Holly Lisle's Blog, page 36

Snow… FFS! But 1259 words that I love, and 27,647 words total… and your picture of the building map I drew yesterday.

It snowed at around three in the morning, and it’s sputtering again now. Fortunately, while the snow has been sticking, the temperature has never dropped below freezing, so we shouldn’t lose blooming flowers, or tender crops, or my spectacular personal back-yard display of dandelions and violets.

(And absolutely no sarcasm here — dandelions and wild violets are my two favorite spring flowers, and have been since I was about five. About some things, I’m remarkably consistent.)

Picture is my back yard and the yards behind it, just a few minutes ago.

On to work. I’ll have to take tomorrow off for personal matters, so there’s not likely to be a blog post…

But today the words flew. And I loved what I got. Nice twists, a fun discovery, and small hints toward the scary bits in the story’s near future.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, I needed to map out a building for the book, and I drew it into my bullet journal so that I wouldn’t misplace it (which is a problem I have with maps in general). And I wanted to show it to you, and finally got the picture from the phone to my blog so you can see it.

I blocked out story spoilers.

Everything else, you can safely see.

The fictional locals have a derogatory name for this ultra-modern monstrosity which I do use in the book but which I won’t use in the blog. It’s probably mostly guessable, though. (I am pleased to note that no equivalently hideous ultra-modern monstrosity exists in the town in real life.)

I’ll also state that if you’re a character in the story, you do not want to be identified as a visitor when you go into this building. If you don’t work there and have an employee badge, your best bet is to stay far, far away from “Redacted” Enterprises. While I didn’t realize it while I was drawing and labelling things, I discovered that “visitors” is in quotes for a dark and evil reason.

1300 words, a weird map, and a couple of nice twists.

I started a bit late, and started in with a problematic bit of what I wrote yesterday…

And stuff clicked. I also drew an enigmatic map in my bullet journal, and if I wasn’t having a miserable time transferring stuff from my phone to my desktop, you’d have a spiffy picture of that right now.

Since I am, I’ll drop it into a future post.

Meanwhile, however, my MC isn’t in trouble at the moment… but in getting someone else out of trouble, she’s going to end up neck deep in the soup.

Some of this is plotted (those 30 story sentences), but a lot of it is simply pouring out of my fingers as I work from one scene to the next.

And I read something both wonderful and relevant to the Ohio Series yesterday in Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky which I’m going to quote here:

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place where you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently…”

That’s what coming home to Ohio has been for me, and it’s what these books are, down at the very bottom, about. They have magic, and monsters, and a lot of alien strangeness. 

But they are still here, now, in this place that I love and that I have loved since I was born here, and forty-one years away has given me both new eyes, and extra colors.

And I’m using them on these stories.

This is going to have to count as a sick day.

I’m feeling rotten — have been since I rolled out of bed this morning. 

Having done my damnedest since 9AM, and having gotten a whole 265 words for my effort, I am now calling time of death on the workday, and going back to bed.

I’ll try this again tomorrow.

Good words, a fun scene, and the very good tension of upcoming danger

Today’s words came easily, and were fun to get.

I started by reading through the last few paragraphs from yesterday, picked up where I left off, and today’s scene flowed nicely, introducing both a long-running “failure to mention something important” by one of my important secondary characters, and then a second such “gee, why would anyone need to know that?” from the same character.

This particular unreliable protagonist has been fun to write from scene one in Book 1 onward, and he continues to both amuse me and make me want to whap him with a fly-swatter (or something bigger) on a pretty regular basis.

My folks, including my main character, are piecing together a dubious rescue attempt into dangerous territory — and while I have no clue how this is going to work, or what’s going to happen next Monday, I do have the entire weekend to let it percolate in the back of my mind, and run little footsteps through my dreams.

Most excellent writing day.

And a big, big thanks to the folks who are funding my Ko-Fi for the three hours daily that are making it much, much less stressful for me to write these five books. If you’re one of those folks, please make sure you’re on the mailing list for the weekly blog updates, because at the point where I’m ready to take these live, I’m going to have to make sure your name in the acknowledgements is spelled correctly (or whatever you want me to put in instead of your real name).

I’ll let everyone know its time to send me the name you want in there from the email address you use on Ko-Fi. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll just use what you have in the Ko-Fi account, but I know a LOT of folks have previously (when I was on Patreon) wanted something different than what was in their account.

We’re, best guess, still about a year and a half off from that. But it’s definitely worth mentioning now, so that you can make sure you’re on the list.

Today, the big cuts paid off big — the combat accountant, the buddy assassin, and 1254 words

Back into positive numbers today, and it feels good. 

And the story flew. My protagonist has discovered that to her astonishment, she is not as alone in the universe as she was led to believe…  

… but discovers immediately thereafter that she is in immediate and deadly danger of losing this family she never knew she had. She calls in the troops.

And discovers she has at her disposal a combat accountant (nope, I will NOT explain) that her lawyer failed to mention existed — while the lawyer’s assassin bodyguard gets excited about the possibilities inherent in rescuing the family member. (He’s a very nice guy for an assassin.)

So. That was my day. It has been a good day.

Now off to do the rest of the stuff on the list.

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Get Holly’s Free Fiction Sampler, plus Weekly Fiction Updates

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Today’s words funded by my Ko-Fi supporters.

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

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Sign up for Holly’s Thursday Writing Tips

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Wow, did things get tense today! 1252 words, and 22,234 words total

My main character was in full force today. Yesterday’s gutting of the wrong words gave me the space I needed to get the right ones, and my three hours flew.

I mention in a previous post having dreamt of my half-sister (who died some years ago) being with me… and today she stepped into the story, not as she was, but as she could have been and would have been had life and the circumstances of her birth been kinder.

She is in trouble, of course (because she’s in important character in a novel written by me). She won’t be named Julie — naming her that wouldn’t fit the story, the world I’ve created, or who she was in real life — and I will not erase who she was in real life, because as long as I knew her, she did her best at everything she tried.

In my memory, she lives as she was — I will not erase the truth of her.

In the novel, she’ll live as she might have been in a world that was kinder to her and considerably more magical than this one.

Now, on to other things.

 

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Get Holly’s Free Fiction Sampler, plus Weekly Fiction Updates

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Today’s words funded by my Ko-Fi supporters.

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

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

Sign up for Holly’s Thursday Writing Tips

◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈━◈

kofiWidgetOverlay.draw('hollylisle', { 'type': 'floating-chat', 'floating-chat.donateButton.text': 'Support Me', 'floating-chat.donateButton.background-color': '#f45d22', 'floating-chat.donateButton.text-color': '#fff' });

Redundant redundancies and a better direction lead to a BIG negative word-count

The day's final word count.

Yesterday I finished with 22,297 words.

Today I started in a bit before 8 AM, full of coffee and certainty that I knew where I’d be going.

First cut in word count

I picked up exactly where I left off, and adding to yesterday’s scene — and then, hitting a chunk of older material that was wrong — I pulled out 673 words.

Fine. It happens.

I was still working through the problem scene… and I thought I was near the end of it…

And then I hit a big chunk of text that was older, set off as a separate scene from a different POV, that I’d forgotten I put in there.

It had to have been some of the words I got last week, before I discovered the current path and why it’s better. That POV and its entire contents were wrong for the direction I’ve decided to take.

Second cut in word count

So I cut all 1581 words of that. Big sigh here, but this is a novel, and it’s the middle book of the series, and a lot of pieces I’m pulling in from the first and second books at this point have to mesh.

So I removed what was more than a day’s planned words… and I kept writing.

I made great progress. I love what I got today, but no sooner had I finished the scene and started reading the stuff that followed than I discovered a third chunk of text that does not at ALL fit the new, better, much more compelling conflict that I found yesterday.

And this one really hurt. I cut out 2,249 words.

Third cut in word count

I still wrote more, but after three hours and change, I’m still buried deep in negative numbers, and at this point I have to walk away to do the other stuff I have to deal with on Tuesdays.

So I end with a count of -1319, and I know that I got a lot of words, and I know I like what I finally ended up with… But DAMN.

I’m sort of dreading tomorrow.

It was hard coming back. 803 words net, and a lot of bloody fixing

I read through last Thursday’s pages, where they’d had a good long time to cool.

The mistakes were clear, as were the things I had to show as important.

So I’ve been working for four hours, have done nothing else since I got up, and what I have is better… but I didn’t come close to getting the 1250 words I’d hoped for.

It was a good enough day, even if I still feel like crap.

I know I wrote well over my objective word count. With all the deletions and fixes, though, I don’t have that much to show for it.

Unscheduled Day Off … ugh!

If it’s been a while since you’ve done a longer fast, you forget.

Intermittent fasting, where you maintain a no-snacks rule and eat at around six or seven every evening is dead simple. You adapt, you don’t feel hungry or deprived, and every day you have plenty of energy to do everything you need.

Longer fasting isn’t like that. You’re running on yourself — feeding yourself out of fat stores — and breaking down those fat stores requires a fair amount of energy. But the weird thing is, you have energy to burn. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to relax, because your body is keeping you up and running so that you can, you know, run down a gazelle or go out with the rest of the gang and bring down a mastodon.

The objective of our bodies is to keep on living. Our bodies remember starvation, because they’re the offspring of the people who survived it. 

They know that you burn fat to keep the body up and running, set its energy to HIGH, keep it awake, keep it moving, because the creature that keeps moving is the creature that has a chance to find food.

When food hits your system, however, Primitive Body says, “That’s enough of that.”

And the energy doesn’t just drop back to normal. It drops to way below normal, so that you can rebuild those necessary fat stores that will keep you going through the next famine.

I’m in that trough right now (and reminding myself that intermittent fasting doesn’t have energy peaks or troughs, which is why I like it). I had to drag myself out of bed. It was an effort to shower.

And even thinking my way through this post is a struggle. So.

I’m taking today off. When I’m done, I’m going to stretch out on the couch and maybe read. And probably sleep.

And ask myself if I really want to make a three-day fast a weekly part of my regimen. Anti-cancer… very good.

Self-inflicted feeling like shit?

Maybe not my best choice when I’m getting words and finishing books.

1695 words… and an epic battle

Really short post today because I’m desperately behind on everything else, but I love the words I got today.

1695 total (way over my 1250 objective).

Epic fight for a character to win a job she doesn’t want at all.

And the deeper race to see what happens to her next begins.