The folks pre-registered for the course have had about a week to look over this. I figured I’d have a little fun now and demonstrate a mild improvement in my video skilz. :D

This is the first third of the video component of the Week One How to Think Sideways lesson.

So my agent’s assistant sent an e-mail to me, letting me know that I’d received an offer to write a paranormal short—that they already had a contract and the details on the money, and that it was for a reputable anthology with one previous volume already out.

I was delighted. I love cool offers.

Of course…during the time leading up to the deadline, I’m still going to be writing the lessons for How To Think Sideways, and those are hugely time-consuming.

You say, “Ahhh, conflict.”

And I say, “Hah! Live lesson material, and proof in action that thinking sideways works.”

I sat down, planned to have a story idea, got up and went about my business…and had the idea I could use in four hours. Lesson Three has that as the demo. “How do you DO that?” :D

Lesson Four will use this story, too.

And I get to write a cool paranormal romance with paranormal elements that haven’t been written to death.

I’d intended to make 50 seats available for each Think Sideways class. Huge interest (about 290 folks already pre-registered), and being able to handle the number of questions and e-mails from a group that size have convinced me to go ahead and increase class size to 300 people.

(If I get swamped or overrun when things go live, the next class will be MUCH smaller.)

This has two benefits for you. The first is that with more seats, more folks will have a chance of getting in.

The second is that I’ve been able to revise my planned price downward. I’m still debating price, and I don’t want to announce a price and then change it. So I’m still a few weeks off from taking that public. I’m still planning on taking the course live in late July.

However, though certainly not all of the folks who are pre-registered will register in the first hour (when the course goes live), a lot will. Enough that it makes the chance of seats coming open publicly for the first class pretty iffy. And if the price I’m now considering is as good as I think it is, figure that any seats that do go public will be gone very quickly.

If you’d like to guarantee your best shot of getting a seat, go here:
http://HowToThinkSideways.com

Sign up, confirm your subscription, and you’ll get the info you need to pre-register.

By the way, when you pre-register, you’ll find the opening part of the Movie One movie. I’ve gotten much better at doing these, and the sound quality is now acceptable throughout.

Well, the weekend was a mess. We lost power for more than two hours on Saturday, and following that, the internet was dead for more than forty.

In spite of which, How To Think Sideways is getting closer to liftoff. Probable registration date for the course is around the end of July.

I have the course curriculum posted, and the FAQ, and the first run of data for the How Much Does It Cost You To Write survey.

And Pre-Registration has opened. If you’re not already on the priority notification list for the course and you look over what I have up and decide you want to take it, SIGN UP here. Be sure you click the confirm link in the e-mail you’ll receive. (Don’t e-mail me an “I confirm” response—you have to click the link for aWeber to verify that you really want to be on the list.) Once you’ve confirmed, you’ll receive the link to pre-register.

Pre-registration has been open less than an hour and already we’re over 200 folks, so if you want in for the first class, don’t wait. At this point, it’s very unlikely that I’ll have any seats left to offer publicly when the course goes live around the end of July.

And I’m doing statistical analysis on the survey. If we don’t lose power AGAIN, I’ll have that up later today.

Http://howtothinksideways.com

I’ve put together a data-collection survey to figure out how much it costs the average writer to write a novel.

The survey is open to anyone who has ever started a book, not just those who have finished one.

I’m asking for information on the time it takes you to come up with ideas, research and do background, develop characters, write false starts, write full books, revise those books, and mail those books to editors and agents.

The questions are data collection: I’ll have to take the data, add up hours worked on various tasks, average them, and the apply them to low-end, high-end, and averaged writers’ incomes (NOT your income from writing unless writing is your job—just your hourly wage, or what your hourly wage would be if you were employed). I’ll come up with figures on the cost of developing a novel all the way to the send-off stage, and will report the information in about a week.

The survey is absolutely anonymous.

If you would be willing to estimate times it takes you to do various writing tasks, and would be willing to figure how much you make per hour in US dollars (walkthroughs, calculators, and foreign-currency conversion calculators are available for the income question if you need them), I would be very grateful.

The link to the survey is here:

http://hollylisle.com/surveys/survey.php?sid=32

I have most of the site set up now and I’m working out bugs. I’ve finished the first lesson, which is, because it’s hugely important and covers so much ground, longer than most of my planned lessons. I’m excited. Everything is coming together pretty smoothly, which is always a nice surprise, though I’m not holding my breath for it to stay that way. I’m getting ready now to install forum software in the Think Sideways site (which we may or may not use, but which I want to have available), and then I’m going to put together site navigation.

C Breathes

So I was sitting in the cafe in Books-A-Million waiting for my guys to finish doing Manly Things at Best Buy. I’d forgotten to bring knitting. I’d forgotten to bring my Think Sideways planning notebook. I’d forgotten to bring my “C” planning notebook.

So I picked up a cheap-o notebook, and a pen that didn’t squidge all over the paper (discovered that my carry-along pen had started leaking), and sat staring at the blank page.

I didn’t stare for long.

“There is no perfect day for a funeral,” my character said in my ear, and I wrote that down. “There is no moment where the box can slide into the earth bearing the battered remains of the man who saved your life and made you whole and restored your faith in humankind and the world, and you can say, “This is good. This is right.”

So began “C.” I sat there scribbling as fast as I could put words on the page, and before the guys finished doing the Manly Things, I had the first chapter in rough first draft.

The first two lines don’t win me over. They aren’t right yet. None of it is a good as it can be, but it’s alive. It’s breathing, and I know what happens next.

But Smudge was born…

I woke up in the middle of the night a week or so ago with the vague idea that I wanted to write some sort of supernatural series with a hero who had a unique problem. No idea what sort of supernatural, no idea what sort of problem, just this nebulous concept that this was something I wanted to write.

Over the next few days, little ideas popped into my head, and I’d mull them over, then let them go. Nothing stuck. I liked some of the bits and pieces, but there was no connection between them. They all felt random. I let them float, not writing anything down, trusting that they would turn into something when they were good and ready. I was in no hurry. I have Think Sideways next on the table, and then the proposal for Moon & Sun III, and then C. I have no shortage of exciting, cool work.

So yesterday, riding into town with the guys, staring at the road, just being happy that I got SILVER DOOR done and in on time, all those unrelated pieces from the previous days collided into one huge, winning, ready gestalt and exploded into my awareness—character, problem, purpose, series arc, main character arc, stories, villain, and underlying theme about life and death and life after death. It was like slamming my head into a cabinet corner. One instant, everything was creamy; the next, I was overwhelmed by full-body sensory overload. (Only without the pain, which was a very good thing.)

I rode along, full of doubt, testing for holes, asking questions, and every time finding the answers already there, waiting, and beautiful. The guy who woke up with the structure of DNA in his head could not have been any more amazed than I was by the structure of this whole story/ character/ concept/ world. Smudge is a working title, the character’s nickname, and probably disposable three or ten times before I come to something I actually like.

But this one has to cook. I clustered all the elements yesterday in the OTHER Moleskine notebook I bought that day, and then set it aside. Because….

Think Sideways is keeping me awake nights

I’ve been writing and rewriting lessons and essays in my head and figuring out how to put the building blocks together in the most logical and usable structure, and visualizing the demos—how to SHOW the subconscious and how to SHOW turning bad ideas into good ideas and how to SHOW you how to train yourself to do the stuff I did to get Smudge, and that I’m doing with “C,” and that I did with the best stuff I’ve written.

Having finished this post, I’m starting lesson one of Think Sideways now.

(Actually, I wrote this about 9 AM today, and got a bunch done on Think Sideways already. Our internet has been out all day. Freakin’ internet.)

My best wishes and my admiration to you guys who are dads. I hope you have (or had) a wonderful day.