Holly Lisle's Blog, page 15

Monday… Arg! But got words, and managed to get some momentum…

Not bad for a Monday. I mostly like the words I got — and the ones I don’t like can sit there and think about what they’ve done until I come back around for the revision.

877 for the day, 40,225 total for the book, and I did manage to get a piece of one mystery in there, and I left myself in a good spot to pick up tomorrow.

So now… 

Laundry.

And then the other Activities of Daily Living that get us all from today to tomorrow… when I shall write again.

A second day of uphill — but progress uphill is still progress

I’m at the midpoint of Ohio 5, the stakes are high, my MC has just discovered for the first time in the series HOW high… and, to rearrange some Rush lyrics that THEY borrowed, I’ve just discovered, from John Barth’s The Tidewater Tales, 

My characters will pay the price, but they will not count the cost.

I’d love to write further on the book, but today has not been easy, and brought with it both cause for a headache and the headache that followed. 

So I’m going to take my 701 words, and my nearly 40,000 total, and say “good enough.”

And disappear for the weekend, where I will play video games, and read books, and nap on the couch if the mood strikes me.

And Monday I’ll come back, bringing new words to the story.

Not a GREAT day… but I did get some keeper words

I don’t know if it’s just me, but sometimes after I have a couple days where the writing just flies, and I love everything that hits the page, I have a day like this one, where it’s pretty much like wading like knee-deep mud, and having it steal one shoe and not give it back. 

(Ohio has mud that will do this. I suspect most places don’t.)

I got words, and I like the words I got.

But there was no magic to it.

I also know that by the time I hit my read through before I do the revision, I am incapable of telling the difference between the words I write when everything is rainbows and bunnies, an the words I write where it’s uphill both ways.

So tomorrow I’ll sit down again, and get more words. And they’ll fly, or they won’t. But they, like today’s words, will move me closer to my goal.

So….

Onward!

Hoo, BOY!!! 1356 words, and the conclusion to my favorite scene in the book so far!

I have 38,397 words in a novel that I’m thinking will need 90,000 to be finished.

Today’s scene was actually the midpoint scene of the novel — the point where everything changes.

So it’s not in the right place, and to get it to fit the book and be in the right spot, I’m going to have to drag it to the midpoint, and then build out the events that lead up to it.

I’m okay working like this. Scrivener is, in fact, designed so I CAN work like this. What I’ll have to do is write several new thirty-word scene Sentences, drag them to the correct spots, and then go back and write the couple of disasters that took us to this point.

But today, like yesterday, the words flew, and while I had no clue what I was going to write until I wrote it, it fit, and it moved me, and I love what I got.

Days like this are pretty rare. I’m thrilled that I had two of them in a row.

1250 Words on Ohio Five… and making myself cry. A LOT…

I had no idea the events I wrote today were going to happen.

None. What I had planned was entirely different, and pretty good. But this was…

So…

Much…

Better…

My eyes are red, I’ve had to stop several times to go walk around in the kitchen and mutter to myself, and here’s the thing. Today’s stuff is not the whole of what’s going to happen. 

I stopped with 1250 words because it just happened to end the first part of the scene.

Tomorrow, when I pick this back up, I’ll write the SECOND twist that I didn’t see coming.

And I guarantee you that I’m not going to make it dry-eyed through tomorrow’s writing, either.

I love this so much. I hate crying, but this part of the story surprised me, reached out and grabbed me, and made be love my characters so much more than I already did.

Done for the day, though.

I’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll bring more words.

Russell Galen for the Win! — I now have rights back on all four Secret Texts novels

Completing the Ohio Novels remains the priority… but I JUST GOT FOUR novels I loved back.

I have the revised, NOT bug-hunted editor drafts on my hard drive (still, and in usable format), and AFTER I have all five Ohio Novels launched, I will have to: 

Bug-hunt, edit, format, find cover art, give each book in each format its OneMoreWord ISBNs for each version, and then take them live…

But Russell Galen remains a brilliant agent, and I now have all my damn rights on those four novels back!!!

Ohio 5: 850 words net, and a WICKED new twist.

This was a “book woke me up and dragged me out of bed” morning.

The words didn’t come quickly, and I had to cut out some stuff that had been… well, really weak by comparison.

Love what I got, though. And I have left myself in such an awesome place for coming back into work on Monday.

Word count: 850 keepers, and 35,100 total. I’m getting there!

900 words… And other stuff.

I managed to carve 900 words out of the day for Ohio 5, and I like them.

Now, however, I have to go do site stuff for a while. Now, however, I’m off to build new pricing boxes over on the HollyWritingClasses.com site so that I can put classes back on sale at the regular price. (And with the private BC discount for existing Big Course owners).

I figured the pricing boxes would be reusable.

Turns out… not so much.

So… off to work on that.

“Something wicked…” might be me!

Mondays can be hard starts. You’re back into work after taking the weekend off, you’re a bit cold on the book because you spent the previous week re-launching your writing classes and your mind has been elsewhere…

And the first hour, I did some gear-grinding and backing and filling trying to get back into the story.

Until I remembered what the guy who’s in the current few scenes does for a living.

And realized that the town has a river I know really well (both in the fictional version and the real one), and thought about what rivers can hide…

And when I had that realization, all of a sudden my fingers couldn’t move fast enough to get the words out.

GOD, I had fun!

Days like this, you just want to keep going…

But if you stop when you hit your word goal (or run a bit over it, actually, but not enough to hurt anyone), you can have a whole week of days like this.

So now I’m going to go work on HollysWritingClasses.com, getting my classes back on sale, and talking to new students, and seeing what it would take to set up a couple of virtual chats.

Onward!

The words of the day are: “Neuroparasitic gelatinous organisms!”

These words won’t make it into the book. They’re brainstorming words. But here’s what happened…

I wrote myself into a corner, in that in Chapter 11 of Book Five, I suddenly solved my entire series problem.

I mean SOLVED IT. Worked out exactly what my heroes had to do to get out from under the oppressive horrors of the villains — and I have some truly awful villains in this thing.

Brain was going, “Ha! HAHAHAHAHHAHA!!! We win, you vile bastards. We beat you!”

And it worked, so I wrote it, and it was really good.

Except that, of course, it killed the book. And the series. And I like this series.

At which point, the part of my brain that had been watching this happen said, “But is isn’t that easy. You KNOW it isn’t that easy.”

And I asked, “I just solved the problem. The solution is right. Damn. Here. Why isn’t it that easy?”

At which point, my brain said, “You’ve already put all the pieces you need to see what’s really going on here into the series.”

And I had.

A chance encounter in Book One.

The question, “Where’s the weakness?”

And the delightful gifting of COOKIES throughout the series. (Yes, a part of me really is apparently for the rest of my life still going to be the six-year-old given free access to Grandma’s cookie drawer when we visited her house.)

So, from writing myself into the “Gee, I just fixed everything corner,” I’ve gone to, “Oh shit, are my characters in trouble now. And they don’t even have a clue how big or how bad this is.”

Sucks to be them.

Awesome to be me, though.