Holly Lisle's Blog, page 56

The Emerald Sun: Banris the Flea wins a battle

Genna, the cat, Doyati, Yarri, and Dan are in the right place at the right time to see a human army winning their war against Banris… until they aren’t.

I had to spend about half an hour setting up my Scrivener file for the new deadlines and writing objectives I’m now working toward — more on that another time.

But with my new deadlines set, my document set up to allow me to make the best use of my time, and my ten-minute timer going, I got 1604 words on the story today, and ended up with a nice realization about the current conflict, and how it will play into what’s coming.

And the cat was busy in this scene, though he manages to make himself scarce right at the end.

Dead Man’s Party — and Fiction as the Day Job again…

Got 1515+ words this morning on Dead Man’s Party, in a smidge under an hour.

Also built my work process for getting a LOT more fiction done, and spending the first two to three hours of every weekday on that.

My daughter Becca is going to modify the process I came up with (after some heavy research over the past couple of weeks) to work in both shorter fiction and long fiction.

Me? Right now, I just wanna do a bunch of novels, the first stack of them in Settled Space.

Then I want to resuscitate some of my Hard Drive Zombies.

And then we’ll see.

But the objective is to make my fiction the BIG paying job again, with the classes as this fun thing I get to do alongside novels that are paying the bills.

I’m a lot happier when I’m writing two hours of fiction first every morning… and that’s the plan. (Mostly…)

Roughed out, the plan is actually:

Monday through Friday…

STEP ONE: Write two hours or 2000 words on the current novel
STEP TWO: Then build the plan for the next novel
STEP THREE: Then revise/ edit/ format/ publish/ market for one hour on the previous novel

Then do the nonfiction stuff.

That’ll put me up to three to four hours a day on total fiction, leaving two to four hours a day for non-fiction plus forums plus blogging.

In that order.

Consistent Novel Publishing. It’s what I’m heading toward.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: 2000 words and intrigue

As of right now, I’m 21,525 words into The Wishbone Conspiracy,  and making good progress. Not having a great day otherwise, but my daughter and I got to write together for a couple hours and hit our word counts.

And the story tied itself in more tightly with the little secret story I’m hinting at in my SF newsletter.

Not feeling great at all, though, so I’m going to get the rest of the items in my bullet journal checked off, and then just rest for a while.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: I discover Tangerine’s real name

Tangerine got himself in some hot water with Cady today — he’s a clever chap who did some deep digging, and found out a bit of her past he would have been better off not knowing.

But during what turned into an awkward encounter between the two of them, I learned both his original real name and his “grew up and legally changed my name” name.

Original first name?

Furball. (His mother had some serious issues.)

Grown up, changed real name?

Keff Ronin.

Keff is having a much worse day than he anticipated. But it will get better.

Because when all is said and done, he’s one of the good guys. It’s just a bit hard to tell that at the moment. He hasn’t yet done a good job of proving it.

2116 words today — took a while, but I’m happy with what I got.

Rediscovered Worldbuilding Workshop: Holidays in Hell and Other Delights

I was doing a BIG search on my hard drive for something I’d previously written about Tangerine, who was a minor character in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood  who became a major character in the current novel, The Wishbone Conspiracy (for which as I blog this, I have not yet gotten my full complement of words for the day…

When I tripped over a handful of old workshops and articles I’d written for Vision, back when Lazette Gifford was editing and publishing that as part of my Forward Motion site.

Most of them are already in place on the writing pages.

But one of the ones I hadn’t yet reprinted was Holidays in Hell and Other Delights: A Worldbuilding Workshop.

I got a wee bit sidetracked with that, and am now getting back to my fiction, STILL not having recovered a big chunk of writing I did on the novel that actually featured Tangerine (that isn’t his real name, by the way).

I put that up so I wouldn’t forget it, and am posting here so you won’t miss it. I was pleased that the quality still held up — it’ll be useful for those of you who write fiction and need to build in some little pieces of worlds to give them added depth and verisimilitude.

The link again: Holidays in Hell and Other Delights: A Worldbuilding Workshop

The Emerald Sun: Chasing the unknown

Today was a tougher day from the storytelling perspective.

I don’t actually know what Genna and Dan and Yarri and Doyati and the cat are going to find.

They’re running west, and something is waiting, and because of the way my Muse works, I’m going to see it when they see it, and not before.

We’re not there yet — but they’re not having an easy time, and are having to stay hidden because they have trouble behind them, and trouble in front of them.

I got 897 words today, and I know next Tuesday, when I pick this back up, they and I are going to go over that last hill and discover what’s on the other side.

The Emerald Sun: In the hills before trouble

Got 1017 words on The Emerald Sun today, my best day so far.

Genna had a revelation just a few minutes ago — she got herself and the other kids out of danger just in the nick of time… but danger is following along in their wake, and danger is waiting ahead.

And that’s where I ran out of time in the writing, because now I have to move on to How to Write a Novel, Lesson 25.

The fact that my Muse does this to me regularly — running me up to a cliffhanger right at the point where I have to stop — is both kind of mean, and kind of helpful.

Because I really want to know what it is that she just figured out that she was getting ready to tell me. And I’ll be eager to show up and get my words tomorrow morning so I can find out.

Onward.

Dead Man’s Party: Things turn mean on the Caravan road

I haven’t talked a lot about the story of Dead Man’s Party — and twenty chapters in is probably not the time to start giving complex plot hints.

And, really, Dead Man’s Party is a messy, messy first draft, jumping through three broad concepts before finally settling into the fourth, so the revision is going to be MEAN.

But today was an interesting day for me as a writer, because I was writing the protagonist’s true love, who has been having to fight his way through zombies and cannibals to get to her, who is traveling with a caravan of people carrying bits and pieces of valuables and trade goods and people from surviving small town to surviving small town in this post-Apocalyptic world…

And who today got hit on by a girl who (correctly) identified him as a good guy, and who asked him if he needed a wife.

And her actions forced me to dig deeper into the lives of the folks who wait for caravans, who tend caravaners, who live behind walls under regular attack as sitting targets, and made me think about the people  who live in the caravans, and are moving targets without the walls, who get killed and eaten in high numbers.

I was shooting for 1515 words today, and got 1719.

And some good questions that are going to have to become a bigger part of the story in the revision.

The Wishbone Conspiracy: Tangerine Returns

Today, a blast from the past who yesterday showed up for this party uninvited today became a major part of the story.

Tangerine was a one-scene character in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood. He was in that story to change Cady’s appearance when she was in trouble but did not yet know exactly how much trouble she was in.

The rule of thumb with characters you don’t want to have popping up uninvited is exactly the same as it is with stray animals:

Don’t name them
Don’t feed them
Don’t get to know them too well

I did all three things in Tangerine’s one scene.

I gave him a name, I discovered that he, like Cady, was a Maryschild, and I let him say the bunch of funny lines that he threw at me.

And then I came up with nine more novel concepts for Cady that I planned to pitch to Baen, one of which actually had Tangerine in it. That was Number Eight, I think.

But then… Baen didn’t reprint Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, a book that hit the Locus bestseller list two months in a row and sold out its first printing in two months.

And refused to look at any more SF from me.

YEARS passed before I finally reacquired the rights to Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood. More years passed until I made the time to get it back into print and to write its sequel, Warpaint. That second book rode off into the sunset with the idea for The Wishbone Conspiracy firmly planted in my brain.  Where it sat simmering for several MORE years, because…

Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

This is my planned third book.

But Tangerine was nowhere in my concept for this book.

He showed up yesterday as an uninvited extra, and today made himself a main character. The Wishbone Conspiracy is not — and has nothing to do with — the novel I plan to write that actually features him.

Oh, no.

This is him showing up dragging something useful to prove me how much I need him, in much the same fashion my much-missed cat Bouncer used to bring me squirrel hindquarters as his contribution to the family. “See, I’m taking care of you.”

The squirrels, the birds, and I were a lot happier when I turned Bouncer and my other cats into indoor-only cats. Bouncer? Probably not so much. He’d sit on windowsills and shit-talk the wildlife outside the windows.

But Tangerine… turns out that isn’t his real name… And who he was wasn’t and isn’t who he is, either.

He and Cady actually were acquainted with each other back in their Maryschild past, though in their previous meeting neither recognized the other.

And today he dropped the back half of a squirrel he’d apparently been holding between his metaphorical teeth and without saying the words, told Cady, “You need me.”

Turns out, he was right.

Oh! Words I got on TWC today? 2024

The Wishbone Conspiracy: Tangerine?

I got 2014 words today on The Wishbone Conspiracy, and sent Cady home — back to Cantata, back to Oldcity…

And someone showed up whom I was not expecting to see for several more books.

Tangerine, the bodyartist from Tangerine’s Dream back in Book One.

I knew when I met Tangerine that he was a lot more than he was letting on, and over the years I’ve found out a lot more about him. But he wasn’t supposed to be in this book.

Until he showed up uninvited.

Tangerine met Cady when she dropped into the newbie bazaar, ambushing both of us. And he met her intentionally, knew she was coming, and…

I have no clue why. What he’s doing there, what he wants from her — the book I’ve planned for him is something entirely different from this one, and I still want to write that one. But this isn’t that.

THIS ties in to the guy whose dead wife Cady just helped find, and into the Wishbone Conspiracy, maintained for at least a couple centuries by real folks who get real bennies from it.

So tomorrow is going to be interesting and fun, because Tangerine is going to tell Cady why he came to meet her and volunteered to help her, in spite of the fact that he’s a big, important Cantata councilman now.

Going to tell her what he wants from her.

And when he tells her, I’m going to get to be there to hear what he says.

If I didn’t have a stack of other things in my bullet journal for the day that MUST be done today, I’d just keep writing. But — this is going to make it really easy to roll out of bed tomorrow morning.