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Finished Kris’s New Fey Novel
Stunningly Good! I’m not going to say anything about it in detail, because I don’t want to ruin it for all the fans, but I will just say this: It is amazing and I can hardly wait for her to finish the next one (third one). And now the first novella makes a ton of sense. How she does it is beyond me. Bunch of stuff coming out this coming week. A new Smith’s Monthly and a new issue of Pulphouse Magazine, among two of them. And working on a new Pulphouse Magazine Kickstarter subscription campaign that will be out in a few weeks. That will be a fun one.…
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Make More Than Coffee Money
The First In a New Series of Classes… Kris and I tend to spend a lot of lunches out in restaurants with a notebook, planning workshops. Usually we have a focus, like a certain week in a class that needs to be recorded. We make sure that I am recording the workshop we want it to be. Between the two of us, we think we hit good workshops more than we miss. And sometimes in these lunch discussions we just end up with new ideas for workshops that we think would be fun or valuable. A couple details have to be in place before we talk about it enough to…
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Kristine Kathryn Rusch Starter Kit
Everything Sent Out… Except the Interview Stretch Rewards with Kris…She and I are recording those now and as soon as we are done and I get them loaded, we will send out codes to get into them on Teachable So if you didn’t get the ten books in the Starter Kit, or any of the other books, first check your spam filter, then make sure you are on your Kickstarter email, and if you still don’t have them by Tuesday, write to Subscriptions@wmgbooks.com and Josh will track them for you. Again, the interviews are not among this batch. Next and final batch. Also, an update on the Fey Kickstarter. LESSONS…
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Recommended Classes of the Week
Finally Started It… Every Monday Kris and I will post new Recommended Classes of the Week (They have a picture of Cheeps on them). Normally each week will consist of a classic workshop with six weeks worth of videos on the weekly topic, a Pop-Up class on the same general topic, and a lecture. Plus there will also be a link to get an electronic book on the same topic. Total value for the class for each part bought on its own is $355. The price of the Recommended Class is $250.00. Since we are not doing sales much at all anymore, for one week only, the first week, the…
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Reading Fey Novel
So This Will Be A Short Post… This is the second full NEW novel of THE FEY that Kris has finished since the Kickstarter. (Plus the novella, of course.) And she has finished the book about writing of the Fey and is almost done with the videos, so we can get that up and out. (I will do a Kickstarter Update this coming week.) I have been trying to hold myself to only reading three or four chapters a night because of my eyes. But that failed tonight (as I should have expected with Kris’s great writing combined with it being THE FEY.) So it is now going on 3…
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A Look Back
To Another Challenge I Finished… 70@70 Challenge. I wanted to publish 70 major books in my 70th year on the planet. Basically from the middle of November, 2020 to the middle of November, 2021. And with the fantastic help of the crew at WMG Publishing Inc, I somehow managed it. Yeah, I know… I am that crazy. I considered a major book as any novel or novella or something I edited like a magazine or collection, or any major novel or book that had to be redone from scratch. It had to have my name big on the front cover. It had to be my book, in other words. I…
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Fun Having My Own Monthly Magazine
I CAN DO WHAT I WANT… So tonight I just finished laying out Smith’s Monthly #62 and decided I wanted to do something fun in #63. I wanted to focus on jukebox stories. About forty years ago, I wrote my first jukebox story about a jukebox in a bar that actually takes a person back to their memory of a song while the song plays. Over the years I wrote a lot of jukebox stories, the first being published in Night Cry Magazine in 1987. The most famous of them all was the story “Jukebox Gifts,” published first in F&SF. That story has been reprinted all over the place, optioned…
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Example of Writing Levels…
Stage Three vs Stage Four Writers… What I am about to show you is not always the case. A lot of stage four writers, me included, often write simple, clear sentences when the character or the type of story, or the moment in the story demands it. But I wrote this as a response to a writer working in the Power Words workshop. Young professional writers flat don’t know what Power Words are and often, because of workshops, think they are overwriting when they use them. Early professional writers, stage three, can’t even see Power Words most of the time. So first let me give you an example of a…
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Some More On Licensing Expo
Dates Are Set for 2023 Licensing Expo 2023 will be at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center from May 23rd through 26th. That is Tues-Wed-Thur. Now, as I have said, I tried my best in the smaller show this year to see everything in three days. I walked the floor right up until the last hour the last afternoon. I was looking for everything I could see, every idea, every type of branding and licensing, and I ended up with a number of preliminary meetings with some. But my goal was to see everything if I could. I thought I had done a pretty good job, to be honest. So this…
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Smith’s Monthly #62
Laying It Out Now… June issue. It will be out later in the month. Yes, issue #62 of a monthly magazine that has about 70,000 or so words in it every month. All written by me. No one else. Do the math. That’s is over 800,000 words per year in just Smith’s Monthly, not counting anything else I do. Except for a light copyedit and the actual loading to the accounts, I do everything else on this magazine. I do all the covers for the short stories and the rest of the contents and the magazine itself. I do the layout into trade paper in a two-column format in InDesign.…