Holly Lisle's Blog, page 13

Somebody’s Lying! 1392 words, 65,395 total… and “Too Good to Be True” comes to town

Today was a hoot.

Seriously. 

Yesterday, I left my main in the middle of a situation that could have turned into a nightmare for her.

And I saved and quit for the day having no idea how I was going to handle it. 

Today, though, the last line I wrote yesterday turned out to be just exactly right… because it could mean two completely different things at the same time, and it turns out I figured out a way to let it mean both.

Which SOLVED a situation that could have ended in bloodshed, disaster, and horror… and instead became pretty funny.

The truth underneath isn’t funny. It’s desperately important, and scary, and my main character both knows the truth and had a hand in engineering the plausible lie that’s covering it up.

She de-escalated the disaster down into “oops, it was all a big misunderstanding.”

It wasn’t. Isn’t.

And tomorrow, I get to bring out the truth, and start building toward the end of the novel, and closure for the fifth book, and maybe a slightly broader tie-up for the first five books of the series.

I have to wrap everything up with less than a third of the book remaining. So tomorrow, my objective is to let my mind wrap itself around creating the events that will conclude the novel, and tie up any remaining threads from the first four… and still leave myself elbow room for a bunch of stand-alones in the same world to follow.

And because I know not all of you guys are readers waiting for the book — some of you are writers watching what I’m doing (and some of you guys might be new to me) — I’ve covered in detail the way I’m writing these books in two classes I built:

How to Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers  … and How to Write a Novel.

I have a system. It looks pretty chaotic from the outside, but there really is a method to the madness, and it’s allowed me write books I’m happy with and hit my deadlines for about thirty-one years now.

A Giggly Scene, A Wicked Secret… and I Love You, Tomorrow

No big secret that these books are set in a decidedly sideways version of the Ohio town in which I live. I love this place, and I’m having a wonderful time building some seriously wacky shit into what is in reality a lovely old town with a great history, and some fine and friendly people.

Today I got to pull out one of the oldest tropes in SF (because I have no compunction about playing with elements of science fiction in my fantasy series, so long as I can them twist them straight back to fantasy), and I laughed my ass off when I realized how I was going to use the damn thing.

I left a note in the chapter so that I remember tomorrow the revelation I had right at the end. I’ve learned NEVER to trust myself to remember tomorrow’s cool thing if I don’t leave a note.

Fortunately, Scrivener is great for letting you leave notes.

And I’m so excited to write what I realized that I was tempted to keep going.

So… 1250 words exactly today, and 64,003 for the book, and I’m five chapters from the end. And I love, love, LOVE the words I got today.

NOW, however, it’s on to the next thing. I have seven tons of lesson reminders yet to build to get everything over on HollysWritingClasses.com working the way it’s supposed to… and I need to get at least half a ton of them built today.

So with words finished, and the start of today’s headache already moving in like clouds before an oncoming storm, I’m going to go do lesson reminder links in lesson reminders for writing classes for at least one hour.

Get Holly’s Free Fiction Sampler, plus Weekly Fiction Updates, and when these books go on sale, get invited to the launch.

In spite of a bit of uphill-ery, I got there. 1281 words, 62,753 total

And I managed along the way to muddy my feet on Vikings, evolutionary biology, predator psychology, and something that looks like next Monday it could traipse into the realm of the steamy near-miss.

I also had a lot of wicked fun, got in a couple of funny one-liners, and at the end of the day (and the week), I’m pretty pleased by where I am in the novel, and what awful things I’m going to do to my main character next week — all now set up by the casual and off-hand hints in the book related to the items listed above.

So with that, I’m going to take my damned headache and head off into the weekend to put my feet up and NOT think about the stuff I set up today.

I’ll get a much fresher take on all of this if, as I come back to it next Monday, I’ve had a chance for forget why I put that stuff in there, so that I’ll be able to clearly see what fits, and what was overkill.

This is pure How To Think Sideways stuff, and I absolutely love when it clicks like this.

But anyway…

Hope you have a great weekend. I plan to.

Coming of the Fen — The Ohio Invasion

There’s a certain amount of wackiness in what I have going on right now, in spite of the fact that the core of the problem my characters are facing is nothing less than save-the-world with a pretty big dollop of save-a-bunch-of-worlds.

I’m having a helluva lot of fun playing with the situation. But…

I can’t guarantee that what I wrote today will stay. It fits. It includes real-world stuff I love, and I think it’s both funny as hell, and downright terrifying in places… but I won’t know until I’ve finished this book and started in on the read-through and markup of all five books if it flows naturally from the first four books without any shark-jumping.

Context is everything. I have a lot of funny shit in all five of these books. But I won’t know until everything has cooled off and I read them fresh if the funny is undercutting the power of the scary, or just spicing it up.

But… Fen. The plural for SF/Fantasy fans who go to SF/Fantasy conventions, which I love but haven’t had the time or means to do in years. The Fen have arrived in my book. At least for now.

And — at least until the cool-down read-through, when I see if they make the cut — I’m happy to have them.

1306 words for the day, and 61,476 total. And I’ve done final calculations on my deadline, and working at this pace I have 26 days left (while still taking weekends off) until I finish the novel. I might get all wound up and run long. But if I stay in bounds, I’m now less than a month out from wrapping up the fifth book, and rolling right over to a re-read of the already revised Book 1, and then the One-Pass Revision of books Two through Five.

Yesterdays revelation became today’s surprising scene

I knew yesterday that I left myself in a good place when I wrapped up the words. I didn’t realize how good until I started rolling this morning. My main character had a massive revelation about the crushing mistake she was about to make, and figured out a way to avert disaster on the upcoming Day One of a big situation she has invited — and has to survive.

No way to avoid the fact that she’s got a potential explosion on her hands — but she didn’t make the Well-Meaning Big Stupid Mistake — and her ally is working with her to help her see through the lens of the past a couple of other big mistakes in history she doesn’t want to replay.

Bad things are still going to happen. She has folks who hate her and want to see her family line die out with her, and because she doesn’t know who they are, but they know exactly who she is, she’s at a major disadvantage.

But with an interesting new perspective, she’s at least figured out a better way to deal with what’s coming at her from out of the dark.

1398 words today, 60,171 total today, and I’m very happy with where this is.

The value of NOT working the weekend becomes clear — 1329 words, and a problem solved out of thin air

I did not think about the book at all over the weekend. I took this one all the way off. Played games on my Switch — Dungeon Village, Dungeon Village 2 (brand new, and much bigger than the first one, with some really nifty additions), some Animal Crossing (though the ‘homework’ aspect of that particular game is starting to wear on me) and Portal Knights, which I love beyond reason. All the PK variations on treasure hunting and the weekend events are enormously fun. 

So I came in today not even remembering where I left off last week. I knew I’d left myself hanging.

I read through Friday’s words, and damned if a lovely solution didn’t just pop into my mind as I wrote. 

I got my words in an hour — fast for me even when things are really flying. And I love what I got, and am looking forward to picking up where I left off tomorrow.

The image on my desktop (captured behind my word counter) is a cave in Scotland. Related conceptually to the answer I figured out as I was getting words down, but NOT a part of the book.

The cave, however, kind of poked the idea at me. So it gets a wave and two thumbs up.

NOW… though, back to building lesson reminders. I’m only on the second version of the first of the classes that need them. And all the classes except the Clinics need them.

Way in the woods and the weeds… and enjoying myself: 1323 words and 57,419 total

I am by preference an outliner, not a pantser. 

By preference I have a map for the novel I’m writing, and while I make take a small side road on the map rather than the freeway, in general I don’t abandon the damn car and go hiking through the woods and the weeds with nothing but a canteen and a pen knife.

But preference sometimes takes you where you’ve been before, and every once in a while, shoving the map in your back pocket and wandering in the direction of the sun can bring you to new ground, to sights previously unseen, and to vistas of wonder and delight.

Which is where I ended up today, and where I got envision enemies thrown into terrible chaos by the destruction of the core of their enmity discovering some strange, disturbing… but still HOPEFUL… common ground.

It’s lovely, weirdly funny ground. 

And writing it made me happy.

* * *

By the way, I’ll note that my deadline still shows as June 12 for finishing the first draft of this novel. The massive derailment of my writing time while I did the things only I could do to get the HollysWritingClasses.com site live (and my end of it was pretty small, compared to the massive work my moderators did) was still enough to destroy that deadline. I haven’t had the heart to do the math to come up with an achievable new deadline yet. I have that on my Tiny Little List for Monday.

Just didn’t want anyone to look at that deadline and get excited. No way am I writing 3,258 words a day for the next ten working days. I’ll need 26 working days to hit the 90,000-word goal, and all the previous books have run long. I have every reason to expect that this one will, too. So I’m still a ways out from finishing the first draft. I just haven’t felt like fiddling with the Scrivener word count meter yet, because I would like to see what I can get done in that ten days.

Strange Directions… 1304 words today, 56,096 words total. What FUN!

Apparently yesterday was too serious for my Muse, who this morning grabbed the story by the scruff of the neck, picked it up out of its “this is damn serious shit” conflict, and dropped it into the middle of action that made me laugh while I was writing it.

I know this sounds weird. However…

The part of me that knows the story’s theme and conflict and necessary points we have to hit is not the part of me that actually puts the words on the page. The organized me gets its day during revision, when it has to pull all the stuff the other half of my brain threw at it into some sort of coherent order.

First draft, though, is where weird and funny and spontaneous good ideas all get their moments. 

And — boy howdy. Today was THAT day. 

Today my Muse grabbed the hands and dug in, and presented me with tiny, bored elves on their day off who found a ruined, abandoned TransAm in the local dump waiting to be crushed, pulled a Car SOS on it (because that’s what elves are good at)… and then went joy-riding.  Chaos ensued.

This was just a couple of lines of backstory to demonstrate the details of an ongoing problem, and has very little to do with the story as a whole or even today’s scene, except to underscore the difficulty of my main character’s job: that even many of the people she wants to work with — folks who love her and whom she loves — are… um… difficult to manage.

And she’s creating a situation into which she’d going to be bringing much more difficult folks, at least half of whom are NOT going to be friendly, or going to love her, or going to have any reason whatsoever to want to see her succeed.

I am having so much fun with this book. I can’t wait for tomorrow to write what happens next. 

Building into a nice conflict for my main character and the town… and UP NEXT…

Got the words. Like the words.

Got 1260 words total for the day (so just over my daily objective), and 54,792 in the book.

I also stole a line from one of my poems posted on this site as a quote for my main character’s most important ally, because it was perfect for the place and the situation, and using it fit the character.

Since the series is coming out pseudonymously, I’m betting I’m going to have to credit the use of the poem in the acks, or get called out by readers who recognize it from the novel under my own name where it was first published.

BUT ANYWAY…

My MC had a rough day today, and by that I mean that I had a rough day getting what I needed out of her. We got there, but the temptation to smack her over the head with a frozen trout while we were working through her fears to get to what she’d actually doing… well…

She wanted to dither, I wanted her to get to the point, and we compromised in the middle, with me finally figuring out the importance of her dithering, and how that GOT her to the right point.

So now, with words for the day that I’ve decided I like, I’m going to head off to start fixing email links in lesson reminders for my classes, and rebuilding the lesson reminder lists for my writing students.

I’m bringing back the frozen trout, while I mutter grouchily for one moment about the biggest weakness of the Internet, which is that every time you HAVE to update/upgrade/repair something on your website, you end up creating link rot (old links posted in hard-to-reach places like inside novels and lessons that break because of the required upgrade/update/replacement).

I’m using my trout to smack at empty air, because the problem for link rot is that it’s a problem without any permanent solution. You can swing that fish all day, but there’s just nothing to hit.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Cookies…

I stepped into a scene this morning where I was expecting to be goofy and funny, and instead, I found Sun Tzu waiting for me.

My relationship with Sun Tzu is a long-standing one. I met him when I was twenty-seven, when my first husband told me that if I divorced him, it was going to be a war, and he had all the money, so he was going to win it.

I took him seriously. I went to the library, and from it took out a book titled Divorce for Men, and a tiny little red book without any annotations in it called The Art of War.

From Divorce for Men, I learned that my husband’s lawyer would expect me to lawyer up instantly, demand alimony, child support, the house, full custody of the kids, and to make the process as acrimonious and horrible as possible.

From the Art of War, which I read and reread and fought to understand, I learned… well, a helluva lot, but the first and most important thing I learned was this.

If you want to win the damn war you didn’t want to fight in the first place, start by being where the enemy isn’t.

So I just wrote out a list of the things I wanted.

Joint custody of the kids.

My car.

My books and clothes.

Barry to keep the fancy house we’d bought together, and the credit cards and all the stuff we’d acquired together… but he had to PAY for that stuff.

I refused child support. I would pay for my life, he would pay for his.

He went to his lawyer (Terry Garner of Laurinburg, NC) with my list, and said he wanted all of that AND full custody of the kids. His lawyer looked at my list, and said, “Shut up and sign.”

And I used his lawyer (whom he paid for) to get the separation on my exact terms, so that the whole thing didn’t cost me a dime. (Sun Tzu’s precept: Feed off the ground of the enemy.)

My name came off the mortgage and I started with a clean slate. (As clean as I could back in the days of joint credit with a guy who’d made an art of living above his means.)

One year later, I used my own lawyer to do the divorce.

About three years after that, the kids told me (and the next day, Social Services) what was going on over at Barry’s house. THEN I took child support. And full custody. And moved away from that town because my kids were being taunted in school by kids who’d heard stories from their parents…

If I’d gone to war over the house, over the money, over custody of the kids, over anything, I would burned the ground I ended up having to fight on. As it was, by following Sun Tzu’s strategies and tactics, by asking for what I actually wanted (and only that) out of the marriage, and then living with my choices, I won the war. Got my kids away safely, got out of that mess without allowing myself to be defined by following the advice of lawyers who make money from exploding marriages.

Anyway… 

Sun Tzu… Saved my kids, saved me.

And showed up in Ohio 5 today at the point where I once again found myself looking at the threat of war, and where he pointed me to Cookies as The Path to Enlightenment.

And once again, I found what I needed in his words. The book, like my life, will be the better for them.