I’ll be back when all the yuck is over.

I apologize for the lack of navigation within the weblog, and I have a call out for help to get me back up and running again.

As for the blogroll, it’s well and truly gone, so I’m debating the best way to link out to other sites I find helpful. At least I finally realized it went missing. If you have some websites you’d like to suggest that offer great reader or writing content, recommend them below.

Discussing the Blog Rules

This post exists so that if you have specific questions about the rules on this blog, you can ask them.

It does not exist for you to debate examples I’ve used to demonstrate the rules.

I will happily answer your questions about the rules.

I will delete debate. This is not a debate post.

I am closing EVERYTHING until he has to go back to work, and I will not be available during this time to read e-mail, check student support/customer service, or deal with any other issues. During the next two weeks, I will not be doing the Walkthrough, writing the novel, or anything else.

I’m checking to see if Margaret can cover for me during this time, but if she can’t, I’ll take care of whatever goes wrong when I get back.

If you have a problem with a class, course, or product, go to http://novelwritingschool.com/support and create a support ticket. If Margaret can cover for me, you’ll get a reply as quickly as she’s able. If she can’t, it’s going to be October 10th (or 11th, depending on how much I find waiting for me in there) before you hear ANYTHING. Please be patient. I’ll be back when I’m able, but this is my kid, and I’m not apologizing for needing this time.

"I Quit!"

After years of publishing my publishing my fiction through big commercial publishers, with thirty-two novels sold to the big New York houses as well as to international publishers around the planet, and more than a million books in print, I have decided to move to self-publishing my fiction.

Why am I going to start publishing myself?

First, because books don’t stay in print anymore with major publishing houses, and my 32-novel backlist has just about vanished.

Second, because I know self-publishing works, and doing this will allow me to write the books I want to write the way I want to write them, and present my stories to my readers without an intermediary.

Read the rest, then follow the link there to come back here…

I imagine it seems a little crazy to walk away from twenty years of publishing with the major New York publishers to go into indie publishing and do all the work myself.

The thing is, as fun as it is to walk into a bookstore and see your novels on the shelf, the rest of the experience gets old fast. Prior to reading Locke’s book on self-publishing, I was going round and round with myself about giving up on fiction altogether.

I was already publishing non-fiction (my writing courses), and the experience was FUN.  And all the frustration, headaches, and fury associated with my fiction career stood in stark contrast to me being able to talk live to my students in a forum, get immediate feedback on work, and, frankly, get paid regularly.

But I LOVE writing fiction.  I didn’t want to quit—I simply didn’t see a way to make it fun again.  To make it as immediate and joyful for me to create as my nonfiction.

When I read Locke’s book, I saw myself.  Someone who does not care about the numbers, who is not interested in constantly pushing for more readers, who wants only to write stories people love and to get them to the people who will love them.

Being a “team player” has never been my strong suit.  Not school, not in nursing, not in writing.  I’m not writing for everybody, and I’m not interested in pretending I am.  I want to write for the folks who already love what I’m doing, not to have someone constantly push me to make my work blander, safer, and more commercial so it will appeal to people who don’t like what I’m doing.

I was BORN to be indie.  And now I can.

I hope you’ll join this adventure with me.

I bought it.

It fits PERFECTLY with How To Think Sideways and How To Revise Your Novel.

I’ve been focusing heavily on teaching the traditional path to publishing because I’m good at it, I know how to do it, and I know how to show others how to do it. And one look at the Eureka! boards will show you my students are succeeding.

BUT…self-publishing has been as good to me as professional publishing. The only problem is, I can’t teach what I do with self-publishing because my method starts with, “First, sell 32 novels to top New York Publishers…” and ends with writing non-fiction. Not exactly a path most of you have any interest in following.

Certainly not a way to sell your fiction yourself.

EVERYTHING changed when I read John Locke’s book. He made himself into the first self-published million-seller, and then he wrote a book on how he did it. It’s a good book, and the parts he goes into detail on are genius.

But HE DOESN’T COVER EVERYTHING. He has whole vast swatches where he says “You’re going to have to learn how to do this yourself.”

I realized reading through what he’s leaving you to figure out on your own that I ALREADY KNOW this. Every bit of it. The week six lessons are on developing your own personal genre, finding your target market, and writing books to that target. These are steps in Locke’s process.

So the Walkthrough for WEEK 6 of How To Think Sideways—Finding Or Creating Your Market—is going to be be the step-by-step on what John Locke left out and said you were going to have to learn on your own.

His book is available as an e-book via Kindle, Nook, and iBooks, and there are software readers out there you can get for your computer if you don’t have one of these e-readers.

Please understand that I CANNOT and WILL NOT reveal the parts of his system he covers in depth.

He earned his $4.99, and I’m not going to violate his copyright—so to get full benefit from Week 6, you’re going to have to get a copy of John Locke’s How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in Five Months.

This is about building your career yourself—controlling your fiction, making sure that you and your hard-earned career don’t get dumped into professional publishing’s “didn’t do as well as we had hoped” bin after three books. I’ve been there. Remember? It sucks, and here’s the thing.

YOU DON’T EVER have to be there.

This is your path to full-time writing if you want it, and I’m going this route with some of my own work.

This is the book, the system, the process I’ve been waiting for. If it’s what you’ve been waiting for, buy his book and get ready for Thursday, when the Week 6 Walkthrough Talkthrough: What John Locke DIDN’T Cover goes live and I walk you through the rest of how to make his system work for you.

Here are links to buy the book. They are NOT affiliate links. I want the man to keep full price on each sale—this book is that much of a game-changer:

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Sold-Million-eBooks-Months-ebook/dp/B0056BMK6K
Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-i-sold-1-million-ebooks-in-5-months-john-locke/1103948392
iBooks: From your i-device, go to iBooks and search “John Locke 1 million ebooks”

Hi Holly,

Your account was suspended because one or more photos you uploaded [my emphasis, not theirs] violated Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This content has been removed from the site. After reviewing your situation, we reactivated your account.

[Some content snipped for being a form e-mail totally irrelevant to my situation]

You may now log in. For technical and security reasons, we cannot provide you with a description or copy of the removed content. Learn more about our policies by reviewing the Facebook Community Standards: www.facebook.com/communitystandards/

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation going forward.

Thanks for your understanding,

Cedric
User Operations
Facebook

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: Holly Lisle (hdl@hollylisle.com)
To: The Facebook Team
Subject: Re: My Personal Profile was Disabled

Since my site is one of those that was hacked by Lulzsec/Lulz Security, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out the problem promptly.

Thank you.

Holly Lisle

So, first…a word to Facebook:

Don’t thank me for being understanding, Cedric. I’m not the least bit understanding about this. My page was HACKED. You’re still blaming me.

But now, what really matters

When I got back into my site, I had one thing, and only one thing, I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to apologize to each and every person who’d received spam from from the Lulzsec/Lulz Security hackers through my account.

I wanted to say “I’m very sorry you were spammed in the worst imaginable way by someone purporting to be me, and I’m very sorry I had no way to contact you when all of this was going on to let you know it was NOT me doing this, and that as it was going on, I was fighting as hard as I could to make it stop.”

What I discovered instead was that all my friends, family members, students, and others were gone. I had no way to contact them to apologize for the awful content they’d received from the hackers.

I was completely alone on my defaced, ruined, still-pornographic page.

Here’s what I discovered about Facebook.

If you’re on Facebook, Facebook owns you. They own your information, they own your contacts, they own your family members, they own your mailbox, they own whatever you create on the site. And in an instant they can take it away, and you cannot get it back. You have no other way to contact friends you connect with through the site but the way they offer you—so all the people you love can disappear out of your reach in an instant’s notice, through no fault of your own.

If you friended me on Facebook, I’m very sorry I could not reach you. I’ll apologize here and hope anyone who knows me from both Facebook and my weblog, mailing list, or Twitter, will pass this along so the people I care about, with whom I have once again lost contact, will at least know where to find me if they want to.

I will not go back to Facebook.

When I realized I could not reach the people I needed to reach to apologize, I immediately requested the page be deleted permanently.

In fourteen days, everything connected to my account will be off Facebook permanently.

I will not be part of anything that exercises that sort of control over people’s information and lives, and that does so in such an irresponsible, cavalier, and incompetent fashion.

If you have people on the site you don’t know how to reach in any other way, fix that today. Exchange phone numbers, exchange real email addresses, set up a place where you can contact each other independently of Facebook’s closed network.

Don’t assume that Facebook will be there for you, that the system will work the way it should, that if you live by their terms of service, Facebook will back you up.

Don’t end up where I am. It’s an ugly place to be.

I ALSO received a notice from Facebook that my account was blocked because I’d posted porn. Considering I’m the person who requested my account be blocked because I was hacked, I’m very unhappy with Facebook’s clueless handling of this issue, and not sure I’ll be able to get my account reopened—or that I want it reopened.

I’ll see what happens, but so far I could not be less impressed with Facebook’s security or problem-handling.

If you received from my via Facebook in the last 24 hours, it was not from me. (I didn’t use the account yesterday or today.)

Nonetheless, I apologize deeply for anything that was sent.

I reported to Facebook that my site had been hacked, but at the moment I am unable to do anything with it but leave it in a state of limbo—I don’t have the new password, and Facebook won’t accept the old one.

If this is the end of my Facebook account, I’ll remove the Facebook links from the site to prevent confusion, but I’ll spend as much time as I’m able seeing if I can fix this.

Please note that I’ve been hellishly unwell this week, and I am really not up for this sort of nonsense.

Holly

I’ve been back to full-time vertigo and full-time migraines, and though I know this is nothing life-threatening, it is damned difficult to work through. I’m doing my best, I’m still producing the HTTS Walkthrough, and Margaret and I are worknig hard on the transfer of all my courses to NovelWritingSchool.com, but other things have slowed down a lot.

And then a couple days ago my computer died, and it’s taken me that time to pull the part of my backups that would fit on my laptop and get more or less up and running again.

I hope to have my main computer back in a day or so, and to have everything back to normal in that regard by next week. (Right now I only have access to some of my software, and some of my records. There simply isn’t room on the hard drive of my older computer for everything I’m using now.)

I’ll do my best to start posting in here again, and to pick up the threads on TalysMana and WABWM. Once I have the site transfer finished and am no longer working such awful hours, I expect the headaches and vertigo to taper off. They did the last time I had some down time.

I miss being here. I’ll be back again as soon as I can.