Holly Lisle's Blog, page 29

A spiffy surprise for my main character — 1263 words and 6832 total

Today was a day for a bit of family history for my main character. It follows a big adventure scene, and reveals to my MC stuff she did not know about her grandmother — big stuff that ties into not just her present but to her past all the way back when she was in fifth grade.

The writing was fun — and I actually got almost a third more words than I get to count, because I spent some of the time doing essential worldbuilding that will let me, in upcoming novels (and probably retrofitted into the earlier ones during revision) — work in some very cool shit about Grandma.

Grandma was much, much cooler than my protagonist ever realized — and she always thought the old lady was awesome.

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All supporters are thanked by name (withheld by request) in each book’s acknowledgements.

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Special houses (may I never visit one on a bad day)… 1321 words of 1250 needed, 5573 total.

Sometimes I scare myself.

I write words every day in a process where I give over a lot of control to my Right Brain Muse.

Small but important note: Right-brain muses — parts of the brain that don’t do much with words and spelling, but that do hold images and ideas and imagination — are theoretical, with the theory coming from studies done of people who had medically severed corpus callosa to stop intransigent seizures. It might very well be that with an unsevered corpus callosum, the brain is much more equitable in distributing its workload to both parts. I, however, like thinking of my left brain as the one that has the logic and reliably shows up for work every day whether we feel like it or not, while I like thinking that the right brain as the one infested with the nightmares and ghosts and really gruesome ideas for things to do to my poor characters that it finds disturbingly funny.

Either way, there is a part of my brain that comes up with wicked plot twists, that scares me, that makes me laugh, and that makes me cry, even though all the stuff it’s pitching at me is stuff it made up — stuff that never really happened — and I try to put that part in charge of the writing as much as possible.

This morning, this part stepped into the scene I’d planned, muttered “Oh, honey, that’s not even close to the worst thing that could happen in this situation” — and went to town.

Today I was almost a spectator to the words that rolled onto the page at ridiculous speed.

Today I scared myself.

No idea how much of this scene will survive in revision, but when my mind decided the bad guys were not going to win this round, it gave me something that I can see visiting me in nightmares for some years to come.

Ohio 4, Chapter 2 — and my MC has reason to question the path her life has taken 1309 words, 4254 total

I’ll take it.

The scene started like an ancient Ford on a cold day, and I had to beat several characters with sticks to get them up and moving… and I am voting this “The Chapter Most Likely to Need Heavy Revision” when all five books are in their pile.

But I got some good action, and some good worldbuilding (without being too heavy on catching up to speed those readers who pick up this book first).

And my main character is having a particularly rocky night, after already having had a painfully disturbing day.

So… good fun for me.

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NEVER GO BACK — Ohio 4, Day 2. Epic chaos begins. 1271 words for the day, 2945 total

I’m making good progress.

I’m also making a mess — I tripped over part of the mess in the last section of Book 3 when grabbing details there to continue into Book 4, where I discovered that I had not cleaned up the ending of THREE quite as well as I remembered.

This, however, is where process matters.

The process for finishing a series on deadline when you have to do all five books at once so you can revised them together and release them in series order over five months is this:

Save revision and tinkering until all five books are complete in first draft.

That way, once you know how the series ends, you can go through all the previous books, bring them up to the current story as determined by the epic ending you discovered while NOT following your outline, and make all changes just once, rather than continually dropping back, tinkering, smoothing, and debugging every time you figure out something that is better to bring to the current novel.

Here’s the thing.

If you don’t set this rule, and then never succumb to the temptation to break it (just this once — HAH!), the better ideas YOU WILL HAVE in each book will constantly have you tinkering with all existing previous novels, just to keep everything updated and matching — and by always going back when critical bits of the story are constantly changing — become a slave to the “better idea”, you will never manage to get all the way forward.

And you delete good shit that needs to stay — only you can’t see it in the heat of “I need to fix this.”

Worse, every better idea dumps you into tinkering mode again. Over, and over, and over.

There will always be a better idea (including better ideas that turn out to be breathtakingly stupid, series-breaking nightmares). 

There will always be a “reason” to go back and tinker with finished books.

I didn’t. I won’t.

All five books get finished in raw, buggy first draft first.

ONE BIG REVISION comes second.

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Ohio 4 Begins! 1446 words, and 1674 total.

I start each new novel with a template I built for myself.

It has my type styles (Courier 12, double space, first line indent, and thirty chapters all set up.

My pre-built Chapter 1 (I built it when I bought Scrivener, and it has survived ever since) looks like this.

The little “Something Clever Goes Here” sentence beneath the CHAPTER 1 header never fails to amuse me when I open the new template… but I’m easily amused.

So today, before I started on the words, I transferred my entire line-for-scene outline to the Scrivener document, sentence by sentence, in to the thirty blank chapters.

And discovered that somehow I had managed to write thirty-one Scene Sentences, and all of them were important.

So I added a new Chapter 31. 

I’m not sure where the extra chapter came from in the outline, but I’ll figure it out.

Meanwhile, the new blank document started with a word count of 228 — these are mystery words that I can’t find anywhere in the document.

Sooner or later, I’ll run across them and delete them. But for now, I wrote 1466 words (out of my planned 1250), and show 1674 total words in the novel.

I love the scene I got… and with it, I’m off to the races.

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Finished all thirty Book Four sentences… Will start Chapter 1 tomorrow.

So there it is. 

I already know the outline is not perfect.

I already know that there are parts of it I will change as I write them, that there are places where I will have better ideas, that there are places where I will decide a scene I’ve outlined is stupid — and will change it — and then will decide that I was right the first time, and go back in and do what I planned…

But this is the process — for me, anyway.

This is how my brain works… and I can’t even say it’s the way it works BEST.

It’s just the way I’ve figured out that allows me to write first drafts that are good enough to keep while I revise them into the stories I wish I could have created right out of the gate.

I have something that has shape and form and that takes me from where I am to where I think I want to be, and that allows me the room to find better destinations (and the net to save the story when one of them turns out to be an imaginary bridge over a very real cliff).

Now I’ll go through the rest of my list of things to do for today… 

And tomorrow, I’ll start on page one, word one of Ohio Book 4.

I’m excited. I always am.

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I now have twenty-four of thirty Story Sentences written.

Long haul — I’ve been at this since 6: 30 am when I got out of the shower.

Today a hard slog — I did a fair amount of deleting, twiddling, rethinking… walking in circles in the office talking out loud to myself and presenting both sides of the “how should I do this?” brainstorming and “why that won’t work” opposition.

But today I got all the way through the BIG MESS of Book Four, and tomorrow I have just six sentences left in which to work out the chaos, mostly resolve the issues of this book…

And bring forward the one thing everyone missed that will form the CORE story for Book Five.

As work days go, I’ll take it.

Got eleven Line-for-Scene Sentences — nineteen to go

Okay. Today was not the best Monday I have ever had. 

I had a revelation this morning about the very strict limits I must maintain on the world… limits I’ve been maintaining subconsciously since I started writing the series without considering why.

Today, I got why.

It helped me a lot in keeping the series from drifting into Evil Series Sprawl, which is when the writer decides that anything can happen.

“If anything can happen, nothing matters,” to quote Jim Baen.

This morning I spent about forty-five minutes writing out exactly the limitations that exist in the series, and why they matter…

AND THEN I started building scene Sentences — 30-word structural plot sentences that let me keep the book on target.

I wrote some that I had to dump, had a big rethink about what cannot happen in book four if book five is going to give a strong, clean ending to the series (while still leaving room for me to continue if the world proves popular enough for me to keep writing in it).

So — tossed out the existing Sentences, started over from scratch, and at least for today, I really like what I got.

The question is, will I like it tomorrow when I come back in and read it cold?

Deadline set for the first draft of Book 4

This is more major writer neep, but any readers who are waiting for the books to come out might find this interesting, too.

I’m giving myself 3 days (including today) to outline and write PACTS (protagonist, antagonist, conflict, setting, twist) sentences and figure out how to work in REDACTED#1 and REDACTED#2. (The redacted stuff is two big plot elements that would be spoilers if I use either of the two words that define them.)

Both of these were supposed to be in Book 3, but a something bigger pushed them out. So Book Four has to start with them.

 

WORK SCHEDULE:

PLOTTING: (today,) Friday July 9 through Tuesday, July 13th

 

BOOK MATH
90,000 words
1250 words per day
72 working days
5 days a week

FIRST DRAFT STARTS Wednesday, July 14

Working Monday through Friday, and taking off both my own birthday and Matt’s, which fall inside the writing of Novel #4…

13 days in July

21 days in August

22 days in Sept

20 days in October

ESTIMATED FINISH OCT 29th

Getting ready to start the Line-For-Scene Outline of Ohio 4

In the little image above, you can see the blue-outlined box with OH-3 CUR1stD in the middle.

Below it, a gray box with a blue text icon and Ohio #1-4.

Enigmatic, maybe, and not very informative. Until you see them in context and understand what a big deal this is.

If you’re a non-nerd reader waiting to read the Ohio Series when it comes out, you can read just this bit and get the good stuff.

OH-3 CUR1stD in the image above stands for Ohio 3, Complete Unrevised First Draft. It’s moved next to its two siblings (show in the big image below this section), where it will wait until I revise the entire pile of five novels in ONE pass.

Immediately below it in the image above there now sits a new blue document link. Ohio #1-4.

I’m building a NEW outline for that book today, because I broke all the old outlines when writing Ohio 3.

I’m hoping to start writing Ohio 4 on either Monday or Tuesday of next week.

 

!!!NERD ALERT!!!

Seriously nerdy writer process and software discussion ahead. 

If you are a reader or writer NERD… keep reading. From here on out, I’m talking about the BIG picture, from which I grabbed the little picture.

Here’s the big picture.

This is the current organization of my fiction process and writing documents, aided by FREETER, the software that makes all the spiffy boxes, each of which is a link to a folder, a document, or something that I have to do each day, like go in and edit my newest blog post.

In the big image above, you can see two rows of stuff that I’m using to build the Ohio Novels. (Or will be once I’m that far.)

My link to my series storage folder, top file. Inside that folder, I have all the worldbuilding, all the notes to myself, all the character development, the books… everything.

Then there’s OBJ1- which is my list of objectives for the first five Ohio Novels (“first” assumes they will do well enough to warrant a second series. If they don’t, there will not be a second series).

A list of cover artists I might be able to afford when the time for cover art comes. Then a cluster of ideas (at the moment) for freebie Ohio stories I’ll write once the series itself is complete, revised, and with Matt for editing that folks who sign up for my pseudonym’s mailing list will receive.

The one-click link to my blog — it’s faster than typing.

Stuff for my UrbanFantasyGirl email list (empty at the moment — that list doesn’t get much love until all five books are done and revised, when I can start sending out teasers and goodies).

The series calendar… built around a real calendar (and a real year) so that I don’t make stupid date mistakes, so that I can track time and pay attention to changing seasons… stuff like that.

Also so that (SERIOUS NERD ALERT) I can make sure that I get sunrises and sunset times correct for specific days — which is important, but saying why would be A) a small spoiler, and B) massively geeky. (Warned ya. Hah!)

In general though, and not giving anything away, each of the books in the first series takes place over a couple of weeks in one month, and each book contains one complete adventure, as well as a couple of bigger stories that will only be complete within the five-book series.

The OHIO S1 W&C is my complete list of world conventions and the characters in the book. It’s very, very easy to just keep throwing new characters into new books. It’s much harder to keep track of existing characters and make sure they remain in all the books and experience changes and growth, and don’t just vanish into the ether because you forgot to write them.

(VERY easy. I have not yet forgotten the sting of forgetting to write Danrith in the rest of Fire in the Mist, or at all in Bones of the Past and Mind of the Magic.)

Romance beats are one form of story structure. Hero’s Journey is a second.

I’m working with both.

Finally, the three (YAY, THREE) completed first drafts, and then the last two novels, and their hero’s journey outline and Line For Scene outlines.

But of which are going to have to be redone before the writing starts, because while I’m writing, I constantly play “beat the outline”, trying to build something better in the story than what I already figured out.

Which means all the old outlines for later books become useless.

You’d think I shouldn’t waste time writing them  then, right? It’s logical.

But if I don’t have the vision of an entire story from book one through book five sitting in my head, complete with pretty good ending, and a lot of nice twists… there’s nothing for me to beat.

So all the work I don’t use has a real and essential purpose. If I don’t have “pretty good” and “not too bad” staring me in the face as I’m writing… I don’t have anything to fight, or anything to beat.

END NERD ALERT

Time to start outlining.