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April Regular Workshops Starting This Week!!
Added Two From Classics This Month… Heinlein’s Rules and Power Words. Here is the full list… Starting April 1st… Heinlein’s Rules (one month only) Writing Into the Dark Teams in Fiction Depth in Writing Killing the Critical Voice Advanced Depth Writing with Power Words (one month only) All workshops are on WMG Teachable. All are six weeks long with five assignments. Those with Workshop Subscription or Everything Subscription, write me for the codes if you want to do the assignments. And please tell me which subscription you have. Thanks! And the Lifetime Everything Subscription is still on sale for half price. If interested, write me directly. That is the only…
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THE GREAT RESTART COMING…
The First of April… A Lot of Year Left… I was doing a calculation of if it would be better to restart the 2025 words per day challenge or try to catch up. The answer is that it depends on how far behind you are. If you are on target at 2,025 words per day, by the end of March you would have written 182,250 words. (Really adds up, doesn’t it?) If you are only 15,000 to 20,000 words behind, no question. You can make that up easily. Extra 50 to 75 words per day. There are 275 days left. Adding 100 words per day to 2025 words would catch…
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Fun Writing Project!
This Will Start in the New Poker Boy Kickstarter… It has been decades or more since I Turckerized anyone. Tuckerization was mostly started when Wilson “Bob” Tucker would put his friends and other writer’s names into his stories and books as a joke or as a shout out to them. He did it so often, it became known by his name. (Bob was a very friendly guy and I was lucky enough to spend time with him in the early 1990s.) In this modern world, you never do that without asking the permission of the person being Tuckerized. For example, in one Star Trek book Kris and I wrote, we…
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Filing System Drawback…
Smith’s Monthly As A Filing System… A number of people have mentioned to me how cool that idea is to keep stories organized. And it really is. When I publish an issue. I have not published an issue since #67, which was November of 2022. Which means I have not filed anything since then. (grin) Granted, for six months of that time I was mostly blind and for another six months of that time I was recovering from surgery and most of this last year I was dealing with business issues. So yes, it has been 2 years and 4 months since I filed anything, but a lot of that…
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Restart Challenge
I Love Restarting… Everything feels fresh and I can pretend that the problems earlier didn’t happen or don’t exist. I have missed about two weeks of stories total in my Write A Story A Day challenge. Not bad, but now I am starting fresh, making sure I get a story per day done, and when I have some extra time, finish a second one to catch up. But the challenge for me this next three months is to write a story per day, and maybe catch up four or five of the days I missed. Totally possible. But it would not be possible without the attitude of restarting. Three years…
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My Filing System
I Am Both Organized and Not Organized For 67 months, I did Smith’s Monthly Magazine. Had one short break in the middle somewhere and now it has been on hiatus for over two years because of the life rolls. But it is coming back. Soon. The last few days I discovered once again why I loved doing that magazine and what is really important to me about it almost more than anything. It is my filing system. Every month I would publish four or five or six short stories. I never repeated a short story, so there are 270 different stories in those 67 issues. There are also novels and…
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Update On My Challenge…
Going Along As Expected… I had a really bad start to March for various reasons, and missed some days on my daily story challenge. I expected times like that to happen. But missing some stories does not mean I have failed. Snort. Not by a long shot. This is a very long year and I would have been delusional if I had thought I could actually write a story every day without missing for an entire year. (Have any of you have a memory of bad days during your year?) But I still plan on having 365 stories by the end. I am on target for that. And here is…
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A Question About My Challenge…
“Am I Running Out of Ideas?” That was the question and it is a good question if you believe in all the myths of fiction writing, as we all do and did in our early days. For me, just to be clear… I never write down ideas. I mostly just ignore them. I never know what I am going to write ahead of time. I sometimes don’t know until the end of the story. I finish all stories I start. I use a trigger like a title of a phrase or image of a character to start my stories. I write stories only for myself and no one else. And…
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Since I Am Now Writing At Pulp Speeds Again…
Just For Fun… I wanted to bring this Pulp Speed post back again just for fun for me to read again as I am firing along now for almost two months at Pulp Speeds. I figured I could use it again as well. (grin) (And yes, tomorrow I will list the story I wrote today and the one I will write tomorrow… Challenge still going fine.) (I wrote this post around 2014, then brought it forward to 2016, then 2017, and just about every year or so since, skipping 2022. Last time here was October. And this month March… I made the Pulp Speed class a regular workshop again so…
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Last Day to Get Craft Class on Early Bird Discount…
And Challenge Going Onward… So first off, today is the last day to get the CRAFT IN THE 21ST CENTURY done by Kris for $200 for the 9 weeks. It will switch to $250 late Monday night. This class on WMG Teachable is something Kris really wanted to do. She will be recording videos every week and they will come out on Monday some time. The first week’s videos are now up. No assignments, just learning about how some craft things have changed in the 21st century. 9 Weeks of Mondays. Early bird price is $200 until Monday night late, then it goes to $250. Here is the video of…