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Money and Kickstarter Workshops Starting
How To Make Money With Your Fiction Writing… Yup, that workshop starts on Wednesday this coming week. Should be a very interesting one, but don’t take it if you want to learn about advertising on places like Facebook and so on. That is not how to make money past a moment in time, maybe, if you are lucky. We’re not even hardly mentioning that. This workshop is how to make money over the long haul and build the income. If you first thought is that you know how to do that, you really need this workshop. If you first thought is you can’t imagine what we will talk about besides…
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Up At 5:30 AM…
For a Run… I have a running group I join sometimes on Sunday mornings and for the first time in a month it will be cool enough for me to go tomorrow morning. Only about 76 degrees as the sun comes up. We are still record heat here. After this summer 76 will feel like I need a coat. (grin) Got to be out in Summerlin at 6:30 a.m. and that’s thirty minutes of driving, so up even earlier. So this is a filler post tonight. Daily streak at 2,984 blog posts without missing a day. My brain can’t really grasp that number to be honest. And oh yeah, worked…
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If I Owe You A Letter
In the Last Three Days, Hold On… I will get caught up today. No problem, I’m just taking some breaks and doing other things. Also about to do some videos in the Decade Ahead class and more cat videos. So next week check those out if you are in them. Again, the Decades Ahead will go through all of 2021 now. No chance in hell any of us can plan while swirling in this mess. The key with all this is just get your head down and keep writing. And make sure you vote. Horror and Historical-focused Science Fiction special workshops are starting on Tuesday. And Making Money with Your…
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An Exercise Goal…
Granted, A Stupid One… I just heard from a marathon run (26.2 miles) that I had sighed up for a few months back that it will actually happen on November 14th. Shocked, I say. Shocked. I signed up just not believing it would happen, but they figured out a way to do it to get the state to approve it. Now I am in decent shape, but not marathon shape, and still about ten pounds overweight to try that distance. But I have six weeks. When I am not injured, which I am not at the moment, I average about 40 miles per week of a little running and a…
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Doc Smith and My Family
Some Strange Similarities… I got to know Verna Smith Trestrail, E.E. “Doc” Smith’s only daughter way back in 1974. Her father had been dead for about a decade at that point and I had never had the pleasure to meet him, but Verna was wonderful. Since Doc graduated from the University of Idaho and the writing group I was in there, and the science fiction club, was thinking of putting on a convention, I suggested that they invite Verna and have Doc be the honorary guest of honor. They went for it and MosCon was born, a great little convention that lasted for years and is trying to make a…
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Henry Kuttner
One of My Major Influences… Not so much for his writing, but for Kuttner’s ability to write a lot of stories. And his partnership and marriage to C.L. Moore. Henry Kuttner died in 1958 at the very young age of 43, so I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Or C.L. Moore for that matter, mostly because she stopped writing and left the field in 1963. But she was maybe the most important of the early women writers in science fiction. Kuttner (and Kuttner and Moore together) did well over 300 short stories and a ton of novels, publishing under more than a dozen major pen names, plus their…
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Special Workshop Invites All Out
All Invites Have Been Sent… So if you think you are signed up for one of the two special workshops and did not get a letter from me for the special Writing Obsession/Horror Stories workshop or the Writing Historical SF workshop, please check your spam filters. If the invite is still not there, then first contact the person who did the kickstarter to make sure they had you signed up and paid. If you are, then contact me. No one can join these special workshops. They were only offered through the Kickstarters. However, we do have one new regular six-week workshop starting in October you can get into. Making Money…
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Publish 100 Cat Stories
Way Back Before Covid, We Did a Kickstarter… January. Seems like a billion years ago, doesn’t it? The idea was part of the Make 100 promotion by Kickstarter, so we decided to publish 100 cat stories in twelve volumes called THE YEAR OF THE CAT. We planned on starting publishing in May and we did. And do one book per month, and we have. Even with Covid and fires and who knows what else coming this year. So this month #5 just came out, right on time. #6 is turned in and Kris and I are working on #7. All fun. Part of that Cat Kickstarter campaign was a workshop…
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Another Way-Back Post
Just For Fun… This is a picture taken by photographer Beth Gwinn of a large group of writers and editors at Westercon in 2000 or 2001. Not sure. About twenty years ago. Looks like some sort of Locus Award ceremony. Sadly, a lot of the people in this picture are now no longer with us. And I suck at names, so I am going to miss a few. Very sorry about that. Starting on the right and going left is Kristine Rusch, Gardner Dozois, Connie Willis, Lucus Shephard, Ursula LeGuin, Tim Powers, Mark Kelly, Steve Barnes, Jacob Weisman, Beth Meachem, Tom Dohorety, Charles Brown, Nina Hoffman, and Janice Gelb. Thanks…
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Another Go At A Myth…
The Myth: Indie Publishing Costs a Lot to Do… Silly myth, but it is pushed hard by traditional publishing and by those who want to sell all their rights and let traditional publishing keep all their money. And it is pushed by just not knowing or getting information from the wrong sources. Remember, there are always people trying to stop you. So let me detail out the costs here as clear as I can. Let me make a couple of assumptions clear first. Assumption #1… For novels you must have copyeditor, someone who finds typos in your work. This can be a good friend, someone you hired at your library…