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End of the Month Catching Up
Time for some writing numbers and regular stuff… Going to catch up all the numbers here, since the last time I did this was almost three weeks weeks ago. January turned out to be a pretty good month for writing. And as things get slowly back to normal again, I will start back up the “thing I learned today” feature. That was fun. I still did it every day over the last three weeks, but not going to spend time here going over them. I wrote about 125,000 total words during January, with everything except post comments counted. Decent amount of fiction. Working to ramp that up. Totals are below.…
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Some Fun Stuff
A Partial List of My Books… If you want a sort of graphic list of some of the books I have done over the years, a nice person sent me a link to my page on some web site that attempts to follow my work. It doesn’t begin to have all the books (not even close) that I have written under the Dean Wesley Smith name there, let alone all the short stories and such (Missing a few hundred is all). And forget about pen names there. But it is still pretty nifty how they do it, so at a glance you can scroll down and see a bunch of…
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More Questions
A Bunch More Discussion Questions For Writers I have been mostly talking to myself over the last four days, trying to make sense of some questions I have that don’t flat seem to have answers. Or at least not easy answers. So on the idea I might keep this up, I thought for a short post tonight I would just toss out a few more questions that would be fun to talk about in coming posts. Again, just sort of talking with myself, but feel free to chime in with other ideas. —Why is every writer I know in a hurry? —Why are most writers totally incapable of planning longer…
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Saturday Night Again
I worked on workshop stuff, watched a bunch of television, wrote a bunch of words, and had a good day. And that, my dear friends, makes this a filler post to keep the streak of posting every day alive. Back tomorrow night with some more questions from the discussion started last week about why modern writers are such wimps. Night.
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Epilogue: Writing a Novel in Five Days While Traveling
WRITING A NOVEL IN FIVE DAYS WHILE TRAVELING… Epilogue… I am writing this from the comfort of my office at home, the day after I got back, which was late last night. I ended having to fight a pretty nasty storm coming in, but made it fine. The drive from Las Vegas to the Oregon Coast took two days, with a stop in Redding. As I said, the novel came in at 37,100 words. But I know for a fact that I will need to flush out the ending slightly because I figured out the end, was tired and did a lot of “and then this happened…” So more than likely the final…
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A Second Filler Post
The drive from Redding, California, over the mountains and down into the valley with Portland, Salen, Eugene Oregon was fine. But from there it got sort of tricky. Hitting with 70 mph winds tonight here on the coast and nasty rain. I came in over the coast range through it. Tiring drive. White snow along the road, heavy fog, hard rain, and wind. Places I couldn’t see anything, let alone the road. Not fun. But I made it. So I managed to get the workshop assignments done tonight and will be back at everything full tomorrow and will do a wrap-up on the travel book here. But tonight the power is…
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A Filler Post
I’ll write the prolog chapter on the nonfiction book after I get home tomorrow night. Right now I just got off the road and am sitting in a suite in Reddding, CA. (Yes, drove from Vegas today.) I want to be up moderately early tomorrow to get over the mountains between here and Oregon before the next storm hits. I have chains but I really don’t want to use them. So tomorrow night I will write the epilog chapter about the entire writing process on the road. It will make more sense tomorrow anyway. (grin) Night…
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Chapter Seven: Writing a Novel in Five Days While Traveling
WRITING A NOVEL IN FIVE DAYS WHILE TRAVELING… CHAPTER SEVEN… Fifth and final day of writing on the novel and it turned out fine. Yup, got the book finished. Go figure. I’ll explain more below. I ended up with 9,500 words today including the 1,600 I did after I finished yesterday’s chapter here. Book came in at 37,100 words. But I might need to flush out the ending because I figured out the end, was tired and did a lot of “and then this happened…” And actually, all the novels in this series have run from 36,000 words to 43,000 words, so this is spot on for length for the series. However,…
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Chapter Six: Writing a Novel in Five Days While Traveling
WRITING A NOVEL IN FIVE DAYS WHILE TRAVELING… CHAPTER SIX… Fourth day of writing on the novel and it turned out fine, but I didn’t make up any ground. But I had a great day both writing and on the vacation part. I ended up with 8,200 words, but had been hoping for a few thousand more. I might still get some more in, but I’ll add them onto tomorrow if I do since it’s 4 a.m. Detailing Out the Day… Once again I made it out of bed by noon and by 1 p.m. I had showered, gotten dressed, and was headed for lunch with the guys in the buffet. Yes, we…
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Chapter Five: Writing a Novel in Five Days While Traveling
WRITING A NOVEL IN FIVE DAYS WHILE TRAVELING… CHAPTER FIVE… Third day of writing on the novel and it turned out to be one of the types of days I was worried about having when doing the planning. The vacation part of the day and a bunch of business completely overwhelmed the writing hours. And there was a lot of business stuff. So I ended up with 3,800 words, but still it was a really fun day, which is the main reason I am traveling here. So maybe there will need to be an adjustment on this nonfiction book. I’ll talk about that below.. Detailing Out the Day… I made it out of bed…