Holly Lisle's Blog, page 70

Are you ready to write series fiction?

People have been waiting for my expansion of my How to Write A Series class to come back. Until now, it wasn’t back because in its previous version, I went way down the rabbit hole of too much information, and I had to figure out what to keep and what to dump.

I also had to get rid of all the damn video. The lessons this time through will not be me talking. They will be you reading. Writers read. It’s how we got to be writers in the first place.

The objective of a class on how to write a series is, in fact, to get the damn series written and published, on time and on budget.

This morning I dug out all the questions folks asked me about series fiction (that I could find, anyway).

And I laid out my plan for the class. You can see a thumbnail of the diagram below — if you click it, you can see the big version, which is pretty big (if you’re on a cell phone or tablet, it may still be unreadable. If so, I apologize.

THE QUESTIONS SO FAR:

MONTH 1

How do I come up with series ideas?

How do I pre-plan episodes?

How do I start Episode 1?

What do I have to get right in Episode 1?

MONTH 2

What do I keep track of while I’m writing the first episode?

What’s special about a first-episode ending?

What’s the difference between Story Plotting and Series Planning?

How do I maintain series continuity?

MONTH 3

What preparation do I do to set up the second episode?

What workflow do I need to produce middle episodes regularly?

How do I add, change, or kill off important characters without breaking the series?

What do I do when the series goes in a direction that I didn’t plan…but I like it?

MONTH 4

What do I do when I realize — AFTER an episode is published — that I’ve made a massive mistake?

How do I write the final episode?

SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I pick up writing a series after a long absence?

SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I build a series out of a story I’d planned as a stand-alone?

MONTH 5

SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I finish someone else’s series?

SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I FIX someone else’s series?

SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I write a series to an exacting word count?

Final lesson will be the one most requested by the current class students

So if you’re interested in writing series fiction, and you have a question that you don’t see answered (or addressed) in my diagram, please ask in the comments below.

My new Free 3-Day Fiction-Writing Workshop just went live

This free workshop focuses on three things:

Helping you build ideas — LOTS of them — that are right for your stories (instead of waiting around for ideas to come to you)
Helping you create the right characters for your stories (instead of using random walk-ons who then drag your story in directions you didn’t want to go)
Helping you build story settings that actually contribute conflict and plot elements to your story (instead of disappearing off the page entirely, or eating your writing time with massive overbuilding).

It’s designed so you can work at your own pace. It includes a forum for discussion, questions, and help.

If you’d like to see what it’s about, start here.

 

Do I have to go to college to be a writer?

There are apparently 7000 different ways to ask this question, and since I have only answered a couple hundred of them in the past two weeks, I’m trying to get ahead of the curve here.

The answer is no. Not just no, but HELL, no!

No, you don’t have to go to college if you want to be a writer, and you could be a happier, more successful writer if you don’t. You certainly won’t start your writing career a “moderate” $25,000 to $50,000 dollars in debt.

You don’t have to have a master’s degree.

You don’t have to have a high-school diploma.

Having a high-school diploma, a bachelors degree, an MFA, a PhD in literature, or anything else will not improve the marketability of your work.

Publishers will not buy your novel because you went to Yale or Harvard or Podunk Community College.

They will buy your work because you have written a good story they think they can make a profit selling.

I’ve written a LOT about this.

Here’s what I have:

Do you need a college education to write?

And then everything else on the right sidebar of this page: Articles, FAQs, Quizzes, and Workshops About Writing and Being a Writer.

 

Yes, It’s Revision… But Is It DELICIOUS?

Like other folks, lots of writers have pets.

And while it had been a whole lot of years since I had pets, for Christmas my guys got me a cat.

Sheldon.

Very cool cat.

Likes to help. Really likes to help with revision, which is generally not an area where I welcome help.

Here. Let me show you…

Here, have a tissue.

No, don’t have a tissue. I want it.

Wonderful tissue smells delicious.

Tissue is chewy but not tasty.

I claim the pen in the name of ME!

How about the notebook?

Can I lounge on your work?

My pen. Pens are wonderful … but you have them all pinned down, vile human.

So…paper.

Also pinned down.

Could be tasty.

Is definitely chewy.

Is NOT delicious.

If you’re going to yell at me for chewing, I’m going to sulk.

I’m not looking at your stupid revision.

Not looking…

Definitely not looking… (But flicky tail says thinking about looking…)

Oh, GAWD, yummy revision!

Nope. Not looking.

How about you? Have a picture or two of the “help” you get while you’re working?

If you have a photo-sharing service like Flicker (or whatever else is out there — I don’t keep up), post one or two images of your helper helping below.

I’d love to see.

Oops — a brief tale of Social Media fail

So I’m working on the TalysMana revision. And because of the way I did the first draft of that story, I was looking for someone online.

By name. Had the WHOLE name. And the one place that name came up was in Linkedin.

Okay, I thought. I have a Linkedin account. I don’t use the damn thing, but I have one.

So I logged in. (Three cheers for 1Password, or my 600+ unique passwords, some of which I haven’t used in about a decade, would be impossible.)

And discovered that there was no more information on the person I was searching for when I logged in than there was from outside.

Which means I’m going to have to change the name and the character in TalysMana.

That’s fine. That character wasn’t fitting the story anyway.

But the other thing that I discovered, much to my horror, was that people I DID know had been trying to reach me on Linkedin — there are about a dozen post in there from 2012.

And those requests for help are in there now because?

Because I haven’t been in there since…no clue. But I now have proof it was sometime before 2012.

So if you were asking me for help promoting you through Linkedin back in 2012, I’m very sorry I didn’t.

I wasn’t there, didn’t know you asked.

And I don’t see myself becoming a Linkedin user now. I don’t have time for the stuff I’m doing as it is.

On the bright side, I might be overworked, but I don’t suffer from all those new stresses and anxieties psychologists and psychiatrists are attributing to the overuse of social media.

Yay?

Me, faith, God… and the good and kind folks who like me…

I received today a truly wonderful email from a very kind woman with whom I had previously corresponded.

In it she talked about this being the year of Christian/Jewish Restoration, and about how we were both due, and about how “I know you don’t like God all that much…”

And she included a video to a beautiful Christian song, and words that she hoped would help bring me back to God.

I like her. I thought her letter was sent in a wonderful spirit of caring and compassion from a genuine, kind, and beautiful person to whom I matter.

And I sent her the best letter I was capable of writing.

I’m not posting her letter here because it was for me alone.

I’m posting my reply to her because this is something I need to say to the folks who are worried about me, my soul, my faith, my relationship with God… and I know there are a few of you who read me who are. From time to time you let me know.

Hi, Kate*,

It isn’t that I don’t like God very much.

I am incapable of belief. I tried. I spent all of my youth and some of my adulthood trying to believe in God in any form, and in religion in any form, and I simply don’t, and can’t.

I’m not an angry atheist, I’m not declaring God evil or dead or wrong, or the people who believe in God evil or vile or wrong.

I’m simply a person with a complete inability to ignore reality in favor of things people belief that fly in the face of reality. I am incapable of faith.

What I know of life and can prove is that what we have in this world is this moment and each other. While I would like to think there is something after death, and while I know that energy cannot be destroyed, I don’t believe that I will continue after death as myself. Wish it. Don’t believe it.

But in life, we have now, and we have our own brief existences,** and we have the people who matter to us. I have spent my life since I figured that out working to leave something important behind for the people who matter to me. My family, my writers, and my readers.

And I very much like the idea of a year of restoration. I’m due. So if you don’t mind hanging out with an atheist, I’ll be very happy to celebrate the year of restoration with you.

Cheerfully,

Holly

I am mindful daily of the life I am living, and I am living the best, most honest, and most creative and worthwhile life I am capable of living.

I choose my actions with care. I work daily to make not just my own life but the lives of the people who matter to me better.

I do this because I love my own life, and I want to help other folks find ways to love theirs.

And that’s it.

When I’m gone, I’ll be gone. If I’ve succeeded at the job I’ve chosen, the work I’ve started will spread out in ripples, and some small part of life and existence far into the future will be better because I once lived.

I think that’s enough.

 

*Kate is my fill-in name for folks I want to keep anonymous. Not a real Kate.

**Added in this version, but not the original letter.

 

 

 

Kate Wordly joins the site

I’ve added some new help for the both readers and writers who use my site, in the form of Kate Wordly, Bot Gofer.

At the moment she doesn’t know a great deal, but as you ask her questions (and I answer them), she’ll become very helpful to both of us.

She’s not an AI. She’s simply a way for you to ask me questions directly on the site. If she knows the answer (which she’ll only know once I tell her), she’ll point you to to the right page.

If she doesn’t know the answer, ask her in a few different ways to make sure you’ve covered possible different wordings. If nothing helpful comes up, please be patient.

I’ll find the questions she’s asked on the next following weekday, and create answers.

I’m hoping to make her a fun, 24-hour-a-day resource for you.

 

Minerva Wakes Hardcover Delay

Today was going to be my Get The Minerva Wakes Hardcover Done day.

But I work exclusively on a Mac.

And in indie publishing, POD publishers give no love to the Mac.

I did a gorgeous job of formatting the book.

All chapters on right-hand pages.
No headers or page numbers on chapter pages.
Nothing on blank left-hand pages opposite new chapters.
Good fonts

Went to embed the fonts into a PDF. Guess what Mac doesn’t do?

Exported to Word, uploaded to my POD publisher.

My two fonts (Garamond and Helvetica) became Times New Roman.
Multiple extra pages appeared at each point where I had a section break.
Headers and page numbers appeared on both chapter pages and blank facing pages.

I have spent an entire workday trying to work around this, and I am in the mood now to punch penguins and snarl at kittens.

So today I accomplished…

Nothing.

I hate days like this.

The Tale of the Tail in the TalysMana Revision

Last Friday, I printed out my manuscript and my revision worksheets, located my  pens, and set everything aside. Saturday was to be my first day of revision.

And Saturday with the the big table cleared for writing, I started into revising my badly wrecked fantasy novel TalysMana, written back in 2010.

I was planning on doing the way I always do it — manuscript loose and on the left, notebook and notes top and right.

You figure, I’ve been refining this system since 1995, and I knew I had it pretty well nailed down.

So I had everything neatly laid out — this time with more papers than usual, because instead of using my advanced streamlined system, I’m going through and treating TalysMana exactly as if it were the first revision I’d ever done. I’m using my first-time-through system from How to Revise Your Novel, and saving all my work to add to the class as a demonstration walk-through.

So here’s what that looks like…

Neat, organized, simple to get through. Time-consuming if it’s your first time, but this ISN’T My first time, and I anticipated making pretty decent progress the first day. Unlike most of my books, I pantsed this one, so the part at the beginning is the part I got closest to right, and I while knew it ran off the tracks more and more the deeper into the story I went, Saturday was supposed to be easy sailing.

I know things are going to get worse and messier the deeper in I get. But hey, I’m a professional. I got this. Right?

Turns out, not so much.

What I wasn’t prepared for was help.

Enter “help,” stage left.

Sheldon levitated onto the table with his usual gravity-free grace. (I’ll note that no one eats on this table, in spite of the fact that it’s in the dining room, which is why no one cringes when the cat goes there.)

He discovered an entire field of his favorite things: Stacks of paper, pens, plastic folder separators.

Sheldon spends a lot of time around office supplies, which he believes are named “No,” “No, dammit!” and, “Aargh!”

Three quick sniffs and a joyful growl and he leapt into the middle of my work, chased my pens across the table, scattered my pages, and carried the pen I was using to the floor to eat.

I retrieved my pen, said “Office Supplies” to him a thousand times in under ten minutes, and watched him sulk off at last.

I restacked everything, got to work, and enjoyed maybe ten minutes of peace and cat-free quiet and stillness. Until the question, “Why is he being good?” flitted all paranoid-y and bug-eyed through the back of my mind.

Of course there was a reason he was being quiet.

It’s the same reason your two-year-old is being quiet.

He’d found something he knew he wasn’t allowed to touch, and because he wasn’t being supervised, he wreaked havoc upon it.

This is a skein of Zauberboll Crazy, lovely German yarn given to me by a friend also named Holly.

Sheldon, a name that I have just discovered translates as “the horns are hidden beneath the fur,” had somehow finagled this out of a bag from beneath the two folded sweaters that were supposed to make it impossible for him to reach, and was lying on the couch shoving his head as far into it as it would go and inhaling Smell O’ SheepTM from it like it was cocaine and he was some Wall Street dude from the eighties, then hanging onto it with his teeth while kicking it with his hind legs, causing the ball to both unravel and to tangle.

Thus ended Saturday revision.

Sunday I set myself the task of figuring out how to cat-proof my work. ‘Cause… still have to revise the novel, still have to revise many more to come, still going to keep Ol’ Horns-Beneath-The-Fur.

So I hole-punched the entire manuscript and put it by itself into the big D-Ring binder. Dug out one of the strap-type cardboard binders I use to hold print-outs of my shorter classes. Put all of the empty worksheets and their dividers into this. (Little-known fact: Holly translates into English as “addicted to office supplies.”)

Cut my pens down to a black one for the worksheets and a red one for the manuscript.

Today, I set out the revision, and this time, got all the way to page 48. The image at the very top of this tale of struggle and triumph is of Sheldon with TODAY’s work in front of him, stymied by my office-supply solution, and trying to take the pen I’m using, this time to have it taken away from him.

And this time… no yarn for him to wreak vengeance upon. That’s now in a zippered bag. Little bugger can fetch a ball (cat-style — he has to chase it, attack it, and pounce on it for twenty minutes before he finally brings it back to you), is trying to open doors by hanging on the doorknobs, likes to turn the touch lamp on and off, and took a flying leap at the light switch the other day. (Would have worked if it hadn’t already been down).

But he can’t (yet) work a zipper.

The Philosopher’s Gambit, Episode 3 of Tales from The Longview, is live!

This story has been done (except for the teaser for Episode 4) since early 2015.

It’s the follow-up to The Selling of Suzee Delight, and follows the regulars from the first two episodes, plus some new folks.

Tales from The Longview is my approach to a dystopian universe — told from the point of view of people not content to accept dystopia.

I’m so glad to finally have it out. You can read the first chapter here:

https://hollylisle.com/longview-3-the-philosopher-gambit/

I’m now outlining Episode 4: The Vipers’ Nest. While that will take a while, because I’m also writing and rebuilding the How to Write a Series class for which these episodes are demonstrations, it WON’T take another two years. Hoping to have it done and on sale in a few months. I’ll be writing Vipers’ Nest during class-building time, though. Not writing time, which is my first hour each morning.

Having now finished my FIRST project from my Fiction List of Three, Talysmana moves into my one hour of morning fiction.