Holly Lisle's Blog, page 62

Dreaming the Dead Chapters 1 — 7: July Patreon Bonus

Back in May I relocated my Dreaming the Dead manuscript.

This morning, while putting together my July Patreon bonus for my patrons, I realized a lot of the folks who might be interested might still be reading here.

So just a quick note.

ALL my Patreon patrons this month get the first SEVEN chapters of the first draft of Dreaming the Dead as their bonus.

It was one of the books they voted heavily in favor of me picking back up, it is the single most compelling project I have ever worked on, and only a massive derailing of my life pulled me away from it…

And it’s coming back.

No one but me has seen these chapters, and while they’re raw first draft, after I re-read them, I’m more exited about the project than I was before.

And my patrons are the only folks who will to see anything more than just snippets.

BIG note. This is RAW first draft. Unrevised, unedited, flawed. This is straight from brain to fingertips to page with no censoring or fixing.

But if you want to see the start of the book that woke me up in the middle of  then night when my dead publisher gave me the idea for it, you’re invited to join my Patreon.

All my patrons this month get the complete three-chapter bonus.

Dreaming the Dead Chapters 1 — 3: July Patreon Bonus

Back in May I relocated my Dreaming the Dead manuscript.

This morning, while putting together my July Patreon bonus for my patrons, I realized a lot of the folks who might be interested might still be reading here.

So just a quick note.

ALL my Patreon patrons this month will be getting the first three chapters of the first draft of Dreaming the Dead as their bonus.

It was one of the books they voted heavily in favor of me picking back up, it is the single most compelling project I have ever worked on, and only a massive derailing of my life pulled me away from it…

And it’s coming back.

No one but me has seen these chapters, and while they’re raw first draft, after I re-read them, I’m more exited about the project than I was before.

And my patrons are the only folks who will to see anything more than just snippets.

BIG note. This is RAW first draft. Unrevised, unedited, flawed. This is straight from brain to fingertips to page with no censoring or fixing.

But if you want to see the start of the book that woke me up in the middle of  then night when my dead publisher gave me the idea for it, you’re invited to join my Patreon.

All my patrons this month get the complete three-chapter bonus.

Vipers’ Nest Homestretch — I hope…

So… here it is Friday morning, July 6, and I have been working steadily for six hours a day on the bug-hunts for Vipers’ Nest every day but Monday…

Granted, as I’m getting into the bug hunts from my later folks, I’m getting a lot of repeat finds.

But I have not had one bug hunter who hasn’t found at least half a dozen “uniques” — errors no one else spotted. And I’ve had several readers who have asked smart and thoughtful questions that required me to rethink and rework portions of the story.

Result?

The story was about 32,000 words in finished revised “final” draft. Before I touch it this morning, it’s already 38,473 words. If I end up adding a smidge over 1500 more words, the damn thing becomes a novel.

And I still have five bug hunters to go. 

I’ve been pulling out words, too, but they’re losing ground to the ones I’m adding.

Why?

Because the writer who gets an intelligent question about something in the story that isn’t answered (because the writer assumed prior knowledge) cannot ignore the question by saying, “Well, to find that out, you have to read the previous stories.”

 

Because here’s reality.

The reader doesn’t have to read the previous stories. The reader can go read someone else’s stories that don’t assume prior knowledge.

So as lightly as I can, I’m including the tidbits of prior knowledge readers would need to bring in from the previous four stories, WITHOUT tipping off the reader to what happens in those stories.

The fun part of this is that, because of the way I plot, I can put in some things that some characters believe to be true (even though other characters know they are not true) so that I’m not cheating in hiding details while still making sure I don’t spoil the earlier stories for readers who DO go through them out of order.

But it’s slow and careful work, and what I thought I was going to fly through in a day or two is now at the end of my second week of doing just the story ALMOST full time.

And I already know that I’m going to have to go through this when I’m done, read it out loud, and do a final Bug-Hunt bug-hunt to eliminate new errors I’ve introduced. 

You’ll be getting a better and richer story out of this. Just not this week.

God, I love my bug-hunters

Am in the middle of one of the LAST of the bug hunter sheets from one of the last of my bug hunters.

And am still locating and fixing new bugs found by more careful readers and pointed out in a format that makes fixing simple — all of this done neatly, concisely, beautifully.

It’s a LOT of work to go through a crowd-sourced bug-hunt, but the folks hunting for me have done an absolutely amazing job.

I’d hoped to take the story live today, it being July 4th and sort of appropriate for the story about the war between the massive PWA and the tiny Bailey’s Irish Space Station. 

Not gonna happen, dammit.

But I’m hoping that Vipers’ Nest can be new and shiny and live on all the platforms where I can get it next week.

Yep. Going wide from the get-go with this one, and with every one from here on out.

Experimenting with Mars Edit

There was a point in my writing career where I was blogging as I wrote. I’d do a starting wordcount and the day’s objective, post little snippets of something I wrote while the letters were still glowing from the heat, build a new post as a digression from my worldbuilding or research (research was the origin of a lot of Rants).

The blog was busy.

And then E cto died.

What was Ecto? A little app I had on my desktop that just sat there besides me — open — so that I never had to slog to my blog, open WordPress, go through the friggin’ interface, set up a post, save, test, save, test, save, test… publish.

When it died, blogging stopped being easy and started being work that did not gently flow into what I was actually doing and actually got paid for (blogging being essentially free nonfiction done during work hours that, if you have to stop and spend a couple hours on an in-depth post, cuts into actual paid work).

I have from time to time searched for something that would do what Ecto did, and have repeatedly had my hopes crushed.

So now I’m looking at Mars Edit. 

The first big test is going to be: Will it actually post to my blog. This is where other programs have died an ugly death.

The second is: How much of a pain in the ass is it going to be to edit a post? Will I be able to do that from here and still get the post to look the way I want?

I’ll still have to log in to update the software, and I’m looking at doing (yet another) total site overhaul with a major re-theming to decrease the cluttered look while still keeping all the content.

But as I write this, I like the interface, I like the simplicity, I like the small footprint that lets it fit on my desktop beside my actual work.

If it works, this could be my path back to doing something that I love (talking about work while I work, and showing off my work while I work) that died with Ecto.

If it doesn’t…? 

Same old slog, and my best attempt to do a post a week, that degrades when things get chaotic into a post or two a month.

So here’s to hoping this works.

The demons that drive writers

There are folks who want to write books.

Then there are those of us who write because drinking kills your liver (and killed most of our relatives) and therapy is too fucking expensive.

You think I jest (and to a certain extent, I do). But there is something that drives people to turn themselves inside out, to rip every event they’ve lived through to shreds to try to make sense of it, to turn all of that pain and horror into plots and characters and conflicts and twists, and pushes us out the other side of unrelenting brutal self-dissection with books in hand.

And since over the weekend (while I was doing some cleaning) I found one of the little shards of horror that made ME who I am poised like a scorpion in the center of a bunch of stuff I was throwing away, I thought I’d share.

We start with the date here, which is Dec. 3, 2001.

The Envelope of Maternal Manipulation

I’ve redacted both addresses, not because either of them is current (I know mine isn’t and have no clue about hers) — but because having strangers show up at places because the addresses are THERE would be uncool.

My mother’s handwriting is distinctive and unmistakable, so I want to have it here.

Next, the lovely missive that came inside this envelope.

Letter from my mother

Done on what looks to me like an ink jet printer.

The words here are fun, so if you’re visually impaired and relying on a reader to read this post, I’m going to copy them for you.

December 02, 2001

Dear Holly,

I hesitate to write to you after the last phone call to you, when you said you never wanted to hear from us again. Being thick headed and figuring you maybe didn’t mean it when you called your dad a bastard, son of a bitch. I figured you probably were having a bad day. Any way not to bother you. You probably actually don’t care but your dad had a severe stroke and we sold our mountain chalet and business and moved to REDACTED. On the off chance that you might call Murphy we didn’t want you to call and us not be there. The people who bought the house kept our same phone number and would tell you. But I’d rather write and incur your wrath for writing than to incur it for not letting you know. We hope things are going well for you. Should you or your family need to get in touch with us our cell phone number in REDACTED. Our six month address is REDACTED.

Mom

SO.

I’m not from a normal family, but I’ve seen them on TV.

On TV, when something awful happens, what does the family member who KNOWS it happened do?

She picks up the fucking telephone and calls everyone, and says, “Your dad had a stroke, and is in the hospital, and we don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

In which case, the person who receives the call packs fresh underwear, jumps on the next plane out of town, and shows up at the hospital, because even if your dad IS a philandering, lying cuntbucket sack of shit, he’s still your dad, and you remember when you were little and he took you hunting and fishing and taught you how to clean game and load shotgun shells and shoot both a rifle and a shotgun and was the coolest man on the planet…

You remember when you loved him.

And you go. Because there’s still a chance what’s wrong can be made right.

But like I said… I’m not from a normal family.

In my family, apparently the way you let someone know someone important to them has had a stroke is to…

Wait for him to die, so you can hold it over the head of the one who wasn’t at the funeral.

Then when he DOESN’T die…

Wait until he’s out of the hospital
Wait until you’ve sold the house
Wait until you’ve sold the business
Wait until you’ve moved your whole fucking parade all the way to the other side of the state, and…
THEN write the letter above.

The purpose of this letter was not to give me a chance to make things right with my father.

It was to fill me with guilt.

It didn’t.

See, I have learned from long and brutal experience that this is the way my mother operates.

When my grandmother died, I got a letter from my mother telling me that everyone was surprised that I didn’t come to the funeral, because everyone else was there.

My mother’s letter was how I found out my grandmother died.

When my sister died a couple years ago, I found out when my mother phoned my first ex-mother-in-law (the child molester’s mother) who told my older son, who called Matt, who took the call, got grim-faced, told me no, things weren’t okay but to go ahead and finish eating, and when we left the restaurant, took me out to the car, and then told me so I wasn’t sitting in front of a bunch of strangers when I fell apart.

That ugly game of telephone tag was how I first even discovered that the sister who was four years younger than me was even sick, that she had been unwell for a long time, and had apparently slipped into a coma and stayed that way for a while. Possibly a long while. There apparently would have been tons of time for me to go see her while she was alive… maybe even conscious. But no.

This was how I found out my sister — who I always figured would come live with me when my parents died — (she had cerebral palsy and was severely retarded, but she was a good kid and I loved her) was dead.  I wrote the linked poem following my learning of her death.

In my mother’s version of family, this is the way you do things.

And I should have realized it a lot earlier.

When I was twenty-seven (in 1986) and considering getting a divorce from that fuck Barry (the child molester), she told me that with his drinking and his diabetes and his running around, he wouldn’t live long, and I should just stay married to him and wait for him to die.

By every proof of her existence, my mother likes to wait for things to die.

Meanwhile, however, Barry died in 2005. Instead of having my third husband, Matt, since 1995 — instead of having love and a partner in life — I could have had that evil spawn of scum and cuntery for another twenty years.

Divorce…?

Is AWESOME.

My best guess is, if either of my parents is still alive, my mother is still married to the husband she hoped would die, so she could send me another of those delightful “Guess whose funeral you missed this time?” letters. Hey, if either of them is still alive, they deserve each other.

But enough of them. Back to why I’m a writer.

When this is where you come from, when this shit show of manipulation and lies is what you have to call home and family, from an early age you turn inward, you start pulling yourself apart, you question EVERYTHING, and anything that does not hold together, you discard.

And then, because all the rage and fury and disbelief and despair inside you has to go somewhere, and because you have to find a way to make it mean something, to make it matter, to make it not a poison that eats you alive…

You write. Novels, short stories, nonfiction, blog posts, words, and words, and more words.

Because even though writing is a gruelling, painful, difficult way to make a living…

Drinking kills your liver
Therapy is too fucking expensive

And when you’re done turning your life upside-down and inside-out and stripping it to the bare-bone essentials and then rebuilding on those, and then turning that process into stories, maybe you will have created something that someone ELSE who crawled out of a hellhole and survived can use to make his or her own life better.

The Fung Fasting Report #4: More success

After the “Failed to drink enough water, felt like crap” fast last month, this month I decided to skip any extended fasting. I have held to:

ONE ketogenic meal a day, NO snacks. We had a family holiday in the month over at my inlaws’ place (combined birthday and Father’s Day) so there one day of eating utterly NON-keto food.

Delicious, but not the way we eat.

We ate, we enjoyed, and when we came back home, we just picked up where we left off.

This, after all, is not a religion. It’s just a very effective way to dump body fat and get healthy.

So. With just Intermittent fasting, NO extended fasts, and with one meal of “Everything I shouldn’t eat, but did…” where am I now?

Waist: 33.75″  (85.725 cm)

Down 8.25″ (20.995 cm)

And how do I feel? Excellent. No weakness, no fatigue, a LOT of work done in the past month.

And my size 10 jeans and jean shorts, which when I started this were painfully tight to the point of being unwearable, now fall down.

I don’t have smaller clothes.

So at some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get some, I guess. I only clothes shop about once every three or four years, though, and none of the size 10 clothes, which were not getting much use, are worn out yet, so I’m looking at breaking out my sewing skills and taking the waists in.

One Tip

We had eggs and sausage as our one meal on Friday. Was delicious. But unlike EVERY other meal we’ve had, all three of us were hungry the next day.

And were hungry the whole day, and ate like famished wolves at mealtime, and were looking at each other when the food was gone muttering, “What else do we have?” I ended up snacking on walnuts. Matt and the kid (now 20) just toughed it out.

Today, no problem. I’m not hungry, and won’t be until around seven, when it’s time to eat. Yesterday’s meal of a big pan-fried pork steak and buttered fresh asparagus (and the cup of walnuts), worked.

But I can’t recommend eggs and sausage as the day’s one meal. It just doesn’t stick.

 

And… Success. Big Week of Fiction only comes to a close

I did NOT get Vipers’ Nest completed.

However, I did get the write-in revision of A Few Good Men done.

It was a red-ink bloodbath — and when I say this, realize that I killed not one but THREE red pens in the process of fixing this sixty-page manuscript.

The How to Write Short Stories folks will get to see the massacre up close and personal — I’m scanning the manuscript into PDF form now for Lesson 5.

I’ll have to do the type-in, formatting, and publication later.

NEXT week, I’ll get back to work on Vipers’ Nest. And may have some very cool things to announce for the folks at Holly’s Writing Classes.

The Big Week of Fiction Only includes Getting My Ass Kicked

Vipers’ Nest

Monday morning…

Wild Optimism. Will have Vipers’ Nest done by end of day Tuesday.

Seven hours in, I was only a short way into the new bug-hunter’s sheet I’d started.

Tuesday morning…

Well, I’ll surely at least be finished with this one bug-hunter’s questions by the end of today.

Seven hours later, I’d finished one third of of the SAME bug-hunter’s finds. And that’s working straight through, no food, coffee and water only, two bathroom breaks.

Wednesday morning…

I’m still just one THIRD of the way through the questions I started on Monday from this one particular bug hunter, many of which have resulted in additional detail, and one in an entirely new chapter.

If they weren’t good, thoughtful, necessary questions, the book would be for sale by now.

But it wouldn’t be as good. 

HOWEVER…

How to Write Short Stories

I have writers waiting for their revision lesson in the Short Stories class, and until I revise A Few Good Men, and scan all my red-ink manuscript slaughter and filled-in worksheets demonstrating the process of thoughtfully and intently ripping a story to bloody shreds to get a BETTER story, they can’t get their lesson.

So today, Vipers’ Nest goes on the back burner until the revision for A Few Good Men is complete.

Wanna hear something funny?

I think I can get this revised today. You may laugh. Even as I wrote the words, my Muse snorted. The bitch.

At least I’ve already filled in most of my worksheets.

The big week of Fiction Only

I built a breathing space for myself.

Lesson 5 of How to Write Short Stories is done, with one exception that I’ll get to in a second
HollysWritingClasses.com is almost done and out of beta, and the parts of it that aren’t are NOT things I can work on or help with
My mailing list is on autopilot for a couple of weeks because for the time being, folks have heard enough from me
The email RPG works as-is, and I need to let the complete overhaul I want to do to make it cooler cook in the back of my head for a while
I have more questions to answer for my Patreon folks, but the last (ten-minute) video took four hours to make, so I need a better way to do those

 

So I have TWO pieces of shorter fiction that get ALL of my attention for the next four days. I’m figuring I can put in an easy six hours a day and have both of these done and published by the end of the workday on Friday.

Vipers’ Nest

First, of course, is the novella Vipers’ Nest. And I whimper when I say this, but the title is going to be Vipers’ Nest when it goes live, because ALL my promo for it, all my Coming Next text in the other books, all the stuff that you don’t want to have to go back and revise and reprint JUST to change two words, is Vipers’ Nest.

I’ve made good progress on this already, and barring finding some big wreckage reported by a bug hunter that I just haven’t hit yet, it could go live as early as today or tomorrow.

The second story is currently a novelette, and would technically be a reprint. I found A Few Good Men on my hard drive in an ancient AmiPro copy. This was a story I wrote on request for the anthology Women at War, edited by Lois McMaster Bujold.

I pulled it out, cleaned all the coding out of it, and read it.  And was really disappointed. It had some funny bits in it, but it wasn’t… strong.

FORTUNATELY (said without sarcasm), I needed a wrecked story to demonstrate short story revision for How To Write Short Stories, and it’s a helluva lot more instructive to fix a genuinely broken story than it is to try to write a broken one on purpose and then fix that as a demo.

A Few Good Men

So this is the cover I did for the broken story students read in HTWSS week four.  I don’t know if I’ll use the same cover (or even the same title) once I’ve revised the story.

This story gets a complete tear-down revision with red pen and notebook notes, a complete rewrite, a type-in revision, a content edit, a revision to content edit, AND a bug-hunt. I don’t think this story will be complete this week to go on sale…

But the tear-down revision, red-pen edit, and scans of notebook notes should be done this week. Which means they’ll be available for How to Write Short Stories students.  Which in this case is the important part.

On to writing. Nothing but fiction for a whole Week! Woot!