Holly Lisle's Blog, page 51
May 14, 2019
The Summer of Fiction Writing EVENT at HollysWritingClasses.com
To beat the summer doldrums, I’m going to be hosting a Summer of Fiction Writing event on HollysWritingClasses.com (HWC).
During this three-month writing party, (June first – August 31st) folks in the free HCW writers’ community:
Will focus on helping newer writers create smaller start-to-finish projects written in the months of June, July, and August, while helping more experienced writers create and complete larger projects
Will have “involve your kids” support — I’ll put together a free downloadable Superhero Summer activity PDF that lets younger writers — male and female — invent cool characters, build the worlds they inhabit, make fitting dangers for their superhero to fight, and learn some fiction skills at a very basic level while doing this, so parents who want to write and have children out of school for the summer can let the kids do something cool, too. (No kids on the forum, however. We are an adult community that occasionally deals with subjects that are NOT kid-friendly.)
Will support finishing existing hard-drive zombies (possibly with a new How to Revive Your Hard Drive Zombies workshop toward the end IF I can make the time AND if that doesn’t become the How to Write a Novel class bonus — voting isn’t going in that direction at the moment, but it’s way too soon to call it)
Will have dedicated event threads in the main discussion board
Will focus on helping writers set achievable goals and then achieve them in three months
Will be a free event with a limited-time participant signature pip and a blog badge for everyone who participates, AND upgraded “Hit My Goal” pip and blog badge for folks who hit their goals
This will be Holly’s Writing Classes’ first home-grown event.
This 3-month writing event will let participants use any of my paid or free classes or workshops, as well as any of the free PDF workshops I have here on my personal site.
How to Write Something Good from a Prompt
How to Set Achievable Goals
How to Hone Your Talent
How to Design a Character
Dialogue Workshop
Mapping /Worldbuilding Workshop
Scene Creation Workshop
Description Workshop
Timed Writing Workshop
Visualization Workshop
Serendipity Workshop
Novel Pre-Writing Workshop
How to Start a Novel
How to Finish a Novel
One-Pass Novel-Revision Workshop
All of the workshops above are available as nicely formatted, downloadable, printable PDFs — just scroll to the bottom of the page you want and select the Download as PDF option.
It will ALSO include support for the free 3-week How to Write Flash Fiction that Doesn’t SUCK class on the HWC site (which you get when you create your free member account, and which comes with downloadable lessons, worksheets, AND a dedicated forum for Flash Fiction students.
Our objective in the writing community will be — first — to set our own goals and then hit them, and — second — to help you set goals that you can reach within the time limit, and then encourage you to post them, to hit them, and to join us in supporting other folks while hitting our OWN summer goals.
Want to get in early and help us brainstorm the upcoming three months, and get a head start on figuring out what you want to start AND finish in that time?
Go to HollysWritingClasses.com and sign in or create your free account right from the front page.
Then come in and hang out with us here: The SOFW Event Thread.
May 13, 2019
First Rewards for my supporters announced on Ko-fi
My Ko-Fi account funds my fiction writing.
At the moment it’s funding less than an hour a day, but I am getting close to hitting that first goal.
So today I announced the first rewards.
Anyone who has funded me on Ko-fi EVER (who is not a family member or one of my indie contractors) is eligible to win.
I’m pleased to be able to start doing some things for my supporters (besides writing fiction), and grateful for your your support.
I’ll go into more detail on upcoming rewards over on the Ko-Fi blog. One of the things is discovered from my survey here is that a lot of folks have cool ideas for rewards, and I want to do most of them.
But again, more on that in another Ko-Fi post.
Dead Man’s Party: Finished the novel first draft
I finished another novel today — this one pretty much on schedule. I’d planned it for 50,000 words, and came in at 50,085.
Wrote 1847 words in a smidge over a hour to get there.
I got a GOOD ending for the novel. Most of the time, great endings are something I build in revision, and this one has the bones to become much better.
Printed off the last of my pages. Next week, I’ll write one final scene for the book, something along the lines of “Six Months Later…”
In it, I’ll either tie the thing off as a standalone, or set up the some hooks for a series. Maybe both. I won’t know what I want to do with this particular novel until I’ve done the revision, but as of this minute, I’m thinking one-off standalone.
I’m not sure that I want to write post-apocalyptic as a regular thing, and I resolved the cannibals and zombies in this chapter, so I’m not sure where I’d take it if I decided to go further.
But it was a damn fine writing day, and I like how it ended. Though it’s pure scruffy, crappy first-draft writing.
The revision will be fun.
And I’ll be using this novel as my demo for Streamlined Revision Process for my How to Revise Your Novel course, which needs this particular bonus lesson.
So even if it doesn’t sell much, I’ll get a lot of very good things out of this particular novel.
May 10, 2019
The Ohio Series: TGIF, and the magic digs deeper
I made myself cry three times today in the couple hours I was writing my 2056 words.
I’m connecting deeply with the magic of a real and remembered place — with a town I loved, with a time I recall with a lot of powerful emotions.
I’m dealing with my connection to this story with my odd version of humor, but there are times when you’re writing along and being snarky and smartass, and you step right into a puddle from the past where you can put faces to names, can wrap the angle of a ray of light around the smell of a basement or the a little bedroom, and suddenly you’re up to your neck in ice-cold memory. It’s a shock. A punch in the stomach, and you find yourself choking back tears at the sound of someone’s voice who’s been dead a long time.
The characters in this book aren’t me. They aren’t people close to me. No thin disguises, no ‘just the names are changed.’
I knew going in that the place I’m writing was powerful for me, so I made the people as different from me and folks I knew and loved as I could. But they have to live in the place, and they keep setting off memory minefields scattered around from this place I never wanted to leave.
I’m starting to understand what my Muse was keeping me away from in never writing about home.
But being safe is never good for your fiction. I’m seeing what I’ve been missing by not writing about home too.
Anyway… today…
My hero is a cop. She has a cookie recipe handed down to her from her mother, who got it from her grandmother, both now dead — and today she used a bit of cop-ness and the suggestion of possible cookies in the future to make the deeply disturbing discovery that the guy who has been claiming to be a lawyer isn’t one, and that there’s something weird about the cookies.
And since she knows what’s in them, and knows there are no bizarre ingredients, she can’t imagine why they have such a hold on the Old Guy.
But instinct tells her to protect this secret. That it matters.
I know — but she doesn’t — that this ties into the fictional magic of the place. I know — but she doesn’t — that the magic of the place already has its hooks in her. She could leave now.
But she isn’t going to… and the time when she can leave is growing shorter by the second.
What’s there? The secret this place is hiding? I don’t know. I’m getting hints of it as I write, the feeling from my Right-Brain muse that it knows.
I have no clue when I sit down to write what happens next. And I’ll note for the record that I HATE pantsing novels. So at some point, I’m going to work through a provisional outline, just so I have something solid that I can ignore and write against and fight with and argue with on my way to the story.
Because, dammit, the story here is big. Dark. Scary. Powerful. And the weird old lawyer who isn’t, and the locked freezer in the basement, and the fact that Tori’s mother’s room was stripped bare and wiped down and repainted with a glossy gray paint, but every item in Tori’s room is exactly where she left it when her mother took her away and went on the run, is a big part of what’s still hiding.
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May 9, 2019
The Ohio Series: 1977 words, with Tori and the snake in the canoe
Fun, fun fiction writing day today. My heroine, Tori Gage, is in Ohio now, in the house she inherited from her grandma, and she’s just started doing the rounds — and has started in the basement.
Where there are three freezers, one with meat, one with home-grown vegetables, and one with a lock and no key.
I also discovered an old aluminum canoe in the basement, and found out something about Tori that came from some experiences from my own childhood.
Here’s the snippet where discovering the canoe reminds Tori of her past.
With the usual caveats: Don’t quote. This might not be in the final version. Don’t bug-hunt. I don’t look for bugs until I’ve done the revision, and this might not make it to final draft. This snippet is copyright to me on the date posted, and all rights are reserved.
We would glide along the Tuscarawas river in silence wearing our bright orange flotation vests, watching summering ducks and geese and their fuzzy-chick offspring, silently pointing out the ripples of sunning bass disturbed by our passage — with the occasional plop behind us as a sunning snake got startled by our passage and fell into the water. I had the snake stick, though — a three-foot-long metal gripper that I was to use if any of the snakes we disturbed fell into the canoe. I practiced endlessly, and the one time it actually happened, comported myself calmly, making both my mother and my grandmother proud.
It was only a garter snake. Having it fall into the boat was startling, though, and exciting.
I could have picked it up with my bare hands, but I had the stick.
And I’d always hoped when the snake finally fell in, it would be a copperhead, because calmly removing one of those would have made me a hero.
But Mom and Grandma bought me ice cream at the Dairy Queen anyway, because I hadn’t screamed even a little bit, and I hadn’t hurt the snake getting him out of the canoe.
The canoeing, the life jackets, the snakes — all real, but my father and I were the folks in the canoe when I about seven. The wishing to be a hero — that was me, too. We never had a snake of any variety fall in the canoe when I was a kid, though a lot fell very close.
The real snake in the canoe landed when I was an adult. And I got it out without hurting it, but no one bought me ice cream.
May 8, 2019
The Ohio Series: Taking the measure of a novel
Yesterday was Marketing Day, and I got the first half of the 4th edition of Create a Plot Clinic finished. Next week if all goes well I’ll finish and do a new cover, and take that class live and wide.
Today, I worked for several hours, and got 1010 words of the 2000 I’d planned. I’m working on Chapter Two, finding my way through the story, and building Smits Corner, a town based on one of my two favorite towns in Ohio. While I was writing, I was crawling through images from Google, and remembering places I knew as a kid (places that look even better today — go figure).
And having my MC, a cop currently named Tori Gage, looking around her long-abandoned hometown and having a sudden bad feeling — what she describe as…
All of a sudden I was pulling off into a parking space, trying to catch my breath. This wasn’t nostalgia.
This was pure unadulterated fear, cold and dark and running into my gut like ice water, the five-second warning a good cop feels responding to a domestic when all of a sudden you know it’s going to go bad. And it’s going to do it in your direction.
Ladies and gentlemen, the magic just showed up.
I have no clue yet what it is, and she knows even less than I do… but she can feel it.
And it just identified her.
This is where, when you’re writing, you take the measure of your novel. Where you start understanding what you’re writing isn’t what you thought you were writing. Might be less cozy, meaner, bigger.
Don’t get me wrong. This is small-town urban fantasy where the protagonist is a displaced big-city cop finding her way back home after too long away.
But this bugger just growled at me and showed its teeth. And when I look under the desk, the eyes blinking up at me are red, and they glow in the dark.
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May 3, 2019
The Ohio Series: Worldbuilding toward getting the right magic
I had a net gain today of 1131 words, but wrote a lot more than that.
Matt and I spent a couple hours talking worldbuilding and characters last night, and I made a bunch of changes and did a lot of rethinking this morning.
Short post today — four hours of writing and developing, classwork, forums, email, and other work stuff, and then other STUFF does not leave a lot of time for blogging.
But I love where the story is heading.
May 2, 2019
The Ohio Series: Writing this one works differently
I mentioned that I’m going to have a different pseudonym for the Ohio series books (and I have real titles and a real series title for this project) — but all of that is staying under wraps until after I start bringing out the books and letting them find their readers.
But this is an odd project for me in another way, too.
I’m also writing these differently. I’m sort of collaborating with Matt — I’m doing the writing, but…
I’m printing off each chapter as I finish it, and putting it on Matt’s desk. He’s making notes in the margins, and I’m going back the next day and making changes the next day based on his comments, and then adding new stuff.
Well, we’re only on day two, so that’s how I think it’ll end up working.
This is something new for both of us, and yesterday he read what I’d printed off for him, and then thought about it, and we ended up having a long talk about the intro, the world, the worldbuilding, the main character, the magic…
Fun, in places really moving… we’re both pulling from deeply personal parts of our lives on this project. And what he brought to it yesterday gave me something so strong this morning that I ended up making myself cry as I was writing.
But I was pulling stuff out as quickly as I was putting stuff in. And at the end of two hours and change of writing, I was down a net 63 words. So this morning my little image shows a negative number.
Positive changes in the story, though. Something a lot better to build on in the weeks to come.
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May 1, 2019
The Ohio Series, Book One, and The Emerald Sun planning
I’ve spent the weekend and the last couple of days trying to figure out my writing schedule. I ran out of The Wishbone Conspiracy before I planned too, and that has to sit in a corner being quiet for a month, resting and getting cold so I can get an objective look at it when I do the revision.
I have not had time to read through and build out the backstory details for The Emerald Sun, because I’ve been simultaneously writing first drafts of two novel plus the biggest writing class I’ve ever done. How to Write a Novel, of which I’m starting Lesson 35 as soon as I do this post.
So I had writing time today, and nothing I’d planned to write that I COULD write. So I started the first book of what is NOT going to be called The Ohio Series, but which is going to be set in Ohio.
And to my amazement, the novel started in a condo in South Florida with a young woman who, when an old dude showed up to tell her that her grandmother had left her a house, and who countered with, “I never had any grandmothers.”
And got weirder from there. By the end of the first scene, magic had happened, and I was hooked.
Got 1834 words by the time I finally pulled myself away. Not as many as my goal when I set up a stock template for 70,000-word novels last week, but way more than I’d expected to get starting cold.
On now to HTWAN Lesson 35: Writing Endings with Multiple Antagonists and Multiple Climaxes. Or what I call Playing on Hard Mode.
Oh, yes. Over the next several weekends, I will be reading and noting and worldbuilding from the first two books in the Moon & Sun series to get the voice of the protagonist back, and to plan out the final story. At the point where I finish the first draft of Dead Man’s Party, which will be in three more weeks, I’ll be ready to start writing The Emerald Sun, which I’m considering changing to The Emerald Sky.
And I’ll have a space in my schedule ready-made for it. It can, as suggested by my daughter while we were working together today, become my next Monday novel.
Origin of the phrase WILD HAIR UP HIS ASS: a true story
I ended up looking up the origin of the phrase “wild hair up his ass” this morning, and discovered there is shit-all about it on the internet.
This in itself is astonishing — it’s the INTERNET, you know? It knows everything. But apparently not.
The best I could find, well, the only thing I could find, was “does something completely unexpected.”
ORIGIN, folks. “This is what a phrase means” is not the same thing “where the fuck did this phrase come from?”
But now, my friend, I have discovered the origin of this phrase I’ve been hearing folks say my entire life.
—
I was in the bathroom this morning getting ready for work.
My cat was in the bathroom using his litter box.
And all of a sudden, he leaps out of the box, runs in tight circles in an absolute panic (which in a bathroom that small is a good trick), and comes to a skidding stop in front of my feet, at which point he crouches, body rigid, eyes black, ears locked back, tail whipping back and forth like we are both about to be devoured by aliens only he can see.
I look around to see what scared him.
Nothing.
I bend over, rest a hand on his shoulders, assure him that everything is okay, that he is all right, that nothing is going to get him…
And he relaxes, rolls on his side…
Which is when I spot about an inch of cat turd hanging from his butt, suspended as if by magic.
Probably NOT magic, I think, and grab a piece of toilet paper, and give the turd a gentle tug…
And slowly remove what’s holding it there, which is about six inches of one human hair.
Mine. Matt shaves his head, Joe keeps his hair short.
Guess who had a wild hair up his butt?
So now he’s calm, happy, purring. I pet his little fat head and kick him out of the bathroom, and get my shower.
Which is when I look up, and see the lizard hanging on the drywall above the tiles, eyeing me.
I just keep taking my shower — I spent time as a kid in both Costa Rica and Guatemala, and I have shared showers with scarier critters than that.
At least until this one dropped of the wall to the floor of the tub, and I did my own version of a “wild hair” dance.
