revision Archives - Page 2 of 6

Thanksgiving 2017

November 27, 2017November 27, 2017 Laura Highcove

In the lead up to Thanksgiving I found myself swamped with things, and while I wrote a post, I didn’t have time to go through the 3+ drafts I need to do to get something I write ready to publish.

That post is now on the back burner because I wanted to talk about what I’ve been doing with my writing. And that is, I hired a freelance editor to take a look at the Law of the Prince Charming. One of the main results was that I put the Huntsman aside to come back to LotPC. Two major changes were that I took out a major plot thread that required some reworking and added in another plot thread that required more reworking. These changes ended up going more smoothly than I thought they would, not that there weren’t scenes I had to pull apart at the seams. There were also a number of smaller changes like shoring up Tabitha and her mother’s motivations throughout the story and strengthening the theme.

I made one pass where I added in the rough changes I needed to, and now I’m in the middle of a revision pass where I am smoothing out the sharp edges the additions created and seeing if there is anything else I need to add. I’ll be going into more detail about what my experience in getting more professional feedback was like in this month’s newsletter, so sign up here if you’re interested.

Thanksgiving also happened since I last wrote a journal post. I spent far more time visiting with family than I did working on my story. I only felt guilty some of the time. It was quite the enjoyable holiday. I ate way too much, enjoyed time with family, and avoided any and all political discussion at the table.

My plan from here out: Get this revision pass done by Sunday morning. Then I can spend the afternoon on the rough draft of that post I mentioned.

Wildrose’s Arc (Aug 28 – Sept 10, 2017)

September 11, 2017September 11, 2017 Laura Highcove

I’ve been pushing through Gabir’s character arc and it’s going well, if not more slowly than I was expecting. I misjudged my timeline for a couple reasons. One being the downtime I needed to get reorganized after being away from home for two weeks, another in that the last time I made estimations on how much time revisions like this would take, the story was far closer to completion than this one.

Gabir’s arc is done and now I’ve moved on to Wildrose’s about a week late. I am really enjoying delving more deeply into Wildrose, since I hadn’t done any scenes from his pov yet. When I started this book I thought I was only going to use pov from Tabitha and Gabir, but I realized that Wildrose was doing a lot of stuff in the background and not confiding any of it to anyone, which means for the reader to have any idea what’s going on, he would have to have his own pov scenes.

On the other hand, there are many scenes where Tabitha and Rose interact, so as I’m doing Wildrose’s arc, a lot of work is being done on Tabitha’s arc as well. So I hope to have the both of them done by Sept 24th. Which will give me plenty of time to fix up the rest of the story, do a smoothing pass, and be ready to start on the draft 0 for the Wizard (Book 3).

Extra time to Write

September 18, 2016September 18, 2016 Laura Highcove

Starting in September I now have my weekday afternoons to work on my writing. I knew it would be an extra four hours a day, but I don’t think I quite understood how much time that was when I made my plan the other week. Which is a good thing, because working through the fight scenes and the prose ended up taking longer than I expected.

It’s not that the work is harder than I thought it would be, just more tedious. The book is over 100k words. Even if all you’re doing is reading the book, that takes a while to get through. Though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in going through and fixing the ugly bits that I’ve been ignoring up until now. This novel is more complete than any other novel I’ve ever written, and it’ll only get more so. It’s very exciting.

I also did some looking into agents, which was a little intimidating. Partially because of the idea that I am actually going to start submitted before long, and partially because I realized I am going to have to write a synopsis. A synopsis is basically taking my book and boiling it down to two pages. Or one paragraph. I started working on it, just jotting down the main plot points and I already have way too much, and I’m only halfway through the book. I decided to put it aside until a little later.

For now I’m going to keep working like my plan is perfect and infallible. When October hits I’ll reevaluate where I am.

Getting Ready for a New Draft

August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 Laura Highcove

This past week I spent most of my time going through and making changes brought about by feedback from my beta readers. So there were a lot of non-connected pieces that I worked on, but I do feel like I’m moving forward well.

I think my plan after this is to finish making a few minor changes and then I’m going to shift to the next draft number, meaning I will go through and read, smooth, and make a whole new set of notes.

Back from Beta Readers

July 30, 2016July 30, 2016 Laura Highcove

So this past week was a delightful collection of both wonderful and completely horrid moments. As you may have guessed, I got my story back from my beta readers! It ultimately ended up going pretty much as well as can be expected from sending your baby out into the world for the first time. All of the comments were positive or the helpful kind of critique.

However, there was a misunderstanding about part of the story, and the comments regarding that section left me in three days of misery. Both beta readers jumped to the same conclusion and since it was an emotionally charged scene, it left a rather deep emotional impression on them that was not what I was going for. It took some dwelling on comments and reading between the lines to figure out that they had reached a conclusion that was not the one for which I was aiming.

Once I figured out the misunderstanding and had talks with the both of them, things turned out much better and all of the critique they gave me was entirely manageable. I mean, sure I’d love for it to have already been perfect, but then making mistakes is how you learn.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a person besides my alpha reader husband, read through a whole story of mine, and it was an amazing experience. One of my beta readers had trouble with names, since different characters call each other different names. It didn’t occur to me, since I live with these characters. The other was much more in tune to how information was parsed out to the reader, pointing out places I had done it well and places I had done it poorly. After reading the comments and seeing the way both of the beta reader’s minds worked through the story I feel like I was able to see the story in a new light.

Looking to the Next Project

July 19, 2016July 19, 2016 Laura Highcove

I finished going through the story and adding in Wildrose’s cards. I only had a few hiccups in the three major arcana cards that get used in the story, as I really had to actually come up with names for them, and having their powers somewhat work with both what I needed done, and (even if loosely) with what they actually mean in the tarot.

With that done, I changed one scene with the Archer and I’m kinda …like done until I get the feedback from my beta readers. I’m not sure how to reconcile that. Now if I got back and read through the story again I’m sure I could find things that need to be fixed, but there’s little point changing them until I get my feedback.

Now my plan is to go through a few of my favorite old drafts and see if they speak to me as my next project. If any of you are following along in the sidebar, I’ll be looking at The Trickster, Blessings of the Nerial, The Colors Of, and Demonslayer. Though it occurs to me now that I go look over there, maybe I should update that page a bit. Look for that to happen in the next week or two.

Limits

July 10, 2016July 10, 2016 Laura Highcove

I finally managed it. I figured out what Wildrose’s artifacts are. For a long time (while writing the story basically) I wanted Wildrose to just have a whole bunch of random artifacts that would do random spells that he would use cleverly. I have come to realize pretty hard, during writing this book, that unlimited options is the worst thing you could possibly have. With too much variety, there is no focus. I finally decided I had to sit down and figure out what the common element was for Wildrose’s artifacts. I knew three things:

1) He works at range. Ie, I kept wanting it to be something he could throw into melee from a distance and then have it do the thing.

2) He is very precise.

3) He has a larger variety of things he can do than the others.

I wrote a few scenes with different ideas, brainstormed several times with my husband. and eventually came up with his having a deck of tarot cards that are each an artifact and each have a spell in them. There are a few rules for the cards*:

1) The maximum number of cards in the deck is set, as are the spells for those cards. (I actually haven’t figured out what either of those are yet. I want the number of cards in the set to be a multiple of three as opposed to clinging faithfully to the actual tarot, and no, I have not spent the time yet to figure out what every spell he has is.)

2) He can have duplicates of a specific card, but he still can’t have over the maximum number of cards. For those of you who know D&D it’s like the 3.5 wizard with his spellbook and prepared spells.

3) It takes a certain amount of time to re-imbue a spell into a card once spent. Time it takes is effected by the strength of the spell. If he happens to lose a card, the process of recreating the card is far more arduous.

So now comes the step of going back and retro-fitting this into all the fights. As I said before I really should not have let myself get this far into the story without figuring this out, as it’s going to require a lot of rewriting, plus my beta readers don’t have it to give me feedback, but that’s where I am.

*This is the disclaimer that I’m still working on this story and ideas are bound to change, so nothing here is set in stone.

Only a few bits

July 2, 2016July 2, 2016 Laura Highcove

It really is a lot harder to write these posts at this stage of the revision phase because there are fewer and fewer things that take a long time and it’s hard to remember all the little steps.

I went through all the commands people use with their Storybook and try to figure out a common syntax. During that time I actually realized the Storybook was too powerful, and had to reconfigure how I thought about some things on the back end. Fascinating! I then went through and fixed all the syntax for the Storybooks in the story.

I went through and changed all the instances of Storyteller Guild or Storyteller’s Guild to Storytellers’ Guild. That didn’t take long, but it made me realize that I need to label individual files for the draft number or else I end up search/replacing every file from every draft instead of just the ones that are current.

I spent over an hour working on an important section of about 10-15 lines toward the end of the book that I needed to hash out. Not really in the ‘world building’ section, but it was something I needed to get done. I am much happier with it than with what I had before.

I did some brainstorming on what will happen in the next book(s), just to make sure there isn’t anything I have to add in this book.

Now I need to go through and add in the syntax for using remnants. After that there are a few scenes I want to add in. Then I’ll get to the dreaded task of figuring out Wildrose’s artifacts. I swear, I should not have let myself get this far into the book without figuring it out, but here we are.

Working on Random Bits

June 26, 2016June 26, 2016 Laura Highcove

A very disjointed week in terms of what I got done.

I put in the artifacts in the places I wanted to put them. So that one is done.

I sat down and actually thought about the syntax for using remnants and tried to write out a few things, but I had problems just with some of it. It works to say “Tabitha used the hellhound’s law of fire.” But it’s a little more awkward when it’s “Tabitha used the stone ram’s law of charge.” It feels like it should be ‘charging’, but then that’s a verb rather than the noun. Anyway, I’m still working on it.

I thought about the syntax for the Storybook and had good reasons to have the command be both: ‘Identification’ and ‘Authorization’. Blech.

I now have a list of all of the important characters in the story. i.e. People who get their roles capitalized! I mostly made the list to figure out if I’m balancing the number of male vs female characters until I realized out in the world of this story, there wouldn’t be an equality. Still good info to have though. Also made me think about who is important enough to have a true name, and who needs to have a color.

This week I’ll make a list of the remnants Tabitha uses and how. And the things that people use the Storybook for. That way I can compare what I already have and then stylize them while they’re all next to each other.