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SUPER Great Challenges
Blog Early Tonight Because of Licensing Expo… Starts tomorrow morning, so I might be late a touch on a few things, but will try not to. And will give a report here and on a couple of the classes later in the week. But quickly, I want to announce what is not up yet, but will be shortly on Teachable (shortly meaning a day or so.) THE SUPER GREAT CHALLENGES… Right now we have the following challenges you can sign up for at any time… Any genre… — The Great Challenge (write a story per week and send it to me for 52 weeks.) — The Great Novella Challenge (write…
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More Reading…
So Chapter Two Another Day Off… As I talked about last night, my problems with most stories is not the writing. And I say so if I do have an issue with that. Been thinking about this as I read more and more stories with the same issue. Information flow problem. What do I mean by that? Simply put, most writers don’t know when to ease up on the details and back story and bring in the story itself, so I often don’t make it to the story even though the writing is great. That is an information flow problem. Can a hook help that at the opening? Not so…
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More Notes From An Editor…
Again a Lot of Reading Tonight… Story after story after story so far tonight, the writing was good if not great. But I would be reading along and suddenly go “where is the story?” Oops… Another thing I noticed is flashbacks in openings. I guess the writer thinks that is a good way to help explain a character, but the reader (in this case me) is not grounded in the present of the story so when I am taken back to some event in the past, I quit reading. And back to point one, that flashback is a long ways from any story. Oops… You know, writers, you don’t have…
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Back Tomorrow With Chapter Two…
Got Too Busy Reading Tonight… Because of all the things that happened this last fall and through the winter, I got really behind on reading the stories for Pulphouse Fiction Magazine that were sent over the fall and winter from the Pulphouse Kickstarter last summer. But been giving every story a good chance, a good read, and finding some. I have been mixing up the topic stories through the fall, so the ones I have left are not that many in any month. One more week I should have a response to everyone who sent in a story through December. This has been a great time reading and I am…
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Information Flow Awareness
Most Writers Don’t See or Understand Information Flow… It is the advanced skill of getting a reader the information they need a fraction of a second before they need it in a story. You can’t do this with the front part of your brain. Only creative voice can pull this off when left alone. Right now, Kris and I have watched the 2001 version of Ocean’s 11 and now we are watching it again while talking about it for the Kris and Dean show. After watching the movie a dozen times, studying it this last week, and now going over it again slowly, the movie has three and sometimes more…
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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…