Holly Lisle's Blog, page 37

No jury duty, 1588 words, and am now over 20% through Book 3 of 5 (also… fasting…)

I’m grateful for writing, and for being well into a story that holds my attention and makes me need to know what happens next.

Having been fasting since Sunday night, I’ve now had nothing but coffee, water, and vitamins for long enough that my hindbrain has started taking action against me.

My legs keep picking me up and walking me into the kitchen and toward the fridge — until my mind catches them at their treachery and turns me around with some difficulty and walks me back.

But all the news is good news.

Being notified last night that I’m released from jury duty until the next term when I’m drawn, I was able to focus on the fiction (in between the fights between my mind and my legs), and get some good, tight words.

1588, well over my 1250-word objective.

I threw myself into the story, and managed to not open the fridge, or touch any little “just something” snacks.

I am not by any means world’s greatest student of the art of fasting — but I can keep reminding myself that we’ll all eat tonight, and use that knowledge to reassure the part of my brain sending me in search of food when I forgot to block it that a meal is, in fact, not far off.

On today’s bit of the story: A father tells a daughter how she is to leave home — and why. And in her I found the replacement for the character who I’d planned for her role (while doing those five line-for-scene outlines), and who was entirely wrong for this particular part.

This is the third of five novels, and in it, a central battle is building — and NOW I have the right character to step into the role I’d arbitrarily assigned to an existing character who didn’t have the strength or the skills to carry it.

Total word count: 19,799. I passed 20% of the first draft finished when I hit 18,000, but didn’t notice.

And since I always run at least a bit long, today’s word count is probably closer to a true 20%.

Now I’m off to do the rest of the day’s work. And the rest of this week is mine without concern for being pulled away from my writing by jury duty. 

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Good wordcount, a good concept… but, jury duty willing, tomorrow I’ll be doing a fair amount of fixing

Yesterday’s jury duty message was, boiled down, “Call again today.” So at 5:30 tonight, I’ll find out whether I’ll be working tomorrow or not.

Meanwhile, instead of my daily short fast (from the night before until around 4 or 5 PM, when I eat my daily meal) — I’m doing a long fast.

For folks familiar with intermittent fasting, my daily eating-to-fasting ratio is anything from 1:23 to 3:21. And some weekends are “any hours if it’s keto”.

But this week, my last food was Sunday evening. And I will have my next food on Wednesday at around five or six PM (or whatever time I leave the courthouse, if there is a session and if the day’s work runs longer than that).

Meanwhile, I’m a bit — skittery. A bit predatory.

I’ve learned that when you fast, after a couple days your body starts ramping up energy, pushing you to get up and move, to go out and hunt things, to find something tasty and kill it because you need to feed the fat stores — because those stores are the stuff you’re suddenly running on exclusively.

Fasting is very, very good for those of us who at one time had cancers fed by blood glucose — and being down about two thirds of the right side of my tongue to remove a lot of dysplasia and a tiny bit of cancer, and thinking I might prefer to hang on to the rest of my tongue, I eat very few carbs.

Carbs raise your blood sugar, blood sugar feeds susceptible cancers — and tongue surgery after the anesthesia wears off hurts about a hundred times worse that wide-awake no-medications-not-even-Tylenol childbirth. I’ve done both.

Anyway. 

I got 1446 words, and met the character I needed to meet today, and she’s talking to me from her point of origin — but the voice I originally had for her is wrong. I’ll be able to keep a lot of today’s words, but my start tomorrow — if I’m here writing — will be to read through from the point where she starts speaking and bring the first bits of voice up to the stuff I got toward the end that is better.

If I don’t… well, she’ll wait.

I’ve met her now. I like her. And introducing her to my MC before the event that happens on (book time, not real time) Friday before the concert is going to be interesting.

The words weren’t perfect. But they were good enough to take me where I need to go.

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Of heredity and the curse and blessing of ancestors – 1264 words and 16,765 total

Today was a goooood writing day. This was a solid Monday in which I leapt into my story world, discovered a massive and necessary secret behind my main character’s origins, found my way through a fair amount of backstory while avoiding what would otherwise have been exposition, and came out the other end knowing something about my main character that had been a complete secret to me before this.

She makes more sense to me now.

And today I discovered the Five Worlds. Nothing more on that except that I find them really cool, and they give my MC something she didn’t know she had.

And if I DON’T have jury duty for the rest of the week (which I won’t find out until 5: 30 tonight), I’m in a great place to pick up with the next scene tomorrow morning.

And I’m so looking forward to writing it, so I’m really hoping they don’t need me.

Meanwhile, however, in case this is the last post from me for a while, I’m throwing in a picture of Sheldon, just because I think he’s very handsome, and his personality inspires the that of the cat in the series. A little bit, anyway.

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The past visits my main character’s present, and she meets a piece of her father. 1297 words, 15,501 total

I’m still ahead of my target completion date for finishing the first draft, though I’m only gaining ground in little bites.

Little bites, though, are repeatable — and a lot more fun than running up against “to hit my deadline, today I have to write 10,000 words.” I’ve done that before.

It’s an exercise in misery that makes me hate the job.

ANYWAY…

Today the story is taking my main character into her family’s past — into the truth behind the mystery of her father’s identity.

The words ran well (though I started a bit late and pretty rough, and took more that three hours to get them), and now I can head off to do the rest of the day’s work.

Before I go, though, I discovered a feature of Fleeter that allowed me to make things on my desktop organizer easier to find. I discovered that the little icons in each box were optional. I wanted a way to differentiate between support documents, unfinished manuscripts, and the stuff that was either finished or absolutely critical to what I’m writing currently (for all future definitions of CURRENT).

So if you look at the third row, I now have my Current First Drafts of Ohio #1 and Ohio #2 in plain blue boxes without any icons. And spaces for the other three when they’re done to the right of those. Each, when hovered over, shows the complete text for the abbreviation. I’ve shown the detail text for Ohio 2 Complete Unrevised First Draft beside its box in the screenshot below.

The two half-with boxes on the next row, lacking icons and outline in orange, are 5 Ohio Synopses and Ohio Titles Brainstorming.

So… hope you have a good weekend.

And (ONLY IF I DON’T HAVE JURY DUTY NEXT WEEK) I’ll see you on Monday.

If I do, both this blog and the Tuesday Writer’s Mailing List are going to be without emails for a week. (Maybe Longer).

I’ll post what I know here as soon as I know it.

OHIO #3 – 1356 words and a strange but touching moment with my main character

The words just flew today.

It started out being pretty tough going — it took me a while to find them, and when I found them, they were emotionally difficult. I was with my character in her head, and looking through her eyes at the terrifying future she’s facing alone, without any family…

But then she came up with a solution to locating her family that I hadn’t even thought of, even though I’d set up a process for it at the beginning of this book — it’s really cool, doesn’t put them in danger, but will, IF she can locate them, at least let her know that she is not the last of her people.

And my fingers flew, getting it all down.

I found myself crying while writing it — because I already know the truth about what she’s just hoping to find.

She does have family out there.

They are not going to be what she expects.

But while it won’t look like it initially, finding them will eventually turn out to be a good thing for her, and for them.

I’m now off to get all the other things listed in my bullet journal done.

And to let what happens next in Ohio #3 percolate a bit in the back of my mind, so that when I pick this back up tomorrow morning, I’ll have someplace cool to take it.

 

 

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1286 words, and a nice twist in the story.

I got my 1250 words with a few extra today, though it took longer than three hours, and there are a fair list of things I didn’t get done… and that I’ll have to do tomorrow, so there might not be any (or many) words Thursday.

What I got was hard going, but I like it. My hero is dealing with a secret from her grandmother’s past, and a new acquaintance who’s own grandmother just died — and a deeply disturbing connection between these two dead grandmothers.

And monsters.

And a bit of magic, or something indistinguishable from it.

Good writing day.

I’ve been fasting since Sunday morning (meaning I had a cup of cashews Sunday morning, and have had nothing but water and coffee since) and I won’t eat anything until about six PM tonight, so I’m a smidge grumpy. 

So, with a fair amount of work still pending, I’m going to move all of it until tomorrow in my bullet journal, and call it a day today.

Hang in!

Ohio #3: Net gain of 1079 words … and quick notes about The Emerald Sun and the Moon & Sun series

As always, I started out the morning by doing a quick read-through of what I got the day before, doing light edits (and sometimes removing stuff that does not work), and then rolling from there into writing the new scene.

I lost a chunk of words to having managed to say the same thing twice yesterday in different words — I kept the better version. Still ended up with a net gain of 1079, and I’ll take it. It was a tougher-than-usual three hours, but it ended well.

Changing topics: THE MOON AND SUN SERIES

Years ago, I sold a three-book YA series to Scholastic — The Moon & Sun series. And wrote the first two novels, The Ruby Key and The Silver Door.

And then got the news that “the series isn’t doing as well as we had hoped” — and never wrote the third book.

There has been a bit of a discussion going on elsewhere in this blog about that series, and about the still-not-written Book Three (The Emerald Sun).

To bring that conversation into this decade, I did get back all rights to the first two books, and last year I started into Book Three.

However, I realized that I have no hope whatsoever of making back enough money on those books to pay me for the time it would take me to write the last one, edit and typeset all three, pay for the cover art for them, and republish them.

There weren’t that many readers in the first place, all the folks who’d read them are now adults…

My problem is that I still want to finish the series.

And with the Ohio Novels — a world I love set in a place I love with characters I love, and that is in the popular Urban Fantasy genre — if the Ohio Novels are successful enough, maybe I could afford to write the third book of the Moon & Sun series and not have it pay me a working wage.

I figured this out last year, and put The Emerald Sun on hold, and started into the still unnamed Ohio series.

If the Ohio Novels sell well enough, I’ll take a one month to finish the revision of the Cadence Drake novel The Wishbone Conspiracy, and another month to get it into print. And then I’ll take six months to write The Emerald Sun, and over the next year, working on those three books after getting my day’s words on the sixth Ohio Novel, I bring out all three Moon & Sun novels in my own editions.

It won’t be fast… and I’m sorry about that.

And if the Ohio Novels don’t take off for me and start bringing in an income that will cover speculative projects, it won’t happen at all.

But that’s the chance I have, and I’m going to take it.

If you happen to be one of those folks who has been waiting forever for those those books, sign up in the form below to get my weekly updates. If and when I’m able to start into the Moon & Sun books, that’s where you’ll hear about it.

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On jury standby — so I wrote 1279 more words, and discovered the answers to a couple of grim secrets

The court did not need me today. I’ll have to call the private number each evening before the next session for the next two weeks to see if I need to report the next day. So every word I get for the next two weeks is literally on borrowed time. I owe it to the justice system, but am getting to take as many pieces of it for myself as I can get until they tell me to come in.

I’m okay with that.

My characters showed me a piece of a puzzle that dropped on my head in Book One, and for which I had no answer… just a lot of questions.

Today’s answer to today’s question was scary. Not funny-scary, either.

But it was the piece I needed to tie a central story event in Book One all the way through to Book Five, and it definitely made that new character I mentioned a couple of posts back into a “gonna be in the rest of the series” character.

I like my words, I got just over my target number for the day, and maybe I’ll get to just write fiction every day for the next two weeks. It could happen.

And if this space is blank over the next two weeks, or has a little Jury Duty notice instead of a post, you’ll know that I appreciated every day I got to keep for myself… And I’ll be back to work as soon as I can.

I’m off my game — had a bad writing day. 486 words.

So here’s the deal. 

I have jury duty coming up next Monday. Have never done it before, but I didn’t try to get out of it. I’m a citizen. This is part of what being a citizen means.

So if there’s an upcoming trial scheduled during my period of service, (which I won’t know until Sunday night), I will not be here next week.

If there is a trial, I’m going to go in to the courthouse, and I will take a notebook with me, and write in longhand in between whatever the process is that includes picking jurors, and do my best to work on the story, or if not the story, then on collateral worldbuilding.

Today, though, I’ve had a helluva time focusing.

I managed in spite of the upcoming potential chaos to my schedule to start out by reading through yesterday’s words, deleting junk and getting new stuff — my daily process…

And I came out with a net gain of 486 words, which is better than nothing.

But my focus is off. I’m tired, I’m grumpy, I’m frazzled, and every once in a while, you have to look a the fact that you’ve been struggling and flailing and not getting anything you actually like, and you have to say, “Okay. I’ve had my ass in the chair since before 8 AM, and I have had nothing even resembling a breakthrough.”

“Time to walk away.”

If there is a trial and if I am chosen as a juror, I am anticipating NO WORDS next week.

AND if I am chosen, and the trial is big, there might one or several more weeks in which I won’t be here, other than to let you know that I’m doing my civic duty, and to let you know when I hope to be back — and then to tell you when I am back.

I’ll miss you while I’m gone.

Tougher day than expected: 1106 words, a bit of ripping out… and the whiff of “big bad”

I always start my words by reading through what I wrote the day before, and fixing a few typos, and getting myself back into the voice of the book — 

And I discovered I’d been redundant yesterday, repeating a fair amount of material across a break between two chapters. 

So I started out the morning my losing a bunch of words, then writing my ass off, and not quite hitting my daily objective, in spite of most certainly having written enough words to have done so.

But these are the breaks. Some days, you run out of time and discover you’ve come up a bit short.

I still love what I got — and bad, bad things are definitely in motion for my MC and her friends.

Somebody else might end up on the slab tomorrow…

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