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Kris and I Married 30 Years Today
So We Spent Most of the Day Working and Writing…. Which is what we do. However, we eventually got done and headed out to look at the magnificent holiday decorations at the Bellagio. And then we went down to Mandalay Boy Hotel and Convention Center to have pizza. Way too much pizza and desert, so we spent the next hour just walking and getting our exercise steps. Then home to watch Slow Horses. 30 Years. Wow. We mostly celebrate from the day we met in 1986, but 30 years married is something to mark. It was a fun ceremony on the top of a hill in the middle of our…
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Value of IP…
Most Writers Never Think of This… But again most writers don’t understand copyright, which is a form of Intellectual Property (IP). Now some writers understand that anything they write has value, although I must admit it takes early stage writers a period of time to get past their egos and their false assumptions that they know what is good or bad in their own work. Interestingly enough, value of IP doesn’t much care about quality, at least in the early stages. Also 90% of all writers I have talked to have zero understanding that the work product they create around a book or story also has IP connected with it…
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Challenges for the New Year
We Have Four of Them To Help You… If you are looking around and trying to set some goals for the coming writing year, consider taking a challenge from WMG workshops. There are four of them on Teachable. THE GREAT CHALLENGE is to write and send me a short story every week for 52 weeks. NOVELLA CHALLENGE is to write and send me a novella every month for 12 months. NOVEL CHALLENGE is to write and send me a novel every two months, and then publish the book in a paperback and send that to me at some point down the road. PUBLISHING CHALLENGE is to publish one new major…
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Fun Run… Fun Pictures
Uphill, Both Ways… Well, it felt that way to a guy still overweight. Granted I have lost four pounds in the last few weeks, but not enough to run too much uphill on bad knees. I ran the first seven tenths of a mile to start, which turns out was slightly downhill. Feeling great. Walked a short hill, then turned a corner and all I could see into the distance was uphill. Well over a. mill uphill. So I walked it. Ran small downhill sections, but walked all the hills, far more walking than I had planned, and missed the podium by one spot. Got 4th in my age group…
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The Fun of Las Vegas
Great Friends and Fun Things to Do… Today, because housekeepers were swarming all over our place, Kris and I got out, had a great lunch, and then spent some hours in Cowboy Christmas in the convention center. Six billion booths and people on two floors of the old massive convention center. Everything you can imagine and a bunch of stuff I couldn’t imagine. But seeing the giant booth of Yellowstone merchandise was fun with the licensing side. We went in, walked to the back, and started back forward in a different aisle. Took hours just for that on one floor. I wanted to do the show to see how my…
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Holiday and a Cat
Figured It Had Been a While… So tonight, a picture of the cat (Angel) who spends a lot of time on my lap watching my screen as I do posts. We put up one of three trees and Angel claimed it. It is now very festive around here. A cat and a Christmas tree. What more can you want out of a blog?
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Great Santa Run
Me and 5,000 Friends Out for A Run… Weirdly enough this year, even with the eye problems which made tripping a real hazard, I managed to run a ways. No Santa Run before this have I run at all. Just too many people, but Las Vegas Blvd has been redone, wide, pavement, smooth, and I managed to stay on my feet and with and ahead of Kris for a half mile or so before we turned onto older streets and I dropped to walking to stay as safe as I could. This is a major charity event for Opportunity Village and every year they try to have the record for…
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Thinking About Next Year
December 1st… Time for any fiction writer to start taking stock in how the year of writing went, and planning for the following year. I will talk later about 2022, but tonight I spent a lot of time really going over a challenge for 2023 and see what the benefits would be and the downsides. And more than anything, how the entire idea and challenge fits for me and my eyesight at the moment. It is supposed to be better, and it is improving slightly, but how much and by when is a moving target at the moment. That makes planning for the year a slight challenge, more than normal.…
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I HAVE A STORY UP!!
A Cold Poker Gang Story!! That’s right, one of my stories that Kris wanted for the WMG Holiday Spectacular 2022 went out today!! It’s a Cold Poker Gang story and you can still get it just fine by going to www.wmgpublishinginc.com and signing up for the Holiday Calendar of a story per day. You will get the ones already sent out (such as my first one) and then get a story per day from there. Now would be a great time to get on board if you have missed it up to now. Read a holiday story every day. And for those of you who have read my story, wouldn’t this…
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Thanksgiving Holidays
We All Have Our Stories and Traditions… I had no tradition for this holiday growing up. None. My family was so unpleasant at its very core, a holiday forcing all of them into one place was my definition of a nightmare. So after five years of being out on my own, my father and his new wife (worse than my mother, which I must say took some doing) were in Palm Springs over Thanksgiving where I had a nice place and was a golf professional. Stupidly, I offered to cook for them. The wife would have nothing to do with that, so she forced us to go up the Tram…