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Negative Habits
Habits of Not Writing… Or not publishing what you write. Over the years I have talked a lot in classes and here about how it really helps to form positive habits on writing. Start a streak, do a challenge, write at the same time each day, and so on. And with the publishing coming in, I have often suggested a publishing day each week set aside only for publishing. Form a habit. But what I have noticed in myself and others lately is not writing, not publishing, is habit-forming as well. Streaks, challenges, and so on to help form positive habits are powerful, but so are the habits of not…
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Gothic Craft Class…
May 5-8th in Las Vegas… In the WMG office in downtown Las Vegas. Starts in three weeks. Craft class taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. We have two openings in the In-Person class if interested. Write me. $750 fee. And on WMG Teachable, we will be doing the Gothic Study Along class. $300 fee. Basically I use Kris’s notes from the class to record what she has done and I read your story assignments. Not as good as being here with Kris, but a ton cheaper. (grin) Four days of videos plus two assignments to write stories. Those who are attending in person will be hooked up on an email list…
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Reading Pulphouse Stories…
Out of Order… So don’t panic if you get a response from me for an October or November story and you have not gotten a response for a story from a previous month yet. I am just jumping around so I don’t get in a rut with the same theme. Plus if I think I might buy a story, I put it aside and read it again in a few days. However, that said, the HEAT WAVE stories are all responded to. TWILIGHT ZONE stories only have a few left. Fascinating patterns I am noticing in the writing. For example, a lot of the stories are pulling me in, but…
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Getting Really Organized…
I Mean Really, Really Organized… So I am writing all these new stories. And they are in bunches of different series. At the moment they are just printed out and stacked by the day and month I wrote it. Yeah, that’s stupid. And I have two file cabinet drawers full of manuscripts I’m not sure where they go, or have gone, or even what they are. And I have a spreadsheet of all the stories that have been in the sixty-seven issues of Smith’s Monthly, along with in some cases the collections they have been in. Some cases. So I was having issues getting started on a story tonight because…
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Time of Great Forgetting
To Get Though the Coming Months… Most writers need a focus of some sort. Today is a great restart date if you had a rough start to the year, or if you are just ready to go. But this month is the start of the time of great forgetting for writers. It lasts from the middle end of this month until July when writers surface and wonder what happened to the last few months. Spring, great weather outside, vacations, graduations, gardens, and a billion other things happened. I talk about this every year and some writers are managing to get through it and still focus on the writing. For me…
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April Regular Workshops Starting This Week!!
Added Two From Classics This Month… Heinlein’s Rules and Power Words. Here is the full list… Starting April 1st… Heinlein’s Rules (one month only) Writing Into the Dark Teams in Fiction Depth in Writing Killing the Critical Voice Advanced Depth Writing with Power Words (one month only) All workshops are on WMG Teachable. All are six weeks long with five assignments. Those with Workshop Subscription or Everything Subscription, write me for the codes if you want to do the assignments. And please tell me which subscription you have. Thanks! And the Lifetime Everything Subscription is still on sale for half price. If interested, write me directly. That is the only…
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THE GREAT RESTART COMING…
The First of April… A Lot of Year Left… I was doing a calculation of if it would be better to restart the 2025 words per day challenge or try to catch up. The answer is that it depends on how far behind you are. If you are on target at 2,025 words per day, by the end of March you would have written 182,250 words. (Really adds up, doesn’t it?) If you are only 15,000 to 20,000 words behind, no question. You can make that up easily. Extra 50 to 75 words per day. There are 275 days left. Adding 100 words per day to 2025 words would catch…
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Fun Writing Project!
This Will Start in the New Poker Boy Kickstarter… It has been decades or more since I Turckerized anyone. Tuckerization was mostly started when Wilson “Bob” Tucker would put his friends and other writer’s names into his stories and books as a joke or as a shout out to them. He did it so often, it became known by his name. (Bob was a very friendly guy and I was lucky enough to spend time with him in the early 1990s.) In this modern world, you never do that without asking the permission of the person being Tuckerized. For example, in one Star Trek book Kris and I wrote, we…
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Filing System Drawback…
Smith’s Monthly As A Filing System… A number of people have mentioned to me how cool that idea is to keep stories organized. And it really is. When I publish an issue. I have not published an issue since #67, which was November of 2022. Which means I have not filed anything since then. (grin) Granted, for six months of that time I was mostly blind and for another six months of that time I was recovering from surgery and most of this last year I was dealing with business issues. So yes, it has been 2 years and 4 months since I filed anything, but a lot of that…
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Restart Challenge
I Love Restarting… Everything feels fresh and I can pretend that the problems earlier didn’t happen or don’t exist. I have missed about two weeks of stories total in my Write A Story A Day challenge. Not bad, but now I am starting fresh, making sure I get a story per day done, and when I have some extra time, finish a second one to catch up. But the challenge for me this next three months is to write a story per day, and maybe catch up four or five of the days I missed. Totally possible. But it would not be possible without the attitude of restarting. Three years…