Lost Words Found: I’m having a strange and disturbing morning…

By Holly Lisle

I think in general we as human beings like to think we’re on top of things. That we have a pretty good bead on not just where we are, but where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

I’m working on Lesson 16 of How to Write a Novel this morning, which is about voice and tone, and to show writers what I’m talking about, was digging through my fiction backlist for demo material for the lesson. I’m adding and then discussing the first  couple of paragraphs of various published novels to demonstrate how changing voice and tone changes reader expectations and why mastering this is a crucial skill…

How could that go wrong?

Well, more like, “How could that go sideways?”

So this morning, the jury’s back, and the verdict on that whole “on top of things” business is:  Nope. Not so much…

Because I came across not one, but two really good Cadence Drake novel starts that I completely forgot I’d written.

The Ships

And we’re not talking about running a thousand words up a flagpole to see who salutes.

We’re talking 13,000 words on one…, 8000 words on another… and when I found these, I remembered a third that had five or six chapters in it and that I now can’t find, but I do remember that it featured the story of who Tangerine, the cheerful hairdresser in HTCB, really was.

Can’t find that one, of course, but finding the two I completely forgot, I now also have the third one in my head as a story I just have to tell.

Lost a chunk of time on the lesson hunting through my hard drives and backups. Getting back to work now. But after I write The Wishbone Conspiracy, I have some really solid starts for THREE more Cadence Drake novels.

Sheesh…

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