Upgrade issues.

By Holly Lisle

All the menus for the weblog are missing following the upgrade of the site. Further, I’ve discovered that my entire blogroll has vanished, and apparently did so some time back, when I changed the site over from Joomla to WordPress.

I apologize for the lack of navigation within the weblog, and I have a call out for help to get me back up and running again.

As for the blogroll, it’s well and truly gone, so I’m debating the best way to link out to other sites I find helpful. At least I finally realized it went missing. If you have some websites you’d like to suggest that offer great reader or writing content, recommend them below.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!

By Holly Lisle

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Have fun, relax, hang out with friends or family, or kick back with a good book. Enjoy the holidays, however you celebrate them.

Holly

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Needed: One TALYSMANA traitor—talent, sense of humor, and backstabbing dagger required

By Holly Lisle

The revision of TALYSMANA is, has been, and will continue to be a bitch on wheels.

The problem I ran into 95% of the way through the first draft was the realization that my ending could not happen with the existing beginning. Like several other novels I’ve written, I stopped writing when I figured that out, so the first draft had no ending.

I left out something critical, only I couldn’t figure out what.

I was hoping it was something simple to fix, like a plot point.

It was, in fact, a whole entire character. This I discovered via a spiffy nightmare that tipped me in the direction of “This is what your story needs.”

Which means I’m going to have to create another character from the very start of the book (or perhaps turn one of the existing characters into the traitor).

I also realized (same spiffy nightmare) that I got half of my villain wrong. The part set in TalysMana is good. The part set in the What Is, however, is utterly wrong. Police would have been on him in three seconds. So that, too, is going to take heavy rewriting.

And oh, hell, not via nightmare but though the real-life pain of reading the manuscript, I’ve discovered the Kettan I’ve read through so far is whiny and weak, and both missed the opportunities in her past, and failed to utilize her present. There are sections where she’s okay, but overall, I loathe her.  The revised Ketten will be someone I can stand to be in the same room with.

Will Grey is good, though. I like him. Emerald is good. And Fred is awesome…but he’s based on my daughter’s basset hound, who is also awesome. Fred will come through this revision unscathed.

This is not going to be any quick, easy revision, though. This is going to be a Book Is Wrecked revision. My notebook is filling up already.

 

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Why I love history: Ancient Roman Dick Jokes

By Holly Lisle

I have been doggedly trying to find out more about the Roman Republic (pre-Caesars, pre-decline, pre-depravity). It’s almost impossible. The Romans were a successful self-governing people with a working republic for five hundred years and change, but damn near every resource I can locate begins at the point where their corrupt senators handed over control to individual despots and everything went to hell. I want to know how they succeeded for five hundred years. I think Americans, as a self-governing people, might all want to know that.But no. Apparently everyone else only wants to know how they failed.

Anyway, I was watching a history of the excavation of Pompeii. My husband was half-watching, but at the same time discussing with our son the sensationalist structure of the show we were watching and its emphasis on destruction and depravity, with the documentary collectivist mindset of “this was all the Roman people lumped into one vast generalization,” rather than “this was a one-day snapshot of the lives of some rich Romans on vacation.”

Watching the show, listening to my husband and son, an object I couldn’t quite believe passed before my eyes.

I said, “Dude, stop. Whoa, stop, stop, stop, you gotta see this. Back it up.” My husband did the Manly Remote Thing, and backed up the documentary. He didn’t have to ask me where to stop. The object on display for just that instant was a bronze phallus. Sort of. It was a bronze phallus with legs and feet, wings, a tail that ended in another phallus…and the phallus had its own phallus, neatly situated between its legs. And bells. Don’t forget the bells.

And this…er…creature…was looking around a corner.

I was laughing my ass off. My husband and son burst out laughing too.

The narrator had been droning on about the Roman equation of the phallus with luck, and here was this amazing, beautifully finished, exquisitely detailed, frikkin’ hilarious piece of artwork that some dude one day before 79 AD had created, and the massive bore of a historian and the flat-voiced narrator didn’t stop for so much as a giggle. They were intent on turning this goofy, delightful bit of creativity into a tedious proof of a deadly dull point, and frankly, I didn’t give a shit about the speculative Roman collective mentality regarding the significance of the phallus.

I wanted to know who the guy was who made that thing, because he was a funny, funny guy. It was the fact that he made the thing look around a corner that got me.

Bugger has been dead for pretty close to two thousand years now. And what he created made me laugh.

To me, this is history. Not who were those people, but who was that guy?

(Found a picture here: Tintinnabulum lookin’ around a corner.) (Opens in new tab.)

ADDED LATER:

The questions really driving me batty:

  • Was this the guy’s job, or was it his hobby?

    If job, what was the job title for this particular specialty, so that if someone asked you where you got your interesting front porch ornament, you could say, “You can by them from Phallius, the … what?”

    If hobby, well—okay. Sure. I’m betting some guy in Kansas has a similar one.

  • How many guys had this job, and if so, were they in competition?

    I’m saying there were at least two, because there are some significant differences in style in some of the…chimes.Matt suspects this was two guys and an elaborate practical joke on each other, with one sneaking his latest creation onto the other guy’s front porch in the dead of night and hanging it there, and the other guy making one with one more phallus than his friend made, and hanging that thing in front of HIS house. And the two of them, caught by neighbors in the midst of these shenanigans, saying, “Oh, these are good luck charms.” And the neighbor saying, Really?! I could use some luck. Could I buy one? Only with more dicks?”

    That’s the sort of thing that could spawn an industry.

  • Was this the equivalent of the tourist T-shirt?

    Go to Pompeii, get a dick? Nobody found any of these things (that I know of) prior to the excavation of Pompeii, so was this actually a tourist collectible, emphasizing the thing the town of 20,000 was best known for? “Pompeii, Home of the Dick?”

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


A note on government stupidity

By Holly Lisle

There’s plenty of this at home to write about, were I to choose to.

But in a ruling that defies belief, the EU just ruled that drinking water cannot be advertised as the best way to prevent dehydration.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/284426/EU-says-water-is-not-healthy

So.

There’s stupid.

And then, there’s “Holy shit, what drugs have you guys been DOING?”

And a tip of the hat to Jim Woosley, who sent me this remarkable link.

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The Kid and the Bear

By Holly Lisle

After years of having the grimmest damn bio in authordom, I redid my bio.

Take a peek. I went for funny. True. But funny.

https://hollylisle.com/autobiography/

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Look what UPS just brought

By Holly Lisle

Have to do the proofs, but the reality of getting these live is getting closer.

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Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


One of my students made the NYT list, self-pubbing his FIRST NOVEL!

By Holly Lisle

A lot of my students have sold novels to publishers, brought out their own books, won contests…

This guy is the first of my students I know of who made it to the New York Times Bestseller list.

Holly,

I can’t thank you enough. Your teaching has been priceless. Using your courses, I wrote my first novel. The Kindle version just made the NY Times best seller list at #19. I am consistantly hovering around the top 100 on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/IRREFUTABLE-ebook/dp/B0052GFSIG

Thanks soooooo much.

Dale Roberts

For the paranoid among you, he really is one of my students. He bought Plot Clinic and Page-Turning Scenes back in early December of last year.

His book, IRREFUTABLE? Fast-paced, well-written, smart, and fun. I bought it yesterday, and it’s excellent. And well worth the $2.99.

Here’s his link again. I’m so excited for him. This is SERIOUSLY cool!
http://www.amazon.com/IRREFUTABLE-ebook/dp/B0052GFSIG

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Production Covers and NEW Afterwords: Arhel Trilogy, and Sympathy for the Devil

By Holly Lisle

First, I’ve decided to write a new afterword for every one of my books I reprint. One of the things I did last week. 😀 I had a lot of fun writing them, and got to talk about the experience of writing them, and then working with them again years later.

I also got the entire Arhel Trilogy finished in CreateSpace (awaiting proofs), along with the third version of Sympathy for the Devil.

ALL the covers underwent some major morphing—I discovered that borders don’t work for CreateSpace, and as a result, was forced to completely rethink my whole Arhel Trilogy design, to the serious benefit of the books.

Take a look at the new covers. The Arhel covers are complete overhauls. They have some of the same elements, but a much livelier feel.

The Sympathy for the Devil cover has a blue sky, courtesy of the “no borders” issue, and again, I think benefits from it.

All images are clickable so you can see the larger version.

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The Blog Rules Discussion

By Holly Lisle

This post exists so that if you have specific questions about the rules on this blog, you can ask them.

It does not exist for you to debate examples I’ve used to demonstrate the rules.

I will happily answer your questions about the rules.

I will delete debate. This is not a debate post.

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