• Challenge,  Fun Stuff,  publishing

    Time to Rest… Blast from the Past

    All Good Intentions… I spent all day in meetings, then working at my computer at work doing workshop stuff, then home at this computer and then reading. I rested my eye regularly, but still too tired in the eye to write much tonight or read much more. So the planned blog is replaced by this placeholder so I can keep my streak alive. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, how about a blast from the past on this Thursday? In this picture from the 1960 World Science Fiction Convention taken by Jay Kay Klein, Ron Ellik, Randall Garrett, Mark Irwin, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Dirce Archer, and James Blish watch BJo…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Just Reading…

    Nothing to see here… Just piles and piles and piles of manuscripts. Kris and I are old-time editors and we read everything in paper manuscript format. Great fun and our cats are too old to care about the strange manuscript piles to cause issues. Clearly we need kittens. Now back to the pile… night.

  • Challenge,  On Writing

    Middle of the Night

    The Problem With My Schedule… I tend to like to write and work on things in my office from 1 a.m. until almost 6 a.m. My night (for sleeping) is until 1 p.m., sometimes 2 p.m. So this morning I was on the phone with some financial people at 9:30 a.m., down at the estate house by 10:30 a.m. and worked solid until after 4 p.m. Think of this way. If you normally went to bed at midnight and slept until 7:30 or 8, what I did was get up at 3:30 in the morning in that schedule and stay up. Ughh… And got to do it one more day tomorrow.…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Busy Day for a Saturday

    Auction, reading, some writing, some working on the estate, some workshop stuff…  And I wouldn’t be reporting all this stuff if I didn’t have a streak going of blogging every day about something. (grin) Here is what the day was like. First to both our stores. Antiques Week is starting here and I wanted to see how things were doing. Starting off great. Then estate work since the day was nice and the light was good in the house. Almost got it. Monday should finish it for me. Then out to the auction for a while to talk with friends there. Then to the WMG offices to work for a few…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Workshops and Stuff

    Worked on Online Workshops… I did that until around 7 p.m. today, along with the standard errands and stuff normal for a Friday. Then home, cooked dinner, napped, and went back to writing. Great fun. And then a bunch of reading, which I will be doing all month for the coming anthology workshop. Tomorrow I will start back on the book I left off before the trip. I hope to finish that one and get to some short fiction at some point soon. Or maybe do some short fiction and then finish the book. I don’t know. We shall see. Another Smith’s Monthly got out. Patreon supporters and subscribers should have…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Writing and Lost Track of Time

    You all know how that happens… I planned tonight to write one of the longer blogs on one of the questions from last week. So I’m banging along on a fiction project and I had taken a few breaks, but didn’t think to look at the clock until I realized it was 5:30 a.m. Those longer posts take me an hour or more, and a clear mind. Not happening at this moment. (grin) So soon. Time… when you are writing a story and having fun, it sure zips past. (grin) —————- FEBRUARY ONLINE WORKSHOPS Workshops start next Tuesday and Wednesday. Yes, it is February already. Still room in all of them, but…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    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.…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    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…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    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…