A Few Great Questions Today…

First A Question on Priorities…

The question boiled down to this… “What is more important? Writing, Learning, Reading, Publishing?”

Great question, and I honestly had to stop and stare at it for a moment because in the publishing world of 2024, all of those are important. There needs to be a balance of feeding them all regularly. But writers tend to get into trouble over time when they drop one or two.

“I don’t have time to study another author’s book or to take a class or worse yet, I don’t need it right now.” So learning gets left out and the writer goes stale and dull in time.

“I don’t have time to read.” So reading gets left out. And feeding the creative voice stops and the writer is doomed to write the same thing over and over again in time.

So back to the main question. “What is most important, even if they are all important?”

This is my opinion and how I answered the writer who asked the question.

Writing is the most important. Regular writing, putting new words to a page and creating stories and finishing stories that you start. Without that, you are just an author who talks a good game. Writers are people who write. Authors are people who have written.

As for the other three, I rank them in a tie for the second most important. You need to keep up all three. Publishing to get your work to readers, learning to keep opening up your mind and becoming a better storyteller, and reading to feed the creative voice and recharge.

I got a hunch that some of you reading this will have dropped one or two of these critical areas. And have a great excuse for doing so. (I do not want to hear the excuse, please. Just fix it.)

But simply put, if you want to be a long-term fiction writer, you must write, read, publish, and learn all the time.

Questions on Workshops Changed Tw0 Things…

Two questions on workshops today in email got us to rethink a few things about WMG Teachable workshops.

First, the answer is yes, you can buy one workshop at full price and gift yourself the second free one. No problem at all.

Second question was about the full pricing of the workshops. The person asked if we were going to do another sale on the workshops and I said “No overall sale until at least April.”

They felt they could not buy a workshop they felt they needed at full price. So for this next week or so, we are going to try something.

Solo Half Price Coupons

If you have a workshop or a class or a subscription you would like to get, but need it to be half price to afford it, just write me directly at my email address and tell me which class and I will send you a personal half-price coupon to get into it.

This includes any of the lifetime subscriptions.

And also the six new December Regular Workshops, which in December includes APPLIED DEPTH (back from Classic for one month), along with Writing with Depth, Advanced Depth, Writing into the Dark, Teams in Fiction and Killing the Critical Voice. All start December 3rd and 4th. They are available now.

So any class or workshop or anything on Teachable you want for half price for yourself, write me directly (not in the comments here) and I will give you a code for that class to get it 50% off. And yes, you can do as many as you want, but you will need a code for each one.

We are going to give this solo class sale a try for a week. And the Give the Gift of Learning will go into December.

Things From My Past…

Most of you may not know that over the years I have owned three bookstores, two comic book stores, and an album store. (Yes, an album store.) I started my first bookstore while in architecture undergrad in 1977 in Moscow, Idaho, bought an album store that was going out of business two years later, and built the first comic book store up from scratch until it filled the upstairs above the bookstore.

I sold the bookstore comic book store, and albums in 1980 and bought the bookstore back six months later.

I wrote a lot of stories sitting at that front desk in that bookstore on an electric typewriter that I used for nothing else but writing stories. One of the last bookstores I owned I bought from Sheldom McCarther in Lincoln City and sold it to the professional fiction writer Dan Duval who is still running it. Fantastic place.

So for a fun picture, here I am in 1982, sitting at the front desk of that first bookstore. Behind the stack of books is my typewriter. At this point my wife and I lived in the basement under the store and Nina Kiriki Hoffman lived over the store. Nina called the place a “Pulp House” and thus where Kris and I got the name years later. I was 32 years old.

And for you young kids, that black thing to the left of me is a rotary phone. The dark board and two bowels on the top shelf is a “Go” board and stones. Yes, many Go games in the store over the years. I had a pretty good ranking for a time.