Holly Lisle's Blog, page 50

Replay: The kid who asked me about being a writer, to whom I gave blunt, honest answers

I think this particular post needs to go into rotation somehow.

A kid had a writing assignment from school, and while in general I will not answer “my teacher gave me homework, and I’m passing my homework on to you” requests, I did answer this one.

I did not pull any punches. Did not glamorize writing. Did not say what was safe, or expected of me, or nice.

I just told the truth, which most people don’t want to hear, no matter how much they might declare otherwise.

So.

Want the truth about writing fiction for a living, and how to get there?

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The Ohio Novel: 1541 words, and the Friday Snippet

Today started with me building the How to Write a Novel class bonus.

I’m demonstrating my method for planning and then writing novels with multiple viewpoint characters and multiple conflicts. The demo uses four POV characters, and eight concurrently running plots, which probably wasn’t as complicated as the series for which I devised the technique — The Secrets Texts: Diplomacy of Wolves, Vengeance of Dragons, and Courage of Falcons.

Very happy with the way the lesson turned out. I have the video heading for the classroom next, and have the audio off  to the transcriptionist now, and should have video, transcript, and anything else I can throw into it into the classroom by the middle of next week.

Then I wrote. Today’s words were okay, but not what I want to put into the Friday snippet. This… this is what I want to show off today…

The Friday Snippet

The Snippet Disclaimer: This is raw first draft, copyright Holly Lisle and all rights reserved. Do not quote, review, or bug hunt. The contents of this snippet are subject to change, and during revision I will not see any problems you find here.

 

There was a nice little local coffee shop half a block from the library with a good view of the street and my car. The guy, who had not yet given me his name, and I, who had not given him my name, had a tiny pissing contest over who got to sit facing the door.

“I’m a cop and I’m armed,” I said under my breath, so softly I was afraid he wouldn’t hear it.

He had good hearing.

“So,” I said, “You have a name?”

“Professor Duncan.”

“I think naming a kid Professor is a shit decision. It limits his career choices.”

He didn’t laugh.

The sigh with which I followed the silence was heavy.

“I’m Officer Gage, Miami PD,” I said.

At that, his mouth quirked in a half-smile. “Touché.”

I shrugged. Gave the waitress my order. Coffee black.

He ordered the same — no frappichino, no goopy latte, no whipped cream or flavors. Which didn’t fit with the turtleneck and the tweed, but did fit with that little martial artist stand-up he’d done.

So I said, “Want to take another run at the name thing?”

“Agren. Agren Duncan.”

“Victoria Gage.”

A little flash of surprise showed, but he hid that quickly enough.

Followed by, “She mentioned you,” which he said after thinking about it a couple seconds too long. He tried to make it sound casual, but it wasn’t. I could tell from the tension in his voice, the aversion of his eyes when he said it, the way every line of his body signaled tension that it wasn’t casual at all.

I halfway expected him to attack me, but instead, he met my gaze. Said in voice filled with phony casualness, “You have a chance to inventory her basement yet?”

Holy shit.

What exactly did he know about her basement?

“Some of it,” I told him.

“Hmm. You probably ought to check the dates on everything in her freezers. Some of it will go bad if it isn’t used soon…” He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Some of it might be going bad already.”

And I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the venison or the ducks or geese or anything else the local hunters had been providing for her.

But I wanted to be sure.

“I might have to go step by step through everything in there.”

He nodded once. Body language, voice, everything changed right then. It was like part of him relaxed — and another part of him tensed up. “Not without backup,” he murmured.

“Gut check suggested the same thing.”

Finally, I now have to get a bunch of stuff ready for The Summer of Fiction Writing, which officially goes live tomorrow at ten AM ET, but which is already open for site members.

If you want to join us and get writing done this summer with other folks who have set some great goals…

Login or create your free account, then come hang out with us in the SOFW Forum.

The official Classroom won’t open until tomorrow morning (lots of downloads and links in there), but you can get your goals put together today, and see what other folks are planning.

The Ohio Series: Tori and the Townie

I had a rough time starting today. Had other things I had to do first (setting up for the Summer of Fiction Writing event), which made getting the words pretty rough at the start. 

But when Becky came in and we started running tens together, things picked up.

And today was interesting. 

My main character, Tori, saw a guy her first day in town that the first identified as a knob, who then demonstrated he probably had more to him than what shows on the exterior.

Today she ran into him again after tripping over what her grandmother had buried in the basement, and it turns out he knew of her existence. 

And the two of them took turns over coffee trying to figure out how much of what was going on the other one knew.

It was a fun couple of scenes. And left me in a good place for tomorrow.

Also, Tori named her kitten Gordon Malloy, after her favorite character on The Orville.

Also mine.

SOFW: Goalsetting in progress now

While the actual Summer of Fiction Writing event doesn’t start until June first at 10 AM ET, folks are heading in now to set their goals — goals that are designed to give each writer work achievable in the time that writer has, and with the built-in leverage to get the work done.

These are nothing like all those New Year’s Resolutions that were dead by February 1st.

So if you want to actually achieve the thing you set out to do, sign in or create your free account at:

HollysWritingClasses.com

Then go here:

https://hollyswritingclasses.com/go/SOFW-set-achievable-goals.html

I’m using the step-by-step process for goal-setting that got me through my first novel before my 25th birthday — though I just barely made it.

But know what?

Just barely is good enough.

So go in, learn how to set meaningful, achievable goals you’ll hit — then figure out the goal you want to hit this summer (or winter, for my Down Under guys). And hang out with us. This is going to be an awesome three months for writing fiction.

The Ohio Series: Surprises and weirdness.

Yesterday was chaos, site issues over on HollysWritingClasses.com, and constant interruption, so while I worked on the book, I didn’t hit my word goal. I did get 1391 words, which is still good.

Today, though… Today was pure joy. I got 2542 words that just flew off my fingertips, and made me laugh as they hit the page.

Lemme give you a chunk of my morning (with the caveats — this is copyrighted to me, don’t quote, this is first draft and subject to change, don’t report errors because this is raw first draft):

There was a smaller box inside. It was bright green, with bold orange letters that said, “Instant Mover in a Box” and the contrast between the green and the orange made my eyes water just a little bit.

The picture on the box showed a can with a partially lifted lid, and suitcases, furniture, clothes, and other things pouring out from the inside in a steady stream. I raised an eyebrow.

Lifted the smaller box from inside the bigger box. It had a decidedly gag-gift look to it.

There was a note taped to one side of the box which read, Open this when you’re ready to be done with us. LOL! Love, The Gang

I grinned.

Somebody had gone shopping at Spencer’s.

Cops collectively have a weird sense of humor — it’s born of seeing humanity at both their absolute best and their absolute worst, from knowing what bullshit looks like from wading through it all day every day, from knowing that any moment of any day could be the instant that something benign goes bad and you end up dead without warning.

So whatever my comrades in arms back in Miami had put in the can was, I was pretty sure, going to jump out at me.

Or was going to smell terrible.

Or was going to make an incredibly loud noise.

Probably all three.

I chuckled.

Opened the box, lifted out the can, which did weigh just about enough to have something springy and noisy inside that was going to explode out at me when I opened it.

Again… not my first rodeo.

I sat on the couch, wedged the can between my knees, aimed the lid part toward the imaginary co-worker who’d bought it for me — probably Sarge, who fucking loved practical jokes — and lifted the lid.

And two things happed at the same time, neither of which included a spring-loaded giant paper snake or confetti.

A small, adorable, very alive kitten jumped out of the can.

Upstairs in Mom’s old bedroom, something exploded.

Marketing Tuesday & Fiction + Classes Wednesday

Here’s what I did yesterday for Marketing Tuesday: A new cover for Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood: A new cover for Warpaint: And I worked on getting the books out wide. Not done yet, but I’ll work on that more today. TODAY… The first thing I did was get 2187 new words on Tori and her […]

Dead Man’s Party: Wrote the SERIES ending…

DEAD MAN’S PARTY

Last week I wrote a stand-alone ending for Dead Man’s Party.

This week, because I had one week and one chapter left, I wrote a series ending, and showed how I built out pieces of story that do not exist in the first draft, but that, if I decide I want Dead Man’s Party to be the first book in a series — (all perhaps with titles of songs by Oingo Boingo…) — I could do that. 

The writing went well, and now the novel, completely finished in first draft whether I want to write it as a stand-alone one-off or as a series, gets a 30-day (or slightly more) breather before I head into revising it.

Which means Monday is now an open fiction writing day.

Wednesdays through Fridays are all The Ohio Series, Book One.

Tuesday is going to stay Marketing Tuesday. I need it. A lot.

Monday, though…

THE EMERALD SUN

Starting next Monday, I’m rereading and annotating Moon & Sun — both The Ruby Key and The Silver Door, and out of them pulling the characters, worldbuilding, and conflicts I need to resolve in book three, which WON’T be called The Emerald Sun, but which I’ll be calling that for now, until I’ve finished the first draft.

Once I have that done, I’ll start writing M&S III on Mondays. It won’t be finished terribly quickly. But this way, it will finally get done.

HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL

The completion of my demo novel ALSO finishes the writing portions of my How to Write a Novel class.

This week I’ll be building Lesson 38, in which I show folks who have finished their first novel how to streamline and adapt the processes in the course into their own personal, flexible, reusable novel-writing system.

And then I’ll be building the Class Bonus. Still three days left to go on the vote on that, and there are still some folks who have not voted.

And the voting for the top few possibilities is CLOSE.

I’ll be building a lot of the other suggestions as inexpensive paid workshops or little classes. Not all. But there were a lot of really good ideas folks came up with in suggesting what they wanted as their included bonus, and I think a lot of other folks might find them helpful, too.

Not going to say anything that might influence the voting (like hinting what the leaders are at the moment).

HOWEVER… This is everything on the ballot

How to brainstorm and create bonus stories to promote a novel or series
My personal Getting Shit Done daily writing system, in detail
Behind the Scenes: DMP and the No One True Way novel-writing process
25 Alternative Idea-Generating Methods for Novels
How to Resurrect and Complete Your Hard Drive Zombies (So They Stop Eating Your Braaaaainz)
How to Turn a Stand-Alone Novel into a Series
Tutorial: Getting Your Novel Into Print
The Conflict Resource: The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of Great Conflict 
Interweaving Multiple Story Threads in Big, Complex Novels
Alternatives to and Adaptations for the Provisional Outline

And these were the five suggestions that were more broadly applicable that I kept off the ballot. I will probably to them as stand-alones.

How to Find Your Home Genre
Writing at Production Pace
How to Work Around POV Limitations
How to Foreshadow and Misdirect in Fiction

And this thing I think I’ll just do as a freebie for everyone:

My Favorite Writing Tools, Services, and Stuff

Overhauling the site

As you might have guessed (by the fact that everything is broken), I’m overhauling the site.

I’m having a miserable, cussing, growling, horrible time of it.

On the bright side, the site now loads fast.

On the dark side — everyfuckingthing else is dark side.

EVERYTHING. The blog is not on its page. The first few articles are linked here on the front page, but the past twenty years of posts? Good luck finding those. I can’t.

Writing Articles? Nope. Going to have to hand-link every single article on the Writing Stuff page.

Sidebars? Nope.

Plugins? Nope.

If I could go back, I’m so frustrated and angry and miserable trying to use documentation that doesn’t answer my questions that I’d  almost certainly return to the shitty, way-too-slow site.

But I can’t. I knew I’d end up here, so I DELETED the old set-up so I couldn’t go back.

So….

I’m too pissed off to work on this any further today. I’ll come in, see if I can get a few things fixed tomorrow. My day off. Going to be a while before I have one of those again, I think.

The Ohio Series: 693 words, and What’s In The Basement?

While I did not get a lot of words today — we have a bit of nice chaos going on here at the moment — the ones I got were good.

First, cookies rear their dangerous heads in my fiction again, this time cookies that apparently have just a hint of magic to them.

Second, I found out what was in the locked third freezer.

NOT what I expected.

Way cooler than what I imagined. So…

Here’s a tiny teaser from what I got today. Your set-up for the snippet is this — my cop MC is sitting on the lid of the third freezer in her dead grandmother’s basement, from which she just cut off a lock — and once she’s seen what was inside, is now holding it down until help arrives. Mr. Yeager was her grandmother’s lawyer. Or so he says…

A corpse, I thought, would have been a lot less worrisome. I would have known how to deal with that.

 

I had my cell phone in its holster. I pulled it out, and I called Mr. Yeager. When he answered, I said, “I have a deal for you. Go to a hardware store and buy me a keyed medium ABUS brass shrouded padlock, bring it to me in Grandma’s basement, don’t ask any questions about what I’m doing, and I will bake you a batch of cookies.”

 

I heard a pause on the other end. “How many cookies in a batch?”

 

“A dozen,” I said.

 

“I’ll do it for two dozen.”

 

Mr. Yeager still wasn’t convincing me of his lawyer-ness. But I began to see where he might play one on TV.

The Ohio Series: 1408 words and a cliffhanger for me

Had a LOT of things going today, all of which were important, some of which were urgent, and all of which collided with my words.

But I did get 1408, and I’m now on Chapter 4.

And Tori got her bolt cutters, took the lock off the basement freezer, opened it, closed it again, and is now sitting on top of the freezer wishing she’d bought a replacement lock while she was at Wal-Mart.

What’s in the freezer?

Dunno. But I’m going to find out tomorrow. Should make for an interesting writing day.