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A Fun Run and Updates
6 AM is Stupidly Early… Especially when you go to bed at 2 AM. It is still dark at 6 AM. And yet off we went to be at a park before 7 on the other side of town for a charity run that honors Prince. Now I did some running early on in the 5K and then just said, “Nope.” Walked the rest of the way. But we had a wonderful breakfast afterward at a restaurant we almost never get to because it is so far from our place. And I got my remaining four hours of sleep after I got home. The Case Card Kickstarter campaign is doing…
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Myth Believer
With Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy… I deal a lot with writer myths. And I will be doing new Killing the Sacred Cows of… posts soon. But one thing I noticed back when Foxworthy was doing his “You might be a redneck…” jokes is that they always had a ring of truth in them. So for fun, I thought I would show how that truth can sometimes be pointed at those who believe in the myths of publishing. If one or two of these strike home, don’t blame me. It’s your myth. Not the Top Ten Myth Believer Sayings… (Just ten random. Trust me, there are a lot more.) 1… If…
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Challenges Are Battles Against Yourself…
Nothing Else Matters… Just You… Challenges have this nasty habit of quickly uncovering issues in your motivation and your consistency in writing and other life issues you are dealing with. This challenge for me uncovered that my vision stamina is not strong yet. If I spend a lot of time during the day, as I did a few days this last week, at my business computer, by the time I get to the writing computer, I am very limited in the amount of time I have. I love writing at night, and my eyes are better at night. I expected to be slow, didn’t expect that sight issue would be…
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Getting Back In The Chair…
Can’t Count the Words for the Challenges… But figured since my writing has been so off and on for the last five months because of the eye issues, I had better spend time back in my writing chair kicking off the dust. Feels great, let me tell you. Can not believe how much I have missed being in that chair over the last five months. I sat down tonight and said, “I’m home!” Couple things I noticed. I am not typing as clean as I used to because the eye is not totally back, so getting letters mixed up when my fingers get off the keys or in the wrong…
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Branding
To Genre… There are a lot of elements to branding in fiction, so much so that we are thinking of doing an entire six week regular workshop on the topic. (Let me know if interested. No requirement to take it.) Branding becomes critical not only the in basics like genre covers, but in so much more, such as licensing, trademarks, and overall value of a book or series, let alone its sales and licensing. And wow are there a lot of elements that go into branding in fiction. (Six weeks worth easy.) Most writers I’ve talked to tell me they understand branding, but as I stare at just their covers,…
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Kickstarter is Live!!!
And Fun for Me!! You can see it at DEAN WESLEY SMITH Starter Kit. All kinds of my books, some great special workshops coming back from other Kickstarters (You get a choice if you missed one before) and some fun stretch rewards, including a brand new lecture series. And I was going to add the challenge there as well, but alas it breaks Kickstarter Rules. Sorry. And take a look at the branding. I’ll talk about it later. Only ten days on this one, so really tight turn. Don’t miss it.
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More On Dean Challenges
Some Great Questions This Weekend… Main question is that if I go past a million words, does that mean anyone in the challenge must as well? Nope. If I write past a million words (love how you guys are worried about that while I am worried with the eyes of just getting close to that number), the challenge is capped at one million. So the full folks need to write that much, the half need to write 500,000 words. If I do 800,000 words, that is the mark for the full and 400,000 is for the half. I will be reporting every week on both challenges with a video. Every…
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Writers at the Ball Park
Great Fun on a Great Afternoon.. Kris and I and Lisa Collins headed for the Royals/Rockies pre-season game here in Vegas. The park is fantastic, we had good seats, and my eyes are better enough that I could actually track balls after they were hit, which was a worry of mine going. Made the afternoon a lot more fun, let me tell you. Kris did a great post about the afternoon on Facebook. I just wanted to put the picture here of what it looks like when two New York Times bestselling writers go to a baseball game. It looks exactly like any two people. (grin)
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Learning In Writing
Not Like Other Skills… This came from a fun conversation with other writers today at lunch. When you learn something in fiction writing, you can’t just take that learning and apply it like learning how to fix a pipe or do something in Photoshop. I wish sometimes it worked that way, but alas it does not. So when you learn something from a writing book, or another writer’s work, or a workshop like we teach, you must do your best to understand it while learning it, then go back to writing and forget what you learned. That’s right, forget it. When you learn something about a craft area of writing,…
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Dean Challenges… Two of them…
Both a Full and a Half Challenge… Last night I mentioned I was thinking about doing a challenge for anyone who wanted to try to match or beat the number of consumable words I wrote from April 1st 2023 until December 31st, 2023. Nine months. I said what I hoped to hit, but of course that is just the plan and we all know how plans go. (grin) But I also suggested that I would set up a challenge for anyone who wanted to try to match me. A challenge similar to the other challenges already there. And a couple people thought they could keep up or beat me, which…