Holly Lisle: Writer

Month: June 2009

  • Novel Snippet: Headless Dude In The Morning (from DTD)

    Got 1201 words this morning, and a scene that I just cannot keep to myself. This was not a planned part of the scene, which I also love. I was just looking for a nice place to end it, playing with the physics of my world, when I tripped over a Muse Bomb I planted…

  • Sunday Night Words

    Not sure how far I’ll make it with the words tonight, or how hard I’ll push. I’ve been sick on and off for the last three weeks, and today was fairly rough. It’s nothing major; just a reminder that as I get older, my body is less efficient at fighting off illness. In spite of…

  • New Writing Course Goes Live

    I’m delighted to announce that I finally got my act together and put up Episode One of THE WRITING CRAFT: Dialogue, which is Dialogue and Subtext.   Have tested everything, it all works, and you can check it out now. This is the first time I’ve done a pure video course (though naturally it includes…

  • I’m writing, and I don’t want to stop!

    I’ve done about a thousand words this morning. My heroine is getting herself in trouble with the police; the hero has cheerfully set her up to be in that trouble while absconding with all her research documentation from a dig; and three bodies, the mess attendant to their butchering, and a second anachronistic Roman-style sword…

  • Writing again. Just. Because. I CAN.

    Second time today. Hitting the scene hard tonight. Want to pass 10,000 keeper words. The twist I came up with this morning dragging my scenes around is paying off big. Nothing else here tonight—I’m just having fun, and wanted to pass it on. Download as PDFPrint Page

  • Questions for New Yorkers

    My MC has a 1-bedroom apartment at the Parkchester Apartments at 2000 East Tremont Avenue, in the Bronx. She’s a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at 15 E. 84th St., New York. I know that, leaving from home, she can take the train from the Lexington Avenue station to…

  • Dragging Scenes Around By Their Ears

    Hah! I just realized that if I move the kidnap scene five scenes forward, I can create all sorts of interesting chaos, introduce an element of the hero that has been invisible until now, throw him and Aleksa Kralj, my heroine, into awesome conflict with each other as well as the enemies, and create the…

  • Three Months Later—The Biggest Mystery of My Life, Solved

    You know how there are things about other people that you envy and wish you could emulate, but no matter how hard you try, you just never manage to pull it off? I had this image of me someday being a person who did not have to throw stacks of books into a locked bedroom…

  • Two-Hour Fiction (with a nonfiction chaser)

    Got a net gain of 1209 new words, in spite of pulling out a couple chunks of previous work. DTD now sits at 9102 words, and I have my hero stuck in the heroine’s hall closet while she and a couple of her grad students are trying to figure out the relationship between the missing…

  • Writing the Novel: Starting Late

    8:08 AM. I’d intended to get started earlier. Lack of sleep, too much shower, laundry… I could blame any or all three, but I won’t. I didn’t get in here promptly, but I’m here now. My plan is for 1500 words between now and 10 AM. I’ll see how that pans out. Timer set…I’m doing…