Answers to the Eleven Big ‘I’m Quitting Teaching’ Questions

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Holly

Think of this as the "I'm Quitting Teaching" FAQ

I was overwhelmed by the number of responses to my 51st birthday post and the announcement I made about quitting teaching. In those responses, I ran across ten questions that needed a response everyone could read, and I realized there was one question no one had asked, but that desperately needed an answer.

So I’ve answered these BIG questions below.

THE ANSWER TO THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION NO ONE ASKED:

What can I do as a student or graduate of one of your big courses (HTTS, HTRYN, HTWAS) do to make sure I don’t get left behind during the upcoming transitions?

Log into your account for EACH course in which you’re a student, go into your Profile on your student page, and do the following:

Make sure your e-mail address is correct and that it’s an address you check regularly,
Make sure it is exactly the same e-mail address in each course you’re taking (so you don’t get locked out of the forum)
Scroll all the way to the bottom of your profile, and make SURE you have checked the box beside Receive Critical Updates.

If you are not getting critical updates, you stand a HUGE chance of missing the announcements that will move you from the existing course platform to the new one, and if you miss the move, you’ll lose your downloads and access to the forum. I’ll give plenty of warning, but there are a huge number of students who are NOT subscribed to critical updates, who don’t visit the forum regularly, and who, having graduated, don’t visit their student pages often.

So if you’re a grad or an existing student, do this now, before you forget.

(These links are for existing students only. They are not registration pages for new students.)

If you don’t remember your login information, please create a support ticket at http://novelwritingschool.com/support and ask me to help you.

QUESTION ONE:

I’m a graduate or a current student in one or more of the following courses:

How to Think Sideways

How To Revise Your Novel

How to Write a Series (stand-alone version)

Will my lessons and extras continue to be available when you lock the course to new students, or do I need to download everything now?

All your materials will remain available, AND you’ll continue to be a full, permanent member of the Boot Camp Writers’ Community on all your course boards.

QUESTION TWO:

I’ve purchased one or more courses from Shop.HollyLisle.com. Will those continue to be available for re-download after you close the shop permanently?

No. If you have all your copies intact, burn them to a backup disk now. If your hard drive has eaten courses you’ve purchased and you need to get backups before I close the shop, log into your account at http://Shop.HollyLisle.com (the login is in the top left corner) and re-download whatever you’re missing. Burn your copies to a backup disk.

When I close the shop, ALL my smaller courses will be available on Kindle, Nook and iTunes, or as print books on Amazon.com and elsewhere. However, if you lose your existing copies, you will have to re-buy them, because my old database will not have any connection with the big platforms, and I won’t be able to issue free copies.

If you have lost your account login information, create a support ticket at: http://novelwritingschool.com/support and ask me to help you get back into your HollyShop account.

QUESTION THREE:

J.A. Konrath is just now opening his writing shop. Why are you closing yours?

Because everything that involves the exchange of money on my site ALSO involves doing customer service. I do my own because I want it done the way I want it done, I’m a perfectionist and a big pain in the ass in making sure my people (customers AND employees) are treated right, and it was my horrified experience that when I hired someone to cover some of my customer service for me, people knew they weren’t dealing with me, and regularly treated my helper like shit.

When people treat ME like shit, I politely help them get their problem solved, then request that they don’t buy anything else from me. My helper couldn’t do that. I refuse to subject anyone else to the sort of abuse my helper took on my behalf, however.

I ALSO refuse to use a third-party customer service option, though, because my own experiences as a customer with those options have been awful. So I handle all problems myself. And even though I rarely receive abusive treatment from a customer, when I do, it screws up my day.

And doing customer service, even when working with the kind and understanding folks I usually deal with, is exhausting, time-consuming, and it draws focus from my ability to create.

So I’m moving EVERYTHING that involves the exchange of money to sites that will not only collect the money for the courses I create and then send it to me, but that will do customer service on what they sell.

It’s worth it to me to have my students get my courses from platforms that are dedicated to making everything work right on every sale, every time—and I’m willing to pay the 30-ish% fee to sell on those sites to have that happen.

If J.A. Konrath is doing his own customer service, I wish him luck—it’s going to bite his writing time. If he’s hired a friend or fan to do it for him, I wish his helper luck—many customers will not treat his helper with the kindness or respect they’d use in dealing with him personally. If he’s farming customer service out to some third-party customer service solution, I wish his customers luck. I have found NO happy solution to customer service, but third-party is the worst solution.

QUESTION FOUR:

(The four-week version of) How to Write a Series is the bonus gift for How To Revise Your Novel. Will Revise Your Novel students be able to get the upgrades to the full, stand-alone version of How to Write A Series? Or is there a discount for HTRYN students to move to the full version?

The four-week version is a solid course in its own right, and a good freebie for How To Revise Your Novel. But ONLY students of the full stand-alone version will receive the updates and the extended version.

There’s a discount for both HTRYN and HTTS students and grads. I’m not sure if I have it posted in the HTRYN course yet (I thought I did), but if I don’t, I’ll make sure to make the discount for upgrading to the stand-alone version available in the next couple of weeks.

QUESTION FIVE:

I’ve been saving money for one of your big courses, but I haven’t saved up enough yet.

If I can’t join the course before you close the doors, is that course just gone forever?

NO! ALL of my courses will continue to be available somewhere and in some form.

(When I said I’m not abandoning my students, I include FUTURE students in that statement.)

A LOT of folks missed this.

How To Think Sideways, How To Revise Your Novel, and How To Write A Series are going to be available for Kindle, Nook, iPad (if I can work out some problematic linking issues) and where possible, as print versions.

Let me go into a bit more detail on this:

If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get the free Kindle app for your computer and get your lessons that way.
If you don’t have a computer, you can get the Kindle app for your iPhone or Android phone, and get the lessons THAT way.
If you just hate Amazon, you can get the NOOK app, and get your lessons THAT way.
And at least for How to Think Sideways and How to Revise Your Novel, you’ll be able to buy lessons in print, though because of paper and printing, these will be more expensive than the e-versions. (And because the courses run about 250,000 words, and 150,000 words respectively, not including handouts, you’re committing to some serious shelf space.)
How to Write A Series, because of its format, may only be available as individual lesson DVDs.

Each lesson will be available separately, (meaning that students can buy them as you can afford them and take them at your own pace) and will include both:

A link for free worksheet and handout downloads, and…
A sign-up link for the Boot Camp Writers’ Community for either a small monthly fee, or a one-time permanent membership.

QUESTION SIX:

Will you be finishing any of the other courses you’ve discussed or surveyed for or said you’d like to create?

No. I’ve had hundreds of course ideas. They’re scattered across my hard drive like a giant guilty conscience, and I’ll be deleting the ideas as I trip over them.

I want my fiction. I want clarity, and breathing room, and to pursue the stories that are scattered in bits and pieces across my hard drive like a garden full of flowers waiting to bloom.

I’ll refine my existing courses and transfer them to the big platforms. I’ll finish Create A World Clinic because only about seven zillion people have asked me to, and it really is SUCH a cool series of techniques.

And that’s it.

Me. Novels. Short story collections. A couple of truly weird fiction ideas agents and editors kept shooting down that I’ll now do. That’s my future.

QUESTION SEVEN:

Has Cadence [Drake] ever done anything like this [complete priority shift]?

I laughed when I read this…but then realization slammed me across the nose.

In what is currently Chapter Four of the first draft of Cadence Drake 2: Warpaint, written a few days BEFORE I made this decision, Cady does exactly this.

Exactly.

And now I’m giving my Muse, my subconscious mind, a fishy eye and muttering, “Okay, so when did you know I was going to make this change, you sneaky bastid?”

QUESTION EIGHT:

When is How to Write a Series available? And is it really that much different from How to Think Sideways?

Okay. Let me just do the existing course rundown here.

All three courses, How to Think Sideways, How to Revise Your Novel, and How to Write a Series, are stand-alone courses.

Each covers its own subject matter, its own techniques, and its own objectives.

How to Think Sideways is my course on how to have the ideas, use them, and create the stories from them that will allow you to write novels (or screenplays, or short stories, or whatever form of fiction floats your boat) for the rest of your life.

How to Revise Your Novel is my course on how to get the book you want from whatever wreck your first draft turned into in ONE revision, and make it the book you dreamed it would be, so you can move on to writing your next book.

And How to Write A Series is how to create the characters and the stories that will allow you to write exactly the series you envision, in exactly the number of books you desire, and have each book be stronger and more compelling than the one before it—and how to end it how you want it and still thrill your readers.

There’s some unavoidable crossover in a couple of very basic writing techniques, but the main course subject matter does not overlap.

My rule on courses has always been that no one will ever by a course from me, buy another course, and find that he or she has just paid for the same damn information, written in different words. I’ve bought those recycled crap courses from other people, they pissed me off, and I swore I would never treat people that way.

That goes for my little courses as well as my big ones. If you want the details on how to create a character, for example, the ONLY place you’ll find those details is in Create A Character Clinic.

And finally, ALL my courses except for the upcoming Create A World Clinic are already available.

QUESTION NINE:

Will all the writing stuff on your website still be available?

Of course! Do you know how many years I’ve been adding to that stuff? There are articles in the writing section that were actually print articles I did for the little writers’ group newsletter I used to send out back when I was still in Schrodinger’s Petshop, before anyone but scientists had even heard of the internet. 1989-1990…somewhere around there.

I’ll still add the occasional writing article to the site as I feel like it. I know me, and sooner or later I’ll have something new to say about writing, and I won’t be able to keep it to myself.

The writing newsletter now has 52 articles in it. One full year of once-a-week tips. It will remain a free resource on the site, and again, if I get froggy, I may add to it. Even if I don’t add new tips, if you stay on it, I’ll make sure to send you links to any new articles I write.

QUESTION TEN:

You’re not still using Word, are you?!?!

Oh, God, no! Not for years. I use Scrivener and Pages, and I have Open Office on my computers but have to confess OO is really only there so when I’m talking to the Windows crowd, I can offer something that I know works.

I just checked, and discovered that I don’t actually have any Microsoft stuff on my computers anymore. Lot of Adobe, lot of indie stuff.

Not sure when the last of Microsoft went away, but I think it’s kind of telling that I didn’t notice is was gone until today.

WHAT DID I MISS?

These were the ten big questions I found, plus the one nobody asked. But over the next few days, I’ll check in here as I can and answer as much of what I missed as I can.

And thank you, thank you, thank you.

I had tears in my eyes reading your responses to my 51st birthday post. I have always maintained that it has been my privilege to hang out with the best people on the internet, and that was proven again with your replies to my post.

But now, ONWARD!

We’re going to have some fun, and we’re going to create wonderful things. Today, tomorrow, for the rest of our lives.

Fifty-One: At The Start Of My Second Half-Century, I’m Rethinking Everything

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Holly

219

Follow Your Passion

Inertia’s a bitch.

It can mean doing nothing until something kicks you out of your complacency and starts you rolling.

But inertia can also summon up Newton’s First Law, part of which is: “An object in motion remains in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

You get rolling in a particular direction, and it make sense, so you keep on rolling in that direction, doing the same things, dealing with variants of the same problems, until your direction, your actions, and your life all start to feel inevitable.

Inertia tells you: This is what you’re doing, therefore this is what you ought to be doing. It’s working, therefore why question it?

Until now, since I started teaching writing online back in 2006, I have NEVER taken a vacation that did not include checking both e-mail and customer service at least a few times. So I never had a full stop to derail my inertia. Even if I rolled slower, I still kept moving in the same direction.

My inertia included back-to-back-to-back 70-hour seven-day-a-week work weeks, creating new writing courses, supporting older writing courses, writing newsletters about writing, building a (very cool) writing community, and a LOT more.

Recently, with the self-publishing explosion, I added getting rights back on all my out of print work, and adding in MORE work while I get those ready to reprint.

There was answering a lot of writing e-mail.

There was lots and lots and lots of customer service.

People love my writing courses and get some simply amazing results from them. So putting what I know about writing into in-depth, comprehensive courses felt like the way things ought to be. What I ought to be doing.

However…

If you want to shake off your inertia, to actually see your life as it is, and to be able to question what you want it to be, there’s nothing like jamming a right-angle turn into your forward motion to shake you loose from everything you accepted as having a permanent place in your life. And the past two weeks have been, for me, that right-angle jump-the-tracks come-to-a-screeching-halt turn.

There was the vacation, first of all. I turned the computer off, and left it off, for two straight weeks. I did not look at e-mail, I did not touch customer service, I did not pay affiliates, I did not work on courses.

I. Was. Gone.

There was my time with the Air Force kid. My older son had a grim time in Afghanistan, which is not to say his tours of the Middle East’s other “vacation spots” have been picnics. But Afghanistan was a real nightmare, and even now that he’s home, there are parts of this last deployment he isn’t going to shake off. Not in a few weeks, a few months, a few years. Not ever. A line of ghosts follow me from my ten years in nursing. He has his line of ghosts, too, and though they’ll become less insistent over time, they won’t go away.

As much as we could, we worked around the ghosts. I loved being able to sit and talk with him again, to discuss the screenplays he wrote while he was in the desert, to talk about going indie from the film-maker’s perspective. I loved just being able to see him, and to know that he was okay, he was safe, he was home.

And I loved having nothing but time to spend with Matt and my younger son, too.

There was Steve Jobs’ death, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I suggested that was anything but a massive wake-up call. He created what he loved, not asking what people wanted but envisioning what he wanted, pushing past “that’s not possible” to make what he wanted possible, and then bringing his visions to those of us who have appreciated the hell out of them.

Figure: Having Windows eat my work, crash regularly, update constantly, welcome viruses like long-lost friends, and require constant fucking tinkering with the system, in the form of .ini files and other tweaks, just to get programs I needed to function so I could get writing, printing, and internet work done, was a part of my life, my expectation, my inertia. I backed up constantly when I remembered, and when I got into the flow of my fiction, I lost whole chapters because that’s just the way Windows is.

Until my husband bought me an early OS X Snowball Mac. I got it for Christmas in 2002. In the almost ten years since then, I have ONCE lost words. About three hundred of them, if I remember correctly. MY screw-up. The Mac asked me if I would like to save the file when Word crashed, and I, being VERY new to the system at the time, said “no.”

I haven’t lost a single word since. And since then, I’ve upgraded through iMacs and iBooks and Pros, and currently have an older Pro, the 11″ minimal-configuration Air, and the currently largest possible iMac desktop. Every Mac I ever owned still works. I just needed bigger and faster for the courses, the movies I was creating. And because, let’s face facts: I’m a total tech ho and while I don’t spend money on shoes or clothes or much of anything else, I’m white on rice when it comes to upgrading to a new computer.

So I owe Steve Jobs’ driven passion to create the best possible products—and to hell with the naysayers—for making my life measurably better.

And the wake-up call from his death, combined with the other elements above, allowed me to question my own passion.

Which takes me to Week Two of my vacation, in which, relaxed, happy, and caught up on my sleep, I wrote three and a half chapters of the new Cadence Drake novel, Warpaint.

And became reacquainted with my real passion. Which isn’t teaching. I’m good at teaching, I like it, and I love students’ success stories.

But I love to write fiction.

And when I compared four hours a day five days a week while everyone else was asleep, stretched out on the couch with the Air propped on my lap, embracing my passion by telling a story I want to tell while knowing it’s going to get published the way I want it to be published…

…Versus seventy-hour seven-days-a-week workweeks stretching as far into the future as I could see, struggling to translate how I do what I do into techniques and procedures and processes other people can use to embrace THEIR passion…

…Well…

…You probably have some idea where I’m heading with this.

But I guarantee you don’t have the whole thing, so stick with me a few more minutes.

Yes. I’m going to quit teaching.

No. I’m not abandoning my students. ALL students who are members of the big courses, including students who join the day I lock each course’s doors to new members, will have permanent access to all your purchased course materials, including, if applicable, the Walkthrough, new self-pub modules, or any other course upgrades, depending on the course in question.

No, I’m not abandoning any of my current courses.

And no, I’m not abandoning the three big promises I’ve made.

Promises first.

I’m finishing the How To Think Sideways Walkthrough. Furthermore, the online version will be the FULL version of the course, minus a few handouts I cannot include, and the Walkthrough. It will include the lessons for Self-Publishing, but it will also include the Commercial Publishing track. So it will be 29 lessons, not 25.

I’m expanding the How To Write A Series Course with what I learn while writing the Cadence Drake series.

And I’m finishing Create A World Clinic.

I’m looking at, best guess, about two more years of working insane hours while I meet these three promises, and at the same time write several Cadence Drake novels, move ALL my courses to Kindle/ Nook/ iTunes/ CreateSpace.

The rest of what I have to do:

Before I can dedicate myself to my passion, writing fiction, I also have to make sure existing big-course students can use the online version of the courses permanently.

And Margaret and I have to put together a way for the students who take my classes via the big publishing platforms (again, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and CreateSpace) have a way to join the Boot Camps writing community.

The Boot Camp Community, with its Self-Pub Resource Providers, its lesson-by-lesson discussions on How To Think Sideways, How To Revise Your Novel, and as soon as we can get the database updated, How To Write A Series, its camaraderie and friendships, will remain and continue to grow.

The Boot Camp Community currently offers free lifetime membership to students of HTTS, HTRYN, and HTWAS for their respective courses (and of course, students of all three courses have lifetime access to the entire community).

For students who take the e-book or print versions of the course, Boot Camp membership will be optional, and will require a small monthly fee or a one-time lifetime membership payment for whichever course the student is taking.

And I’ll become a Boot Camp member writer, rather than an overworked occasional visitor.

But as I get things transferred, everything else is going off my sites. I’ll be closing my little writing shop, and closing the online versions of HTTS, HTRYN, and HTWAS, as well as the Free Plot Outline course.

I’m working on transferring How To Think Sideways first, and the Walkthrough will not be included in the e-book and print versions. I may at some later date figure out a way to do the Walkthrough lessons as DVDs, but right now, my plan is to simply keep them available for Legacy HTTS students.

If you want the How To Think Sideways course with free lifetime community membership and the Walkthrough included, you’ll need to join before I post all the lessons on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (because of technical issues, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to offer the course on iTunes).

I have that pencilled in on my calendar for February, 2012. On the day the course goes live on the big platforms, the doors for the online version close permanently to new members.

How To Revise Your Novel will then follow suit as quickly as I can make it happen.

How To Write A Series will be open to new students considerably longer, because I still have to write the books that I’ll use to expand the course.

And following that, I’ll write the rest of Create A World Clinic, which will ONLY be available through the big platforms. I’ll never sell it from my own shop, which I hope to close before or around the same time I close How To Write A Series.

It comes down to time.

I’m fifty-one.

I don’t know how much I have left, but whatever time I have left, I want to invest in my passion, my true love, the thing that has made me willing to pop out of bed at six in the morning for the past twenty-seven years, just to be a part of it.

I’m going back to writing fiction exclusively.

All the existing courses will still be there for you, in one fashion or another. The community will get even better.

But no matter how long I live, I cannot live long enough to tell all the stories I still want to tell. I would, however, like to write as many of them as I can.

And I aim to give it my best shot.

Think Sideways Self-Publishers’ Bulletin

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Holly

Okay. How To Think Sideways for Self-Publishers is a go. I’ve figured out how to do it, how to keep the price way down, how to put it up on the big platforms (Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Createspace), and how to get the essentials like worksheets that won’t work in e-book readers into the hands of the people who buy the course.

So this is going to be my first BIG course on anything other than my own site and my own platform.

If you’re interested, and you want to know when the course starts going live on the various platforms, sign up for the notice list below.

For folks who can’t see the Javascript version of the signup box above, I’ve created an alternate page where you can sign up on the HTML version of the form…which won’t, of course, work on the page of WordPress…

The Alternate Sign-Up Form

FINAL covers for the ARHEL series

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Holly

Fire in the Mist, FINAL cover art

I ran through all three covers with Matt, and decided on final designs. Went with a cloth background for the books, moved the border in and faded it just a touch, and completely redesigned the titles for all three books.

Bones of the Past FINAL artwork

Also changed the gold border from rounded to squared, and thinned it down a bit. These aren’t quite as shockingly vivid thanks to the cloth overlay, and they’re much easier to read even at tiny sizes.

Mind of the Magic FINAL artwork

Much happier with these than the first versions.

Sympathy for the Devil Cover Art

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Holly

Be careful what you pray for...

It took a bunch of tries to get this right. But I like the results. I think it captures the spirit of the book.

This one is almost ready to go. Hoping to have it live in a week or so.

ADDENDUM: Just finished uploading the print version to CreateSpace. Here’s the wrap-around cover for that, as well as the cover copy:

Turns out God has a wicked sense of humor…

Nurse Dayne Kuttner puts her soul on the line to bargain with God for amnesty for Hell’s damned. But when God not only listens, but takes the deal she offers literally, her world turns upside-down.

Plagued by pushy reporters, devilish doctors, desperate colleagues, bewildered friends, an imp named Earwax, and pursued by the Netherworld’s hottest guy, Dayne stands her ground…and pushes Heaven itself for an accounting of how love and Hell can coexist.

Turns out God has a wicked sense of humor...

The special SELF-PUB modules for How To Think Sideways Self-Pub

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Holly

How not to be THIS self-publisher.

I took a break from putting together a cool HTTS Hotseat today with a writer who needed to know how to create a villain for her story.

Got out a notebook, wrote out the existing modules in How To Think Sideways, and figured out how to streamline the HTTS Self-Pub course.

URGENT!

All current Think Sideways Classic students, as well as all Think Sideways grads,
will get ALL the new modules, and will keep all of the old ones.

If you are in Think Sideways Classic
or have graduated from the class,
DON’T BUY HTTS Self-Pub!

HTTS Classic students and grads
get ALL the old modules
and ALL the new ones.

The modules I’m removing from of HTTS Self-Pub are:

How To Discover (Or Create) Your Project’s Market
How To Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, And Sample Chapters
How To Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, And Artists, And NOT Wreck Your Project
How To Deliver What You Promised And What They Want On Deadline

I’ll be replacing them with:

The Special Skills of Self-Pub Market Creation
Identify and Connect With Your Target Reader
What To Do When You’re Writer, Publisher, Art Department, and Marketing And How To Schedule Your Time
How to Deliver What Your Readers Want

A low-priced Self-Pub version of How To Think Sideways?

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Holly

178

Discount HTTS for the Self-Publishing Writer?

Self-pub has become the way to go if you want to write and make a living at it. The last few years, my self-pub has paid the bills, and my commercial pub hasn’t. Among commercially published writers, I’m not alone. The majority of commercially published novelists are working a “real” job just to survive.

Successful self-pubbed writers are doing better. You can read sites like http://jakonrath.com/ and http://lethalbooks.com/ and those of other self-pubbed writers who are making a full-time living publishing themselves.

If you aren’t a big name, online self-publishing is the new midlist.

This is the thing I wanted to do with Rebel Tales…

…but what grew naturally out of improving tech and online markets is a million times better than what I’d planned. Why? Because YOU control your career, and you get to keep all the money. You’re not splitting it with a publisher who takes almost everything, and an agent who takes 15% of what’s left.

Sales of Kindles and Nooks and iPads (and iPhones) are all up, and these are all instant-gratification bookstores you carry around in your pocket. Or purse. Meanwhile, print book sales are falling, and brick-and-mortar bookstores going out of business.

What You Need To Know To Self-Publish

There are two types of knowledge you need in order to self-publish successfully.

The first is the technical stuff—how to get ISBNs, how to format your own book or hire someone to format it for you, how to price it, etc.

You can learn that ANYWHERE.

The second knowledge you need is a thousand times more important. You need to know how to write books worth reading.

I can teach you that.

So I’m putting together a stripped-down, just-for-self-publishers version of HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers.

How To Think Sideways for the Self-Publisher

The objective of this course is to be about half the price and about 60% the size of HTTS, and to give writers who KNOW you want to self-publish:

the writing skills you need to succeed at it, without all the Japanese Bowing Etiquette involved in commercial publishing,
to give you the contacts you need to publish your own work professionally,
and to get you out there doing it.

Lean, mean, focused.

HTTS Self-Pub will contain none of the stuff on query letters or dealing with editors. NOTHING on manuscript formatting for submission. Nothing on how to write a synopsis or an extended editor outline. None of the walkthrough. None of the frills I threw in like first drafts of my novels. Well, maybe ONE first draft.

It also won’t include on-site workgroups. To keep the price low, I have to cut somewhere, and setting up and maintaining private workgroups is a major pain in the kiester. You’ll meet lots of folks in the community. If you want to create a private workgroup via e-mail on on a password section of your blog, you can certainly do that.

HTTS Self-Pub will include:

All the writing lessons, writing techniques, writing checklists, and writing course videos.

You’ll also get full member access to the following Writers’ Boot Camp boards:

Eureka HTTS (you can read this board now to discover what students learn from this course)
Renegade Marketing
Help!
Questions About Your Lessons HTTS
Writing Discussion HTTS
Idle Chatter HTTS
The new Resources for Self-Publishers board, which will hook you up with the folks who do professional e-book formatting, packaging, cover art, editing, and copyediting, writing blurbs, any anything else you need to help you succeed. (If you OFFER these services, contact me now about getting your place on this board. Currently I have about 2000 active writers in the private community.)

My objective with this course is to create successful professional career writers in the new Yes-You-Can-Live-On-Your-Writing online midlist.

The full course, with the walkthrough and future upgrades and a multitude of other cool things, comes in two speeds (6 month and 12 month) and three flavors: Single Payment $399, 6 month subscription 69.95/month, and 12 month subscription $37.95/month. If your dream is to publish commercially, (or if you want the BIG boost in help you’ll get from the Walkthrough upgrade) this is the course you need.

The stripped-down HTTS Self-Pub will have one speed and one flavor. 6 months, $37.95/month.

If you’re not, no reply is necessary.

If you are, please post a YES. What I’m trying to do here is get a rough level of interest to decide whether setting up the extra site and revamping the course materials is worth my time.

So all I need to know from you now is, are you interested?

IMPORTANT!

If you’re already an HTTS student or HTTS Grad, you’re getting EVERYTHING in the Self-Pub course, PLUS the walkthrough, the private workgroups, and the Walkthrough boards, blogs, etc. Just log in to get the stuff as it goes live.

The Arhel Trilogy Covers

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Holly

Today, I did the covers for the Arhel Trilogy.

Fire in the Mist

BOOK I: Fire in the Mist: Compton Crook Award Winner "Best First Novel"

Bones of the Past

BOOK II: Bones of the Past

Mind of the Magic

BOOK III: Mind of the Magic

I wanted something striking but simple for these books—and I wanted the central images to be meaningful. So I went with Ariss, the keyu, and a dragon. The toughest part of these was coming up with an appropriate title design and name layout without getting too friggin’ frou-frou with the font. And I still wanted that touch of gold to tie these together subliminally with the suspense stuff.

I’ll probably have something in that gold on every cover…though it might be very slight.

The New Paranormal Suspense Covers

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Holly

I finished the following covers for my upcoming novels today:

Midnight Rain

Midnight Rain: "He'll NEVER forget you..."

I See You

I See You: "Someone's watching..."

Last Girl Dancing

Last Girl Dancing: "Don't talk to strangers..."

Night Echoes

Night Echoes: "Your past is waiting..."

Because of a bit of a financial bump, I’m pushing hard to get all the backlist up in the next couple of months. To my amazement (because I thought exactly the opposite), I think the suspense novels are going to take the longest. I’m having to go through them and edit to bring the late-draft manuscript versions I have up to the published versions.

The scans don’t have to be rewritten. They just have to be edited, and my guys (and in two cases, my co-authors) are working on that.

So my release schedule is going to change completely, and will probably start with either the Arhel trilogy or the Devil’s Point trilogy.

But there will be books soon.

2275 words of new Cadence Drake

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Holly

I got up this morning and for the first time in a long time started writing a new novel that dragged me out of bed.

Chapter one of that novel, “Can’t Kill A Dead Guy,” is now finished in first draft.

It was like coming home. Cady’s voice was there. Not the bitter, dark voice at the end of book one, but the voice I hear when I write her—the voice I heard when I wrote her the first time, right up to the moment everything went bad for her.

She has her feet under her, she’s alone but dealing with everything much better than I thought she would be when I outlined the story, and the biggest fear I had reopening her world—that all I’d get writing Cady was Cady-in-hell—is gone.

It was like sitting down and talking to the best friend I lost fifteen years ago, that I just got back, and finding out she’s still a person I want to spend time with.

Nine books is a lot of time. Today told me it’s going to be time well-spent.

I have to do the other stuff I have to do now—student support and starting on the HTTS walkthrough and everything else.

But today I came home.