Tag: the huntsman

I Lost the Entirety of March

Laura Highcove

I looked away for a moment and suddenly it’s a month later. Though looking back at my last entry, today is April 4th and just today I put the finishing touches on my list of things that needed to be fixed/written, so I followed my plan perfectly even though I had forgotten what it was. I have also gone through and pulled out the items that I think are maroon problems. Maroon problems are the most base problems, dealing with issues that span the book, like not foreshadowing early enough or not taking steps toward a pay-off.

They are the hardest to deal with for that reason, because they touch so much, but also the most important to hammer into shape. I also put in action steps for each one but at this point I have no idea how long each of them will take. I’d like to think less than a month but there are 24 of them and I’m not confidant I can knock out one a day. I mean some of them may be easy enough to. Uhhh, okay, let’s aim to get one done a day and check back on April 18th. I can even pick and choose which ones I think will be the easiest.

Working for Productivity

Laura Highcove

As I said last week, I got through my goal of getting all I have of the Wizard smoothed out by March. I was then going to write a few more scenes, but a number of those ended up not working because I just don’t have enough of a handle on where those characters are in order to move forward.

The next step is going to be going back through BOTH the Huntsman and the Wizard and making a master list of things that need to be fixed/written. It won’t take as long as going through and editing things, for sure, but I’m still thinking at least a month. I’m going to aim for April 4th, which is a Sunday, to get this pass through done. Then I’ll make another plan.

Blessings I did not touch at all this week. I’m a little sad about that, as I would like to work on it. It’s just hard to have an actual goal right now. I suppose just word count?

Also, not that I mention it here a lot, but my house is a freaking mess. So I think I’ll have to spend a considerable amount of time on that in the next week as well.

Been trying for a while to get back to more productivity and I haven’t quite found that sweet spot yet. Of course I don’t think I ever really felt comfortably productive at any time, so maybe I’m just grasping at shadows. But I’m going to keep going anyway.

September Goals

Laura Highcove

I sat down to figure out what it is I have to do in order to finish the Storyteller trilogy. It was kinda a big (huge) long list that I of course had to break down into smaller steps in order to keep from driving myself insane. The basic gist of it is, however, to first finish reading through the Huntsman and writing down all of the major issues that I want to/need to address both in this book and the Wizard. Then I will do the same with the part of the Wizard I have written along with a list of everything I wanted the trilogy to do and loose ends for every character.

I can then sort though this list and look for the items that will make the biggest waves and start there. I’ll shoehorn in what I can, all while November gets ever closer. Once November and NaNoWriMo hit, I will pour myself into finishing the Wizard draft. Right now the Wizard is at 56k words, so maybe about half the book …ish. So 50k words for NaNo should get me to the end, or at least pretty close.

Of course my productivity has been rather low so the idea of doing NaNo right now is pretty intimidating. But part of sitting down and writing out everything I needed to do in order to get the trilogy done and approximate times of how long each step would take reminded me once again how long it actually takes to write a book. As such, I am kicking myself in the butt to move forward because despite appearances, I do actually want to get these books done.

So for right now, I’m reading through the Huntsman and making my list. My goal is to have it done by the end of next week.

Also, if you haven’t read The Law of the Prince Charming yet, it is completely posted here for free. Check it out. More views and comments certainly don’t hurt the motivation factor.

Still Writing

Laura Highcove

Starting off this post with a reminder to be kind to yourself during the pandemic. This article was written at the end of March but it still applies. Now back to your normally scheduled post.

So my writing life has mostly gotten back to normal. I’ve been posting my chapters of the Law of the Prince Charming, which is continuing to do well. That is actually getting really close to the end. I think there’s a bit more than a month left.

I’m still pushing through the Huntsman. I’ve hit the chapters that have the timeline issues now. That’s a lot of fun to figure out. Not really, but it has to be done and I am figuring some of them out. Not that far from the end which is great.

The plan right now is to finish this pass, and then do a pass that is nothing but writing a list of everything that needs to be fixed/changed. I love lists, so this is quite fun for me. Once I have that list I’ll (probably) have a better idea of how long it will be until there’s a ready draft.

I’ve also gone back to Blessings of the Neriel and starting piecing together the scenes I’ve written. I figure since The Law of the Prince Charming is out there, the likelihood of it doing well enough that a traditional publisher will want to pick it up is rather low. As such I need to be working on whatever my next project is while I’m finishing up the Storyteller trilogy, and as of right now I’ve picked Blessings of the Neriel. I’d really like this book to be a standalone, mostly because I’m not interested in working through another trilogy right now. I have so many different ideas that I’d rather get to more of them than spend the extra time on the same idea.

Hope everything’s going great for you.

Time Has No Meaning

Laura Highcove

It’s almost June and I really can’t believe it. March took so long and now it’s going super fast. My husband and I went on a vacation to a family condo and now I’m back to my regular schedule, well as regular as it ever is.

I’m still getting up my Law of the Prince Charming scenes three days a week, along with the accompanying video. I’m super proud about the fact that I haven’t missed an update yet. If you haven’t checked that out yet, here’s a link. We’re less than a month out from the halfway point of the book. It feels a little weird. I’ve been living with this book for so long, as well as working on second two books of the trilogy, that I often forget that it’s actually out there in the world for people to read. But then that was always my goal, having people read, and hopefully enjoy, what I write.

I didn’t make a ton of progress on the Huntsman. What little I did on vacation got lost when my USB drive got corrupted. The hubby’s still trying to see if he can fix it, but I’m assuming the work is lost. I’d like to work on this a little more than I have been because it occurs to me that eventually the LotPC will eventually finish posting, and if it does gain a whole bunch of readers, they’ll want the second book and it’s certainly not ready to be published yet. So I should have some sort of goal toward getting it done around Septemberish when the LotPC will be done posting.

But I have 26 more chapters in the Huntsman. At a chapter a week that still puts me into November, and this is nowhere near the final draft. If I want to get this done this year, I’m going to have to put in some work. Well I suppose there are two options. I can panic at the amount of work and give up, or I can start working toward getting it finished. For now I’m going to choose option number two.

Being Gentle with Myself

Laura Highcove

Man, living through history is hard. Yesterday Georgia started to reopen. The general consensus is “are you f-ing stupid?”. Also, last night the store had toilet paper. Yay!

In regards to my writing, which is why you’re really here, I have been doing far better. I am giving myself less hassle for not being productive and I’m actually ending up more productive. How productive, I’m not sure since I stopped using my timesheet, but I am getting done what needs to get done and that’s the important thing. I am still moving through the Huntsman and enjoying the revision step as much as I always do. I am doing a last pass through the Law of the Prince Charming before videoing my reading each scene and posting that video along with the text on Wattpad for public consumption.

I am keeping up with my Stories & Succulent YouTube Plant Channel’s update schedule. I am also now on board with diymfa.com for writing a new series of posts on Writer’s Intuition the first of which will go up in June. All in addition to working at the barn in the mornings, keeping the house clean, and caring for a sick fish. (He’s doing fine, but I’m doing daily water changes right now.)

It’s a lot of stuff, but like I said, because I’ve been giving myself less hassle about it, things have been going pretty smoothly. I have no end goal for finishing the Huntsman, not that I’m going to let it go on forever, but right now I’m just going with the flow. I’ve also been playing video games, watching lots of Asian Shows, and caring for my plants. In general I’m just being gentle with myself. It’s an easy trap to get into right now that there’s so much free time and that I should be super productive as a result, but living during a pandemic on this scale is stressful. Low-key, all the time, you can’t get away from it, death is actually an option, stressful. Do what you can and take care of yourself. I’ll say it as many times as I need to.

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 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.

The Year 2020

Laura Highcove

The first journal entry of the new year! Things were crazy at the end of the last year. Crazy! And now I want to get back to a normal. Not the same normal as before, since that’s impossible with my new houseplants and YouTube channel, but a new normal that I can be happy with.

So basically I “forgot” about writing for about three months and even now I’m having a little trouble getting back into it. I can give you all the reasons why I think this is, but after I wrote that long tyraid, I did what I normally do in a situation like this. I created a list!

This list is all the things I need to do to basically finish the Storyteller trilogy.

*Smooth what I have written
*Write the rest of the Wizard, draft 0
*Alpha read
*Fix major plot point through two books
*Fix minor points through two books
*Beta read
*Fix any problems
*Two-three final passes

Man, it looks so easy when it’s just a list like that. But once I had that list, I went through and guesstimated how long each step would take.

So I currently have seven more chapters to smooth. I’m going to give myself one week for that. I think that’s pushing it a bit, but it might just force me to get it done and over with. It’s not important that it’s perfect yet. *Jan 13-19*

Then I need to write the rest of the wizard. So I think what I need to do is once I’ve smoothed it, I’ll do another one of those “outlines” where I go through and outline what I have, then get ideas of where I wanted to go and scenes I still need to write. And write a list of all the things I want to have happen. Including the ending. *Jan 20-26*

Then I need to write them. I’d like to give myself a month, do a Nanowrimo type deal. *Jan 27-Feb 23*

Then I’ll need to smooth, maybe two weeks. *Feb 24-Mar 8*

Then I send out the Wizard for alpha reading. Hopefully they can get it done in a month. *Mar 9 – Apr 5*

When I get it back, go through the list, then go through myself and write down everything! *Apr 6 30- Apr 19*
-scenes that still need to be written/finished
-plot holes
-details to be done
-medium things
-minor things
-naming crap

Then I need to fix these problems. This is going to be the hardest to figure out the time-line of. For right now I’m giving myself a month. This will likely change. I’ll reevaluate the time-line when I get to the step above. *Apr 20- May 17*

Beta read: See, again, if it can be done in a month. *May 18- Jun 14*

Fix any problems, make a final list: one week *Jun15- 21*

Two-three final passes: ~month min *Jun22- July19*

Whenever I do one of these schedules, I’m reminded about *why* it takes so long to write a book. There’s just so many steps and there’s only so fast you can go over this many words. Still, I now have my goal set up in front of me. When I finish it this time, I can finally play Kingdom Hearts 3. :p

Finally Back to Productive

Laura Highcove


Got back from my vacation in Williamsburg and had a ton of fun. This was Argon’s first time going to the condo, but as expected he spent maybe an hour slinking around before he was perfectly fine. I played a lot of Hyrule Warriors, went to Busch Gardens, bought clothes, ate food, and ended up writing a decent amount while I was at it.

I also used the vacation as a reset point for my writing. I didn’t record how much writing I did while on vacation. I just ended up with 8k words written on my phone by the end of the week. But when I got home, I just accepted that I was back on schedule, and I split my time between two stories: Blessings of the Neriel, which I realized I needed to keep restarting from the beginning because my characters weren’t solid enough, and a new story I started during vacation that I ended up tossing aside because the idea isn’t developed enough yet. (Oddly enough, the characters are there, the story just isn’t.) And I ended up working more on a story I had started a while ago, with the working title: Kirin.

As such I’ve been getting work done while I’m waiting for my alpha readers on the Huntsman. I keep having an urge to work on it, but I’d like to 1) wait until the alpha feedback is back and 2) read the short stories my husband wrote in the Storyteller world for Nanowrimo, but we’re having some trouble getting that formatted right so I can read it. I might lose patience before July and start working on it anyway, but for now I’m just happy to be writing again.