title: Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love AND Money: Second Edition: New and Updated
author:  Holly Lisle 
description: Holly Lisle is the author of more than thirty published novels (and counting), including the recent re-release of her award-winning first novel, Fire in the Mist, and her upcoming re-release of Cadence Drake: Hunting The Corrigans Blood, which will kick off the ten-book Cadence Drake series. Holly had an ideal childhood for a writerwhich is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows: So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where wed tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Childrens Home, where we lived. My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks. It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, Thats a bear footprint. From the size of it, its a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bears still around. Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.  I dont have the gun with me that will kill a bear, he told me. I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, Im going to shoot him so hell attack me. I want you to drop what youre carrying, run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened. The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, Im sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home in the dark down the Kwethluk Rivers looping, slough-crossed course, because I did not want to let him down. We were not eaten by a bear that nightbut neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life Ill ever forget. I keep that story in mind as I write. If what Im putting on paper isnt at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra following us and our bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesnt make my cut.
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  [Dedication](index_split_001.html#filepos670)
  
  To my family, whose love saved me.
  
  To my friends, whose hard work and commitment rebuilt the state . . . and me
  too.
  
  And to New Yorkers, who are a loving, giving, courageous, inviting community.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  [Dedication](index_split_000.html#filepos109)
  
  [Author’s Note](index_split_002.html#filepos3023)
  
  [Prologue: September 3, 2002](index_split_003.html#filepos5486)
  
  [Part I RISE](index_split_004.html#filepos19714)
  
  [CHAPTER 1 The Fighting 69](index_split_005.html#filepos20002)
  
  [CHAPTER 2 A Hopelessly Quixotic Battle](index_split_006.html#filepos65029)
  
  [CHAPTER 3 HELP](index_split_007.html#filepos147174)
  
  [CHAPTER 4 The Perfect Metaphor](index_split_008.html#filepos249561)
  
  [Part II FALL](index_split_009.html#filepos336870)
  
  [CHAPTER 5 A Broken Man](index_split_010.html#filepos337159)
  
  [CHAPTER 6 Losing 101](index_split_011.html#filepos415097)
  
  [Part III RISE](index_split_012.html#filepos481406)
  
  [CHAPTER 7 Bonu