Tag: wildrose

Changing the List

Laura Highcove

Last weekend I went to Otakon with my husband and two of our friends. One of these friends I will refer to as ‘The Cheerleader’ and they drove up with us. The Cheerleader has been beta reading for me since LotPC because …well they’re good at stories and good at encouragement. Anyway, we all ended up talking about LotDK for a good portion of the trip up. I had lined up questions to ask my Hubby and the Cheerleader and I got a lot of good answers.

Not only that, but I was able to just talk about my story and hear what other people thought about it, which is very valuable. I know how the story goes in my head, and it’s interesting to see if that’s translating properly, and if it’s not, where the disconnect is and why. And even, if sometimes the way someone else takes it is even better. Or if I get to be all superior in thinking that my ideas are better and I can’t wait until they get to read it. Mwahaha!

As such, once I got back I was able to finish writing up my List of Revisions for LotDK, which after a few passes turned into a chapter by chapter list. I also managed to make a schedule for how many chapters I need to get done per week in order to be done by November (for Nanowrimo). I start out with four chapters per week and eventually end up at two a week. Obviously because the later chapters are far messier and will need much more help.

I have already started, and so far things are going well. I do anticipate problems, but every bit I get done is still done, even if Wildrose and Gabir continue to give me problems. I feel like a lot more things are starting to come together though, and that’s good. And I’m still enjoying the story, which is also good.

Headed for the New Year

Laura Highcove

Most of what I’ve been doing in the past two weeks is smoothing of the Huntsman in order to put into place what I can and see where the holes still are. The first 14 chapters went by very quickly, only needing some minor notes and fixes. At chapter 15 my progress slowed down considerably because, as I told my alpha readers, ‘that’s where things get messy’.

There is far more smoothing and straight up new prose that needs to be done in order to push forward. The other day I literally did nothing other than write out my thoughts on where the story should be going in order to try and figure out where the story was going. It was a bit painful, but it gave me enough to move forward.

I found that keeping track of word count is too difficult because of the way I switch from writing to smoothing and back. It’s disruptive to pay attention to the shift, and it’s not a clear enough divide to get any meaningful data from it. It would’ve been a different story if I’d done it during Nano, but alas.

I also created a timeline to keep track of the different plot threads during the Huntsman. Doing so helps to organize the shape of the story which allowed me to find a hole. It also encouraged me to write out the timeline of the Law of the Prince Charming, so I know how much time the book took. It is 30 days.

My goal is to push through the Huntsman. Wildrose is giving me the most trouble. I’m trying to give him some direction, but mostly I just need the most basics of what is going on. I’d love to try get through the rest of the novel this week before I go away for Christmas. However, I’m not sure how realistic that is. I might need to take off the writer gloves and just do nothing but reorganize what I have and write down what I don’t.

I’m also planning on overhauling my newsletter some. It sort of got …ignored for a while, and part of that is that I think something needs to change. Expect some news on that by the end of January.

Letting my Characters Go

Laura Highcove

I did a few smoothing passes on the Huntsman, each focusing on one of the main trio: Gabir, Tabitha, then Wildrose. I was able to push what I had written a little further with each pass.

Wildrose’s storyline is the one that needs the most work right now. I know where I need/want him to be at the end of this book, but he still has a large number of steps to get there. This is after I admitted to myself that the way I *wanted* him to get from here to there wasn’t going to work. I think the past two weeks I’ve repeated: “No, it doesn’t fit with my plan, but it’s what the character would do.” sooooooo many times.

Whenever I get stuck, like sit and stare at my computer screen for ten minutes without typing, stuck, it’s generally because I’m trying to force a character to do what I ‘need’ them to. (And I don’t always realize this right away.) When I release that expectation, they go off on their merry way, and while I have no idea if it will tie back into what I already have, it is much more natural and enjoyable.

I also made a list of the scenes that still need to be written. Not nearly as long as it was last time I did it which is encouraging. I wrote out two or three of those scenes and revised a few that I had previously written but needed to be updated. I had a few new things pop out that very possibly could lead somewhere nice in the way of tying things together. Still worried that I have too much going on, but I figure I’ll never figure out what’s the most important if I don’t write everything first.

Resetting

Laura Highcove

I came off of last week being on vacation where I really didn’t do much, if any writing. I came back and got back to work as I should finishing up rewriting a few Gabir scenes and then restarting the story to focus on Tabitha’s storyline. I put in a good number of hours through the week. Since I had last week off for Williamsburg, I agreed to work this weekend to give my coworker a nice long weekend. Oddly enough, despite that, Saturday I still got a lot done, and it wasn’t until Sunday that the extra barn work started dragging me down such that I told myself I needed to not push the writing too hard and just recover.

It’s a shame to lose the momentum I had, but I’ll get back to it tomorrow. I want to try and have Tabitha’s scenes done by June 3rd. I had to do a bit of a recheck into myself because I realized I was not enjoying the story because I was so focused on whether or not the story was technically ‘good’. One of the things I realize from writing this journal is that I keep having to come back to the same realizations, because it’s so easy to get caught up in life and goals and expectations that I lose focus on what’s important. Then I have to not beat myself up for having forgotten, because it’s just another one of those things. Every once and a while I just need to stop and reset by reminding myself of what’s important. And the ability to realize I need to do that is one of the most important skills I’ve learned. Anyway, I am back to feeling like I am making progress as I focus on writing a story I enjoy. Cause who cares if it’s technically ‘good’ if I hate it?

I’ve now pushed to the end of what I have so far for Tabitha, so I’m going to shift over to Wildrose and smooth through his scenes and see what comes out the other side. I’d like to get that done by the end of the week at the latest, and start trying to weave more Tabitha/Wildrose storylines together to catch up to where Gabir is. (By the end of the *next* week.)

Wildrose’s Arc (Aug 28 – Sept 10, 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).

Smoothing Pass (Aug 7 – 13, 2017)

Laura Highcove

So I managed to get this done even with Otakon this weekend. I finished creating the summary/loose outline before I left, and this morning (which is technically the 14th, but I’ll count it) I went through and moved the pieces around a bit. Now I’m feeling better about how things are coming together.

This is the reason that I sit down and just do overall organization passes. It’s pretty much like creating an outline, only I don’t think I refer back to my outline as much as writers who outline do. The process of creating the outline helps me fit everything together in my head, and then I only refer to it if I get lost.

This time I plan to try something new and create an outline with the notecards in Scrivener. Not sure how well it will work, but I am going to put together the middle of the story where things are really rough right now as just an outline in order to shoehorn everything in. Shouldn’t take me more than a day. Then I can get to work on Gabir’s arc which, while it is the most important, it is also the most solid right now. So even with Writer’s Digest this weekend, I should be able to get that done.

I think the Wildrose arc will give me the most trouble, but starting in September I’m back to working at the barn only half days and so I will have more time in the afternoon to work on his arc as needed.

Of course with Writer’s Digest this weekend, I may attend a panel that completely changes my writing life and give me some sort of amazing insight, but barring that I think my plan is pretty solid.

The Wildroses are in Bloom

Laura Highcove

It’s that time of year when the wildroses around the farm come into bloom and the gentle smell permeates the air. And they always make me think of my Wildrose.

Wildrose © Laura Highcove

Like Tabitha I had a commission of Wildrose done as well. He is a wizard who was raised by gryffins, and he is part of the most effective Storyteller team the Guild has.


Wildrose © Laura Highcove

If you want to know more about Wildrose, you can click here
to get the first chapter of The Storyteller and meet him for yourself.

If you want more information on the artist, you can find it here.

Character Creation

Laura Highcove

I don’t really plan my characters. I may have a vague idea that I need a character in a certain place and they might be kinda like this. But I never know my characters until I write them. I consciously put more of myself in Tabitha than any other character I’ve written in the past. And even that didn’t happen until I had written a lot of her already. In fact I remember the specific place where Tabitha shoved her personality in my face.

It was a similar situation with Wildrose, in that he ended up being a lot like my husband unintentionally, and later I put more pieces of my husband in there. At the same time he is himself.

And some characters come more easily than others. The Huntsman was the most difficult character for me in this novel. I literally did not pin him down until several drafts in. He was going to be the huge gruff guy, then the comedic relief, and who knows what else. He flopped all over the place until he finally settled where he is.

In general, I don’t think I ever look at a character or a person and set out to write any of my characters based on them. It just drifts that way as I go, but then I am a discovery writer. I am convinced that those characters just exist in my brain and I write until I pull enough of them out.

Looking to the Next Project

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

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.