Holly Lisle's Blog, page 64

I don’t like the state of the world right now.

Honestly, I don’t know ANYONE who likes the state of the world right now. Not a single person. And I’ve been wanting to write something about this, but I have not had an inch of breathing room for blogging all month.

But I was looking for something I’d written about people getting paid for their work this morning, and tripped over an article I wrote in 2005.

In which I said the same damn thing I’ve been wanting to say for months. The fact that EVERYTHING has changed since 2005, and that NOTHING has changed since 2005, made this article both gratifying and deeply and disturbingly creepy.

So something I have only done once before, I think: Here’s a replay of an old blog post.

On the Other Hand

Announcing the Public Release of How to Write Short Stories

I did a private Members’ Only release of my new class, How to Write Short Stories, last week so that we could test software and make sure everything was working correctly.

I’m now delighted to announce that the early sale was nearly bug-free… and we have squashed the few bugs that did get through.

How to Write Short Stories

Right now, you can still get the class for the EarlyBird price of $67 — It’ll go up to $97 when I have the first four lessons finished, but folks who buy while I’m building the first half of the class save $30 and just better than 30% off the final price.

What’s in the class?

Eight weeks of comprehensive step by step lessons with worksheets, forum discussion, questions and answers, and of course permanent membership. Buy once, get all the updates and any in-version upgrades for free, retake the class as often as you like.

Here are the eight lessons:

How to Think Short: Painless Short Story Idea Creation
How to Plan Short: Fun, Simple Short Story Design
How to Write Short: Get the Story You Want at the Length You Need
How to End Short: Landing Twist, Resolution & Meaning
Contests, Anthologies, Collections, Magazines: Writing To Theme, Length, and Deadline
Writing Story Time in Short Works: Five Seconds or Five Hundred Years in 6000 Words
Spin Off, Spin Into: Creating Good Short Fiction to Market Your Long Fiction
Genre Short Stories: Hitting Fundamental Notes or Defining YOUR Genre

 

Why the Discount on a Brand New Class?

I don’t have a fancy sales page yet. Right now, I have the basic curriculum outline and the questions folks asked me that I’m answering in the the lessons.

The pretty sales page doesn’t come until the class is finished (in other words, after I’ve finished writing all the lessons).

There’s a REASON folks get a discount on the first, AKA SPLINTERS version of the class.

I’m writing the lessons at a rate of one every one to two weeks, and I do not go back to revise, so what you get tends to be…

Raw.

BUT… you get to let me know what you don’t understand. I answer questions in class, and revise the lessons after the course is done to meet the needs of the students who had problems with the first draft.

You get a discount, I get funding and beta testing while I build the class … and then you get the final version at no extra charge.

I raise the price when I’ve finished Lesson 4, and I’m done with Lesson 2, and working on Lesson 3 today.

I’m not going to flog this early-in discount with a bunch of posts and emails and showers of confetti.

If you’re interested, now is the best time to get the class. I don’t put my classes on sale, and depending on the scope and scale of the revision I need to do to move a class from the Splinters Version to the Finished (For Now) Version, I sometimes raise prices beyond what I thought would be the final price. In this case, I think the final price is going to be $97 but if I end up going over eight lessons, that changes.

I try not to do that, but extensive upgrades and a lot of added content both make it necessary and raise value. When that happens, I raise price accordingly.

If you’re interested, you can see my ugly page and get the discounted version now here.

Me, Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, Tongue Cancer, and Jason Fung, MD

Something you might not know about me. Back in the early 2000’s, I was fat. Not chubby. Not “just need to lose a few pounds.” Morbidy obese.

The point at which I stopped weighing myself and just gave up was when the scale hit 220, but I didn’t quit eating, and didn’t quit needing roomier clothes. So I weighed more than that. I just don’t know how much.

On a five-foot, six and a half inch frame, (which using a standard weight chart would make me 5’7 because of the one-inch heels) my max healthy weight would have been about 150 — my wrist measurement is exactly 7″, which qualifies as medium frame. Which made my body mass index back then 34.4, and made me morbidly obese.

At the time, so was Matt. He weighed over 300 pounds.

I was working pretty hard on the morbid part, too, killing myself in bits and pieces. I had adult onset diabetes, something I didn’t know until some weird anomaly triggered the ex-nurse in the back of my head. I bought a glucometer from Wal-Mart, checked my blood sugar and Matt’s, and about fainted. Both were awful.

I was also growing an already active parathyroid tumor, but wouldn’t know about that for some years yet.

And I was feeding future squamous-cell cancer of the tongue, one of the cancers associated with excess intake of sugar and sweeteners.

NOTE: The other predisposing conditions for tongue cancer are smoking — never even tried one cigarette; drinking — come from a long line of alcoholics who drank themselves to death, and decided I was never going to drink, and never did; and, , which I’d never heard of.

Anyway…

When we first checked them, our blood sugars were so high I thought the damn meter was broken. But purchase of a second meter, and repeat tests at different times proved that in FACT we were both in incredibly bad health.

We were also way too broke to see a doctor, had no health insurance, had no backup, had nothing but a roof over our heads and the Internet and a desperate need to fix our lives.

Matt researched, and found the Paleolithic diet, which for us became our permanent way of eating for a bunch of years.

Because we were desperate AND broke, we ate what I called Wal-Mart Paleo, which was hamburger and other cheap ground meat, frozen vegetables, and raw fruit and nuts in season — or whichever was cheapest at Wax-Mart at the time. We eliminated snacks and junk food, and just ate one meal a day. (Mostly to keep down costs.)

This was a low-carb, medium-protein, high fat diet.

And we tested our blood sugars both fasting and one hour after meals. Rigorously. I used to be a nurse. I knew what happened to people with long-term diabetes.

In a short period of time, I lost at least sixty pounds (more, but because I’d stopped weighing myself after the scale topped 220, I don’t know how much more), but I plateaued at 160, and Matt lost over a hundred, from around 300 down to around 200.

Our weight is both still there.

More importantly, our fasting and postprandial blood sugars dropped down to normal. And then never went back up.

With the one meal a day thing, and no snacking, we didn’t know it at the time, but we had accidentally discovered 24-Hour Intermittent Fasting, which was eating just the one low-carb, medium protein, high fat meal a day, and drinking lots of fluids.

So I can attest that eating Paleo works to get the weight off. Well. And quickly.

But here’s the thing. I’d been a dieter since my early twenties, and the thing I KNEW about dieting was that no matter what you did, the diet would eventually stop working, and the weight would come back, and bring friends.

But this weight never came back.

Neither Matt nor I regained the weight we lost, which is unheard-of for diets.

Until, about a year ago, when we changed the way we ate. We started eating extra meals, and snacking, and our weight started to climb.

Which was when we discovered — guess what? — it wasn’t the Paleo that caused the weight loss. It was something else.

We went back to eating once a day, and the weight came back off.

Back to tongue cancer for a minute

I’d been a diet soda fan since diet soda came out in the 1970s, and my fluid of choice was not water, but the diet crap I’ve been drinking forever.

Even while eating Paleo, I hung on to those damn diet drinks.

It looks now like the artificial sweeteners are what caused the tongue cancer.

I have no other predisposing factors.

Never drank.
Never smoked.
Never chewed betel nut.

Turns out tongue cancer “of unknown etiology” (which means “we have no fucking clue what’s causing this) is showing up in women in their fifties — in other words, the exact market for folks who drink a lot of diet sodas, and have for years. My evidence is corollary, not causative, but there’s a lot of it.

With about half my tongue gone, and no desire whatsoever to lose the other half, or my jaw, or half my face [I’ve seen the pictures: Not for the squeamish] I determined that I would do everything I could to stop the cancer.

I found mine when it was just a place on my tongue that wrinkled a little when I curled it, and that was sensitive to heat.

I’ve been drinking a lot of green tea. A LOT. Enough that it was causing me severe nausea every day.

But it was the only thing I knew I could do that might help prevent the cancer from coming back, so I kept at it.

Matt was searching for eating-related help, though, and discovered mention of autophagy (the process of the body destroying broken cells to use pieces to build new, healthy cells), and a link to this and improvements in squamous cell cancer.

He got the book.

I don’t recall if I’ve ever recommended a book here before (except for one of my own) — but I’m recommending not one, but two — and their author, Jason Fung, MD:

The Obesity Code

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss

The Complete Guide to Fasting

The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting

Why I’m recommending?

Because he clearly demonstrates the link between elevated insulin and a massive host of health problems (including Type 2 Diabetes, morbid obesity, squamous cell cancers, and other life-threatening diseases, like Alzheimer’s), and then CLEARLY demonstrates how to drop your insulin blood levels back to normal, and what doing this can do to save your life.

And I can confirm from more than a decade of personal experience that what he recommends works.

By the way, these are not affiliate links. I make nothing if you buy these. I bought both books myself, and am following the process — and I’d like my readers to be able to live longer, healthier, better lives. So we’ll all be around longer.

Holly

P.S. If you’re an HCW writer, there’s a place for discussion here. You’ll need to login first.

How to Write Short Stories: Outline for Upcoming Class

WEEK 1: How to Think Short: Learning the Concepts Behind Short Stories

WEEK 2: How to Plan Short: Building the Pieces of Short Fiction

WEEK 3: How to Write Short: Writing to Submission Lengths

WEEK 4: How to End Short: Landing The Twist and The Meaning

WEEK 5: Contests, Anthologies, Collections: Writing To A Theme

WEEK 6: Time and the Short Story: 50 Years in 6000 words

WEEK 7: Spin Off, Spin Into: Creating Good Short Fiction to Market Long Fiction

WEEK 8: Genre Short Stories: Hitting Fundamental Notes

As part of the class, writers will write:

one short story of any sort
one genre short story OR literary short story
one short story written to a theme OR written to spin off from or into the writer’s existing long fiction

 

These eight lessons will also include information on adapting lessons to literary markets, working subtext (hidden deeper meaning) into stories, and timeless marketing, pricing, and packaging information for indie publishers.



By the way, I have a cover art poll up in the forum. If you’re a member, it’s here: Cover art troubleshooting and cover design comment/crits #1

Revision for Vipers’ Nest, plus building How to Write Short Stories

Got everything set up yesterday. So for the next week or so, I’ll be doing the revision of the 30,000-word Vipers’ Nest, and following that each day, building the curriculum for my next new writing class, How to Write Short Stories.

My Patreon folks will get the inside look at the Vipers’ Nest revision with marked-up revision pages of a couple of individual chapters for the first two levels, and a one-hour video of the type-in revision process, all with notes and explanations. Trying something different this month.

I haven’t finished counting short story questions yet, but there were over 500 when I wrapped up yesterday. Course might be a little longer than the eight weeks I envisioned, but I want to keep it as short as possible to keep the price down. I’d be happiest if I could keep it the same length as the How to Write Villains class, which is eight weekly lessons (and a lot of writing).

What is this? More money laundering through Amazon?

In the wake of the money-laundering discovered on Amazon by author Patrick Reames, it’s clear that Amazon has a problem.

I’m not certain it’s only with ebooks. I’ve discovered strangeness with high dollar amounts that suggest the possibility of criminal activity, and the fact that some of the books that are — compromised, for lack of a better word — are books I’ve written, suggests that this issue could have a pretty wide spread.

Today I went in to connect an indie paperback to an indie e-book, and in the process discovered that a lot of books I’d written were being sold for phenomenal amounts of money.

(All images below link to full-sized screenshots so you can see ISBNs and other details.)

Here’s how I found these problem books:

Author Central, where you find books that MIGHT be yours

I was in Amazon’s Author Central doing work on an upcoming release, and discovered that there were a number of new buttons for books I’d written years ago, for which there were no legitimate reprints or authorized new editions.

In some instances, they duplicate the Amazon page, but use the new ISBN, which Amazon does not allow. Sometimes, but not always, they show up in searches for legitimate sellers.

In others, they create a new user name that includes the author’s name.

I’ve found several different kinds of creepy strangeness here that are worrisome.

On the first image below, this is a duplicate of the legitimate Amazon page with an alternate ISBN. This book is still in print, by the way, and while the new price is insanely high, the used price (visible on the full-sized image if you click the small one, is almost double.

In-Print book with dummied page

Below is an independent republication of a book for which rights reverted to me, published through CreateSpace, so this problem is NOT limited to just commercially published books or commercial publishers.

Create Space version of book with unreasonable price

The next image is simply a reseller page, but again, look at the prices. These are not books out of print. These are books that are in print by the publisher and still available in brand-new print versions for about twenty bucks. Yet the prices on these are for $1949.78 for new, and $713.52 for used. They’re not rare, they’re not autographed, they’re not collectible.

Different Version, not dummied page

 

Next is the page for Hawkspar, which shows a used version of the hardcover for $8.75, the Kindle version for $7.99 from Tor, the paperback for $23.88 from Tor, and then the paperback version from some third party for $2,839.88.

The two legitimate versions, and the crook’s version

 

This is the book that actually tipped me off to the problem, actually. This one has a different ISBN number than the legitimate seller’s book, duplicates the page, and is the one I actually talked to the Amazon representative about.

Price on that version

And the last two. These use AISNs rather than ISBNs, and are clearly reseller books. They aren’t trying to look like publishers, but the prices for paperbacks that probably sold in schools for about ten bucks are pretty insane.

Another “laundering-priced” book

So what I’m coming away from here is an impression of Amazon being used for large-scale criminal activity of some sort. That’s not an impression any business wants to give.

And another

Why do I say “large-scale criminal activity?” I’m one author. This many of the books I’ve written have something obviously wrong and illegitimate going on with them.

Does it affect me? I don’t think it hits me financially. I cannot imagine anyone who even loved my work a lot paying that much. So my readers won’t get hurt. They aren’t my listings, so the sellers can’t say I got paid for the sales.

But something in wrong here, and here’s how this DOES affect me. With the money laundering issue caught above, and then discovering books with my name on them that have something bad going on with them, it does make me less comfortable about using Amazon, either as a writer or as a customer — and I’ve done both for a long time.

At bare minimum, this is a problem of perception: Amazon looks bad for having these books on its site.

If you’re an author, either commercial, indie, or mixed, I’d very much like to hear if you’ve found works of your own being used in this fashion. I’d like to know wide this problem has spread. Post whatever you find below.

Three hours of writing, and the third first draft of Vipers’ Nest is now done!

The story came in at 30,073 words. Close enough to the 30,000 I’d planned to make me happy.

It’s really different this time. I ended up not using anything from the previous (two – sigh) first drafts.

The story focuses on Shay, Melie, Wils Bailey (THE Bailey from Bailey’s Irish Space Station), the station, Herog (and peripherally Cady), and on the PWAs execution of its plan to destroy both the Longview and Bailey’s.

Fair warning. This story has one tiny cliffhanger in it that will not be resolved until the opening scene of Wishbone Conspiracy, which will be the next Cadence Drake novel. If you keep the highlighted sentence in mind as you read Vipers’ Nest, it won’t be a cliffhanger.

So next week I’ll start on the revision. Will as promised revise the first chapter (or two) on video for the Patreon Hero level, and talk through what I’m changing and why.

Considering Knitting Process and Story Yarns

I have mentioned (from time to time), that I am incapable of sitting still.

How it started

Moving fingers prevent me from having to bounce a foot. A moving foot while I read allows me to keep my hands still for a bit.



Awake, I find myself randomly walking down the hall in the middle of work without any conscious awareness that I needed to move. I just did, so my right brain took over, got me up, and marched me down the hall to the living room.

Starting a side panel

It figures once I’m there, I’ll do push-ups to quiet down the fidgets for a bit so I can get back to writing. I had a hell of a time sitting still in school. And I am, even at the age of fifty-seven, a remarkably squirmy human being.

So, in order to keep my hands moving and the rest of me still, I have developed a couple of quiet down-time obsessions. I play video games.

Front neckline and collar I hated

And I knit. Generally only for a few hours a night, but I’m pretty quick, and even though I don’t use patterns (and do a lot of ripping back to change designs as I think of something I’ll like better), I still get a lot done.

Close-up: Design I ripped back

So here are some pictures of my most recently completed project, and some things that are currently in progress.

The keeper front before I did the collar

One of these days I’ll show you some of the things I finished and kept.

Inside, with half of ends worked in

I still had some sleeve ends to sew in after I finished steaming the finished sweater (after ripping back and redesigning the front once, the collar half a dozen times, and the sleeves eleven times.

And Sheldon keeping me company while I worked

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get a design right.

Finished sweated after pinning and steaming

And the following are part of a new sweater I’m putting together.

This is the start of the front.

Again, there is no pattern for this. I simply look at what I’m doing and decide to change colors when I see something I like. A fair amount of ripping back goes into this, too.

This is the back past the halfway point

The technique that makes the curves is working in short rows. For this sweater I’m using the loop and turn method.

This is the pinned, steamed back center panel

Yarn, incidentally, is Noro Silk Garden Light. Devilishly expensive, but I love it. So relatives got me gift cards for my birthday back in October, and I bought two different colorways with it, and am making one sweater from each.

Sweaters start as the idea of what I think I want to make. And they get a first draft, and a revision.

Like my fiction. And I do a LOT of story development and plotting while I knit. The process of knitting is pretty amazing for allowing your to connect story ideas into a threaded narrative.

Maybe that’s why stories are called yarns.

4 hours of Vipers’ Nest & How to Write Villains Lesson 7 this week!

HAH!

In spite of having to do a ton of work on income tax this week, I still managed to get in four writing hours (and nearly 4,000 words) of Vipers’ Nest.

So I’ll do one more hour tomorrow morning to catch up with my Patreon writing.

Getting close to the end, and THIS time the story is tighter, and holding together better.

And I completed How to Write Villains Lesson 7: The “Come-Back” Villain.

PDF and Print Page Options are back

This took a bit of time and effort (and deleting one really annoying plugin that required an email address before you could get your PDF), and replacing the annoying plugin with a sort of pricy but really nice new one.

But at the bottom of every article and post on the site now, you’ll find both a “Download as PDF” button and a “Print page” button that — and this is really important — just print the article, NOT the headers, footers, sidebars, and so on.

So you won’t waste a lot of toner printing information off, and you won’t get a massively bloated PDF.

I’m pretty happy with this (and it allowed me to play hooky from the goddamned taxes for about two hours to take care of this particular help desk issue).