Holly Lisle: Writer

Category: C: The Secret Project

  • Vacation OVER! New story, bigger maps, and starting Create A World Clinic today. #wabwm

    I enjoyed my vacation, which is to say that I slept through the end of 2012, and woke up in 2013 feeling human again. So over the last couple days, I put a novella I wrote years ago (REWIND, which is the precursor to C–The Secret Project) into Kindle and ePub format, and I’ll put…

  • WABWM: New story finished over the weekend

    8:06 AM Finished the short story Long Road Home yesterday (was Do-Over on my weblog progress bar, but the working title sucked). Sentence: A woman who’s lost everything makes a deal with the devil to relive her life, only to discover the deal didn’t work the way she thought. First draft came out at about…

  • Light Through Fog

    I worked all weekend, and have been working nights for a while, in addition to working on the course. See, around the same time that I was getting ready to take How To Think Sideways live, I got this request for a short story from an editor who was putting together an anthology. That’s basically…

  • Not Dead. Definitely Swamped

    I hadn’t planned on the week following registration for How To Think Sideways being a week of troubleshooting all the many things that broke on the system software; thought we’d tested everything, but you only think that until a course goes live and real students start taking it. Anyway, this week I’m playing catch-up writing…

  • Bombarded by Writing

    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…

  • More About “C” In Its Current Incarnation

    First a note on “Genie In a Bottle.” I got it wrong, but I was in a bookstore that didn’t have the book, and I was working from memory. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I’ll learn from anyone who can teach me. There’s a screenplay writer named Blake Snyder who wrote…

  • “C” is BACK!

    Every writer needs to have a secret project, I think. Something that you’re revved about, something that drives you completely crazy, something that you keep on the hard drive and tinker with and dream about and work on when you’re stuck on the things that are paying you money. I’ve had a number of secret…

  • So now that I’m done…

    Okay. The Mac sending mail sound has just echoed across the computer, which means the finished Ruby Key is on its way to my agent, Robin. I’m pretty wiped out, but very happy with the book. It wrapped at 63,000 words, which was well within my target zone, the new ending worked beautifully, (though I…

  • Wandering Ways

    I’m almost done with the first draft of The Ruby Key. Due to the fact that I left out a lot of important and exciting things in the middle portion of the story (because I write very, very tight in first draft and almost always have to expand in revision) I’m going to end up…

  • Updating the Schedule

    So around June, I had everything planned out. And then I needed to write one book a full year earlier than it had been planned. And I did. But doing so wrecked every other item in my schedule. Obliterated. Toasted. Annihilated. Turns out, I could do the insane “everything at once” provisional schedule only for…