Holly Lisle's Blog, page 48

Wordcount doesn’t reflect progress on the Ohio Series, Novel 1 today

I built the first part of my series Octopus Map, uncovered the secret behind how the magic works, did a big rethink of a couple of items on my provisional outline, and if I only have 622 words of progress to show for that, it’s okay.  When I get back to this next week, I’ll be on much sturdier ground.

I know how the magic works now. And WHY. 

How and why are the core of the whole thing — and it’s a very cool kind of magic, and something that’s going to change my protagonist in ways she cannot yet even imagine.

The trick is to set a hard limit on what the main character can do so as to avoid “Superman Syndrome” in which the heroine has a superpower for every problem.

Today I made sure that will never happen.

It was a good writing day.

 

The Ohio Series: Novel 1 – Friday snippet (a day early) that might not make the final version

I’m going to note that the urban fantasy series I’m writing operates around the importance of trade.

That it’s and old system, and that it operates across multiple dimensions.

And that my protagonist is a cop, and the guy she’s working with is… difficult to get a handle on.

With that set-up, this is so offbeat and was so unexpected that it might have to come out of the final draft. It might not fit once I’ve done the final worldbuilding. But with the usual caveats: 

This is rough, raw, first draft; it undoubtedly contains errors, and I do NOT make corrections from this draft; this material is copyrighted to me; do not quote or use in reviews…

The set-up is that my protagonist’s ally is explaining why he had to change his identity. Here’s the snippet…

“Building a network up from nothing is a helluva lot of work, though, and let me just say that the rewards offered by this particular world were… not enticing.”

“Prospective bride not pretty enough?”

“You ever see Star Wars?” he asked me.

“Sure.”

“She looked a lot like Princess Leia, minus the sticky-bun hairdo. And was a real princess.”

“Then what was the problem?”

“She was a real princess. And a cannibal. She’d had two previous prospective bridegrooms killed and cooked when they failed to live up to her expectations.”

Every once in a while, the words that come out of someone else’s mouth are so utterly ludicrous that it doesn’t even matter if they could be true. Or might be horrible. The shock value of them catches you, and you crack.

I just lost it, right then, right there. Laughed my ass off. Had tears running from my eyes, had to excuse myself to go blow my nose.

When I got back, he was staring at me, an accusatory expression on his handsome face. “That wasn’t a joke.”

“Dude,” I said. “Cannibal princess. I’m sorry, but I keep seeing Princess Leia cooking Han Solo and serving him with cranberry sauce.”

Yeah. It’s definitely out there.

In other updates, the Sweater From Hell required a complete rip back of the sleeve I was starting here.

Too much flipping of the whole sweater while knitting the sleeve in.

So now I’m doing it this way…

Faster, lighter. Remarkably, however, the 2/2/8 stitch pattern is still just as inconceivably frustrating.

The Ohio Novel: Art of the Trade

So… Tori’s grandmother was a big fan of The Art of War. 

Was something of a legend among the folks who trade between the stars.

Today was a fun day, as story bits came out of the woodwork at me, including a conspiracy of potentially biggish proportions. 

After a couple of writing days where the story felt like it was meandering (this is the stuff you generally end up doing massive revision on), today’s words flew, and brought with them a new piece of the magic I need the world to have.

Not so Marketing Tuesday: Finished the BIG HTWAN bonus

Did no marketing today. I had too much of a backlog, and in the middle of The Ongoing Chaos, I have to do what I can when I can…

So today I built the last pieces of the How to Write a Novel Graduate BIG bonus. This is Interweaving Multiple Story Threads in Big, Complex Novels.

I’m adding all the materials into the classroom now, so it’ll take me another hour or so to get everything in place and the classroom opened up.

But if you’ve already graduated from the class, you can head into your classroom at HollysWritingClasses.com, watch the video, download the transcript, go through the worksheets and the LOOOONG lesson, and see how you put complex monster novels like Talyn, Hawkspar, and the Matrin series (Diplomacy of Wolves, Vengeance of Dragons, Courage of Falcons, and Vincalis the Agitator) together.

Dead Man’s Party revision — Three more chapters

I got three more chapters and change finished on the read-and-annotate part of the revision before I had to move on to other things. Had a late start, but managed solid work and some good re-thinknig of early middle of the book before the fine edge of chaos wedged its way into my day.

So now I’m heading into the list of things that I have to do that don’t require deep though or creativity, because any sort of thinking that can’t be guided by a checklist is going to be beyond my reach for the rest of the day.

The Ohio Series – A chaos writing day… and seeking calm through abusive knitting

I did the best I could.

I had phone calls to make, though, and phone calls to answer, and emails that had to be dealt with promptly, and things I had to put together for people, and at the end of five hours (I was up EARLY this morning), I had 381 new words of fiction, and that wasn’t even with deleting any.

I’m throwing in the towel.

It was a good day overall, but fiction-wise, I might as well have been trying to write in the middle of an Iron Maiden concert with Bruce Dickinson at full volume running in circles around me while he sings. (Yeah, I’m a fan.)

That would be a great experience, but probably about as productive for getting fiction written as today.

So I’m going to check on the forums, going to put together notes for the podcast, and then I’m going to close my eyes and breathe and wind down a little.

Or frustrate the crap out of myself with the Sweater from Hell, an ad-hoc design-as-I-go exercise in demonstrating to myself yet again that simple counting — 2-2-8…2-2-8… — is my nemesis.

So my Summer of Fiction Writing numbers have taken beating this week.

I’m hoping things will settle down next week so I can just fall back into my world and focus.

I’m not counting on it, though.

The Ohio Series – The danger of Old Words — long, rough day, not a lot to show for it

So I was over two thousand words for the day when I rolled down to Old Words on the page.

Old Words on the page will hurt you. They’re things you wrote before you backed up to insert a better idea.

And my better idea was big, and good, and I had a helluva lot of fun writing it the last bit of last week, and yesterday, and today.

But when I finished today’s words, I hit the slab of Old Words at the bottom of the page. Read them.

And discovered that I could either have the new, better story, or the old, less good story, but both scenes occurred during the same time with the same characters, and took the story in two different directions.

The old direction was nowhere near as good as the new direction, and the words could not be salvaged for another project.

They simply did not make the cut.

So I cut them.

Which after hours of work during an otherwise brutally stressful day left me with a net gain of 834 words.

On the bright side, I get to write more tomorrow, and there are no more slabs of Old Words lying around to cause me pain.

The Ohio Novel: The weird little lawyer and the body on the stairs

In spite of everything — and today there was just a whole lot of “everything” to contend with — I got 1872 words I love.

And found out there were some mysterious circumstances connected with Grandma and her death.

I’m going to leave it at that, except to note that Grandma’s old lawyer tried to make a break for it when Tori started asking questions… and catching him and pinning him down required Tori, Duncan, and some of her better cop skills.

Fun chapter, fun writing day.

Marketing Tuesday: Not so much, because the HTWAN BONUS is still not done…

Marketing Tuesday got pre-empted by my need to finish the HTWAN Student-Voted Bonus, Interweaving Multiple Story Threads in Big, Complex Novels.

Which still isn’t done. Today’s image is a screenshot of one of the pages showing the technique for building and then using the threads in a complex novel.

At the speed this is going, it’s going to take me at least another week, and possibly two to finish this bonus.

So everything else I’d planned today got done, but that was small stuff. 

I did not get to start the HTWAN Surprise Bonus, How to Turn a Stand-Alone Novel Into a Series. That’s still pending.

Why did I decide to throw in this bonus as an unasked for, unpromised extra?

Because it fits the class.
Because it’s one of the most important skills you’ll need to have if you go commercial.
Because it’s even more important if you go indie.
And because it is ridiculously fun.

This will not teach you how to write the series. That’s a BIG class, and it already exists.

But it will teach you how to find the series you DID NOT know was there found inside most novels — and will also show you how to know when a novel should NOT be made into a series.

 

OH… Yesterday I got nine chapters of Read-Through Assessment done on my novel Dead Man’s Party. So yesterday was a pretty good day. Long. But good.

Slightly late re-drawing Ko-Fi winner

Yesterday was a bit more chaotic than usual, and between a number of things coming at me from different directions, and a replay of the damned vertigo, I remembered to let the winner of the redraw for the final prize know, but forgot to announce it.

So… Tiny little drum-roll…

Pomegranate won the drawing for the fifth signed Create a Character Clinic.

Congratulations, and thank you for supporting me on Ko-Fi.

I’ll gather mailing supplies, and get all the prizes out to their winners as quickly as I can.

I’ll also note that I’m now 89% of the way to reaching my second goal, which is funding eight hours of fiction writing a week, at $20/hour. This is two hours a day, four days a week, and comes out to $640/month.

How did I come to that hourly rate? Rounded down, it’s what I made working as an RN in 1992, when I hung up my cap and decided to write full time.

It seemed like a good place to start.