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An Obvious Topic…
So Obvious I Never Think to Talk About It… Back up your work. That’s the topic and I have told the story many times of how I wrote a short story per week from January 1st 1982 onward and sold some of those. But I have no copies of any of them except the ones that were published, or in the mail at the time, because in May of 1985 my house burnt down, and since I was working on a typewriter, I lost most of those stories and the two novels I had written. Seeing two novels you wrote as nothing but piles of flaked ash is not something…
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Books Don’t Spoil…
I Have Been Saying That For Years… In traditional publishing, books are like bananas that go bad after a short time on the shelves and must be replaced with a fresh banana. But in indie publishing, years can go by before a book finds its true market. The book didn’t spoil in that time frame. Brandon Sanderson got well past a million bucks just doing a Kickstarter campaign for a hardback of a ten year old novel. Thankfully for him, he understood that books don’t spoil. So I fight this stupidity all the time in a lot of ways. And one way I try is by adding reprint stories in…
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Two Posts About the New Workshop Sale
The Two Posts Before This One… Both posts talked about the In-Between workshop half-price sale and also all the new classes and workshops that are available this time. New Workshop Sale! New Workshops Now Available In Sale And remember, if you want to get any workshop on TEACHABLE.COM for half price, simply hit “Purchase” and then on the next page at the top put in the code: IN-BETWEEN All of the May regular 6-week workshops are available and all of the June regular 6-week workshops are available. Plus a good ten new Pop-Up classes. And my favorite new classes, the nine-week collection classes where you write five stories and then…
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New Workshop Sale!!!
The Half-Price Code is… IN-BETWEEN Yes, It Has Been Two More Months of Covid… As I said months ago, I honestly never would have predicted this last spring. Not in a million years. Not many did, and those who did warn us of this, none of us listened. We just couldn’t imagine being locked up for MORE THAN a year. But at least now we have some hope on the horizon with the vaccines going out and so many of us getting them. But we are a long ways out of this, with 600 to 700 dying still every day in just this country. Back when WMG Publishing did what…
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Starting to Sink In that I am Vaccinated!
And So Is Kris… I was actually vaccinated back in January and early February. I stood in line for four hours for the first shot, and five hours for the second. But there was no sign on the horizon that Kris was going to be vaccinated anytime soon at that point, so nothing changed at all for me. I didn’t even give it a thought about changing anything. Basically, for the entire 14 months, there were entire days I would never leave the condo, or if I did it was to go down to our office on the ground floor of this same building. On really exciting days I went…
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Writing Quote From Joe Lansdale
Wonder Where I Have Heard This Before? Joe Lansdale said on Facebook today… “The writer who thinks the whole purpose of writing is suffering isn’t one I’m much interested in. The one that tells a story for the joy of telling it is the one I’m interested in. Writing can be hard, but it shouldn’t be miserable. Some days it might be, but on the whole it should be an exciting, if occasionally, frustrated adventure. A story is made better by style, character, dialogue. All the tools that make it work, but the most important component is joyful passion and a willingness to improve on your passion to make it…
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Jim Steinman
Died Today at 73…. Way too young. I just spent some hours tonight watching some work by one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Jim Steinman. He wrote on Broadway and in movies and just about everywhere, and maybe wrote some of the best songs in our lives. You can look up the thousands he wrote and I bet you will go “He wrote that! I didn’t know that!” for half of them. But my favorite writing of his was always the work he did with Meat Loaf, including the two Bat out of Hell albums. My all-time favorite Jim Steinman song is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. This…
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4:30 A.M.
This is Even Late For Me… I even got up an hour early this morning, and it still took me this long to get everything done today. And sadly, not a bit of it was my writing. So I am done except for a few more stories to read tomorrow morning. Over this next period of time WMG will be sending out rewards and stretch rewards for The Return of the Fey Kickstarter. I will contact everyone with the special workshops information later in the week at some point. So now once again I have typed something here on this blog to keep my streak alive and I am going…
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Going Light Tonight
Been At This Computer Too Long… We are doing the mystery study along right now and I am recording the last couple of Pop-Ups, so basically I have been at this computer since noon, so except for a lunch and dinner break, that is 13 hours and my poor eye is tired. Too tired to type anything of value here tonight. So going to do nothing but type a little to make my streak and call it a night. Maybe tomorrow. But at least the streak of almost nine years of daily blogging has held so far. Night.
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Pulp Speed Writers (Take Two)
A Post I Wrote in 2016… Talks about the kind of writers who are or were Pulp Speed Writers. After yesterday’s post, I thought it would be worth bringing back as well. Answer a few questions. Pulp Writers’ Abilities… I got a great question today about some of the basics the really prolific pulp writers did to be so productive. And how to go about finding out about a lot of their styles. How I have learned about so many of the older pulp writers is by reading books about them, often in their own words, reading books about the era, and just finding anything I could to read about…