Holly Lisle's Blog, page 44

Sometimes the bear eats you… 833 words, but I do like them

I started in this morning at about 7:30 AM, got going at a pretty good clip, and then realized I didn’t like what I was getting.

So I deleted that, came at it from a different direction…

And didn’t like what I was getting.

So I tried a third time. 

As I write this post, it’s 12:23 PM, and I’ve decided the third direction is working, and is keepable. I’ve written a lot of words today, but the only words you get to count are the ones you get to keep.

So I didn’t hit my objective, even though I most assuredly wrote more words than the objective.

This is writing. Sometimes its tougher than this. Sometimes I end up with negative numbers. 

Today I’m still on the right side of the line, even though my progress bar isn’t as fat and beautiful as I would prefer.

Tomorrow, I’ll do it again.

Trusting your characters to surprise you: 1400 words from Friday, reported a day late

Writing yesterday went really well. I hit this awesome surprise, where one of my characters suddenly did something perfectly unexpected, showing up at my main character’s house with a cell phone video showing the impossible in action.

It was exactly the weird and twisty wonderfulness that thrilled me, and made me laugh, and at the same time made chills run down my spine, because it makes the situation my main character is in so much worse.

After the writing, however, my day took a sideways turn, and I didn’t have the chance to blog.

So I don’t have a spiffy picture of yesterday’s daily progress.

But I did get the words, and I cannot wait until Monday to get back to them. I will wait, because part of the process is religiously observing the two days off that let my subconscious mind refill.

I’m refilling.

So enjoy your weekend. I intend to.

Fun, Joy, Surprises, and The Way You Want A Writing Day to Go

Some writing days are just wonderful, and amazing, and fun from beginning to end… and you have to appreciate them when you have them, because a lot of them aren’t.

So this is me being joyfully grateful.

In spite of the fact that I got nearly three thousand words today, I actually only wrote about 1500 new ones. The others came from scenes I sort of remembered writing in two different failed starts of Book 2, in which I went off in wrong directions. (THOSE two false starts, you see, are excellent examples of the OTHER kinds of writing days.)

After the second crash, of course, I did a careful line-for-scene outline using a new technique I’ve come up with.

Today, working off that incredibly useful outline (something that will be showing up as an addendum in at least one or two of my writing classes, probably How to Write a Novel and How to Revise Your Novel, but possibly something else as well), I realized that there were a couple of scenes I’d remembered that might be cut, pieced together, and adapted for this version.

So I went in, grabbed copy, revised, rethought, moved things around, dumped everything that didn’t relate, and came up with a tense, compelling scene that brought together things worth saving from both earlier starts, all tied together with the thing I’ve discovered in this version of the story that makes everything work.

Things that previously had been parts of two entirely different stories that didn’t connect at all suddenly came together (with some help and hard work, of course) into this one scene that has secrets buried in it, leads to surprises to come, and let me do something both funny and awful to a villain.

Today was fun.

But today is also because of this…

I love snow.. and now I have some. 

Better and better — Ohio Novel 2 and 2377 words

I woke up this morning knowing how Ohio #2 needed to end. And today I jumped to all the way to Chapter 25, five chapters from the planned last Chapter 30, and started writing the necessary stuff to get the story to that ending. Tomorrow, I may drop back to chapter 12, and then write toward todays work on the beginning of the ending.

Or I might write from 25 all the way to the end, and the go back and pick up the middle — though that path in the past has led to a certain amount of tinkering with middles and endings and even beginnings to get things right in the final draft. 

Either way though, with the exception of choose-your-own-adventure novels, readers read fiction linearly.

And most of the time, I more or less write it that way.

This book is coming at me from a lot of directions at once

But it is, by God, coming.

I wrote 2377 words this morning — way more than I’d planned — and I wouldn’t have even stopped except I have other listed in my bullet journal that must be accomplished today.

Writing was delightful, though. I built in a good, solid hunk of action tied to a bit of a mystery — and I pretty much know how that bit of mystery ends. I could write it tomorrow. Maybe.

Then I could use that bit to write the ending, and introduce the issue that I now think is going to set up Ohio #3.

But I might let what I know and have on the page sit and age for a bit now, and go back to the empty Chapter 13, and follow up with what I wrote yesterday.

Either way, I win.

Usually I don’t know the ending until I write it. This happens for me with a lot of novels, but most spectacularly with third novel of the Secret Texts trilogy, where I had no clue at all how the thing was going to end until my right brain started pouring its surprise ending out as my fingers were moving… and that turned out to be my dream ending.

This wasn’t a dream. This was more like having a brick of fiction attached to a happy tiger cub dropped onto my head from Santa in a sleigh.

The fiction brick was nothing like what I expected.
I’ll have to find a good home for the tiger… and while it’s with me, it might leave some messes in the book as I get to the finish line.

I didn’t even believe in Santa until the bugger present-bombed me.

And the results so far have made for a pretty good surprise.

Link to a special thank you for the folks funding my fiction writing time…

This link will take the folks who are funding my fiction writing over to my Ko-Fi page, where you’ll find my update, thank-you, and what I’ll be doing for the folks funding me.

Thanks to everyone who’s helping me out.

Pretty good day — Ohio Novel #2 Progress

This morning, I increased my daily word-count goal to 1500 (up from 1250). This was a small change, and I’d been hitting that number pretty regularly anyway. So I decided to make it my regular objective.

I came in just above that with 1532 words for the day. 

Have a nice situation going on with my main character and one of my favorite protagonists who is in deep trouble, and with a handful of folks who have gathered to figure out how they might help.

I like what I got, and this has left me in a good position from which to pick up words tomorrow. (Characters are still in trouble, and there’s some conflict about how it might be solved.)

Now I’m off to write the next Thursday Tip, my free weekly email for fiction writers, and after that, I have a longish stack of other things on my bullet journal to get done.

It was, however, a good writing day — and my focus on a reasonable word count, and on doing fiction first, is making me very happy.

Monday, and 1333 Words

Not a lot to say, but the wreckage of last week has now been cleared away, and I sat my ass down and wrote my book, and Ohio #2 is 1333 words closer to the finish line, with a total of 35,900 words down…

In FIRST DRAFT, which is still a long way from done.

But. Before you can do the revision, ya gotta do the first draft. 

And today’s words were fun.

Seven. But close to done.

At the moment, I don’t have much more to say than that. If I can get this last hill of shit shoveled, I will then be able to get some actual words today.

If I get to my fiction before I run out of working hours, I’ll be starting at 34,298 words, with a writing goal of 1250 or better — but if I get to work on the book at all today, and don’t hit my wordcount, just getting to write some fiction will be a win.

Here’s hoping. AND working.

Help I didn’t ask for… a long slog ahead to fix what a “helpful” company irreversibly broke

Oh, irony. 

Two days ago, I think, “Gee… the writing is going really well, I miss blogging, and I would love to blog about writing fiction again.” 

Two days ago, after a middle-of-the-road-but-not-bad day of getting my words — I have fun, I like the words I get, and I get enough of them to move the story forward and to add some pretty spiffy complications — some nameless jackass at some nameless company decides that said jackass can make some changes to my basic NONWRITING work process that will make my life better by breaking the way I do damn near everything I do.

I can either put my faith in this awesome company [THAT’S IRONY] which — having once completely broken my still-unfixed daily work — has proven that although it might NOT break my process again, it could. At any time.

I can say, “Yeah, sure. I’ll take that chance.”

Or I can change my process, not depend on the help of that company or any other company like it, and make sure I control this particular mission-critical task from end to end.

EASY DECISION: Wherever it’s possible, you don’t give other folks the power to wreck your work.

OUTCOME: I have to figure out how to control the process from end to end.

So yesterday I worked from 6 a.m., when I started work and discovered I couldn’t work on anything else until I fixed this, to not long after 6 p.m., when my eyes were crossed and I didn’t dare keep going.

And my accomplishment can be summed up in a single number.

3

This is an objective number that defines what I accomplished yesterday, encompassing 12 hours of straight work, one cup of coffee, and one bathroom break. This is not 3 out of some knowable bigger number, because I have no way of telling what the end number could be. I could be 6. It could be 60. It could be worse than that. 

It is, however, an objective number of what I’ve completed in a finite but very large task.

BECAUSE… if I can’t get words, I can damnwell stick with my decision to get back to blogging, so that when I can get back to fiction, the blog will attest that I did not just forget. I did not lie down. I did not make excuses.

So that, when I can get back to the words, I will have the reminder of what broke them for however long this takes, and the reminder of how important it is to keep your mission-critical processes in your own hands.

Three. At the end of today there will be another number. At the end of tomorrow, there will be one after that. And so on, until this is fixed. 

‘Nuff said. Onward.

Restarting Fiction Progress Updates

Ohio Novel Word Daily Words: 1402 of 1250

To say that I’ve been absolutely shitty about keeping up with the blog would be too kind by half.

I’ve been in Ohio now for a year and three months, more or less, and have written six posts since getting here.

One of them was about my fiction progress.

There have been some things that have gotten in the way, like Covid, and trying to revise Dead Man’s Party only to discover it wasn’t a book I wanted to have written, and working on the Ohio Novels, and the stress and depression that apparently has hit a lot of other folks besides me with Covid and lockdowns and a world that doesn’t feel particularly warm or welcoming right at the moment.

Doing a regular podcast also pulled from my pool of “time that isn’t writing fiction.”

But the thing is, I have been making very good progress on my fiction, and I suddenly realized that going back to posting that would let me share a bit of how this is going.

Because in spite of all the shit in the world right now and how it has affected everything else in my life, the Ohio Novels are coming along nicely.

Book One is done in revision, and is awaiting its final editor pass (from Matt) and me doing the typesetting, and then the bug-hunt. NONE of which will happen until the first five novels are complete and I have my small team of bug-hunter volunteers.

I’m currently doing a minimum of 1250 words per day on Book 2, Monday through Friday.

I’ll post as regularly as I can. Fiction words come before blogging. Things like technical issues over at HollysWritingClasses.com come before blogging.

But coming only after the sanctity of fiction and the necessity of keeping technical stuff working with the nonfiction, I’m going to shoot for SHORT daily posts on the fiction, and will consider this a success if I accomplish a minimum of two or three posts a week.

I’ll include my little Scrivener screenshot of where I am at the end of each writing day for remaining four novels, along with a bit of “what’s going on in the writing or my life”, and occasional links to my temporary UrbanFantasyGirl.com site for readers who like that sort of thing and who think they might like these Ohio novels.

The Ohio Novels are going to be under a pseudonym well separate from the OTHER pseudonyms I’ll be moving to.

I am finally biting the bullet on the whole issue of using pseudonyms, which I’ve resisted for thirty years.

I am a broad writer, with a big backlist of fiction in many genres and an equally big backlist of nonfiction (though most of that is exclusively on my writing site, HollysWritingClasses.com), and I was the idiot who believed from the beginning that all my books should be under my real name.

Turns out, that’s an awesome way to guarantee you’re going to bring folks who love just one of your genres to a shit ton of stuff they’re guaranteed to hate.

Most of my pseudonyms are going to be public.

My SF is going to be under HD Lisle.
My high fantasy is going to be under Holly Lisle.
My nonfiction is going to be under Holly D. Lisle.

These books and classes are all already out there, I have already wrecked their find-your-perfect-audience hopes and killed their Amazon also-reads, and while some day I may successfully clean up that mess, these books can’t be my priority. Hoping to get them to sell better is going to be like towing big iceburgs with rowboats.

I’m going to have to re-cover, re-blurb, re-link, re-promote, and bring in the new pen names WHILE writing fiction full-time AND taking notes for the update of my How to Revise Your Novel class, and none of this stuff is going to happen overnight. It’s a process.

My urban fantasy Ohio Novels, however, are NOT going to be under a public pseudonym for the initial book launches. (There’s nothing I can do to keep folks from outing my pseudonym eventually, but at least I can give the Ohio stuff a chance to build an audience that doesn’t also bombard them with everything else I’ve ever written that they would hate.)

I’m going to give them the best chance of finding their perfect audience that I can manage.

BUT anyway…

You can see by today’s screenshot exactly how far along I am in Ohio #2, and what I’ve done so far today. It’s not mammoth progress, but done consistently, it does add up.

And that’s where I am right now. Stressed like everyone else, doing five days a week of manageable word counts on the second of five books, having the occasional day where the words actually fly…

And now once again taking my fiction-writing process public in small and manageable ways. And, I hope, reconnecting with some old friends who used to hang out here with me.