Holly Lisle's Blog, page 30

HAPPY DANCE!… Ohio 3 first draft finished at 89,556 words and 1828 for the day

Today was a good day. I had to delete one whole chapter, and I ended up writing about three times as many words as what shows, because of that giant chunk of deletion.

But I landed the next to last chapter, and retrofitted the last chapter to fit the new stuff today.

The last chapter — it had originally been written as a middle chapter, but it had that perfect last line that, when I read it this morning, made me laugh and cry  — didn’t need much. I made it match the new next-to-last chapter.

And then read it again. And laughed and cried at the same time.

So. Book 3 of the Ohio Series is now done in first draft. And like nearly all my first drafts, it will probably get longer in revision. BUT not today, or tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I’ll read my raw outline for book for, and make that fit what happened in book three.

That might take a few working days, but best guess, I’ll start into Ohio 4 on either Tuesday or Wednesday.

Today though?

Happy Dance!

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One more writing day left on Ohio Book 3 — 1552 words today, and 88,306 words total

I am very pleased to report that the rethink on what had to happen to end Ohio Novel #3 worked.

Worked like crazy.

So did the revelation I had last night that I remembered to write down in my bullet journal yesterday, which was just this:

“B” tells “T” to carry the walking stick.

(Names disguised because all identifying details stay under wraps until the pseudonym goes live and the books are in print.)

But…

“B” tells “T” to carry the walking stick.

Is that a big nothing of a line, or what?

It doesn’t seem to have anything important in it. No promise, no wonder, no conflict… NOTHING.

And it didn’t have any promise to me last night when I wrote it down, except that my muse said, “Do it.” So I did it.

But this morning, it was magic. The final conflict in the story rolled out of that dumb line, wrapping into one solid scene a secret from a lost past, love of home and all its places, monsters and violence… and a couple of surprises I can’t even hint at…and it rolls perfectly into tomorrow’s work, which is to write the right scene to go before the LAST scene.

The last scene — my Book 3 Perfect Ending, is already written. It was a scene in the middle of the book that failed to fit or to mean much of anything until I saved it and just dragged it to the end of the book to save, where it revealed itself as THE RIGHT ENDING.

So… to sum up…

HOLY CRAP, today was amazing.

I’ll finish Book 3 tomorrow, and Friday, I’ll re-outline Book 4. (That might take more than just Friday, by the way.)

But, wow… my muse was on a roll last night.

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The wanderer, in wandering, finds a nightmare in real life — 1264 words, 86,754 total

I had no clue what I was going to write today. 

I knew that yesterday I’d pulled well away from my line-for-scene outline, getting something better by far than the story sentence I’d written… but I had no clue what was going to happen next.

I had the advantage of having the perfect ending for this book already written, and already moved into position at the very end.

So I just asked myself, “What has to happen now to get me from where I left things yesterday to where things end up… including that perfect last line for the mid-point novel?

And what came was scary, and dark, and dangerous, and completely unexpected, torn from memories of my MC’s grandmother that “T” has been dragging around since childhood — memories that came together with an artifact that is going to have to be retrofitted into Book 1 in the five-book one-pass revision…

But… DAMN.

Talk about adventure. 

And I’m only halfway through the scene. Getting out the other end of it is going to be bloody.

But that’s tomorrow.

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Sisters, love, and rivalry — 1268 words, and 85,490 total.

Today I brought a lot of myself into the story — and managed to make one of the more embarrassing incidents in my own childhood into an incredibly embarrassing episode for my main character.

Rule of thumb — all the cool shit you ever did gets to go to your other characters. The places where you took a header into the mud, though? Your main character gets to keep and be humiliated by all of those.

Got the words, closing on the ending, and re-set my objective for the the wordcount on this novel, as well as the finish date, which I’ve shortened considerably.

Had a lot of fun today.

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Calm before the storm day: 1428 words, and 84,814 total

Next Monday, all hell is going to have to break loose in Tori’s world, but today was… nice. Relaxing. She and someone who is going to be important in her life from now on got the chance to meet each other after a long and harrowing ordeal in finding each other.

I was grateful that the writing went so smoothly — and doubly grateful that I woke up early this morning and knew most of what I wanted to accomplish when I started.

I managed to surprise myself a couple times. Discovered a bit of fun I hadn’t anticipated.

And I left myself in a very nice position to pick up next week.

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Post-Cut: Pizza and Ice Cream for the win! 1338 words, and a better direction

So again, here’s where I started:

At this point, I think I have a reasonable chance of actually finishing the book in 90,000 words rather than 110,000, so I reset my counter back to 90K, reset it again so that I was starting at zero words from the new target, and started writing.

And this time, the story stayed weird, and funny — but in the dark and dangerous way that I need for the ending of the middle book of the series.

I still have all those other words over in my Book Four Scrivener document, and while I have them in there as the first two chapters, I’ll probably end up doing a new first chapter, and bumping them down to two and three.

With all the math fiddled and fixed, I got better than my planned words for the day, have a much better focused scene that drives me toward the already written ending of this novel without sidetracking…

And after a compelling and important meeting between between my main character and the person who will become primary to her in the last two books, this chapter had an equally important meeting my main character and one of nearly equal importance.

As things that need to happen at the pivot in a middle book, I’m really pleased with how this is now working.

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A pre-writing post: After Monsterity, 1357 words that no longer fit Book 3

At least, they don’t fit in the way I need them to. 

I have the pieces of the story that I need in them, but writing on which I spent 8022 words, four scenes, and two chapters needs to be small and tight and avoid (in this book, at least) — one scene, not four — the introduction of five new named characters.

I can handle one… and that one — who may or may not be critical in one of the later two books (or who may be a main character in a second series or a stand-alone for me if the first five books do well — is going to have to summarize the concept behind what he’s doing.

Here was today’s lovely starting word count.

 

Here is the unchecking of two chapters that will have to be dropped into the Book Four manuscript as soon as I post this.

And below is the wordcount following the removal of those two chapters to Book Four.

 

There is a bright side. I have a wonderfully funny way to start Book Four now, and a hefty chunk of words I’ll get to count the instant I open THAT manuscript.

Filling in, catching up, and debugging: 1299 words, and 91,045 total.

So… yup… today I ran over my planned length.

It’s okay. I wrote a fair amount of new stuff, debugged a few small issues from yesterday’s work, and I figured out an optimal word length for the book that will, if I can stay under on on my word budget (which is around 1800 to 2000 words for each of the remaining chapters, allow me to finish the book on time with 110,000 words total — which is still within acceptable objective standards for delivering the same reading feel as the first two books.

I made myself laugh at one point, and made myself cry just a page or two later.

And dealt with an issue that has bugged me in so many urban fantasy novels (including ones I’ve really loved) in a way that I have not seen done before.

By doing it, I limited characters’ power creep issues, where in some series I’ve read, the heroes keep gaining additional powers in every book, until by the time the series is over, they’re not people anymore. They’re gods.

I want my people to stay human. Today, I set the parameters to make sure that happens.

Anyway, I like what I got, and I have two more chapters mostly written that I will just read through and adapt to make sure I don’t contradict the rest of the book — and then five big blank chapters in which, in bites of 2000 words apiece, I can write toward the finished final chapter.

I could conceivably finish reading through and touching up both existing chapters tomorrow, and maybe even get started on the first blank one the waits after them tomorrow.

If I can do it, that would be cool.

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Wow! Monsters and spies and the anguish of immortality — 1315 words, and 89,746 total

Tomorrow, I’m going to hit 90,000 words.

I still have eight unwritten chapters outlined, and I still have one character who is locked inside some deep trouble, and one whose real identity has not yet been discovered, and I’m writing toward the ending that’s already finished so at least that won’t go haywire…

But SHORT AND TIGHT isn’t working out for me right now.

I’m pretty sure I’ll have some things I can cut severely in the revision.

Right now, I just have to make sure I don’t leave out the essentials in the first draft.

Good writing day, where I had a lot of fun (though my main character most definitely did not… Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!).

Now to hit the last items on my list.

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A monster, ice cream… and a Scrivener compile error. 1402 words today, and 88,431 words

First, the compile error, because for a while, I thought I wasn’t going to have any way to show my wordcount for the day.

There are things you have to remember to do when using Scrivener that must be taken care of the moment you do them. 

Adding a new chapter file, for example, requires that you then go into your COMPILE section of the program and check the box noting that the chapter is to be compiled. Unchecked files are what keep all your background notes, worldbuilding crap, and other stuff that isn’t going to show up in the actual novel from being counted in your word count. Most days, because I’m worldbuilding as I go, I have a fair number of words that DON’T get counted because they aren’t actually part of the story.

If, however, you forget to check the box for something that is to be in the book itself, you lose your daily wordcount from showing up in your nifty little tracker, and while —  when you do suddenly realize that you’ve written a helluva lot of words without moving the bar one bit, and you go in and check the COMPILE box — you have fixed the problem, and the NEXT words you write will show up in the progress tracker (and your manuscript print-out), your daily words to that point will NOT show up in the tracker.

So I had to highlight today’s words from each of two chapters, and then copy the screenshots of today’s INTERREGNUM and MONSTERITY words to figure out when I was done.

1041 new words in INTERREGNUM.

361 new words in MONSTERITY.

Which are named rather than numbered, because I’m tired of renumbering chapters. When I have the thing done in first draft, then I’ll go back and renumber everything.

But I love what I got. I’m finally bringing together two people who met in the very early part of Book 1, because a big secret has finally come out.

Good writing day, in spite of my lapse in checking the right boxes BEFORE I started writing.

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