Category Archives: Thinking Sideways

Courses, classes, and novel for 2011
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So…I’ve been MIA for a bit more than two months.

I’m back now, and ready to get down to the cool stuff, but before I get to that, here’s where I’ve been, and why:

After losing just about six months last year to constant migraines, vertigo, and there for a while the dread that I was going to drop dead any minute, I took time off from all my work except for answering customer service e-mails. I was off from December 17th to January 10th. Which is why there were no writing diary posts, no regular e-mails, and nothing else from me.

During that time, I didn’t have a single migraine, I only had one regular headache, and I had no vertigo. And I thought, cool. Rest fixed it. I’m all better.

Within two days of getting back to work, I was having migraines again. Every day. My second week back to work, the vertigo came back. Granted, I was doing taxes, dealing with a massive software glitch on one of my sites and world’s worst customer service, and updating websites, and it was frustrating, exhausting, and—except for spiffing up the sites, which was fun—it sucked.

But it had to be done, so I gritted my teeth and did it.

It demonstrated something I’d started to suspect when my vacation cured the migraines and vertigo, though. I can’t prove causation, but I have a strong enough correlation to think the migraines and the vertigo are both work-and-stress induced.

But a girl’s gotta eat. And if you wanna eat—at least in the world of the self-employed—you gotta work.

Enough background. Move to what’s cool.

I put together my schedule for the year, and did everything I could to make it sane, livable, cool, and fun for myself, while allowing me to fulfill promises I made last year before my life went south on me. My main objective in this is to create wonderful things while not living in daily pain—but I hope what I have planned will be fun for you, too.

So here’s my 2011.

January.

Educational, but already gone, eaten alive by income tax prep and upgrading websites. Taxes are done, websites not so much. Such is life.

February.

Starting today, actually. I’m doing the new stand-alone course How To Write A Series (which will also be the free graduation bonus for How To Revise Your Novel students who complete the course).

  • Week 1: Fundamentals
    • The 192 different types of series (yes, really—there are 192, and you’ll learn to identify every single one
    • How to make sense of them
    • How to choose the series type that’s right for you
    • Designing your series (It’s going to be a busy week)

      • Lesson will post on Feb. 7th, Live chat will be on Feb. 9th.

  • Week 2: Writing Your First Book
    • Presenting your characters
    • Establishing your world
    • Using your limitations
    • Controlling your story
    • Bringing in your ending

    Lesson will post on Feb. 14th, Live chat will be on Feb. 16th.

  • Week 3: Maintaining Your Series
    • Tracking and connecting your stories
    • Developing and using timelines and other series tools
    • Planning and writing follow-up novels
    • Designing a bullet-proof exit strategy

      • Lesson will post on Feb. 21st, Live chat will be on Feb. 23rd.

  • Live discussion: Q & A
    • If you’ve taken the course as I’m creating it, you can buy one of a limited number of tickets to attend the live session after Lesson 4 with me where I’ll answer questions on your series and brainstorm with you, or…
    • You can send your questions to me beforehand at a special e-mail address, and I’ll answer the best of them during the same live session.
    • Either way, every student will have access to the video and transcript of the Week 4 Q & A, which I’ll post to your student page as quickly as possible after the live session.

      • Lesson will post on Feb. 28th, Q & A will be on March. 2nd.

IMPORTANT: The How To Write A Series course has ONLY one live Q&A at the very end of the course.

The HTTS Walkthough has weekly live chats. I wrote this post sometime after 1 a.m. this morning, I had been working since eight in the morning, and I got the details of the two courses mixed up. I apologize for the error.

The stand-alone price for the four-week course will be $97, and will include mindmap, lessons, videos of techniques I use while prepping to write Book III of the Moon & Sun series (with transcripts), step-by-step instructions, my own proven system for keeping a series tight and not letting quality degrade with subsequent books, series worksheets, the course completion Q & A, and more.

If you receive the course as your graduation gift for completing How To Revise Your Novel, it is, of course, free.

March

Starting March 7th, I’ll begin creating content for the first month of the long-awaited, long-delayed How To Think Sideways Walkthrough. There’s been a lot of speculation about the Walkthrough. So here’s what it it, and how it will work.

I have to get the third book of the Moon & Sun series done this year. The kids who want to read it have waited too long already. So for the walkthrough, I’m going week by week through my own Think Sideways process, building Book III while I document what I’m doing and why. Documentation will take the form of notes, screen shots, new Technique videos (with transcripts), and pdf mini-lessons where I think they’ll add value and give you something new and useful. (I learn something with every book I write. I don’t know what I’ll learn this time, but when I learn it, so will you.)

Each week I’ll also offer a VERY space-limited, first-come, first-serve video session where I’ll take questions from students about problems they’re having with that week’s lesson in relation to their current project, and I’ll use a whiteboard to brainstorm directions they can take with problems that are stalling their stories. There will be an additional charge for the live session. ALL students will receive these videos (plus MP3s and PDF transcripts) as part of their course, as quickly as I can upload each. (TRANSCRIPTS TAKE LONGER. I have to pay someone to do them, and the person I hire has to do each one by hand.)

Either way, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot problems with your story by seeing it done live, and hearing the back-and-forth discussion between the students in the live session and me.

Current students, students who join How To Think Sideways before March 1st, and course grads will all receive the walkthrough at no extra charge. The price of How To Think Sideways will go up on March 11th, when I upload the first new material, to reflect the added content. All students who join the course on March 11th or later will pay the new price.

April – September

The HTTS walkthrough, writing Moon & Sun Book 3, revising Book III, and sending it off to my agent.

October

Start the loooong-delayed Holly Lisle’s Create A World Clinic.

November

Finish Create A World Clinic and make it available through Novel-Writing School, and via Kindle, iBook, and Nook.

December

Off. I’m going to need it.

January 2012

Tax prep. Oh goodie.

…After that…

I’ll surprise you. I have some things already on the calendar. But it’s not full, so I’ll surprise me, too.

But THAT’S NOT ALL…

Because Rebel Tales now has full editors who have their full season guidelines posted, we’re now open for story submissions in a BIG way. Writers, I’ve made resources easier to find, and have made the query desk one clink from any page on the main site.

WE WANT STORIES!

Join us in our quest to create a great new serialzine while bringing back the midlist, and to create writers who are making a living from their writing while writing great stories.

Ask questions here, let me know what you think.

I’m not dead. I’m doing taxes.
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Pretty much the same thing, right?

I have news, I have course announcements, and I have other things—but those all have to wait until the tax stuff is done.

I’ll try to post all the good stuff here on February 1st.

Until then, I’m singing

Eleven months out of the year
It’s fun to be self-employed
And when I am done with my taxes
I’m going to be overjoyed.

Give back,
Give back,
Give back my money to me-e-e,
Give back,
Give back,
Oh, give back my money to me.

Sung to the tune “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean…”

Feh. I’ll see you February 1st. Before then, if I (hah!) get done early. But this is like shovelling out the Agean stables, so don’t hold your breath.

Feel free to add extra verses to my song. Misery shared may not be halved, but at least we can get a laugh out of it.

NovelWritingSchool.com coming in November
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I have the temporary front page up here: http://novelwritingschool.com/

I have beta testers going through a free plot-outline course (a major upgrade on the current version done via e-mail on THIS site). We’re finding bugs and getting them out of the way now. Once we get the bugs out, this will go live for EVERYONE, well before November. Probably next week. I’ll post here with a link when it does.

I’ll have some of the simpler existing courses ready for you in November, and will gradually build out until all of my courses and existing freebies are transferred to the new school—and then I’ll start adding new courses.

The reason? Site maintenance on a bunch of different platforms and at a bunch of different domains has become too much for me to handle. So Holly Lisle’s Novel-Writing School will free me up to concentrate on course building, NOT web work.

“I Have A [Writing] Dream”
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Fiction is my passion. Stories that matter and that have something to say were my earliest independent love, they have been the focus of my creativity for a quarter century now, and I have made them my career.

Now, a few months from fifty, I want to tell you about the vision I have for the future of writing and great storytelling, and ask you where and how you might choose to join it.

My vision compresses down to three words:

Create, Teach, Produce.

One: Create

I want to bring meaningful stories to discriminating readers, viewers, and listeners.

This means I’ll continue to write my own fiction. Working on novels 34 and 35—with 32 published novels behind me—I’m pretty well established in that part of my vision.

Two: Teach

Beyond writing my own work, I want to help more good stories make it into the world. To me, this means offering powerful tools to writers to help them write stories that are the best work they have in them—not just filler for bookshelves, but stories that come from their heart and passion, and that, when written, move, inspire, and enrich the lives of the readers who discover them.

To this end, I’ve created all the free writing resources on the Forward Motion pages of my site, all the short writing courses in my online shop, and my first two comprehensive writers’ training courses, my how to write your novel and build your career course, How To Think Sideways, and my novel revision course, How To Revise Your Novel.

Those are a start. I have a stack of notebooks full of other ideas, and am simply working to make the time to create what’s in those notebooks. (Create A World Clinic is next.)

Three: Produce

Even beyond that, though, I want to create a publishing enterprise where editors come up with their genres and themes and are directly rewarded for their success, where writers create stories that matter to them and are directly rewarded for connecting with the readers who long for the stories they’re telling, and where people whose creative passion is storytelling can make a good living doing what they love.

Rebel Tales is the start of this part of what I want to create. Rebel Tales is still in a holding pattern while Margaret finishes and tests the backend that will allow me to pay each writer and each editor monthly their percentage of their work’s monthly gross income.

Because I think direct, perpetual monthly royalties on works created are the best way to encourage great work, and because building a way for people to be able to make their passion into their career matters deeply to me, it’s critical that I be able to pay my writers and editors in this fashion from the start.

Four: Help Out

While not immediately connected to the production of great storytelling and the creation of an expanding body of fiction worth reading, making sure that my readers, writers, and editors don’t starve is a big deal for me.

I’ve done some work to this end. I created affiliate programs to pay 50% of individual sales to anyone whose recommendation of my courses (or my writers’ courses) leads to the sale.

I created the 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make publishing program for people who had deep knowledge in a subject to create writers’ guides on subjects writers frequently get wrong and sell them through my shop.

I want to create a site that will allow these folks and other specialists to teach regular courses and offer information in their areas of expertise to writers who need a one-stop shop for research.

Sitting in a holding pattern, I have Money To Write (how to create monthly “royalty” income that will allow you to write full-time). I have an enormous amount of material for this program, but no time to get it into the software or do the necessary promotion.

I have discovered to my chagrin that I cannot do everything.

And the reality is that I’ll be fifty in October, and no matter how much time I have left, it’s running out at a hell of a pace.

I need help.

I have never longed to change the world. In fact, I’m utterly and ferociously against anyone whose stated goal is to save the world.

My objective is and always has been to work with those people who dare to dream that they could create, who dare to act to pursue their dream, and who want to make their own lives better—for them I create the tools and the training and the community that will allow them to do this.

To fulfill my own dream, to build my chosen vision into reality,
I need people for whom bringing great, unique stories to readers tired of “canned fiction product” matters. And if you aren’t a writer, a reader, or an editor of any stripe, I still need artwork, web design, data entry, product finishing, contract and rights assistance, and other things I guarantee you I haven’t even thought of yet.

If my objective strikes a chord with you, if my vision resonates with you, and if you can see yourself as a part of this, then look at what I want to do, and tell me where you fit in—what you can do, why you want to do it, where your passion lies. What is YOUR dream, and how could working with me help you achieve it?

Mostly ‘Cause Tomorrow’s My Birthday
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I could have worked tonight. But I decided since tomorrow is my birthday to stay up late with my guys, watch the conclusion of “Life on Mars,” play Fable II, knit a pair of socks, and just have a good time.

No words. No words tomorrow, though I’ll put up a post. No words Friday. And no words Saturday.

I have birthday stuff planned with my family, and since I’m going to be 49 (and the next one is {shudder} 50) I decided today that I deserved to have fun and celebrate, not work.

I hope you get wonderful words. I’ll have a post up for you every day.

Think of me. Have fun. I’ll see you again Sunday night.

(Will still be doing customer service for Think Sideways students all week. I’m not taking time off from that.)

Motivation, Third Video, Now available
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The third of four videos for THE WRITING CRAFT: How To Motivate Yourself is now available in the student area for all Think Sideways students who have reached Lesson 5 or later, and for all Think Sideways Grads.

Handouts and other things that will be included will have to wait until next week, along with the fourth video, which I ran out of time on today.

Stress, Migraines, and Stuff You Love
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As noted elsewhere—I hauled ass like nobody’s business for eight months to create a way for me to write the novel I wanted to write without having to do it to anybody’s specifications but my own.

My mad plan worked, and for the first time since I was an RN, I had a regular, reasonable income that did not depend on me writing at a hard run in order to keep us all fed.

I got started on the Dreaming the Dead—the novel of my passion—and I was having a wonderful time with it, sitting down late at night every night and getting as many words as I got before I fell asleep. No pressure, no specific deadline (a vague one in the back of my mind only), and not even any dedication to the idea of writing to a market or marketing the book when it was done. I was writing for the sheer love of writing—to spend time with characters I could not find anywhere else, to explore a fascinating problem, to uncover mysteries and wonders.

Yes, I fully intended to send it to my agent. When it was done. When I was damn good and ready.

And then…

And then…

Brief aside here: You might have noticed, if you’ve been around here or in Think Sideways, that I … ah … am not a good relaxer. I am very good at deadlines, very good at pushing hard toward goals, very good at driving myself.

Taking my time? Taking it easy? Doing things just for fun? Not my best skill. I know this about me, but I sometimes forget it. End Brief Aside.

I forgot why I had worked so hard last year and part of this one. I forgot that THIS book was supposed to be special, different, NOT the same ferocious race to the finish line, doing the absolute best I could in the absolute least time humanly possible so that I could get paid and we could eat.

I forgot. And I set what seemed like a reasonable deadline for myself. 2000 words a day, more or less.

I also forgot that my life is different now. When writing fiction was all I had, writing fiction WAS all I had. I could put the rest of the world aside for long stretches and just push for the finish line.

I wrote, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t getting other things done. When I got other things done, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t writing. Over the last couple of days, I got hammered by headaches, stress, and guilt, my productivity on everything dropped to miserable levels, and I started hating life. In one week. From one change: the decision to write Dreaming the Dead to a “publish it” deadline.

I sat down this morning and took stock of what I have going on that is NOT the novel—stuff I love and am thrilled to be doing and want to complete.

You can look at the mindmap I did here, or the outline version here.

The fact is, my life is full of cool and wonderful work. And writing fiction is the cool and wonderful play I had planned for the end of each day.

I need to get back to my original plan.

Adding A New Way To Pay
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Over the last three or so years, since I brought out Create A Character Clinic, I’ve had requests to add another way to pay besides PayPal.

I’m finally able to do so, and am looking at three alternative methods. (PayPal will remain my preferred method, but I want to be able to meet the needs of folks who can’t or won’t use them).

My three possibles (these are possible because the upgraded How To Think Sideways software supports them) are:

  • 2CO
  • Authorize.net
  • Clickbank

I’d like to know if you have recommendations, either as a customer or as a merchant, and either pro or con, for any of the three payment processors above.

The new payment processor will be for Think Sideways, not for the shop. There are still issues with adding another processor there, unfortunately, though I haven’t given up.

Writing the Novel: Math Hurts
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I’ve done the math on Dreaming the Dead, but it isn’t adding up to the kind of progress I want to see.

This year, I’ve had The Silver Door come out in hardcover, The Ruby Key come out in paperback, and Hawkspar come out in paperback. And I had the short story “Light Through Fog” appear in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance.

But last year, instead of another book, I wrote the How To Think Sideways course—about, I’d guess, 250,000 words long. I haven’t counted. I SERIOUSLY don’t want to know. But I know my writing speed, and I know I put 70 hours or more a week into that course for eight months, and while it wasn’t all writing, a whole lot of it was.

So I got the course instead of a new novel…but I did it so I could pay bills while I wrote the novels I wanted to write without having to have contracts for them, to write them to someone else’s specifications. This was not self-indulgence. This was a determination to write the books I know I’m capable of writing without having an editor tell me “there’s too much story” or that the audience for which she’d bought the books “isn’t that smart.”

I have a problem with this. I don’t want to have my writing crippled by someone else’s low expectations, or the demand that those low expectations be treated as a law of physics.

(This has nothing to do with the Moon & Sun series, by the way, or with the Korre novels. I’d love to continue those. In the future, if the opportunity presents itself, I will.)

So Think Sideways is buying me the time to write what I intend to be one hell of a novel, and to—when it is DONE—find an editor who wants to find the readers THAT novel will appeal to: someone who isn’t acquiring product for readers he or she doesn’t respect.

I’ve met a lot of my readers. I like them. More, I respect them. Smart, tough people overall. I want to be able to look them in the eye when I have a book coming out.

But because I chose Think Sideways and threw myself into that, next year I won’t have a book coming out. This was a trade-off. A gamble. My decision to believe in what I can do, and do it, and see if my unadulterated vision for my books can grab the passion of an editor, a publisher, and readers.

(My agent is … intrigued … by my career choice here. And supportive, for which I’m deeply grateful.)

Now, however, I’m six months into 2009, and 15,000 words (6%) into what I’m targeting as a 250,000-word first draft. Not good. I would very much like to have a shot at a book coming out in 2011—which means getting this one done this year.

Writing the novel becomes, therefore, first on my list. I get the words, THEN I do other things. On the days when the words don’t come easily, nothing else gets done. (If the possibility of switching off to site work exists, then the writing will get shoved to the side, because site work is easy, and writing sometimes isn’t.)

I have roughly 165 working days ahead of me. A few of them will go to family stuff. A few will be eaten by problems. The Christmas-through-New-Year block will require probably ten. Figure 140 days base.

I’ll need at least a month for revision. 20 days, leaving 120.

I have 235,000 words to go to hit the end of the first draft.

120 into 235,000 gives me 1958 words per day, minimum. Extra words on any given day can buy a breather on a future day. Breathers matter.

So round up to 2200 words per day before I do anything else. Night writing can buy me some time. Last night it bought me about 500 words into today’s total, if I choose to count them. I might not. The more time I can buy myself up front, the more time I can spend doing a revision that nails every issue. I want this book as tight as I can get it before my agent sees a word of it. I could just count night writing as a buffer.

Going to see what I can do in the next two hours. And though I made an exception today, because I needed the math, and figured I’d share the process and the reasoning behind it, writing updates, news, and other bloggables will hit the site AFTER I’ve gotten my words.

Wish me luck.

Think Sideways Is Up and Running
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I’m posting this a lot of places, because there’s one issue that I hadn’t counted on when shutting down the course so we could do upgrades.

The new version requires members to check a box to receive critical e-mail updates (which is good, and will make my site host much happier)—BUT NO ONE has clicked the box, because the default is OFF, and we just installed the software.

So every student, grad student, and prospective student who needed to know that the course was back up and running just got cut out of the loop.

Pass this on for me if you would, please.