that upset about it, but still, it’s the right thing to do. And hopefully after this, the story will start to come together a bit better, including the opening scene that I knew was not the correct opening scene.

Goal for this week: Keep up 1k words a day. (I have been and it’s been so awesome.), read my group’s submissions. Get my next submission ready.

[SGC Week 2] Settling In

Laura Highcove

It’s a blah kinda day, but really not all that bad. Been playing Triangle Strategy and Stardew Valley. Been keeping up on my words. Been keeping the pets fed. Been going to work. Been hanging with the husband. Been keeping the house somewhat in order. It’s a rather full and varied life, but that works for me.

I think one of the more interesting things I’ve realized is that writing 1k words a day isn’t really that much of a drain. Like, I’m getting it done but I don’t ever feel like I have to spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer doing it, and I’m still able to get other things done. Part of my brain wants to tell me ‘well then obviously you could be writing more’, but truthfully, the fact that I’ve been pretty consistent about getting this done for the past two weeks is awesome. I don’t want to try and do more and then burn myself out, especially since, like I’ve said before, this is the rough part of the book. If I can just make consistent progress for the next month I will be super happy.

The SGC writing class last week was on narrative distance, where were saw where we normally wrote, then tried the opposite. I write close most of the time, and writing far was really weird. I could see a point for it, but I don’t really like it. :p And the Write Ones group critiques were the other two people in the group. Both stories were enjoyable. Though we had one of the critiquees come out of the loving bubble of silence and then start explaining everything we had said we didn’t understand about the story. After about five minutes I took off my headphones because they just kept going and I didn’t want to hear it. The point is that you should find out about it from the story, some things should be questions, but I totally understand that desire to explain everything. I used to do it as well, so I don’t blame them. But I just didn’t want that information so I can continue to not know when I read more of the story.

This morning I still hadn’t put in my next pages for critique. I was feeling way too self-conscious about the roughness of my rough draft. But the group leader convinced me to submit anyway, and so I hope it goes well. The next critique day is on my Birthday so that will be exciting. I will have cake!

Goals: 1k words a day, keeping it up. Be accepting of the critique that will come in on basically the roughest thing I’ve ever let another person read. I know my group wants to help, so there’s no real danger, I just have to convince my lizard brain of that.

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.

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.

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.