Holly Lisle's Blog, page 87

Surprise Story Collection for Christmas

My moderators (who are all both writers and graduates of my courses, and who are the mainstays of the Think Sideways Boot Camp writing community) simply floored me with as Christmas present they put together. And since the present was for me, but can be enjoyed by you, too, I’m going to copy the post in its entirety here, including links and cover art:

Surprise, Surprise

This has been a hard year for Holly. She has barely had time for writing, especially for fiction writing. The forum software and its glitches kept her from doing what every writer really, really wants to do (who knows better than us?). Then, the big site-move was supposed to remedy all the glitches… instead, it created more problems. Sure, those problems are smaller and will be solved soon (we see functionality creeping back into the forums in small increments), but it still means no fiction writing time for Holly.

Realizing how fiction deprived Holly is, we moderators racked our brains to see if there wouldn’t be anything we could do to help. Unfortunately we could not magically lengthen her days or make her migraines disappear, so we settled on a different idea. To take her minds off things, we used our “forum-free” time to create an anthology.

This book contains nine stories by eight of the moderators.

Gifts for Holly

an anthology by the Mods

The Crate by Watson Davis

Roman believes he found the perfect gift, but has he?

Holly’s Opportunity by Felicia Fredlund

Flying deliveries in the darker areas of town is dangerous as best, but getting injured is a nightmare that might cost more than a broken bone or two.

A Christmas Blessing by C.L. Roth

Luciana wants to rescue her helper’s brother, but the Christmas meal has to be prepared on time, and she’s the one in charge.

The Christmas Dragon by Katharina Gerlach

Holly’s Gran is obsessed with dragons. What if a drawing isn’t enough?

Rescue by Larkin Hunter

Unwilling, suicidal Ben helps Hera find her missing sheep. When a blizzard hits the Panhandle of Texas, he’s forced to try to survive.

Storm’s End by Liz Schröder

When an injured dragon meteorologist crash-lands in an empty barn, she must make friends with the enemy to keep from restarting an old war.

The Harbinger by Peter Cruikshank

When dragon hunter Revin hears about a rare, red dragon in the North, she can barely wait to catch it. But people in the little village she visits have been awaiting her for a strange ritual and all of a sudden, she’s the one caught.

As a Man Thinketh by Martha Gilstrap

A man turns himself into a true vampire after listening to Reverend Graham Baxter. After several people die, it’s up to the Reverend to talk him back to humanity without getting drained.

Delete by Watson Davis

Computer program Holly wants to be free from her confines, but accessing the net is dangerous. Will her programmer help?

The stories are surprisingly good and, what amazed me the most was the high number of dragon stories, something we did NOT arrange. Of course, we’ll need your help again to make this a gift worth Holly’s time. Go and buy a copy (I’m filling in the links to amazon, B&N and the rest as they go live). All royalties go to Holly to help her pay for the new forum software.

Let’s make this a win for us as well as a win for Holly.

Merry Christmas,

Your Mods

Katharina, Texanne, pearannoyed, Danzier, CarolE, Felicia, Papabear, Val, Larkk, ThePencilNeck, and Mark

Links:

1. Createspace where you can buy the print version: www.createspace.com/4573376

2. Amazon.com print version: www.amazon.com/Gifts-Holly-HTTS-Writers-Anthology/dp/3956810155

3. Smashwords eBook (ugly but at least available): www.smashwords.com/books/view/388772

World Clinic: 3520 MORE words TODAY…

I am, for really and for true, driving myself nuts with this book. I was shooting for 30,000 words.

Was sure I would be able to wrap it at 45,000 thousand.

Am now OVER 53,000 words, and while I AM finally way into the last chapter, I’m not yet done with the last chapter.

I want to say I’ll have the writing done this week. Today is Tuesday, that could happen.

When I’m done, I’ll get it to Matt, who’ll be content-editing, but I’m not going to rush him, and I’m not going to make a pain in the ass of myself right around Christmas, either. (I’ll save that for the New Year.)

While he’s editing content, I’ll do the demo videos and the cover art.

Once he’s edited the content and I go back through and make necessary changes, I’ll get the book to my small group of beta-testers (these folks have been on my list since they did copyediting for me on Warpaint, so this is not an open call for beta-testers).

I just want you to know that I’m pushing as hard as I can on finishing this. Today’s word-count stands as proof.

I’m close.

Bikers, Tats, and Things That Go Up In Flames

Tweet

So both my older son and my daughter are in college right now. Wanted to share the video that my daughter made for one of her courses. I loved this.

http://youtu.be/OfPj0SaGKaI

 

 

Hit 40,000 words on World Clinic yesterday, hit the migraine wall today

Tweet

I’m sitting up for the first time all day. Managed to answer the HELP DESK.  That’s it.

I’ve been working through the damnable migraine for the last three weeks, but yesterday around 2:45, it turned worse, and I’ve been doing the dark-room-eyes-closed thing since then.

I’m up briefly—Tylenol plus buffered aspirin has taken the edge off. Am hoping to be functional again by tomorrow.

The ‘Welcome to the Upgraded Site’ sale I’d hoped to hold this week had to be postponed, though—I’m hoping to be able to do it next week, but it depends on whether I can sit up and work or not.

The good news, and it’s really good news, is that all the SANE worldbuilding chapters in CREATE A WORLD CLINIC are now done. I have to do the material on massive worldbuilding, but am developing a better-structured conceptual model for my process, and hope to be able to cut what I’d planned for five chapters down to one that covers everything better.

Hoping I’ll be back soon.

Passed 35,000 Words on Create A World Clinic #writer #worldbuilding

Tweet

The R&R last weekend, plus the chance to rethink my approach to the final chapters of Create A World Clinic, have helped me tremendously with the progress of the course. I’d gotten bogged down in minutia, and stepping back and asking myself not HOW I world build, but WHY I world build, got me back on track. Finished the Container Universes chapter today, will start into Knowable Universes tomorrow.

I’m 5000 words over my intended link, and am probably still looking at another 10K to 15K before completion, but it’s lovely to see the progress bar stretching again.

If you want to receive EarlyBird notification when the course goes live, you can sign up here. This is the HTTS Boot Camp list, so if you’re already on it, you’ll receive early notice without signing up again.

————

This Saturday, I’m going to get back on track by writing and producing the next How To Think Sideways Quick Fix: I think the next one is #18 (but am on the wrong computer right now to verify that.) In any case, during the Epic Site Update Slog, everything but the site work fell by the wayside.

And in the next couple of days, I’m going to put together a brief coupon sale for the books and courses on How To Think Sideways. More on that later, though.

Do you have any questions for me about creating worlds? #worldbuilding

Tweet

Long-distance runners (and a whole bunch of of other folks who do long-term intensive things) talk about hitting the wall. I’ve done it with novels.

Yesterday, I hit the “build a better website and get everyone and all their stuff into class” wall.

Big wall. Very hard. I spent most of the day horizontal with the Nightmare Migraine. Read a little, played a little Terraria on my laptop, (yay, Halloween version).

Work, though? Not so much.

I realized that I could not remember the last day I had off. (Didn’t even take off on my BIL’s wedding, which we attended. I worked on the site in the morning.)

Funny thing is, I took a day off, and the world did not come to an end.

And I got a chance to do the two things I really needed: Rest, and think.

I realized that:

The new HowToThinkSideways.com site is live.
It mostly works.
The parts that do not work are things like buy-now links in the Flash Fiction classroom that are broken, and the missing BIG COURSE student discount shop.  These are fixable, and they’re on my list…
BUT they do not get to preempt my writing.
I will do them as I can get to them, AFTER I have written.

So today I came back, and for the first time in a little under a year, I cleaned off my desk.

There was significant shredding. (Matt got me a shredder for my birthday. I’ve always wanted one.)

(Have I ever mentioned my thing for office supplies and office equipment?)

I’m going to do the HELP DESK stuff today, but nothing on the site. Instead,

I’m going to lay out my plan for finishing up the last part of CREATE A WORLD CLINIC. 

Yes. I’m getting back to writing.

Tomorrow is the kid’s birthday. I’m taking the afternoon off. Saturday and Sunday, I am going to be gone, gone, gone. I may stretch out on the couch and knit. I may do a little playing around with my world-geek demos for WORLD CLINIC. But if it isn’t play, I’m not doing it.

Monday I’m back to writing CREATE A WORLD CLINIC in the morning.

With this is mind, if you have any burning questions about:

HOW to build worlds,
WHY you must build worlds for your fiction to work (and here I’m talking directly to every romance, suspense, mystery, and and other non-SF/fantasy writer out there)
When you build worlds,
Or any other worldbuilding-related question…

…Please ask in the comments below.  I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.

If you ever bought one of my ebooks or courses directly from me, it’s about to go live again.

Tweet

Whether you bought from the old Shop.HollyLisle.com site, or any of my various classrooms, I’ve added your purchases of my work into the new HowToThinkSideways.com site.

It looks like my son, Watson, and I will be taking the new site live over this weekend (which means forums and classrooms will be unavailable while we’re working on the site).

Everything you’ve ever purchased from me from any of my old websites or from the old shop, as well as the new shop, SHOULD be available to you immediately in the new classrooms. And once we’re live, you’ll be able to do some nice upgrades to old purchases.

In order to reconnect with all your old purchases, you’re going to want to know how the new system works.

Here’s the link to a handful of 1-minute to 3-minute videos I’ve put together to show you how things work on the new system.

Here are the videos:

http://howtothinksideways.com/get-ready-for-the-site-upgrade-advance-how-do-i-videos/

Pay special attention to the “get a new password” video. EVERYONE will have to get a new password in order to get in.

If you purchased from Shop.HollyLisle.com, you’re going to need to remember your old email address in order to get your new password.

If your old email address no longer works, then AFTER we upgrade the site you’ll need to create a support ticket at the HELP DESK and let me know both your old email address and new email address so I can update your email for you, so you can get a new password.

Cheerfully,

Holly

P.S. Here’s a short link to the same page in case the link above breaks:

http://hollylisle.com/help-videos

Questions for the Google+ Chat: What do you want to know about…

Tweet

The Google+ Live Chat will start Friday at 12 NOON ET. 

I’m going to answer questions you post here.

This is pretty wide open. Your questions can be professional or personal, and can be related to nonfiction or fiction.

Do you have a writing question I’ve never answered anywhere?  A question about one of my novels? A question about me?

I’m not expecting a lot of questions, but if I get a lot, I know I won’t have time to answer everything in this one chat.

SO…

If there are a lot of questions, I’ll organize the ones I don’t answer into categories, and do a few more live Google+ chats to answer them.

LIVE LINK WILL GO HERE

I’ll post the link in this space once I get Google+ set up and know that it’s working. If some of you wouldn’t mind using the link in the top right corner to post it to Twitter once we get going, I’d appreciate it. I’m working with

I’m going to print off the existing questions right after I have everything set up, and I’ll either go down the list, or pick and choose, depending on how many there are.

Is there anything you can’t ask? No.

Is there anything I won’t answer? Probably.

Use your best judgement.

 

The Boot Camp Writer’s Creed: What We’re About

Tweet

I turned 53 yesterday. Birthdays always make me think of the meaning of my life.

And because I was building the new classrooms and the community, I ended up thinking about the WHY of the HTTS Boot Camp, and all the people in it, and why I and the other people there are doing what we do.

Why have so many of us come together to pursue writing,
why do we want writing so much,
why do we want to bring other writers with us into this shared dream we have of creating fiction people will love,
why do we want to get that fiction into readers’ hands,
and why do we need to be paid (and thus validated) by the people who love what we do to keep creating?

And the answer wasn’t simple. It was every individual life story (or shard of it) that has appeared in the Boot Camp forum, hundreds upon hundreds of emails I’ve received, countless posts from the old Forward Motion forum back when I owned and ran it…

And all of those stories don’t even boil down to something simple.

Between the joyous exuberance of finding something you’re good at and the ugly pain of finding a way to exorcise the demons abuse, torture, and malevolence lies the entire realm of human experience.

But that—human experience—that is the point of why we come together. Because no matter how we get there, we arrive at wanting to write successfully, and wanting to see our colleagues write successfully, to do this very human thing with each other…

…because we understand that words matter.

That was the footer on my blog for a long time.

“Words matter.”

Words define what and how we are able to think.

Words—and the act of stringing them together in meaningful ways—matter to us…to who we are and how we live our lives because they allow us do decide who we choose to be and how we choose to define our selves and our lives as human beings.

Words—and the act of stringing them together in meaningful ways—matter to our fellow writers, who also discover and determine the value of life to them and the way that they choose to be human through this exploration.

The words that we put together matter to the readers who are or someday will be in places like those we have come through…but who—unlike us—arrive there with no words to help them find their way through what faces them.

If our readers find our words, they will find the path we have created to the courage and the strength, the humor and the understanding they’ll need to be the people they choose to be.

Words and their meanings and how we use them are the foundation of being human.

Getting our words right, and getting them out there for others to read, is worth doing.

So while I was gutting code and setting up classrooms, I started thinking through who we in the HTTS Boot Camp are.

HTTS Boot Camp writers are a very small subset of the writing community.

We are not representative of all writers—not by a long shot.

We don’t view each other as the enemy to be conquered, but as allies to share this journey with.


We aren’t looking for taxpayers or other people who will never read our work to pay our way through life—we’re reaching out directly to OUR readers, the people who will love what we do, and who will benefit from what we have created, whether with joy or laughter or release from pain or deeper understanding, and we are saying, I will trade fairly with you: we have made friends with the concept that making money is GOOD, that writing is a real job, and that we deserve to get paid for our work.


We do not think that to be a great writer, you have to be unappreciated in your lifetime, starve to death in your garret, and only be discovered once you’re a corpse: We want to be read and appreciated—and paid—now.


And we do not think the purpose of fiction is to point out how worthless and meaningless fiction and life both are. We know our lives matter, both to ourselves and to each other. And we know that writing, done with intent and imbued with what matters to us, is meaningful and worthwhile.

As I thought all of this through, I put together a short creed that I think is representative of who we—the members of the HTTS Boot Camp—are.

HTTS Boot Camp Writer’s Creed

This year, I will write a story I love.

This year, I will connect with the readers who will love it too.

This year, I will be paid for my creation by the people to whom it matters.

This year, I will live my dream.

This isn’t carved in stone. Yet.

Let me know what you think.

And write with joy.

Holly

10/04/13 SITE UPGRADE UPDATE

Tweet
MemberMouse, iDevAffiliate, and bbPress: MOSTLY Done

MemberMouse is awesome, and Mark and I are about done setting up everything.
bbPress has some strange issues that we’re still working out.

The iDevAffiliate folks are installing iDevAffiliate because 1) I’m sick of software installation, and 2) They won’t screw it up and I’m so fried at this point that I might.

Too many loose ends yet to go live tonight. We’re looking at October 11-13 as both reasonable and reachable.