Nearing the end — 1521 words, a spiffy twist, and the REALLY fun stuff tomorrow

By Holly Lisle

I ran over my planned words today (1250) because I got hooked by the scene and couldn’t make myself stop.

My MC got to spend some time with someone she’d thought was a hallucination, found out a bit more about how she’s surviving in a town where things keep trying to kill her…

And the best stuff is still to come.

I have, I think, about four more scenes to write to get this book done, which will but it at, best guess, about 95,000 – 97,000 words.

That’s a nice, meaty novel length.

And once that’s done, I’ll build the line-for-scene outline for Book Three.

I figure I should be working on that by next Friday (the 25th of February).

I love so much the way this is coming together. I wish I could be more specific. Wish I could give some snippets, maybe an early first-draft chapter or two like I used to.

But I can’t screw up my pseudonym by attaching myself to it. I have to give this series a legitimate chance of starting out fresh, with a brand new author name and no publishing history at all.


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A bright and glorious day: 1264 twisty, tight words, and racing now to the conclusion…

By Holly Lisle

Some days you launch out of the gate (or the bed) with wings.

Today was that day. I shot out of the shower, downed my coffee, and hit the desk with the document already open and at the right spot from yesterday — and the words flew.

Better yet, while writing exactly what I knew I needed to write today, I also managed to surprise myself, bring in a second encounter with a character introduced in this book who just today told me who and what she is, and does… 

And my characters broke my heart and made me proud of them at the same time. 

Tomorrow will be tying in what I’ve discovered over the past few days with what I planned.

And pushing hard for the conclusion, where I know a lot of the specifics, but am still missing the big one.

But I know what this second novel has to accomplish when it hits the end, and just as my Muse (right brain) tossed me the pieces I needed today, I’m trusting it to do the same during the last few days I put into this first draft.

I also moved my deadline back by five days.

I’m going to run over 90,000 words. I want some elbow room on the timer while I do that.

ONWARD!


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Got 1909 words, one GREAT “grandma revelation”… and moved several plot lines forward.

By Holly Lisle

I made my word count and more. Better, though, I discovered what the Second Room wanted to show my main character, and I left myself with a couple dilemmas she gets to deal with tomorrow. 

I found out about my town’s past and a few of its important past inhabitants — and the effects they’re still having in the present.

And I set myself up for that “barbecuing Grandpa” last line in the chapter that’s going to come back again in a couple of future books.

This was a GOOD Tuesday.


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Mondays are Rough — 1159 words (about a hundred words short), and I like my progress…

By Holly Lisle

Today was tough. Just was. 

I had a lot of things I had to do first (15ths of the month or their equivalents fall into every life, and the actual 15th of each month is mine.)

I love a lot of what I got.

Met my MC’s great-grandfather.

I did some very good worldbuilding that is going to help me out in the rest of the series…

And I got a net gain in words.

Just not the 1250 I’m shooting for every day.


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Barbecuing Grandpa, a trip to ancient Scotland… and 2022 words

By Holly Lisle

It starts here. First thing this morning, I deleted 3267 words.

I said ouch.

Because the screenshot of what I was left with looks like this, with those 63 words I decided to save yesterday out of sight at the bottom of the chapter.

Barbecuing Grandpa Ohio 2 2021 02 12 at 8 56 21 AM

Those words were twice as many as I thought I could save — so I’m not complaining.

That ain’t a lot, but I knew coming in to work this morning what today was going to look like. 

However, from the moment my MC stepped through what I’m enigmatically going to call ‘the second mystery door’, everything clicked.

And my progress today was 2022 words. The negative number on the screenshot is because I’m still pretty deep in the hole (compared to the original length of the chapter), and Scrivener keeps track of the size of the hole (at least if you tell it to).

But I left myself at a wonderful spot, and I know exactly where I’m starting when I come back on Monday. 

I had a happy writing day and a lot of fun meeting a new character in an old, old place… and what my MC is learning about her past has been a joy to write — as has been writing the terrible things I’m putting her through while she learns it.

I’m so glad I decided to face the beast yesterday, kill it, and come in to challenge the blank page this morning. Because now I have the first half of the RIGHT chapter… and I’m already looking forward to Monday.

 


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HUGE story win: Price? 2000+ words words cut today, net gain of 670 today, and 3267 to delete tomorrow…

By Holly Lisle

Today went really well from the story perspective.

From the wordcount perspective, not so much. 

I deleted a ton of words back in chapter six, wrote a ton of new words in that chapter, and came up with a net gain of 670 words.

Tomorrow is going to be tougher, because tomorrow I’m going to end up deleting almost 3,267 words… though with luck, I’ll end up being able to save the sentence at the end of that entire chapter…

Saving a quote while losing words 2021 02 11 at 11 09 06 AM

“And kids in school these days are probably a lot less likely to spread rumors that your mom or grandmother barbecued your father and served him to neighbors on the 4th of July.”

I like that line. I need to keep it. My character lived it.

Meanwhile, my difficult today and tougher tomorrow are brought to me by this single writing truth:

There is always a good idea.

There is always a better idea.

And there is always the right idea.

And today, I uncovered the right idea — the one that pulled all the keepable stuff in the book together. I lost a couple thousand words today.

I replaced them with the right words.

I’ll lose several thousand tomorrow. 

I’ll replace them with the right words. 

And in doing so, I will bring my MC’s past to life for myself and my readers, increase the stakes she faces for the entire series of novels, introduce a truth about an upcoming essential character while hiding that truth in plain sight, and, if I’m lucky, scare the socks off my future readers while at the same time making them laugh.

It is for such days as this that writers live.


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Apparent betrayal leading to epic upcoming battle… and 1372 words

By Holly Lisle

Turns out, for my MC, the solution to her problem isn’t going to be what you ask, or how you ask it. It’s going to be who you ask.

And for me, the resolution for this comes from having my hero walk forward down a path that almost promises to get her killed, and seems to be a betrayal of everything she believes in…

But that isn’t.

I’m so excited I’m almost jumping up and down.

Tomorrow’s words are gonna be one helluva twisty twist.

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Down to the Closing Stretch — 1473 words today — and gonna run over 90,000 (but not, I hope, by much)

By Holly Lisle

God, stuff clicked today. Pieces from earlier chapters told me why they were there, my MC came up with this great solution to a big problem that introduced her to some big secrets her dead grandmother’s lawyer has been conveniently failing to mention…

And I know my ending. 

It’s going to be big. Messy. Fun.

And it’s going to need more words than I have left to land exactly on 90,000… but I’m okay with that. The extra is going to be SO worth it!

And I’m sitting here writing about a snowy February day (planned several months ago when I started writing this book) while watching a snowy February day outside my window.

How cool is that?

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First the time, then the weather. THEN the words.

By Holly Lisle

THE TIME

This morning, I dreamed a digital clock, which showed me 7:31.

I woke up. Immediately checked the time. It was actually 7:41.

My brain is ten minutes slowdammit.

Anybody still have your copy of The Brand New Human’s User Manual? If you do, could you give me the steps for resetting my brain clock? At least my software has updated to the digital clock, but I’m pretty sure my manual got lost in a move.

THE WEATHER

Right now, outside it’s 16℉. According to my weather app, we’re not going to go above freezing for the rest of the week. The last time I saw weather like this, I was nine years old; I lived in Alaska, three miles upriver from Kwethluk, in an enormous 3-story log-cabin boys’ dorm where my folks were dorm parents; and we heated the place with wood, which my father and the bigger boys in the dorm went outside and cut.

The entire compound had been, I suspect, a cold-war US listening post — though nobody tells nine-year-old girls this sort of thing. You have to piece that stuff together by yourself from context.

The compound still had a flag on one of the walls, though, that said Nunipistinguk — which in the local Yu’piks’ dialect probably meant “Those Dummies Built a Basement in Tundra.”

(Every time the river rose over the banks — which was a recurring spring-thaw event — the basement flooded.)

(As a longish aside, because my one-room, five-grade school up in the boys’ dorm attic, was in English and the kids there were all learning English, the only thing I ever learned to say in the local dialect was “I want another cup of coffee.”

The spelling is wrong, but I learned it phonetically. It sounded like “jolly goofamick gootooden.” I was nine back then, and nobody sane would have let me near coffee. (Votes are still out on whether someone wound as tight as I am should be drinking it even now.) So I never got to try the request out in real life.

(If you know any Yu’piks, ask if that’s what it actually means. If it’s profanity someone thought it was funny to teach a kid, I apologize. I much prefer to make my profanity intentional.)

Oh. And I still remember the word gussak. Which, as the nine-year-old outsider, I got called a lot by the other kids. It’s derogatory. It derives from the word Cossack.

Anyway, the extreme low temperatures we’re moving into in the north and east, if they hold, will be the most extended period of deep cold I’ve experienced since Alaska — so if you’re up in the Big Purple Belt of coming freezing temperatures, here’s some useful information I learned when I lived on tundra.

The coldest temperature I ever experienced was in Alaska, and it was -81℉. Not a typo. (This was in either the winter of 1969 or the winter of 1970 — probably ’70).

The military guys — who I assume built and operated the place before the US military decommissioned the site and sold it to the Moravians — had an Arctic thermometer outside the window of what was, to me, the boys’ dorm-parents’ suite (probably officers’ quarters) which was situated on the floor beneath the boys dorm (certainly barracks). Anyway, I wanted to go outside to play, in spite of having seen the temperature.

So my dad walked me over to the door, opened it, threw the contents of a cup of hot coffee he’d been drinking over the steps down to the boardwalk — and the liquid exploded with a crack like a shotgun, and turned into brown snow. 

What I Learned: Things made out of mostly water don’t go outside in weather like that. Since a lot of us are about to have weather like that… be careful out there. Fingers, toes, and noses don’t grow back.

 

THE WORDS

Today, my fingers flew. I got 1,386 words — significantly over my must-hit objective of 1,111. And I found out something so very, very cool about what caused the invisible car. It wasn’t something I’d planned, it wasn’t something I’d even imagined, but when the words started rolling, it just rolled out, and it gave me another scary thing to drop into my little Ohio town.

Also, I’m creeping toward identifying a character who’s going to be very important in Book 3. I’ve known all along who he really is, but it’s one of those things that I’m dripping into the stories a bit at time. And today, I discovered something new about him.

Excellent Monday, and I’m very happy with the results.

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I knew today was going to be rough. Deleted a couple thousand words. Net gain – 604 words (79,997 total)

By Holly Lisle

So… yeah. I wrote hard. I love what I got. 

And I love it because Matt and I did a long live-brainstorming section last night, and he and I worked out a helluva better way to go with the story.

I deleted a lot more than I’d expected, though — some of it in places half a dozen chapters back.

So very worth it, however. Today’s book is MUCH better than yesterday’s book.

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