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.