Holly Lisle's Blog, page 68

Hurricane Irma and Me

I’m not crazy about where this is going…

So I spent a couple hours this morning letting folks who needed to know how to stay in touch.

Holly’s Writing Classes members:

LOG IN
then go here, especially if you’re also in the path.

I’m not going to be writing an HTWAS lesson this week. Not going to be reading and critting stories for the “Party” collection.

Not going to be working much on the site. Not going to be writing much fiction, or revising much of Viper’s Nest.

We have to board up the house, have to put everything that might break as far out of reach of wind and water damage as possible. Including US.

We’re not in a great position for Irma, especially if we get her as a Category 4.

We’re doing everything we can to make sure we stay safe, but that’s going to take work. Lots of it.

I’ll try and stay in touch on the forums, especially as this gets hairy, and will try to post here. But power is an issue. When my daughter Rebecca was in Wilma, she was without power for a month.

So I’ll be back when everything is wrapped up, taped down, and on high ground.

Secret Mornings with The Vipers’ Nest

No secret that I haven’t been getting a lot of fiction written lately.

Between building and getting the HollysWritingClasses.com website ready to come out of beta, and editing a collection of short fiction by students, and writing a brand-new Version 2 of How to Write a Series, I’ve been working long hours and weekends and I didn’t see where I could make room for anything else.

Meanwhile, my daughter Rebecca, also a writer (and an artist), has been dragging through a never-ending revision of her first for-publication novel. (She wrote a ton of fanfic as a kid, and had a serious following as Nymph du Pave.)

I need to write fiction, though, and one thing I learned when my youngest was an infant was this: The time of the day where you always have a little more room is before you wake up.

So Becca and I decided to get up earlier, and get together each morning for an hour of timed writing.

I set up a private chat room, and since Monday of this week, the two of us have been doing ten-minute runs for an hour each morning before we do anything else.

Saying that it’s been going well would be understating by a lot.

I’ve done the complete read-through and focus outline for Vipers’ Nest this week, she’s done a huge amount of retrofitting to fix broken worldbuilding in her pantsed first draft.

Today, I start the write-in* for what looks like it’s going to be the first novel-length Longview story. Short novel, but novel nonetheless.

Becca’s had several major breakthroughs on characters and world.

Gotta go. Words await.

*Write-in is when you take the printed-out copy of your work and write changes on the paper with a pen. It’s NOT editing. It’s rewriting, the second stage of a complete revision.

Me, obstacles I’ve faced, and how I’m still writing

I talked with Amanda Truscott at CreativeUnblocking.com about some of the obstacles I’ve had to overcome in my writing career, and how I overcame them.

In a very short time, we covered a lot of ground.

You can read the article here.

Fixing Vertigo: A new solution for BPPV

I was diagnosed some years ago with BPPV — Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.

With me, it generally starts with slight dizziness that gets worse over a day or two, becoming so bad that I have to have my husband hold me up to get from one end of the house to the other.

There are a bunch of exercises you’re supposed to do to get the little positional elements in your inner ears back where they belong… and NONE of them worked for me.

So a couple days ago I started getting dizzy again, for the first time in several years, and by the end of yesterday, I could not move. Sitting up, lying down, turning my head…all of it was impossible. Lying still with my eyes closed, I STILL felt like I was falling off a building and accelerating toward the ground.

Enter Matt, who is very good at finding and fixing problems.

I didn’t even bother to search the Internet, because I’d been to the specialist, I’d been given the sheet of exercises to do, I’d done them (correctly and regularly), and they did NOTHING.

When Matt said, “I searched the Internet and found something I think will help — an exercise you could do that doesn’t involve flinging yourself backward on the bed,” I was dubious. But he showed me the video he found, and the doctor who came up with the procedure demonstrated how she’d thought it up (if I can see the reasoning behind something, I’m a lot more willing to try it).

It worked.

I went from, “I’m going to be trapped in bed for a week with my eyes shut (at its worst, the vertigo is so bad I can’t even read or look around while lying down) and being half-carried to the bathroom” to…

“Hey. It’s gone!”

And I’m fine today. Was a little dizzy when I first got up, so I did the exercise once. And even the little dizziness is gone.

Half-Somersault Maneuver
Half-Somersault Maneuver VIDEO

 

 

The Midget on the Bicycle Who Woke Me Up

We were turning out of a side road onto a divided four-lane. What I mistook for a kid on a very small, solid black bicycle rode down the side street’s dividing line, pulled the bicycle in front of our car, jumped off it parked it in the right-hand lane of the divided highway directly in front of us so we could not pull out, trotted across the four lanes, and disappeared into the trees on the other side.

He was about the height of an eight-year old, slender and quick, and he was wearing a light brown tweed suit and cap from around the 1930’s. High brown socks. Black boots that laced to the ankles.

He moved with the certainty and purpose of an adult, though, and before he disappeared into the woods, he turned and looked over his shoulder at me with an evil grin. He was in his late forties or early fifties. Pale grey eyes, large nose, no visible scars—but I realized he was wearing the cap because he was bald, and he wanted to be mistaken for a child.

I woke up realizing that he was the answer to the question I’d set for my subconscious mind the night before, which was this…

“Show me something from the world I’m currently building.”

He did. Time, place, and first scene, which is NOT set in South Florida, or even in this world.

That had been part of my question—where and when is this series to be set?

Having written this, I’m now going to go work on that world.

Stillness in the Heart of Chaos

After a gruelling two years in which I’ve written very little fiction but have:

Built a stellar team of folks to help me run my writing site:

 

Dan Allen – Developer

Kirsten Bolda – Site Designer

Cat Gerlach & Amy Padgett, Forum Head Moderators

Carol Englehaupt – moderator

Karen Lynn – moderator

Chris Makowski – moderator

Tom Vetter – moderator

Rez Zircon – moderator

Rebecca Galardo – help desk

 
Completely overhauled one of my Big Three writing classes, How to Think Sideways

 
Built two new writing workshops: Title. Cover. Copy. Fiction Marketing Workshop and 24-Hour Intensive: Find Your Writing Voice



 
Threw out the first version of How to Write a Series, and am now writing an all-new Version 2 that everyone who owned the original Expansion Version already owns

 
Worked with the head of my team, Dan Allen, my site developer, to get a new website built on HollysWritingClasses.com and all the classes broken by WordPress nearly three years ago up and running

 
Worked with my designer, Kirsten Bolda, who is making my designs beautiful (you haven’t seen any of her work yet except for the headers on the new HollysWritingClasses.com blog

 
Designed the internal and external interfaces for the new site software Dan is building me, using online paper-testing, feedback from my writers

 
Designed a couple of additional software projects Dan and I will be building together over the next couple of years

 
Wrote the third and fourth (still unpublished) stories for the Longview Series

 
And got through a bunch of surgeries with one less parathyroid gland and minus pretty close to half a tongue, but healthier and with a lot more energy and focus than I’ve had in quite a few years

 
And I’ve drunk approximately 2190 cups of unsweetened plain green tea. Three cups per day, every day, without missing one cup or one day, since the day after I was diagnosed with dysplasia, which was the day I went home, searched the Internet, found the book Anticancer, and read it straight through. The amount I’m drinking is just enough to keep me perpetually a little bit queasy. Which tells me it’s enough to be of benefit.

The last two years plus have been rough. But worthwhile.

The definition of LIFE is: Shit goes wrong. Deal with it. Shit goes right. Enjoy it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

So I’m not going to say, “Hey I’m getting to an easy stretch!”

Because the definition of STUPID is: Thinking that when life gets better, it will stay better.

I’ve been stupid. I’m getting smarter.

There’s been a lot of chaos the past couple of years. A lot of times when I felt like I’d been ground into the dirt, when I was scared for my life, when I was scared about money, when I could not see my way clear to a time when anything was ever going to be okay again.

But every morning when I step into the shower, I close my eyes and breathe deep and let the water pounding on my head become the sound of the rain, and the silence of solitude, and I embrace whatever the day might bring, and my resolution to get through it.

And so far, every day I have gotten through it.

Sometimes that brief stillness, that brief respite, gives me a gift.

Which it did today.

As soon as I post this, I’m writing a story, the title of which is “Freebie,” which made me cry and made me happy at the same time when I thought it up, and which is going to be included in the anthology my HWC writers and I are putting together right now.

More on that in another post. Right now, I have a story to write.

This Morning I Caught My Brain Doing Something WEIRD!

I woke up this morning from one of those dreams that seem to go on forever, where there were international spies and murders and I was a writer working on getting a lesson done on deadline, and for some reason, my lesson was interfering with the international spies, who’d sent someone to make me stop writing it.

The lessons I’m currently writing are about creating series fiction, and I’m guessing maybe international spies are tired of being the subject of so many thrillers.

Anyway, in my dream I was looking at the lesson I was writing while I was creating it…

And my Left Brain spotted something funny on the lesson, but kept its mouth shut. Apparently because if it had said something, it would have woken me up, and it wanted to know how the dream turned out.

(I beat the international spies. With some pretty cool martial arts moves. I don’t know martial arts, but, you know… My Dream, My Right Brain’s Rules.)

Anyway…

Here’s some of what my Left Brain spotted, written out as best I can remember it.

And the dreaming brain insisted those were real words in a real lesson…

I did think it was funny that I recognized both the Greek omega and the explanation point, though, even while I was asleep.

(My right brain is really, really, really, really fond of exclamation points!!!!!)

And when I woke up, my Left Brain said to my Right Brain, “YOU CAN’T READ! You don’t even recognize real letters!”

Which is probably not completely true.

My right brain might be able to recognize letters it learned as pictures (like when I was a kid and drew cats in the shape of the letter C).

But I think when I’m writing, my right brain is mostly dictating, and my left brain is mostly typing. I know some folks have anomalous wiring, so I can’t say for sure that it’s true that EVERYONE’s right brain can’t read.

This is the first time I can think of that I’ve seen how my right brain sees letters, though, and had my left brain recognize that what it was looking at was not what my right brain said it was.

And my Left Brain has been an insufferably pompous snot all morning about this.

So — ever catch YOUR brain doing something weird?

 

Gender, Race, Political Affiliation, and the Wide-Open Field

Right now, the world I want to live in is being destroyed in front of my eyes by the people who think they’re saving it.

Being different and trying to force people to respect how different you are by agitating for laws to require respect for your difference has become a cause célèbre.

Problem is, we are ALL different.

I don’t mean just a little different. I mean “holy shit, are you kidding me?” different.

Because no matter who you are and no matter what you want and love and think and desire, you are on the polar opposite end of the universe from not just one person you’d consider a freak, but by a whole lot of folks who think YOU’RE the freak.

Everybody is different. Hold on to that, because I’m going to come back to it.

And BECAUSE everybody is different, I think the case needs to be made for Real Individual Freedom, which is obtained by MYODBAKYHTY, otherwise known as the Philosophy of the Wide-Open Field.

And I am an excellent person to make this argument, because I am deeply and weirdly different, and BECAUSE of my own differences, I have been the beneficiary of the Wide-Open Field.

Right now, whole bunches of folks want a special law to protect their little bits of “special and different.”

And the thing about laws is, they create fences, and the more fences there are, the more impossible it becomes to get from who you are to who you want to become.

The very best law legislates as little as possible, with the broad rule that anything not expressly forbidden is permitted.

See all that green in the Wide-Open Field?

What is good and right and honorable in American law started here.

The absolute worst law legislates as much as possible, with the broad rule that anything not compulsory is forbidden.

Chinese Communist law, Russian Communist law, and the laws of all totalitarian countries start here and live here.

There is no Wide-Open field in this picture.

Right now, I see a lot of people trying to create laws legislating how people THINK about gender, and race, and political affiliations.

They want to FORCE respect for their point of view, for their alignment, for who they are.

They want to FORCE people to think that however they are is right, good, normal, okay.

And you can’t. People are going to think whatever they think, and you cannot do a single thing to force them to be better, but by trying to force people to think thoughts YOU approve of, you can make the situation a whole lot worse. And not just for them. For yourself.

You can’t make people like you, you can’t make people respect you, and you can’t make people believe that whatever way you are that’s different than the way they are is good, or okay.

You can create an environment, however, in which everyone has to start demanding their own laws to protect their own tiny bit of turf.

But Law create more fences, not more field.

So you can be part of the problem by locking down pieces of freedom with pieces of “compulsory action” and “compulsory thought.”

Or you can embrace the Philosophy of the Wide-Open Field, which starts with “Everything that is not forbidden is permitted,” and which is protected by the Rule of The Wide-Open Field:

MYODBAKYHTY

Pronounced Mee-YOD-bak-YHET-ee.

MYODBAKYHTY: Mind Your Own Damn Business, And Keep Your Hands To Yourself.

If you leave the Wide-Open Field wide open, there will be room enough in it for you to be whoever you are.

If you push for laws to try to force respect and obedience from those who don’t respect or like you, realize that the people YOU don’t like or respect can also get lawyers, and they too can push through bad laws that fence off thought and action and lock down parts of the field of individual rights and personal freedom until you cannot speak without doing so illegally, and you cannot think without committing a crime.

Please consider that there are four-hundred-million-ish people in the USA, and maybe as many as eleven of them HAVEN’T said, “There oughtta be a law…”

The Honest English translation of “There oughtta be a law…” is “I wanna shove MY view of the world down YOUR throat.”

When you support more laws, you start forcing people who never gave you a second thought before to hate you, because the law you favored put them in a box, and made them criminals for their thoughts.

MYODBAKYHTY.

Say it with me. Mee-YOD-bak-YHET-ee.

It is the simple rule that grants broad and amazing freedom. When you live by this rule, and this is the rule enforced by the law…

No one else needs to like you.

No one else needs to respect you.

Bastards can fucking HATE you… IF they mind their own business and keep their hands to themselves.

Which you make possible by doing the same thing.

The moment you realize that if you like and respect yourself and are living the life you want to live, or are at least pursuing the path you’ve set out for yourself to get there, you are FREE.

When you’re earned your own respect by living the life that matters to you, what other people think of you doesn’t affect your world.

And being able to walk across the Wide-Open Field that the freedom of broad individual rights creates allows all those narrow-minded bigoted jackasses you detest (the ones who don’t know you’re cool and who hate everything you think and love) to stand in their own place with their own issues and find their OWN path across the Wide-Open Field.

Probably well away from yours.

Maybe you don’t want them to have that freedom – the freedom to hate you from a distance.

Do you want the freedom to hate them from a distance, though?

Take a moment to consider that if the people you can’t stand are NOT forced by restrictive, field-narrowing laws to bow and grovel before what they hate or be criminalized for their THOUGHTS…

…the people who hate you (or at least what you stand for) might meet you in the field and come to like you, even if they discover you’re different, in whatever way you’re different. And no matter who you are, you’re at least different than someone, because odds are pretty high that whoever you are, you’re not like me.

And if those narrow-minded, bigoted, straight-gay-cis-trans-black-white-yellow-brown-red-rightwing-leftwing-middlewing-other-path assholes don’t like you?

Fuck ’em. Ignore them. Enjoy hating them in the privacy of your own unrestricted life.

As long as the rule is MYODBAKYHTY, and they’re following the rule, and you’re following the rule, and the government UPHOLDS the rule, the fact that they’re assholes doesn’t hurt you.

The Wide-Open Field gives freedom to everyone. Having a wide-open field lets you, me, and everyone else find our own way home to who we need to be, without having to fight through any laws, any restrictions, any punishment for being different.

‘Cause here’s the thing you gotta remember.

Everybody is different.

And when the Wide-Open Field is all locked down, EVERYONE gets locked up.

Progress Report: New Classes, New Story, Site Upgrades, and More

The nice thing about writing your plans down is that you then don’t lose track of them.

The nice thing about writing them down on a blog is that neither does anyone else.

So, because I’ve been head-down and grinding for some months, and will continue to be for some months yet, I wanted to take a moment to let you know what’s come of all this grinding.

There are some new writing classes

How To Write A Series has reopened, and I’m writing a brand-new, much better VERSION 2. IMPORTANT: If you owned a previous version, you own this one.

Check first to see if it’s in your classroom. We now have almost all previous owners added back in.
If it isn’t, take your receipt to the Help Desk.

I’ve brought out the new workshop 24-Intensive: Find Your Writing Voice. If you’ve struggled to find your own voice in fiction, you’ll see significant improvements in both your writing and the ease with which you do in in 24 working hours.

I’ve finished the first draft of Longview 4: The Vipers’ Nest. I’m now giving it a cool-off before revision.

I’m writing Lesson 9 of How to Write A Series, and will have that finished tomorrow.

Dan and I are now working on the final front end layout for HollysWritingClasses.com. I can’t give you a date for the site moving out of beta, but we’re close now. This is the last step.

We have the affiliate program, and are integrating it in with the site.

And the finished version of what we have now will become the basis for the ReadersMeetWriters.com site. Not gone, not forgotten.

My dreams have not changed. Some of my paths to reaching them have. But that’s a story for another time.

I need to go work on finishing a lesson now, and then go in and talk to some writers, and then see what Dan has done on the stuff he installed for me yesterday.

But I wanted to take a moment to say that when I get really quiet, it’s usually not “nothing going on.” It’s usually “working too hard to talk.”

Read with hunger, write with joy, live with passion.

Upcoming Price Increase: How to Write a Series

I’ve written and published the new Version 2 lessons through Week 8 as of today.

So today I WOULD be raising the price of the class to $267 or $55/month for 5 months until Lesson 12 is published.

BUT I want to give myself a week to write the first draft of Longview 4: The Vipers’ Nest — I’m writing the series as a demo for the class as well as to fill in some things happening in Cadence Drake’s universe from another perspective.

So until Friday, May 5th, How to Write a Series will still be $197 or $40/month for 5 months.

If you want to get the class at its lowest possible price, register in the next seven days.