Holly Lisle's Blog, page 18

FUNNY words today — and 1389 of them. It was a very good writing day! Also… HWC Update.

So first the book, because that’s where my morning started. And it was a WONDERFUL morning. Not only did I get 1389 new words, but I also the answer to something that happened in Book 1, and that explained a lot. And I discovered a secret one character has kept through four novels, and just today finally came clean about.

And I made myself laugh. I love when that happens. The words just pop out, and they’re from the part of my mind that has no censor, and that will say goofy things. And this time, they were goofy while revealing stuff about character I thought I knew that gave them some extra depth. 

The counter showing my wordcount is wrong, though, because I discovered this morning that Chapter Five was three chapters long. So I cut all the many extra words from the chapter, and pasted it into a new one. And Scrivener counted them all as new words. The wordcount in the HEADER is right.

On to the frustrating bit. HWC members have started logging into the new site in spite of the fact that NO invitations have gone out, and the other fact that WE’RE NOT DONE YET.

So now I have to go write an email telling all the folks who jumped the gun to log out and wait patiently so they don’t break something.

We’re going to call this Good morning/ Bad morning.

In spite of a bunch of HWC website stuff, 649 words on Ohio 5, 14.300 total

Short and sweet, I got words. I did it while working around website issues with the forum and the classrooms over on HollysWritingClasses.com, where we’re still getting things set up.

Had to stop now, because I have to pay full attention to the website while I have folks who are working on it and who will need input from me (though that input has been damned useless so far).

I’m tired already, and I’ll be so very glad when this website stuff is done, and I can just go back to writing.

OHIO 5: Small words, but yesterday’s revelation continues to spawn big things

I got 272 words and now have 12,393. 

And what I got built on big, scary things that I discovered yesterday, and gave me a nice new segment of the same scene.

I’ll be glad when I can spend more time on Ohio 5, but we’re in the last stages of replacing the old HollysWritingClasses.com software with the new software, and there are a ton of things on that which I have to be around for and to be a part of.

We thought we’d be doing the move today, though (in which case I would have gotten NO words), and we’ll find out later today whether we’ll be able to do it tomorrow.

We have just ONE sticking point. I’m hoping today it comes unstuck.

I wanna get back to writing FULL-time again.

Ohio 5: The Surprises Keep Coming – Plus… Fasting Brain!

Matt and I are doing this fasting thing, where we eat one meal, then fast for 47 hours, eat again, fast for 47 hours…

It’s simple, it’s stress-free, it gives me tons of energy.

And fortunately, my body doesn’t read this as “hunger” until I smell food. Which I won’t smell until dinner tonight.

Fasting on a 47/1 schedule has a couple of weird side effects.

The first is that I keep getting up and walking around, and I find myself thinking while pacing instead of thinking while sitting. (I think my body has geared up to go run down some antelope, and it’s secretly trying to drag me out the door so I can go find some)

The second is that I get really, really chatty (and working at my computer, that translates into writing lots of words). I was shooting for 250 words for the day, because my project manager, my database guy, and I are on the countdown to shutting down HollysWritingClasses.com now, and I have things I need to do there.

But…

I got 1001 words, and now have 12,120 total on Book 5.

My characters are doing very cool things, and I got to build out more of the revelation yesterday.

And realized that tomorrow I’m going to have to remove all used of the word ‘oligarch’. 

I think I’ll replace it with asshole-in-charge.

Other than that, I love what I got.

Now, however, I have to go run a few circles on the ceiling, and then drop into the forum. 

Revelations galore, and a wild shock for me — 1015 words today, and 11,119 total.

Hooo, boy! I shocked my own socks of this morning.

I thought I knew where the story was going, and I did not. Well… the part of me that writes consciously didn’t, anyway.

My Muse might have had this planned… but I don’t think so. I think it  was surprised, too.

The revelation my subconscious mind pulled out of its hat was the kind of surprise that fit so perfectly, and was so duplicitous that I found myself wondering how long it had stored that away.

It didn’t come easily. Through some hours of writing, and cutting out bits and pieces, and putting things down, and muttering, “No, that’s not it,” I was working toward something. But I didn’t know what it was.

And then, Muse went “TA DAAAAAAH!” like some little kid who just brought home a kitten…

Only this one wasn’t seven hundred pounds with foot-long fangs.

DAMN, it was beautiful.

And I love when that shit happens.

…

Oh… also… Realized that I have for years held onto the domain that is going to be the second half of the stuff James Husum and I are going to be working on as the backend for my Title. Cover. Copy. class.

So a weekend of letting my Muse sleep while I stretched out on the couch playing Kairosoft games on my Switch just paid off with HUGE dividends.

HOWEVER… Now off to see how the “moving the site” stuff is going, and where we are.

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

Desktop Curtain, from Many Tricks: My single favorite Mac app

Big fan that I am of GSD (getting shit done), I’ve found things over the years that have made GSD easier.

The screenshots below are Before and After on a TINY section of my very large desktop this morning. The white bar on the left isn’t neatness. It’s Scrivener below a 30-word PACTS Sentence that would give some massive spoilers on Book 5.

So…

HERE’S BEFORE…

And keep in mind this is a tiny section of a very large desktop screen, and that most of the right side of it is covered with folders.

Okay. NOW…

Here’s AFTER one simple click…

Beautiful, right? Calm, soothing, beautifully damned invisible. It’s like a massage for your brain.

I’m not an affiliate for the software or anything. I just love it — and this morning, starting in stressed about the upcoming HollysWritingClasses.com site overhaul, and the upcoming class debugs, and getting Ohio Five done so I can then do the five-novel, 470,000+ word One-Pass Revision…

I felt that moment of peace as my chosen blue covered all the crap on my desk, and I wanted to say thanks to Many Tricks [NOT AN AFFILIATE LINK] for  my favorite focus-to-get-shit-done app for the Mac. 

Now… back to the words. I’m doing mean things to my characters today.

Big surprise, right?

OHIO 5: 620 words, the wrap-up of Chapter 5, and the start of Chapter 6

It was not a dark and stormy night. It was, instead, a pretty decent afternoon in May.

But my MC has just discovered that there has been a whole lot of lying going on, and that things she thought were dead sure certain were, in fact, a tissue of lies told to her by people she trusted.

Not all of the people she trusted. But certainly some of the ones she’s been holding close.

She’s about to go into a dark place in search of the truth… because even the lies conflict with each other.

This is, in fact, a very nice place to leave the book for the weekend. Lotta conflict, and a lot of time to let whatever’s going to happen next (I have no clue; this was not planned) knock around in the back of my head and pick up bits and pieces to keep it interesting.

I know where I’m GOING with this. 

But right at the moment, I have no damn clue where I am.

But here’s the tap-dancing happy bit…

At 10,104 words, even if I run long and need 100,000 words to tell this story, I am officially more than ten percent done with the first draft.

And it’s FRIDAAAAAAAY!

Have a great weekend.

I’ll be back here Monday.

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300 words on Ohio Five… and the discovery of how something clever got done

Nice interplay today between my main character and someone important to her, as she discovers more about what her grandmother had been up to.

300 words exactly. I’m happy with that. The HWC site move/upgrade is now right on top of us, and we could get the “go” at any time.

So the fact that I got words at all feels big. The fact that I had to do that, plus monitor site progress, and send out an email to the folks who volunteered to help me fix all my classes post-move… 

I’ll take it. Many folks have done much more under more difficult circumstances, so I don’t mistake this for anything amazing.

But I did get words.

And I like them.

Ohio 5: Grandma’s Secret and some pasts remembered – 685 words, 9191 total

Turns out my MC’s late and much-lamented grandmother had a secret she was keeping from those nearest and dearest to her.

This secret might explain a scene in the very first book. 

The grandmother’s personality, by the way, is spun off of my maternal great-grandmother, who lived to be almost 103, and who was a CHARACTER.

God, I loved her. She was seventy when I was born, but she and I were friends right up to her death, when I was thirty-three, and she was 102 and a whole lot of change.

She was fierce, and fearless, and grumpy with almost everyone. But when I asked her to tell me about what life was like when she was a kid, and later, a young woman, she told the best damn stories.

Hers was a world without electricity or running water, without cars or planes, without fancy grocery stores. She delivered the mail on horseback when her father (who’s primary job was blacksmithing) was too drunk to do it. She was courted by a number of beaus, but married a young blacksmith who turned out to be an awful choice, though she divorced him and married him a couple more times. They had three kids.

Hers was a world without nukes on the plus side — but with a lot of deadly air-borne and water-borne diseases on the minus side.

She initially thought cars were a joke. Like me, she loved horses.

I lived in a piece of Grandma’s world when my parents moved us to Alaska for a year and a half when I was nine (back in 1969). Because of that, I, too, have washed clothes in a washtub using a washboard, and dried them on racks beside a wood stove. Have eaten food cooked on and bread baked in that same stove, which was also most of the day heat for the house. (The wood furnace below was the heat for the boys dorm above our floor).

I have drunk water pulled straight out of the river and sanitized with Clorox, because no one anywhere up or down the river had plumbing (permafrost is not the friend of water pipes), and old cultures generally aren’t eager to adopt new technology anyway. So we had outhouses and a honey-bucket, and the folks upriver from us had the same. And the river was full of water-borne bacteria.

I helped catch food and clean fishing nets, and have lived without TV, or radio, went to school in a one-room schoolhouse in the attic of the house where we lived, had frost completely occlude the single-pane windows in that enormous log cabin in winter, skied on the river on a rope tied to the back of a snowmobile, rode in a dogsled pulled by a team of huskies, watched the midnight sun in summer.

Some of that stuff is now working its way into this series — bits of a hard and primitive past that are now colliding with a very different, easier but also more difficult and much more dangerous present.

With… of course… alien magic.

And Ohio.

Every once in a while, I make myself cry. Mostly, though, I’m having a lot of fun.

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

Plugging along on Ohio 5: Some good stuff, some that’s probably expository… 306 words, 8508 total

Part of today’s work is going to end up being edited heavily during the one-pass revision. Because it was world-building. Thinking with my fingers, walking my way through why what’s going on matters and how those actions work, and what their consequences have been.

It was right in the chapter, and parts of it will survive as written in the final draft…

But parts of it are going to have to be dropped into a couple of earlier books.

Still, I love what I got. And while what I wrote is primarily an expository lump, I have, at this point in my life, very good “Expository Lump Distribution Skills”. 

And I’ll deploy them during the five-book one-pass revision.

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