Tag: writing

2018 Timesheet

Laura Highcove

So one of my long term projects for this year was an excel spreadsheet that I recorded the hours I spent toward my writing career. I’ve heard the advice over and over that if you want to be a writer you need to treat it like a job. So one of the things I decided was that I needed to spend 20 hours a week on my writing. The spreadsheet was to help me track when I’ve done that. It also helped with the times when I felt like I haven’t spent enough time writing, since if I have the actual numbers, then I know. And when they’re low, I knew I needed to spend more time on it. Plus I love organized data.

I was still getting used to the idea and figuring out which things I was going to keep track of. By the end of January I settled on the basic DIY MFA sections of Writing, Reading, and Community with several subsections, and here’s the summary for the year:

Feb-April I was super on point, with hitting my 80 hours a month (20 hours a week) goal, with a solid 50% spent toward writing and ~25% ish toward the other two.

I was on vacation the first week of May and while I did some writing, I did not track the hours. The middle two weeks were less than productive due to making up hours over the weekend and then some depression.

June-August were Nationals as well as the beginnings of Nickel getting sick. I’m not really surprised that my hours plummeted. It was probably one of the worst periods of consistent depression I’ve ever had. I’m actually proud I got as much done as I did.

Sept and October are a little nuts. That is almost entirely due to the Writing Excuses Cruise. I chose to count the entirety of the time spent on the cruise on my timesheet, since I was technically there for my writing, but I didn’t want to spend time nickel and diming each little thing I did. This encouraged me to add an ‘event’ section to next year’s timesheet for things like writing retreats and conferences. Anyway, that retreat lit a fire under my butt for the next month to get the Huntsman draft done and do some heavy rewriting.

My November hours were curious to me, because I did NaNo, and I did it very well, but I had a sad dearth of hours. I think that since I had given myself the NaNo my goal, as soon as I had the words needed, I didn’t really push myself to do anything else. Two of my weeks were nothing but writing. Something to keep in mind for next year. Perhaps there’s a place between 50k and 90k that I can hit without burning out, or perhaps I just need to give myself two goals for November. There was also Thanksgiving travel, of course.

December was going great until my cat Copper got sick and had to be hospitalized for three days. That really killed the week. She ended up being fine, a known issue that likely flared up due to the stress of the new cat. I also did nothing while traveling for Christmas. Sort of sad to end the year on a down-swing, but such is life.

After looking this over, I’ve decided to take into account vacation time and ‘rest’ days (for sickness or depression) so that I don’t just look at my lack of hours and feel bad. I also noticed that overall, I am not happy with the lack of time spent on reading and analyzing what I read. I might give myself some sort of goal there.

I’m super excited to see what next year will bring. I already have the new timesheet made up, with some cool excel tricks to make the sheet itself less time consuming. Yay data!

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.

And After NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

So a few days out from Nano now. It’s time to sit down and analyze how Nano went for me this year and the lessons I can take away from it.

Starting NaNo
I had little to no anticipation about NaNo itself. I’ve been doing NaNo consistently since 2008 and getting words down has never been a problem of mine. I knew I would be able to produce the needed words. My worry was more that I wouldn’t write anything of substance, or that nothing would work with the story. I went in with my goal of 2k words every day but Fridays.

Ending NaNo
By the end of NaNo I could feel my pace slowing along with the ideas for new scenes to write. I was able to tell I was about a week into needing to revise. It’s something I recognize about my process, the need to go back to the beginning of my story and smooth before I can push forward again. I actually tried for a few days to do this while keeping track of the new words I wrote toward my daily goal. Unfortunately this is more difficult than writing straight up, and by that point I was into the black hole surrounding Thanksgiving. So I shifted back to just getting my 2k words a day through brute force. I finished three days early then stopped writing. I’m pretty sure I was just on the very edges of burnout.

Post NaNo
I gave myself several days off. I was planning a few weeks to work on a different project, but Monday morning, ideas were literally shoving their way out of my head. I had to pull over on the way to work to write one down. I poured out two new scenes (1.2k words) in 42 minutes this afternoon.

When I look back at the numbers on my excel spreadsheet, I noticed I had never spent more than two hours a day getting the needed 2k words. Usually it was closer to 1.5h. 7.5-8.5 hours a week in order to churn out 12k+ words. Not too shabby. And there were good ideas in there as well, even if the prose isn’t all worthwhile. The week of Thanksgiving and the week after were a bit of a wash in terms of total hours spent on writing stuff. I got my Nano words, but I did little else. I’m a bit disappointed in that.

From Here
Part of my path forward will be giving myself more than the one goal. It’s possible my lack of output was simply due to my whole focus being getting Nano done, so I didn’t really put effort into working on anything else.

I also have a few more things I want to play around with: How many words can I write easily in one day, knowing I need breaks in between writing sessions? What do I need to do in order to recharge my ability to write during a single day? (ie, what refills my creative well) I also want to figure out if there is some way to tell how long I can write new prose before I feel the need to smooth, or if it’s just a feel thing.

Goals for the Week
Writing 30 mins/day assuming I have a scene idea I want to write (which so far I have).
Revising and eventually Smoothing the Huntsman for an hour/day.
Keep track of my actual words/hour because numbers!

Finishing the Race

Laura Highcove

So I just finished NaNoWriMo on Tuesday. With where I am in my writing life, finishing NaNo is really sort of a given, at the same time it is great to look back over the month and be proud of all the words and ideas that have poured out over the month. Of course I also have a lot of questions about what the heck this story is still going to do, or how it’s going to fit together. Still, forward is forward.

Still anticipatory about ending this trilogy. But that’s to be expected right?

I think I’m going to take a few weeks and organize in general, my life and my writing. I’m still feeling off since Nickel died, and I figure that’s normal since my normal has shifted. Plus we just got a new kitten, so that’s another shift. Lots of traveling for the holidays (past and future), the house is a bit of a disaster, there are presents to buy for Christmas, and normal demands of the season (fricking cold).

So no pressure on myself for a while. Plans in the future involve smoothing the Huntsman and then what I have written for the Wizard. Hopefully that will give me more insight and ideas. I’ll make a more solid plan sometime soon. Goal from where I’m sitting now …I’d like to have beta readers for Huntsman in …six months? That will be pushing it a bit with how rough some of the rough draft is, but we’ll see. It also depends on how the Wizard develops (or doesn’t) in that time.

But one thing I am oh-so super excited about is that I have been keeping track, well as best I can, of the amount of time I spend on my writer job in an excel spreadsheet. It started out because I was curious how much time I was spending, and then continued on as a way for me to motivate myself when I was slacking, and give myself a rest when I had worked enough. I started in January of this year, which only *feels* like a million years ago. As such, I am coming up on a year’s worth of data to look at. It’s so beautiful and organized. /dreamy eyes

What I Learned on the Wxr Cruise 2018

Laura Highcove

So I already did a post about what happened on the Wxr cruise, in that I really feel like I found my writing tribe. That is wonderful and amazing, but beside that, I also learned a ton of writing skills as well as learning a few new lessons about myself.

The first lecture of the cruise was from Brandon Sanderson on Characterization. It was a more fleshed out version of something he’s spoken on, on the podcast before. It came in handy already as a diagnostic tool for a character people were having a hard time connecting with. It gave me a solid way to look at why people might not like said character, and thus, how to fix it.

He also said something during the Q&A session at the end that really struck me as well. Something like: “As you get better at writing you will try harder things, and as a result, you’ll think you’re a worse writer than you are.” I had been struggling with this rather hard for the past two years, while working on the Huntsman. I remember how easy writing used to be, where I would sit down and pump out words, and yet I had to fight for every inch on the Huntsman. But since hearing the above, I was able to put my head down on the Huntsman and get to ‘The End’ on my rough draft.

Some of the lectures were interesting, but not immediately relevant. More of a ‘file away for later’, like Mary Robinette’s ‘How to Read Outloud’, and Dongwon’s three part lecture on ‘Surviving the Books Business’. There were others that I incorporated into my writing asap like Tempest’s talk on inclusively in writing, Piper’s ‘Writing Romantic Elements’, and Sandra’s “Setting up your Life for Writing”, which went wonderfully into the mentality around writing and how to protect your writing time.

The one lecture that caught me most by surprise was Amal’s lecture on writing poetry. I have never been a fan of poetry. I just never got it, and the people who do are so passionate about it, it’s almost a turn-off. However, the way Amal explained the difference between poetry and prose as the way singing is different from talking really clicked with me. And when she had us try writing some poetry with that distinction, it just …worked. And from what others got up and read in front of the class, it seemed to have worked for a lot of people. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for poetry, and so the exercise she gave us for using poetry to get past ‘stuck spots’ is certainly something I can see myself using.

I also got something very important impromptu critique group that I got into by chance. It was my first time critiquing (and being critiqued) in person, but I was riding high on the safety of the whole Wxr space and so it went really well. Apparently the narrator problem I’d had in the Law of the Prince Charming, that I thought had been fixed was, in fact, still a problem.

And since I was stuck on a boat for several more days with little else to do, I decided I was going to go head down on this problem and figure out how to fix it. Long story short, I realized the problem was with tense and I experimented with switching the prose from past to present. After much reluctance and knashing of teeth on my part (because I hate reading present tense in books), I realized that I was much happier with the way it sounded in general, and got enough feedback saying it did feel better than I am currently in the process of rewriting the book.

But, I think, the most important thing I learned on the cruise happened at dinner on Friday night. I was in a bit of a depressed state because this was right after I had figure out that present tense for my novel sounded better, but before I reached acceptance of the idea, and was ready to leave the table when Mary Robinette came to join us. I stayed because, well, she’s a highly intelligent writer and I like the sound of her voice. At one point she started talking about how she finds the guest speakers for the cruise, and how she has to tell them that they can’t give the 101 or 201 versions of their talks because the Writing Excuses listeners have such a high level of theory already. She says she has to inform her speakers to think of it like they are giving a lecture to their peers, who just happen to be still early in their careers.

It was the first time I thought of connecting myself to published authors with the word peer. I mean I know I’ve gained a lot of skill over the past four or five years, but it wasn’t until that moment it really dawned on me that the only thing standing between me and publication could be that I haven’t found an agent. Not that I’m at the end of my learning by any stretch, but it was certainly a context shift. And, on top of that, I had access to all the other amazing people of the same level who were on the cruise with me.

During the final party, Mary Robinette did warn us that after everything we had learned on the cruise, that writing might be difficult for a while. But I found a new groove since the cruise. The newfound confidence in myself and my skills carried me through a lot of things I had been having difficulty with before the cruise. And that’s how I know this retreat was so successful, because I met so many amazing, wonderful people, and because it inspired me to write better. Totally have to go back again next year.

NaNoWriMo 2018: The Wizard

Laura Highcove

I’m finally able to say that I have a complete rough draft for The Huntsman. Turns out I lied to everyone on Facebook though. I apparently started on the Huntsman (according to my blog) for NaNoWriMo of 2016, meaning it’s only been two years, and not three. Sorry for the confusion, but I’m far happier to realize that it only *felt* like it took a million years to write this book.

I struggled a lot with this book, as most people do with sequels, but knowing other people have suffered like you have only helps but so much when you’re in the depths of your own suffering. However, in September of last year, when I was feeling particularly panicked, I decided to write a note to myself that I wouldn’t look at again until I had finished this book. It is as follows:

Sept 27, 2017: I am so beyond stuck with this story that I don’t even understand how any of it is going to work. There’s so much that needs to go on, none of it is flowing. None of it works. I am sitting here terrified, going to through the story trying to find something that will work to make this story make sense.

So when I do make this story work, I am going to look back at this moment and remind myself that I can make anything work. It might not look pretty between here and there. I might have to change or completely rewrite a bunch of stuff, but there is a way that this story works and makes sense, and I just have to get out there and find it without worrying about what it looks like now or how long it might take. If I can make this story work, then I can make any story work.

I’m so proud of me for making it through. All it took was stubborn refusal to give up on my story. Well and support, breaks, some wins, and a whole lot of words. But mostly not giving up. 🙂

And now, on the 31st of October, NaNoWriMo looms. I am immediately launching myself into The Wizard, which is book three of this trilogy. I figure there’s little point spending time polishing book two before I finish book three. Mostly I want to see if I can create something resembling a satisfying ending on a book three. Plus, there’s a high likelihood of something needing to change in book two anyway. I changed quite a few things in book one while writing book two, and that one I had polished.

I’m a little anticipatory (Huh, spelled that word right on the first try.) about NaNoWriMo this year, but I think it’s mostly surrounding starting on the third book of my trilogy. If a book two was uncharted waters, then book three is so far off the map I can’t even begin to wonder what it will be like. But then being a discovery writer, to me, is all about having faith in your ability to eventually figure out wtf is going on. Writing, keys flying over the keyboard, and suddenly your characters are doing something you didn’t expect, the plot is going out into left field, and that moment when suddenly it all works and makes sense? Oh man, it is pretty great.

I’m sticking with the standard 50k words for my NaNo goal. I know I won’t be able to get much past that without going through and smoothing a few times anyway, so trying to push for more words will just burn me out like it did two years ago. (Yay, learning from my mistakes.) So 2000 words per day (Fridays off). No big, it’s just NaNoWriMo. If you’d like to follow my progress: This is me.

WXR 2018: Finding My Tribe

Laura Highcove

I started listening to Writing Excuses at the end of season nine, so 2014. And after getting part way into season 10, I went back and listened to the archives. All of them. I found out about the cruise in 2016, and I applied for the scholarship for the past two years, but finally saved up enough money to go this year. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I hung around on the Google group where everyone was talking for months ahead of time. I picked my roommate, Morgan, because she wrote fantasy and didn’t snore.

But it wasn’t until the Saturday when I flew into Houston that the people-interactions really started. I met Eric in the airport using the Discord app everyone was on for conversing on the cruise. Then, since Morgan’s flight was delayed, (There was rough weather, most people got delayed.) Eric and I met up with Michelle and we all shared an Uber to the hotel. Both of them had been on the cruise before, and Michelle let me tag along into the group of people she knew as soon as we got to the hotel. Everyone seemed really nice and entirely non-threatening.

After picking up registration bags, we went behind the waterfall where they had swag for us. I went up to a table with books on it, because of course I did, and the person behind the table began to describe the books. I had to reboot because the voice that was speaking was Dan Wells, and I was entirely unprepared to hear that voice in a non-podcast situation. Then Howard Taylor said something from the table beside him, which furthered the surrealism, and I had to ask Dan to repeat himself because I hadn’t heard what he actually said. He was very nice about it, which bolstered my confidence further, so when I turned and saw Mary Robinette Kowal at a third table, and walked over and asked if she could also speak for me to complete the blowing of my mind. She acquiesced.

I managed to work through the “getting to know you” sheet where you get people to sign your paper based on something about them, like what genre they write or what their job is, by actually talking to people. Though, in truth, I was given a task, and I am good at task completion. But it was also a very comfortable situation. Then those of us who went on the NASA tour further bonded by living through the torrential downpour on our cart train that had no sides.

That night was the cocktail reception, and oddly enough, I settled right into talking with people. Part of it was by that time I had bonded with my roommate, and I’m always braver when I have someone I know around, and part of it was that I sat at a table and almost everyone was a genre writer. Even if I do attend other writing events, I rarely find genre writers, and if I do, they’re all YA. (Not that I have anything against YA. I just feel like I never find adult fantasy writers.) So again, it felt a little surreal to ask what everyone was writing and have so many of them be my same genre.

At this point I was still rather intimidated by the hosts, but I still managed to get my books signed and to ask them to hug my stuffed animal gryffin (That I’ve had all the people who are important in/to my life hug). It was also the first time I was able to meet Brandon Sanderson. I cried a bit, I’ll admit it, but he was perfectly accommodating, and he signed my book and took a picture with me grinning like a silly fangirl. My one regret about the whole situation was that I was simply too overwhelmed to approach him as a writer. It doesn’t help that he wasn’t on the cruise, so while I got to see Mary Robinette, Howard, and Dan as real people, he’s still Brandon Sanderson. At least for now.

The introduction/instruction speech that came at the end of the reception really helped to settle things in my mind, and solidify the feel of what to expect from the cruise. All of the instructors and the helpful team were introduced, as well as the rules for how to treat each other. I know the Wxr hosts have always been pretty big on making a space safe for everyone there, and I was really starting to feel that.

The next day we got on the boat and that’s when things finally started to settle a bit in my mind. All of the Wxrers had red badges that hung from our necks, meaning we could spot each other through the, well frankly, massive crowd of muggles who were on the cruise as well. The classes were simply amazing, though that’s fodder for another post. We all ate dinner together rotating tables so we got to meet other people, as well as the hosts. Morgan and I sat with Dan, Howard, and Mary Robinette on various nights.

And I found the most amazing thing happening. I was interacting with people. People I didn’t know very well, but it was like that red badge was magic. As soon as I saw it, I would meet the other person’s gaze and wave, and they would do the same. Or I could just walk up and start a conversation. We were able to just be comfortable around each other, as people, because we had been brought together by this cruise.

I am not normally one to join in or participate in conversations. I like being on the sidelines, listening to other people say interesting things, but never feeling like I have anything to add to most conversations. And if I do, it’s usually a quick comment and then over. Only at the dinner table, I found so many people with topics they wanted to discuss that were interesting and that I had something to say about. One night I started talking about Supernatural and fan fiction, and I realized almost halfway through the night that I was actually having a good time participating in a conversation. That I had things to say, that these were topics in which I was interested. I have never before had such an actual lengthy conversation with people in a group setting like this, not even among my friends.

I also hopped into a discussion on magic system creation where I felt emboldened to add some to the conversation. And I jumped into a quickly created critique group that all looked at the part of my story, I’ve been trying to fix forever and thought was “okay”, and told me it still didn’t work. And I felt safe getting that feedback, and glad that they were willing to say something.

I had, for the first time, actually found my tribe. So much so that I cried when it was time to leave the boat. After my flight landed in Atlanta I found myself looking through the crowds for red badges and being sad when I remembered I wouldn’t be seeing any. I clung to Discord, that last connection I had to them, and I mourned not being on the cruise anymore.

For the first time I really understood Daisy’s reaction in Agents of SHIELD, after she’s freed from Hive’s control, and she throws herself at him again, begging for him to let her back in. I felt like I had been removed from a situation that felt so right for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t sure what to do without it. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, and maybe I’m not. But I know I need to figure out a way to be able to go on the cruise again next year. And for now, I’m very grateful for Discord and for everyone involved with putting on and attending this cruise.

Gratitude and the New Normal

Laura Highcove

I’m going to start this post with gratitude. Gratitude for my friends, with whom I spent a wonderful week of discovery at a resort in the Dominican Republic. Gratitude for the Writing Excuses Cruise Team who put together a writing retreat so wonderful I cried when it was finally over. Gratitude for my husband who is so supportive of me and my pursuits. Gratitude for my boss (And friend) who worked with me so I could do these two events, even so annoyingly close together, and took care of my cats while my husband and I were away. Gratitude for my cat Nickel, and the ten wonderful years I got with him. And Gratitude for myself and my stubborn refusal to give up on me.

These past couple of months have been really tough for me emotionally, almost entirely due to Nickel’s rapid decline in health and final day last week. It was difficult for me to remember how many good things I have going on in my life and the amount of support that is readily available. But then that’s part of my depression.

I have been so out of my own normal habits that it’s been uncomfortable trying to go back to them. I didn’t have a weekend at home for a month. My writing has been ridiculously on and off again, and of course I’ve barely looked at social media outside of checking on the new season of Supernatural. Thus why this post is coming in on a ‘not Monday’. I realized I needed to just get something out. Just like I needed to just do my laundry on whatever day, and clean the bathroom finally. I had a lot of life changing experiences all in a very short amount of time and I still haven’t been able to sit down and fully process any of them. There might be no ‘returning to normal’ after this, because my normal has shifted so dramatically.

But even then, the laundry still needs to be done, the bathroom still needs to be cleaned, and I still need to write. So I guess enough has stayed the same.

There is a Way this Makes Sense

Laura Highcove

It’s funny, even though I know the only way I’m going to get past this stuck spot in the Huntsman is to keep writing, and even though this persistence has always worked in the past, I still find myself dreading the idea of working on my story. Being human is such a funny thing. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the present and somehow think things have always been terrible, and always will be terrible, but then if it’s going well we worry about how that will change for the worse.

It’s all a matter of perceptive. I’m really no more stuck with this book than I have been in the past. And truthfully, I’m farther along than I ever have been. I’m starting to figure out some things, but IDEAS! are easy, and bringing them together to make sense for the end of a book is hard. I always get stuck at this point of the book, and have for a number of trunk novels that never got finished. The Law of the Prince Charming, while not the first book I managed to power through, is one of very few. And it took six months of agony before I basically just popped out the second half of the book.

It’s been longer for this one, and I figure the reason is I just haven’t found that thing, that bit that ties it all together. It’s out there somewhere. I know it is. A thing I try to tell myself in times like this is: “There is a way that all of this (my story) makes sense.” That doesn’t mean things won’t have to change or shift around, but there is a second half of this book that is beautiful and wonderful and makes sense. I just have to tap into it …by continuing to write until I get past this stuck spot. Blargh. I mean: I know I can do it!

30 min

Laura Highcove

So it’s been a little longer than two weeks like I said, but I needed a little longer to get myself back together than I thought I would. I went through a really rough bit and I’m still climbing out of the hole on the other side.

Long story short, I found out Nickel has cancer and I hid from my depression by binging 13 seasons of Supernatural and ignoring the rest of my life. If you’d like the full story and the lesson I’ve taken away from it, you can sign up for my newsletter, since I’m not going to go into those details on the open Internet.

I did manage to get the alpha of the Huntsman up and I went to Otakon this past weekend. I even managed to have a pretty good time at the con and a great discussion with my husband about the Huntsman during the easiest (no traffic) trip back from Baltimore we’ve ever had.

Still struggling with the lingers of the habits I formed over the past two months, and so right now I’m rereading some old stories I’ve written, writing some on a new story and thinking through the ideas I got from my husband during our talk. I need to get back into the habit of writing. Motivation is low. Right now I’m going to be happy to spend 30 minutes a day writing new prose. I might check in more often for a bit so I can keep up with my goals.