Holly-Lisle Archives - Page 2 of 2 - All the Billion Other Moments

Holly Lisle’s writing clinics on sale

Just wanted to let people know that Holly put her three writing clinics on sale ($2 off each) through Friday (March 9th) at her online e-book shop.

I can personally recommend them, especially the language clinic. I’m currently working on my second language for Miracles and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. The books are clear and concise, and most importantly they make the process fun (and manageable, but fun is more important). If any of this even sounds vaguely interesting you owe it to yourself to check them out (the shop pages contain Table of Contents and excepts):

Prepping for Revision

Parallel Shift changed into something I’m not quite ready to deal with, so I’ve started doing some background expansion for Miracles. I’m currently creating the language for race of creatures that live under the mountains using Holly Lisle’s Create A Language Clinic. It’s going well and I’m surprised by how much fun it is. The language itself won’t feature too heavily in the final product, but the way in which they speak factors in.

Current plan is to do the human language next, to help with using more reasonable names, and then I’ll move on to Holly Lisle’s Create A Culture Clinic. There’s going to be quite a bit of expansion going into the revision, so I want to solidify the background stuff as much as possible at this point.

You write fantasy? Isn’t that a lot of work?

Holly Lisle posted the the introduction to Holly Lisle’s Create A Culture Clinic, the next volume in her Worldbuilding Course. Reading it really drove some things home for me. My wife often asks why I choose to write stories set in a fantasy world that I have to create, giving myself that much extra work to do (other people ask too, but she asks most often). There are two problems with that. Firstly, it’s not so much a choice so much as when I sit down to write, I write fantasy stories. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write fantasy stories. Secondly, I don’t think it is more work.

No one seems to believe me on either of those, but the second one seems to dwarf the first in peoples minds. How can I possibly believe such a thing? Because it’s true.

If I want to have a race of purple headed bird people in my world I have some work to do. How to they interact with other races? How are their lives different than humans? What’s their history? Do they speak their own language? Do they eat worms? That’s just the start, and perhaps these violet faced flying folk will only play a passing role in my story.

What’s that? I’m failing to prove my point? Be patient.

If I want to set a story in modern day Saginaw, Michigan, where I’ve never been, I still have quite a bit of work to do. What are the people like? What’s the economic and social structure? What local slang is in use, and by what age groups? What clothing lines are popular with high schoolers? What’s the ethnic makeup of the city? What color are the police cars? How many schools do they have? That too is just the start.

See, in the fantasy world, I make my own answers. Sure I have to make them work in a believable context, and I might make some stupid choices I have to later deal with in some way, but I can’t really be wrong. After all, I’m the world authority on those purple headed bird people. You might think people will be forgiving in the second scenario. It’s only fiction after all, right? Not that I’ve seen. Authors who take liberties with the world we live in get ripped apart. Maybe not all the time, but I’ve seen it happen about really stupid stuff.

So why not write about my hometown, or somewhere I know more about firsthand? I’ve always felt I had a lot of good reasons why I chose not to do that. But Holly’s introduction gave me another one by pointing out a big danger in writing about the world you live in. If you fail to capture the culture in the story, once the culture changes you’re story will no longer work. Yikes! It’s not that it can’t be done, and maybe I could do it, but it sounds like a lot of extra work.

Rebooting the Edit Process

It’s time to get back to editing my first novel. I’m going to start over. I read lots of articles on editing when I started, and one of them really stuck out: Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision. I recently re-read the article, and it makes a lot more sense now. Right from the opening it grabbed me and said, “Just start over and try this.”

The first draft of your novel is finished. Now, according to the recommendations of any number of writing books, pundits, and writers who go through this themselves, you’re in for five or ten or more rounds of revision, in which you’ll polish your work until it is a gleaming, perfect pearl … and in which process you’ll dither for months or years.

You can do that if you want. But you don’t have to.

I believed that when I read it the first time, but I didn’t have the confidence to try it. Instead I tried something which can only be called “my way.” I can tell you with great confidence that “my way” sucks big time. Maybe I needed to fail on my own before trusting someone else on this. Who knows.

So I need to start with the Supplies section, and the thing that sticks out right now is:

A table where you have room to stack your manuscript into three piles and have the spiral-bound notebook open at the same time.

Yeah. I have that. It’s the rear section of my desk. Problem is it currently looks like this:

So that’ll be step one for me. Clean the desk!

Podcasts-a-plenty

Work’s still a bit crazy, but I’m trying to keep it at bay. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (if it would only stay still and wait for me to catch up).

I’ve been listening to some more Podcasts lately (if you don’t know what podcasting is, look it up, or ask a ninja). It started with Dragon Page Cover-to-Cover, a podcast about Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels featuring interviews with authors. Talk about a show for me.

In the past few weeks I’ve discovered some great podcasts about writing: Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing and Tee Morris’ The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy. I’ve been listening to these while eating breakfast. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and it has the added benefit of making me feel guilty for not writing. The other day Denise asked if Holly Lisle had a podcast. She didn’t at the time, but she does today. I listened to Holly Lisle On Writing at lunch today. There’s another one to add to the list.

I’ve always had an attraction to the audio format. I used to devour the children’s audiobooks at the local library. I even have some that my grandfather copied to tape for me somewhere between the ages of 2 and 5. I discovered Old Time Radio at some point during elementary school, and ever since I’ve been fascinated with audio drama. I’ve written a number of radioplays over the years, and with podcasting, maybe it would be worth dusting them off (not right now though, I have enough on my plate).

2005 Year End Clearance

Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 00:00:54 -0500 From: Jason Penney <...> To: Jason Penney <...> Subject: story idea an epic battle/war is tearing apart the land. A small time thief sees his opportunity to make good, but becomes involved in helping a refugee family (maybe just some kids?)

I found this email earlier this week. I have a lot of these ‘story idea’ emails, but this one is the novel I’ve been working on since shortly after sending this to myself two years ago today. I’m slightly less than half way done my second draft, and while the story has changed with time, I can still see how I got from there to here.

I’ve been a writer most of my life. When I was younger I sort of just assumed that you learned to read, learned to write, and then wrote down the stories in your head, and that’s how books were made. Today, I’m still pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to work, but three years ago I didn’t feel that way. That type of thinking was schooled out of me. I never stopped writing, but I really forgot about writing books.

Throughout high school I wrote poetry. Lots. Every emotion I felt hit the paper while it was still fresh. I probably wrote four or more hours a day. I have stacks of notebooks filled with the stuff (which are fading away because I can only write long hand in pencil). Inside these notebooks I can find a few first chapters or unfinished short stories. I never stopped wanting to write fiction, but I stopped believing I could (or maybe that I should). After high school the writing mostly stopped. A few ideas here and there, and the occasional poem, but mostly nothing.

Sometime in 2003 I decided to take this whole writing thing more seriously. I worked on short stories a few nights a week. Then, near the end of December in 2003 I found Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love AND Money by Holly Lisle. This free book on writing really got me going. It helped me organize my thoughts on being a writer, and commit myself to making it happen. I set out a series of goals and started working towards them.

Have I met them? Not exactly. I originally planned to write short stories for all of 2004, and try to have a draft of a novel done in 2008. Right at the end of 2003 Lazette Gifford posted on Forward Motion that she would be teaching a 2 Year Novel class. Moving from idea to completed novel over a two year period. I signed right up. So I missed my 2004 goals, but I’m ahead of things for my 2008 goal, so I figure I’ll call it progress and keep moving forward.

As 2005 winds to a close, I want to take this time to thank Holly and Zette. If it wasn’t for them I’d probably still be floundering around wondering how to get from A to B instead of making my way along the path. I also want to thank my wife, Denise, for being so supportive of my writing, even when she’s frustrated that I’d rather write than vacuum.

WordPress: Hiding the comment link without disabling pings

I saw this question over on Holly Lisle’s weblog, and thought I’d try to help. After a number of posts eaten by the comment gnomes, I think I’ve found the answer.

Since this might be useful to someone else, I’ve decided to post it here.