Saturday Snippet, and My first week back to full-time fiction.

By Holly Lisle

She's back...
She’s back…

I had a blast this week—and fairly late yesterday, I realized why.

It is the first week in several years where all I did was write.

I did not build site infrastructure, work on website design, put together HTML for lessons, prep courses for formatting, design book covers, design lessons, test plugins, install plugins, upload self-pubbed work or build Kindle, Nook, or iTunes pages for the same, or anything else. (Well, okay. I did student support…but if I don’t do that, students complain. :D)

But this week, for the first time in years, I was just writing, revising, and…writing.

On Cadence Drake: WARPAINT, I started with 21,456 words, and finished with 28,424 (roughly 8,000 words for the week) and the realization that at some point I saved over the final version of the plot cards I’d put together for the book. So the week ended (and will begin) with me replotting the remainder of the novel. Got most of it yesterday, have a few scenes left to do.

On CREATE A CHARACTER CLINIC, 2nd Edition, I got through 178 pages of in some places HEAVY revision, and will finish up through the final manuscript page (p. 222) this weekend.

Some of the weekend revision and ebook formatting I may do while Isaac (as a tropical storm, a depression or whatever it turns into once in finishes messing around over water) either brushes west of us or, if the track shifts eastward, drops in for a visit. We have the edges of outer bands now. But mostly this one looks likely to miss us.

And the snippet.

From the 8,000-ish words I got, I decided you’d have fun with these:

NOTICE: This material is copyrighted, unchecked raw first draft, probably buggy. Please don’t post typos or corrections (I do my edits at the end of the first draft of the project and will not see your comments when I revise). This material may not survive to publication. Do not quote or repost anywhere or in any format. Thanks.

“Do you understand what happened?” I asked him.

“You made me want you.”

“Yes. You have to understand there’s something in me now—it might be something that has always been there that I never noticed, or it might be something new that came with the nanovirus—and that something wanted me to own you. To make you my captive. My slave. It wanted me to use you.”

He tugged against my grip. I did not release him. I wasn’t done making sure he understood.

“You’re going to be in this cage today. You’re going to be dealing with all of this—you and the others. You’re going to find things in yourselves that are going to want to get loose. And at some point, you and I and everyone else doing this is going to have to let set our worst demons loose in order to win over the [SPOILER DELETED].”

I released his wrist.

He studied me. “How bad is it?”

“It isn’t,” I told him. “It feels wonderful. It feels like feeding the part of you that’s been starving, giving it the best meal ever.”

“That’s a problem,” he said.

And that was an understatement.

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