Yesterday through the 30th, everything in the e-book shop is 10% off, to celebrate the fact that we’re up and running again.
Moderately Grand Reopening Sale
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Category Archives: WB1–Language Clinic
Moderately Grand Reopening Sale
Fever Sale
In honor of the fever. I’m already tired of this. Drinking fluids, resting.
The sale is my sense of humor, such as it is when I’m sick, anyway. It runs through Monday so the folks who surf from work aren’t left out.
ALL CLINICS $2 OFF!
EBOOK AND PRINT VERSIONS
Sale Runs From Saturday July 28 through Monday July 30th.
Clinic Week Sale
I’ve put all three Clinic books on sale from today through Friday, each one $2.00 off.
Why? For karma. I’m struggling on the Ruby Key revisions, and the last time I put books on sale, the bad karma cleared. The line-for-scene is crawling, and most of the cards so far are red or orange. Not good. My stress level is rising, my confidence is falling.
I’d had some serious, bad stuff going on for a while the last time I put books on sale (also for karma), and everything got better. It may be New-Agey, it may seem crackpot. No matter. It worked last time, so I’m trying it again.
ADDED LATER:
Also put Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood on sale for a flat $3.00 (57% off). It’s not a clinic, but….
Anyway, I hope the discounts are a good thing for some of you, and provide good content and a useful service.
One-Day-Only Hump Day Sale
Wednesdays suck in general. Today, mine is worse than usual, so I decided to do something good to offset all the bad karma.
There’s a one-day-only Hump Day sale on my writing books—15% off on any of them that you buy. Buy one or all three and get the discount.
French review of Create A Language Clinic
My French is nowhere near what it used to be, I’ve just discovered. Once, years ago, I could comfortably read Spanish and French at the newspaper/ novel level and was working hard to add German to my language list. No more, alas. I was stunned and dismayed to discover how much I’ve simply lost. I can still manage some Spanish, both conversationally and in reading, but German has become an indecipherable sea, and while my French grammar remains, the vocabulary has all but disappeared.
However, I still read well enough that I got the general gist of a fascinating review of Create A Language Clinic (and fell back on free translation to fill in what I missed).
Reading the review, I discovered that the reader had worked through the book the same way I worked through the post; using a translation service. That’s a hard, hard way to learn to build a language—weirdly recursive, in that you’re working from a language you don’t know though a translator that translates like a multilingual drunkard with comprehension issues to convert into your language the method for creating other languages. I lift my glass to the diligent Leppiya, who definitely did the course the hard way. And apparently still got the humor. I’m glad that came through.
Holly Lisle’s Create A Language Clinic now in Paperback
Have done the copyedits. Have fixed typos and clarified a few things. Have redone the font, made it all pretty for print, and now Holly Lisle’s Create A Language Clinic has passed muster and is now available for purchase.
In a few days, a revised PDF version will be available for download from the shop, free to anyone who purchased it previously. It will take me that long to get everything switched around.
Sproing! Another week begins.
The print version of Language Clinic landed on my front step late last Friday, and it turned out beautifully. I’m going through and copyediting, will do final revisions, and have the thing available for sale in the next couple of days.
Other than copyediting most of that, I did nothing writing-related over the weekend except let my sizzlin’ brain rest. Turned out to be a good plan. The opener for Create A Culture Clinic was really dragging, and I was having a hard time figuring out how to make the book useful from page one; I wanted to skip long-winded theory and go straight into creation, but theory kept wrapping its vines around my ankles and tripping me.
Something clicked last night. Here’s how the thing will go. Maybe you’ve never created a culture. If you haven’t you may be heading for a problem. Maybe you have created a culture, but it already has a problem.
Ten Problems Your Culture Might Have:
- Your good culture is fighting an evil culture.
- Your culture is feudal Britain in drag.
- Your culture only exists to grind a religious, political, or philosophical axe.
- Your culture exists in the “American Dark Ages”—that is, you could give any one of your characters a driver’s license and an ATM card and he would be indistinguishable from everyone you know.
- Your culture contains only paladins, clerics, bards, rogues and healers, and maybe the occasional barmaid or whore.
- You can only list the things your culture is against, not the things it is for.
- Your culture contains nothing you disagree with.
- Your culture contains dwarves, elves, or ents… or all three.
- Your culture consists of you, your friends, and your local Starbucks, only far in the future, or far in the past. Or maybe even in the present.
- Your culture boldly goes where TV has been going for a long, long time.
The Culture Clinic will drop you right into the middle of religious, government, home and family design on page one, and you’ll be slashing your way through the thorny thickets of everything that is trite and overdone, heading straight for those fresh, exciting cultural ideas that are born from your own experiences. You may not realize it yet, but you have had worthwhile experiences.
Figuring out the problem-solving direction of the book is going to make writing it this morning a lot more fun.
First Three Chapters of Create A Language Clinic Available
Create A Language Clinic Now On Sale
It’s taken all day. It’s the only thing I’ve accomplished all day. But the Language Clinic is live and on sale now. All systems tested, everything works.
I cannot believe how much longer this took than I thought it would. I’m almost afraid to think about the rest of the Worldbuilding Course.
Done!
I’ve written over five thousand words since 4 AM, have created two full chapters and one new worksheet, and have overhauled the entire structure of the book, but the revised version of the Language Clinic is done! I’m printing off a copy for my copyeditor, and tomorrow, I will get back on track with NIGHT ECHOES and HAWKSPAR.