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Wow! Have We Done a Lot…
I Swore I Wouldn’t Do Online Classes… Not kidding. I swore I wouldn’t do them. Back before there was anything like Teachable, I was pushed into doing one online class one fall by a group of writers, encouraged by my wife. I swore it would only be one. I honestly did. Kris and I laid out the class and I presented it. Had to create a web site that acted very much like Teachable for the first few years. Then since we had decided for the moment to not do any more in-person classes, I did a few more over that first year. (We brought the in-person classes back at…
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Looking Forward…
Monday Morning Classes… Over the years we have done numbers of Monday morning classes, where every Monday morning four new videos appear on a certain topic. For 2025 we are doing PUBLISHING MONDAY and BITE-SIZED BRANDING AND TRADEMARK. Both should be great fun, 52 weeks of four videos per week per class, and they are available as the 4th item on the 12 Days sale list for 50% off. (No homework or assignments, just learning every week.) In 2023, we did a very future-looking Monday morning class called THE DECADE AHEAD, talking each week on how to focus out ten years with your writing and publishing. And just today I…
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I Am Making Progress On My Challenge Preparation
Actually, A Lot of Progress Today… I even did a couple of Smith Monthly Covers!! Still not sure about some of the tiny detail stuff, but covers look very possible and a lot of fun. Yay! I also did some of that basic stuff like used a few exterior hard drives to make sure everything was backed up. Amazing how many files I have with my fiction since my first computer days. And got two computers down on my office desk in WMG and ready to get set up. Those coming to the January Space Opera here in Vegas in mid-January will get to see all that sort of thing…
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Happy Holiday!
Hope The Holiday Is a Good One… Kris and I are staying quiet, just enjoying the free time to work and get caught up on a bunch of stuff. And considering the last few years, this is heaven. I have even managed eight hours of sleep for a few nights in a row. Wow. Mostly we are just getting ready for our writing and publishing in 2025. And looking forward like that also feels great. So this is an ideal holiday for us. Sure hope your holiday, no matter how or what you celebrate, if at all, is a good one. Twelve Days of Workshop Sales… General Information… We are…
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More Challenges for the New Year…
Our Regular Four Challenges Enter the 2025 Holiday Sale… For years now we have had four challenges that writers can jump into at any point during the year and start at any time. — THE GREAT CHALLENGE which is to write and send to me one short story a week. — THE GREAT PUBLISHING CHALLENGE which is to publish one major thing a month. (Collection, novella, or novel.) — THE GREAT NOVELLA CHALLENGE which is to write a new novella every month. — THE GREAT NOVEL CHALLENGE which is to write a new novel every two months. Very few people have tried the novel challenge and only a couple of…
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Talking About Advanced Craft….
So Much To Learn and It Never Ends with Craft.. I am always calling very advanced and successful writers “Stage Four” writers because they do things in craft and storytelling to hold readers. And readers never see what the writer is doing and most middle stage writers can’t see it either. Sort of like watching a chess master when you “play” chess. You know the pieces and how they are supposed to move, but you can’t see what the chess master is doing. So a few years back Kris and I put together 18 Advanced Craft Workshops. They are nine weeks long each. We did six in 2023, six more…
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Discussion About Publishing…
So Much To Learn and Do… Indie publishing just eems overwhelming, I know that for a fact. I am going to be doing a lot of my own layouts and publishing on my challenge in this coming year (I will announce what I am doing with the challenge after Christmas as I ramp up.) And I am trying not to panic. Failing at times. So I have really been giving a hard look at all the details now involved with publishing and sales. And slowly realizing I need to figure out a way to organize all that I am learning and have learned to keep the panic down to a…
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32 Years…
Kris Did a Great Post On Facebook… About our 32 wedding anniversary. We tend to celebrate the day we met, which on May 4th this coming year will be 39 years. But the wedding on the top of our tree farm 32 years ago was very special and a ton of fun. We did it at the last minute, with great friends coming without notice. Professional writers and close friends Chris and Steve York stood up with us and thankfully they haven’t regretted it too much in the last 32 years. Well, maybe a few times… (grin) Here is a picture of us teaching in our old office in Lincoln…
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Challenges for 2025…
I Love Challenges… Of course, most of you know that. And at some point I will be talking here about my personal challenge and goal for 2025. Today, I sent out a letter to everyone in the three Beautiful Trophy Award challenges for 2024 to see how they were doing and to get a sense of how many trophies we will need to have hand made. If you did not get that letter, make sure your email is turned on with WMG Teachable. The “Beautiful Trophy Awards” are hand-blown glass floats made in small glass shops on the Oregon Coast. They are stunningly beautiful and every one is different. We…
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Interesting Copyright and Workshop Fun!
Copyright Notice… Kris and I went to see Wicked (part one) tonight. Great movie and I am a fan of L. Frank Baum’s work in all manner. I have read all 14 of the original OZ books, some numbers of time, and most of his short stories. At one point before my house fire, I even had 12 of the original hardback with dust editions with the fantastic (Denslow and Neill) art. So I am sitting watching the credits tonight and made note of the credit given to the author of the derivative novel, Gregory Maguire. But unless I missed it, not one credit to the original Baum source material…