Holly Lisle's Blog, page 54

The Wishbone Conspiracy: 2204 words… AND a scene snippet

Today I’m just posting a snippet because it surprised me.

I have this big, scary, rich guy in the story who’s powerful and dangerous… and here’s where Cady meets him:

[DISCLAIMER: This is copyrighted first draft. It may contain bugs, which WILL change in revision, and for which I do not need any notice of typos or other errors now, because first draft is not the place where you deal with those. Please don’t quote or use in reviews — it might not make it to the final version of the book. Probably will… but no guarantees.] 

With that said…

I’d been awake for over thirty-three hours, had eaten enough food for ten people during the banquet, had enjoyed the music and entertainers, and had found my host the most terrifying specimen of genetically altered humanity I had ever seen — and yet found myself laughing at his stories.

 

He was warm, friendly, funny.

 

He was sitting at the head of the same table as the rest of us, telling us a story about hunting down a pack of predatory saurids that had been attacking a village, and when he got to the part where one of the monsters had circled around behind him and bit a chunk out of his ass, he stood, turned around, and yanked down one half of his pants, and showed us a missing chunk of posterior the size of my head and shoulders.

 

He laughed. “I still got t’ little devil, and skint and et him. And got what’s left of ‘im stuffed and ’anging on me wall.”

 

I was laughing so hard my eyes watered. One of the braver men said, “Why don’t you have reju fix your — er — posterior?”

 

“And give up me gorgeous scar? Are ya daft, man? The ladies love it. And how else could I show ‘em me ass in polite company?”

It was a good fiction writing day. Now on to the other stuff.

Marketing Tuesday: Finished with my survey results (and a game)

So, for as long as I’m doing Marketing Tuesdays, I’ve made myself a little image — with Scary Halloween Lettering, because for me at least, trying to wrap my head around marketing is scary.

But I have the most amazing readers. I had a massive response to my three-question quiz. Thank you to every single reader who answered — there’s a story that will be coming your way once it’s written.

The results were compelling, consistent, and very, very revealing.

My readers like what I write, and are not looking for me to switch up genres or be any less… er… challenging in my willingness to drag all sorts of characters, conflicts, and genres into the stories I tell.

My readers, however, know a lot of writers who write things similar to what I write, and these other writers are not marketing their work as hard SF, or high fantasy, or space opera, or crossover fantasy.

These other writers who write in the genre I’ve been writing since I started market their work as urban fantasy. Werewolves, spaceships, stepping from one world into another, magic in modern settings or strange settings. I’ve gone extensively through their work, bought a lot of it, am reading a lot of it. 

So I’m going to have to do a bunch of stuff over the next months. 

Get or make new covers that accurately reflect the contents of my work.

Change titles on some work: It was noted by a number of respondents (and my husband) that both Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood and Warpaint are dreadful titles that are not even marginally reflective of the contents or genre of the stories they contain. 

Create new editions, making sure that the books contain their previous titles so there’s no confusion or accidental double-buying.

Write new cover copy. 

All of this while still working on the current novels, Dead Man’s Party and The Wishbone Conspiracy, which I’m just letting you know right now is another awful title and is as of today relegated to the status of Working Title That Sucks, and That I’ll Fix In Revision.

In Other News…

Was talking to my older kid, Mark, last night, and he mentioned that he was writing a text adventure using software named Twine. I was knitting while talking on the phone, and made a smartass comment about my software being called Yarn, but after he gracefully bypassed my dumb joke, he described what he was doing, and I realized that Twine would allow me to build the text-adventure game that I already tried to make once — and that failed badly — a game that would let folks play through finding everything they want and nothing they don’t on this ridiculously huge site with all the different stuff that’s on it…

And I started building that game today.

 

Free Writing Class: Find Your Fiction Mojo

This is one of those classes I built and then forgot I built.

(Yes, there are more of them, and I’ll get them all back up and running over time.)

But today I stubbed my toe on THIS one.

Just click the cover below to go to the sign-up page for the class.

This is a simple email class with some downloadable PDF worksheets — no payment, no classroom, no personal information except the email address you want the class to go to (has to be your address because you’ll have to confirm the email — you can’t have it emailed to anyone else).

This is a quick start for folks who need to find their way to being excited about writing fiction, and loving what they write. If it sounds like something you could use, go here.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: Totally left-fielded myself today. WOW!

Oh.

My. 

God.

Today was the day you want to be a novelist for.

Yesterday, I’d set Cady up with a banquet on an activity card,  and a crazy thirty-plus hour schedule she was going to have to get through in which she would not have a single minute to herself, and in which she had to have at least a bit of alone time so she could plant the bugs her rescuers were going to need so they could find her before she got herself killed.

And then today, my right brain Muse threw me something so amazing, so crazy, and so PERFECT that I could not believe it. It came from the very darkest part of my life, from the places where I have seen things go wrong in horrible ways…where my reality and my close associations with loss and pain, and how much you would do to fix things if you could, come into play.

And yet, the scene is bright, and happy, and cheerful. Full of hope.

Devious as hell.

The perfect first-draft mid-point twist, and not AT ALL what I thought I was going to be writing today. It was, instead, a complete one-eighty from where I thought I was going to find myself.

I am so damned excited I want to keep writing, but I got my 2216 words, and had to get the bit from between the horse’s teeth and rein him in.

Long list of other things I just have to do.

Won’t have another Cady day until next Wednesday.

But lemme tell you, I am already looking forward to next Wednesday with delight. I love this woman and the crazy shit she gets herself into, and I love what’s coming next.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: 2068 words, and I passed the halfway point

This was a good writing day, in spite of the fact that I slept in, AND in spite of the fact that I had a hard time getting started this morning.

Pushups and coffee only go so far. Problem was, I woke up at around four AM, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went out to hang out with Matt for a while, played several hours of No Man’s Sky, and then napped for about an hour starting at 8 am.

Anyway.

Got Cady into a desperate situation, in which in spite of having taken every conceivable precaution, she is now disarmed and on her way to a process she knows is one hundred percent certain to kill her. And will have absolutely no opportunity to escape.

And I have just set the stage for the second conspiracy in the novel, the one that is the reason for the current (probably awful) working title.

Which I hinted at earlier, and which is going to have a nifty little twist before I hit my ending.

The Mid-Point Twist (for HTWAN students reading this) was completely unplanned, but it fit within the structure and world I’d built, so it evolved to surprise me. I love when that happens.

Time now to get going on the other work of the day. But small happy dance here, because I am halfway done with this The Wishbone Conspiracy,  and I still love it.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: Flying words, and ONE word that summoned a new world

This morning was an awesome experience. First, I got 2117 words on The Wishbone Conspiracy. Fun words.

I woke up a little late, got started a little later, but nevertheless popped open my Scrivener document, headed into the last words I’d written, scanned my plan for the chapter, and jumped in.

The words started slowly— they usually do. But Cady was in a smartass mood, and made me laugh a couple times with things she said and did, and then stepped into a situation she wasn’t expecting, and dealt with that a little less gracefully than one might have hoped.

As she sometimes does.

And in the middle of her dealing with the well-earned fear of the bad shit that’s now racing straight at her,  she used a funny word that stopped me in my tracks.

Not gonna share the word.

She made it up, it was the right word, had the right feel, and it summarized a situation she’d been in perfectly.

But that word also clicked for me on a completely different level.

That one word said, “This is what you were looking for. This word. Think this, think Ohio, think the series you were trying to get to come to life on you in the shower this morning…

I did. And all of a sudden my blue-ink Ohio World pen was racing across the notebook page, asking question after question after question, setting limitations, presenting conflicts.

This is the notebook, POST notes. Still steaming slightly.

So…

Not only did I get the words on The Wishbone Conspiracy.  

I also got a hard lead on the new series I want to build. I got my main character, the problem she faces at the beginning of the first story, a GREAT series name, and a real sense of what the books are going to be about.

Urban fantasy in a place I love with a world I now cannot wait to write.

I will wait, of course. I have other projects that take precedence.

But now I can start into the preliminary work. Worldbuilding, Octopus map, overall planning… Stuff I can do for fun in my off-time, just because I love it.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love this job?

I love this job.

I’ve UNPUBLISHED Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, and Warpaint

This was a tough decision to make.

I’ve pulled both Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood and Warpaint from circulation.

They will be back…

But not until I know I’m going to put them in front of the readers who will love them.

I’m going to have to get (or make) new covers for both books, completely redo keywords and blurbs, change my books’ categorization, and give them a chance to cool (though sales have been small enough that THAT part shouldn’t take long… I had them so badly categorized that they haven’t been “hot”).

Based on what I’m learning today, I’m going to have to split-test covers and blurbs to jut the folks who like to read the kind of stories these are.

I’m finding the face of my audience today — my real readers — and my big, happy news is that I’m not going to have to change what I write. There’s already a market I’ve been writing in that has a lot of readers who would love what I do. Which is thrilling.

But I’m definitely going to have to change the way I present it to readers, so that the folks who would love it can find it (which hasn’t been happening), and the ones who wouldn’t will never see it.

Just discovered the actual genre for Cadence Drake… derp!

Biopunk.

Biopunk?

BIOPUNK!

Real genre, I write it, I have been writing it since the late nineties…

So how exactly did I miss this?

How did I not realize this was a thing that those of us who love science and genetics and SF and fantasy were writing?

That would be the Epic Fail.

Thanks, guys. You are helping me beyond words, and I’m gonna write you a kickass story as thanks.

Marketing Tuesday #1 – Reading Emails, Building a “Loves, Hates, and Recommends” chart

So because last Tuesday was TAX DAY, in which I had to finish up everything to get to my accountant, today is my first ever Marketing Tuesday.

In which I am building a chart to help me understand who my readers are, what they’re looking for from me, what other work they like and what they like about it.

The Research Chart Header

Reader and Email are on there so the folks who answered the three questions I asked, whether via email, on my blog, or over in the HWC forums, can get their stories.

And so far, it’s looking very much like I’m going to have to write a new story for them. The people who like my work are enthusiastic about it — but in most cases, not for the reasons I thought.

SO FAR… (and I have a LOT of feedback yet to go through) many of MY readers love the fact that I mix genres, love my insertion of grim and gritty and real-world into fantasy and science fiction, love the fact that my worlds feel real, and do not mind at all that I smoosh all the stuff I love from nonfiction (anthropology and archeology and history and science and pseudoscience) into books that are ostensibly about other things.

Turns out… I’m not the only writer who is currently doing this — and the fact that there are folks who write what I love to write and who have really good audiences for it is encouraging as hell.

It just means I’ve been putting the stuff I love to write in front of the wrong people.

And the answers I’m getting to the questions I asked are showing me everything I was getting wrong… and better yet, how to get those things right.

So I’m going to have to write a story for these folks.

I think it’s going to be a short one-off that will introduce a new character, a new world, and an idea I have for my first “now I know what I’m writing” series.

Hugs and thanks to everyone who answered my questions. You guys are magnificent. 

Mondays… -@*~$^

Got my words on Dead Man’s Party — that was the fun, interesting, easy part.

We did a site update over at HollysWritingClasses.com that was overall just buttery smooth. But I did not have “Test Downloads” in my list of post-update checking, and downloads were not, therefore, tested.

And guess what was broken?

Dan fixed them quickly and beautifully, but in the meantime, between the time we identified the presence of a problem and the time he fixed them,  I stressed out all over the place.

And there was just a ton of not-fun email.

And I’m just now getting to the FUN email, which is folks getting me their answers on my search for the identification of the genre I actually write…

Which is NOT Space Opera.

And while research has turned up some amazing gems, and while I had the coolest idea for the next stuff I want to to write (after I wrap Dead Man’s Party, The Wishbone Conspiracy, and The Emerald Sun), I’m still not even the littlest bit solid on how I can get my existing books re-classified and in front of the readers who will actually like them.

Should be an interesting week. I could totally give Monday Drama a miss, though.