Holly Lisle's Blog, page 66

Longview #4: Write-in revision completed

I finished up the write-in revision this morning, and while I was at it, completed the story blurb:

TALES FROM THE LONGVIEW, EPISODE 4: Gunslinger Moon

When freedom is silenced, how does it speak?

Ex-PHTF slave WE-39R (This Criminal, from Episode 1), renamed Jex, is part of a team the Longview’s Owner has tasked with finding the meaning behind Bashtyk Nokyd’s enigmatic final diagram. Drawing the most undesirable assignment, Jex and an unlikely ally fight their way to pieces of the truth.

Note the new title. I’d written up one hundred possible titles for the episode, and asked several people to select possible winners from among them. Got back the selections, but Matt read the story and all one hundred of my possibles, and he said, “None of those,” and spent a few minutes in silence. After which he said, “Gunslinger Moon.”

And he was right. It’s perfect.

Editor wins when editor is right.

So. This is the story of the team the Owner sets to the task of figuring out what the hell the philosopher meant with that diagram he drew at the dinner table (shown above).

This episode is the quiet before the storm.

The storm comes in Episode 5: The Vipers’ Nest, a BIG chunk of which is already written.

And Episode 6, for which I haven’t even a hint of what the title might be, will conclude the series.

Oh, right. Type-in revision tomorrow! Should be able to have it finished in one day.

New Longview 4 first draft DONE!

Just the link. Still have a ton of work to do before I sleep.

Three A.M. Wakeup: The NEXT Cadence Drake

Technically it was the thunder that woke me up, but the Longview story I’m writing now (#4, still without a title) had stirred up something in the back of my mind.

In Longview #4, there’s this game AI, you see. She’s really cool. Name is Retha.

And I got to thinking about her, and about other AIs like her in Settled Space, and then about Bashtyk Nokyd, and the future it looks like we’re building now.

And holy shit… Stuff started clicking, and I just finished putting together a concept for a radical rethink of The Wishbone Conspiracy.

Getting started on my Longview Hour now, but the fact that I lost a bunch of hours of sleep did not hurt my writing day at all.

Made some nifty progress on the next Longview story

Had a really good writing day today, to the point of getting sucked into the story, forgetting to keep track of my timer, and writing about half an hour over my planned hour.

Details here. Because I wrote more elsewhere, and am already behind on the other things I need to do today.

Not a revision. A new story.

So I printed out my draft of The Vipers’ Nest, and today I read through it, sorting as I went.

32,000 words of what I wrote came out, and will go into Longview 5: The Vipers’ Nest

Keeping Matt’s comments in mind, I focused on finding the quiet space for this story.

This story will just be the tale of Jex. Jex, who was WE-39R in Tales from the Longview #1: Born from Fire (Enter the Death Circus), is taken out of storage along with several other men, all of whom are given a chance to earn their place on the ship’s crew if they can find something in the dead philosopher’s belongings that can explain the meaning of the enigmatic diagram that was his solution.After 1208 words this morning, I’m pleased to have 7881 words done, and to be on the right track for this story.

Which will be Longview 4, and which at the moment doesn’t have a title.

So this might end up being a late-December release. It’s going to be shorter, I think. It’s going to be mostly in Jex’s voice.

And it’s the calm before the storm that’s coming.

Finished Vipers’ Nest… Until I didn’t.

Sometimes you finish a book and you know you don’t quite have it.

I’d done my short version print-out, read-through revision of Longview 4: The Vipers’ Nest. Finished the story last Tuesday with 40,000-plus words, which made it officially a novel.

But back of the mind said, Don’t say anything. Not yet. You don’t have it right yet.

So I just sat on it, created a copy for my husband, and gave it to him the next day.

Matt read it. Since we got together, he’s been my first reader and content editor. He’s really, really good.

And he came back with the single comment that changed everything. “You’re trying to cram three books into one story, and this one has no single main character.”

Then he did the second thing he does. He asked me a question. “So how does Bashtyk Nokyd relate to the game?”

And I saw the answers.

So I’m going back to do a complete overhaul.

I’m going to be ripping out two thirds of the existing chapters to put in the NEXT story (or two), and drilling down to the main character of this story, who was also the main character in Longview 1: Born from Fire, (the guy on the cover) and I’m building out the tie between him and the way Bashtyk Nokyed played a video game to figure out how to save Settled Space.

Or at least the people who want to be saved.

 

New Article: Writing from a prompt

Got a little sidetracked this morning.

Had a 9th grader ask me if I had any suggestions about how to write from a prompt.

Was a nice, literate email, and it asked about PROCESS, not if I could help with the actual homework.

So I added a new article to the site: How to Write Something Good from a Prompt

Because I figured:

This is not the only person who’s ever been confronted by this issue
If I’m going to figure out the directions, I might as well put them where anyone who needs them can find them.

And now… Mwah-hah-hah! Today’s HOUR OF FICTION begins. Just about finished with the revision of The Vipers’ Nest!

Oh. My. God. The wonder of a good writing day.

I was writing the battle scene in Longview 4: The Vipers’ Nest, and I thought things were getting a little away from me.

And all of a sudden Herog had a revelation about the battle he was fighting that told me three things:

How a tiny space station in an out-of-the-way corner of its galaxy becomes a genuine power to be reckoned with
Where the City of Furies fits in my space map (I truly had no idea until about two minutes ago)
And what happens to the Pact Worlds Alliance.

Damn, damn, DAMN, today was a fantastic writing day, and if I started an hour early ran an hour over, I couldn’t help it. I had to know what happened, and the space battle got real on me, and BOY was it ever worth it.

So if you like the story when you read it, thank these guys, and the folks who joined my Patreon this month and who will start showing up in the credits next month, because without these guys I’d still be wishing I was writing fiction every day:

HERO

Julian Adorney

Thomas Vetter

Karin Hernandez

Tuff Gartin

Nancy Nielsen-Brown

Holly Doyne

John Toppins

Rebecca Yeo

Cat Gerlach

Rebecca Galardo

Eva Gorup

Dragonwing

Zeyana Musthafa

KM Nalle

Michelle Miles

Julie Hickerson

Isabella Leigh

Beverly Paty

Paula C Meengs

Meagan Smith

Misti Pyles

Dan Allen

Mary E. Merrell

Francine Seal

Ava Fairhall

Susan Qrose

Elke Zimoch

Angelika Devlyn

Jim Guererro

Maureen Morley

Heather Wittman

Misty DiFrancesco

Wednesday McKenna

Paul Williams (moley)

Cora Anderson

Lynda Washington

Reetta Raitanen

Anders Bruce

Becky Sasala

Heiko Ludwig

Faith Nelson

Ken Bristow

Jason Anderson

Marya Miller

Brendan Fortune

Jean Schara

Indy Indie

Justin Colucci

Alexandra Swanson

Dawn Morrison

Jane Lawson

Bonnie Burns

Eric Bateman

Resa Edwards

Christine Embree

Patricia Masserman

Claudia Wickstrom

Nan Sampson

Juneta Key

Jennette Heikes

Jess

Amy Fahrer

Joyce Sully

Charlotte Babb

Sarah Brewer

Nicola Lane

Sylvie Granville

Benita Peters

Michelle Mulford

Kirsten Bolda

Amy Padgett

AMAZING

Alex G. Zarate

Deb Gallardo

Cathy Peper

Deb Evon

Ernesto Montalve

Glenwood Bretz

Elaine Milner

Cassie Witt

Erin O’Kelly

Liza Olmsted

Felicia Fredlund

Hope Terrell

June Thornton

Amy Schaffer

Simon Sawyers

Anna Bunce

Teresa Horne

Susan Osthaus

Barbara Lund

Kristen Shields

WONDERFUL

Daniela Gana

Connie Cockrell

Donna Mann

Ewelina Sparks

Amber Hansford

Storm Weaver

Kara

Dori-Ann Granger

Panos

Stacie Arellano

Betty Widerski

Susanne

Thea van Diepen

Claire Smith

Liz Horton

Beverley Spindler

Peggy Elam

Irina Barnay

P.S. Have to make new covers for the whole series, but this is the provisional one I had on hand.

Best Bug Contender: Midnight Rain Bug-Hunt

There’s no actual prize for finding the “best bug” because a “best bug” in a manuscript is purely subjective. There would be no just, objective way to award a prize.

But this is my favorite bug found so far, located by Midnight Rain Bug-Hunter Charlotte Lenox…

Fart Lauderdale. The automated book scanning process did some really interesting creative editing with this.

Cthulhu LIVES (because someone put food in a pocket)

So, yeah. Cthulhu is alive and well, after being really dead for a while.

And partially it’s my fault, because I should have known better than to skin a Great Old One and turn him into yarn. Or try to do something useful with him. But, hey, you’d think a monster like that would knit up into something both waterproof and warm, right?

But I also blame my older son, Mark, who asked me (three years ago) to knit him a sweater. He was driving a long-haul truck at the time, had put on some weight from the combination of brutal job that prevented exercise and short stops that required pretty much living on fast food, and he said driving through the mountains out west, he spent a lot of time being cold.

Mark and the Cthuhlu Sweater

I started on the sweater. The two of us had bounced ideas around about what would make a sweater that was both warm, and cool. That would fit him. That would fit his passions and his personality.

And fortunately for me, I also decided to make it a sweater that would be as close to one size fits all as possible. Which dictated the design—primarily 3×3 ribs, which offer both a lot of warmth and a lot of elasticity, the weirdness that … er … crawled out of doing a LOT of ribs, and the outcome. Which was the fact that when he finally had both the time off and a working vehicle he could use to come down and see me, it fit him.

Sweater back — everything’s okay, right?

In the interim, you see, he became a FedEx guy, started schlepping between 80 and 140 packages around every day, including ones that weighed a hundred pounds or more… and he lost a lot of weight.

All is NOT well…a tentacle escapes

The idea was to make a sweater that looked mostly normal, pretty mundane, but that would have a couple of interesting surprises for the observant.

The sweater was a trip to make.

I did not use a pattern.

A rib sprouts tentacles

Did not swatch. I knit the entire thing top-down in one piece including the button placket, but excluding the pockets, which are sewn on.

I used my own process of biometric knitting, in which you grab any needles you think will make the yarn look nice, any yarn, do ONE biometric measurement, cast on, and knit.

The tentacles got around

As I knit, I tried it on myself, and made sure that it was bigger. Having not seen my son for years, I had to guess at height, arm length, torso length, shoulder width, adjust for possible weight changes, and hope like hell I got it right, because there is no way to undo a single-piece sweater to make little adjustments.

Please note the visible, readable, care label, which describes NOT feeding the sweater.

And of course I signed my work, because I’m pretty happy with this.

Ribs. Ribs, I tell you. They are better than spandex or elastic.

I tried three different approaches to the sleeve and pocket tentacles before Necessity, Mother of Invention, suggested an invention that worked really well.

And the kid liked it, too.

Guy who just received a really weird sweater made by his mom.