Holly Lisle: Writer

DTD — 567 words, and my hero revisits a memory

Sam remembers something that happened in his past. It doesn’t sound like much, but It was. It gave me huge insight into the character, and allowed me to introduce a tiny slice of his extraordinary past into the story.

It was a reflective bit, too… pacing-wise, a moment away from what has to this point been a pretty tight, action-filled, and destructive opener.

I’m pleased with what I got.

If you’re playing Write A Book With Me on level 2, you’re only in for 500 words. I got rolling and ran a bit over.

So. How’s your writing going today?

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37 responses to “DTD — 567 words, and my hero revisits a memory”

  1. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    D&D came in at 510, OFL at 1021. OFL scene will definitely need a rewrite, but at least the scene is written!
    No words tomorrow due to a wedding – will resume on Monday…

    Reply
  2. Don Avatar
    Don

    Took thursday off did 777 words today major plot twist. Very pleased with how things are going.

    Reply
  3. Patricia Avatar
    Patricia

    788 words last night, and Ryan is feeling good about having a purpose now. He and the heroine are learning more about each other as they plan an escape together, and the trust is slowly building. It’s fun to make up a new language! I’m afraid mine is a bit disorganized right now, so I’ll fine tune it when I’m revising so I can add extra goodies in there. 🙂

    Reply
  4. Dawn K. Avatar
    Dawn K.

    1,947 words, some old, some new as I’m editing the rest of the first section right now to match my new beginning. It’s good to see so many people writing along right now!

    Reply
  5. Kait Nolan Avatar
    Kait Nolan

    625 last night. Finished another scene (albeit with a lot of bracketed stuff I need to fill in later). The end is nearing…

    Reply
  6. Sarah Collins Avatar
    Sarah Collins

    Too much other stuff going on Thursday to end up with much progress, but it’s still progress I suppose.

    Edit-IP +3
    WIP +145 – finished the end of the first scene, but I’m not sure if it’s too abrupt. Or, rather, I know it’s abrupt and I love it, but I won’t know how well it sits until I’ve, um, let it sit . The style is SO different from EIP. There will be secrets and clues and revelations along the way and I feel absolutely devilish for dropping them as I have, but it’s just so much fun. =c)

    Reply
  7. Charmaine Avatar
    Charmaine

    First post tonight, first night measuring words. My Pirate Girl story has moved along 521 words tonight. Am so very tired from a long day teaching, so actually nodded off briefly while typing. Will read what I’ve written in the moring and hoping there’s some words I can use.

    Looking forward to this adventure.

    Reply
    1. Sarah Collins Avatar
      Sarah Collins

      Welcome, Charmaine!

      Reply
  8. Emily Avatar
    Emily

    I finished my hard-copy edit!!! The home stretch of 26 pages flew by.

    Reply
    1. Sarah Collins Avatar
      Sarah Collins

      That’s fabulous! Congrats!

      Reply
      1. Jessica Avatar
        Jessica

        Awesome! WTG!

        Reply
  9. Debora Avatar
    Debora

    I have not been able to write the past few days. I’ve had time, although life has been hectic. Always is. So why am I not writing? I’m not really sure.

    I was trying to figure out my MC’s motivation for wanting to remember what happened during the summer and fall of 1863. Maybe I’m being premature. Maybe it’s too soon to be asking this. Maybe my muse does not want to cooperate.

    So I’m going to head back to where I last left off and plunge back into time, back into my map. It’s still June, the battle hasn’t happened yet, but the townspeople of Gettysburg are on the alert, and easily agitated.

    Hope this works.

    Reply
  10. Jessica Avatar
    Jessica

    It was too busy at work for words so I had planned to write when I got home. But then I noticed a show about the Trojan war and another on Mayan cities – both of which are influences for my non-earth cities/cultures. So I got out the laptop and with a little help from the PVR, landed a whole whack of words on research (didn’t count them though). The timing is great because the next few scenes are going to need the cultural undertones.

    Normally I have all the worldbuilding and culture stuff figured out beforehand, but I left it at just bare bones for this wip. It’s coming together nicely.

    Reply
  11. Khena Avatar
    Khena

    656 words for me. Poor Nathalan just doesn’t know what to do with himself. He made a promise, but something more important to him has come up, so he is trying his best to decide what to do and getting nowhere. His travelling companion is having no such problems, which really confuses him. Hopefully he can figure out what he’s going to do today =)

    Reply
  12. Steph Avatar
    Steph

    558 words yesterday, bringing the total word count for this fledgling project to 1,675. Closing in on Chapter 1, and about to get into a difficult flashback for the MC.

    This feels easy now, but I’m on vacation…hoping that I can keep it up once I’m back to the grind next week…

    Reply
  13. Larkk Avatar
    Larkk

    Laptops aren’t supposed to die, but that is what my old one did. So even though I have a beautiful iMac G5 I’m still sad. No more writing in the coffee shop, on the back porch, on the couch, in the woods…well, okay, maybe that’s what finally did it in. Now I am tethered to my desk. Or would be if I didn’t have to move the computer to the dining room because of our ongoing home office remodel. Which is why I didn’t have internet either for a few days either. Anyway, I did have words:
    Tuesday 362 words-torn between wanting to know what happens next and feeling incapable of writing it
    Wednesday 1544 words-and why do scenes that happen before and after the novel keep demanding to be written?
    Thursday 706 words-pretty much winging it as the answers to my questions haven’t caught up with the story (yet!)

    Funny, I was perfectly fine when all this stuff existed in just my head, but now that it is spilling onto the page, I get frantic if something threatens to keep me from writing it down.

    Reply
    1. Dawn K. Avatar
      Dawn K.

      I’m sorry to hear about your laptop. I would miss mine terribly if it died. I’m sure you will miss yours for some time. Congrats on still getting your words out!

      Reply
  14. Laura Avatar
    Laura

    700 words and the FMC finds herself neck-deep in trouble. She has to figure out whether she wants to join her twin sister and mentor on their quest for the legendary four treasures of the Tuatha De Danann (meaning that if they find and take them, they rob all the other witches, druids etc. of their power). The answer would be simple, it’s just that her sister’s mentor has promised to give the FMC a possibility to live longer than until the end of her apprenticeship (here I should mention that twin witches are considered an abomination and only one of them survives to live a full life because she has to absorb the power of the other to become truly whole). Let’s see how it turns out tonight.

    Good luck with your writing! 🙂

    Reply
  15. Minze Avatar
    Minze

    373 words. Not really much, and I was tired and headachy and had a nagging feeling that everything was too wordy and boring and irrelevant. I’m finding it difficult to write the aftermath of an action scene. Basically the whole paragraph could have been summed up with “…and they walked into town”, but I felt that a little more was needed, some kind of a reaction shot perhaps. Ah well. I’ll try again on Monday. Have a good weekend, everyone.

    Reply
  16. Cat (from HtTS) Avatar
    Cat (from HtTS)

    679 words and I had to make it really boring for my MC (not for the reader though) to get her out of the prison. Lucky for her, she had the sphinx so no one dared to treat her bad. Now, she is up to mischief again.

    Reply
  17. Leah Avatar
    Leah

    563 words today. Laughter is good for the soul, and my heroine shared this extremely funny–to me anyway–story about her parents. It has some similarities to what is happening between she and the hero at the moment.

    Reply
  18. Treelight Avatar
    Treelight

    The rewriting is even harder than I had thought.
    Ok, I managed some passages that I like and so somehow count about 500 words for this day, but I’m not all too happy about it.

    I more or less know now what I want to happen in the following scenes, but the right words keep running away from me.

    Reply
  19. Michelle Avatar
    Michelle

    This might go up for yesterday’s word count…I’m in Korea and this time zone thing is driving me nuts, so I’m not sure if this post is for Thursday or Friday!

    My Thursday count was 258. Not much, but accompanied with lots of interesting new backstory and major side character development.

    Reply
    1. The Pencil Neck Avatar
      The Pencil Neck

      I wouldn’t worry too much about the time zone thing and what day it is there vs. what day it is where Holly is. When I was in India, I initially had the same sort of confusion. But I finally just decided when I was done for the day and posted that in the latest entry here in the WABWM blog even though her Saturday was my Sunday and all that.

      For awhile there was another poster here from India and, iirc, Holly suggested the same thing.

      Reply
  20. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    About 1600 for my main WIP tonight, and my MC just did something reckless which ended up hurting someone who was trusting him. But the healer busts it out, and uses his energy to heal the little girl, so it comes out all right.
    And 260 in my short story- the potentate is mere steps away from finding calamity, and the end of her life as she understands it.

    Reply
  21. The Pencil Neck Avatar
    The Pencil Neck

    759 words.

    I finished up a scene I hadn’t planned on, wrote a short scene I hadn’t planned on, and then started another scene I hadn’t planned on. I figure I’ve got one more scene after this.

    After the Thief discovering that he could transform himself into an owl last night, I had his Mentor (who didn’t see the transformation) realizing that it was him when he came up and hooted at her. I changed that. She doesn’t recognize him and being enmeshed with her own problems, leaves him behind. He flies after her but she’s too fast and he from this high in the sky, he’s not recognizing the landmarks of the city. So he’s lost. And he flies too high and even though the sun isn’t quite up yet, he gets burned because it IS up that high up.

    So he flies down looking for a place to sleep and ends up back in the Temple where he hides in a dark gap behind a statue beneath a pergola sort of thing. He sleeps until he’s woken up by a priest at mid-day.

    Gonna have him do something that people start interpreting as a “sign” of something. (The Empress may actually intervene again like she did earlier in the story.)

    Reply
    1. The Pencil Neck Avatar
      The Pencil Neck

      That’s not one more scene in the entire thing. That’s one more unplanned scene.

      Reply
  22. Ieva Avatar
    Ieva

    700+ words. I was very happy with that as I’m having a hard time at work and meeting my goal in writing added that invaluable little “I’m a cool person even if there are people that don’t see it” dash of self-confidence. So it’s all good.

    Reply
  23. Valerie Avatar
    Valerie

    992 today, which finished up the scene that I started yesterday, and on a good note. I’m happy with the words I got, and looking forward to tomorrow, which is always a good sign.

    Reply
  24. KQ Avatar
    KQ

    524, grinding through. Work’s been hard, but I am still trying to carve some time out. I have decided to ignore all my misgivings and just get this thing done. Going to try to put in a lot of time this weekend. I’ll update on my Monday, everyone else’s Sunday night. Happy writing to all!

    Reply
    1. Larkk Avatar
      Larkk

      Can’t wait to see how you do this weekend! Cheering for you:)

      Reply
  25. Jamie D. Avatar
    Jamie D.

    I’ve been pushing to 500 words per night this week…so far, so good. Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty tired by the time I get to writing, so the quality isn’t as great, but the story’s still moving along in a fairly coherent manner, so I can’t complain. 🙂

    Reply
  26. Clare K. R. Miller Avatar
    Clare K. R. Miller

    I was on a bit of a roll today and got 773 words. Cricket’s broken wrist gets bound up, and they’re on their way back to town to find the doctor when a female elf starts chasing after them, catches them, and heals Cricket’s wrist. The healing might happen too quickly, I think, but I’ll change that in the revision if I decide I need to.

    Reply
  27. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    finished the scene i started last night, and although it came slowly, i’m very pleased by how the results. Also got alot of outlining for the next scene, or at least things i could do with it. This scene turned out really long, so i’m going to chop some things that were planned. Hoping i can refine that before writing tomorrow.

    776 words for me tonight

    Reply
  28. Jim Mitchel Avatar
    Jim Mitchel

    Been really busy the last two days, so I’ve had very little time for writing. But I did manage 411 new words, and they were enough for me to cross over 20K total words!

    Woo-whoo!!

    Reply
    1. Valerie Avatar
      Valerie

      Congrats on the 20k. 🙂

      Reply
      1. Jim Mitchel Avatar
        Jim Mitchel

        Thanks so much!!

        Reply

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