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All July Workshops Started
July Regular Workshops… This might be out best list for a month of workshops we have ever done with the addition of the Magic Bakery workshop and Information Flow. I am very, very pleased these workshops have come this far. And are still moving forward. You can find the workshops under Online Workshops to the right of this post. Sign up for July on Teachable.com. For credits or workshops beyond July, write me. Each regular workshop is 6 weeks long. Again, it will take you about three hours per week on your own pace to do each of these if you do the assignments. All workshops have now started, but still…
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A Copyright Scam
On Facebook and Other Places… You know how really stupid writers are about copyright when some company can offer a way to make money off of the writers by sounding stupid and using terms wrong. The scam I have seen numbers of times now is that a company will offer to “Copyright Your Work” for you for a measly $99.00 plus fees. Not kidding. (I bet those of you who understand copyright just shook your heads.) And I got a hunch the scam artists on this one have a lot of takers. All writers too stupid to realize that the moment they wrote their story in some form, it was…
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Lifetime Subscribers Offer
Something Special For Lifetime Workshop Subscribers… After some discussion at WMG Publishing, we have decided to occasionally offer something special to the Online Workshop Lifetime Subscribers. Not all of the lifetime subscribers will be able to take us up on the offer, but we want to make the offer anyhow. So we want to offer a $750 Publishing Master Business Class to anyone who is a lifetime subscriber between now and September 1st. That’s right, $750 tuition on us. I have sent letters to all lifetime workshop subscribers giving them the details. If you become a lifetime workshop subscriber before then, the offer will stand for you as well. The…
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A Copyright Question
Going To Phrase It A Little Differently Tonight… Fact: You sold all rights to your book, signed them all away in some contract that seemed like a good idea at the time. Your book no longer exists in your magic bakery. Now, a corporation owns your book, is doing nothing with it, and you can’t get it back. It is an accounting number on their financial bookkeeping. All your work is gone. Poof. Because you made a bad decision and signed over all rights for the life of the copyright. (All the writers I saw in Barnes&Noble did that, sadly.) Question: When can you or your heirs publish that book?…
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July Workshops and Copyright
Still Time to Jump In… Kris and I have been working some on the two new regular workshops, Information Flow and The Magic Bakery, and they are turning out really nifty so far, in my opinion. The Magic Bakery will help put this business in complete perspective. And Information Flow is going to be tough, but an eye-opener. And I had a question yesterday that made me realize that writers just don’t know much about the aspects of Public Domain, and thus Copyright. So if I asked the question… “Can your heirs still sell your work 71 years after your death, when your work has dropped into the public domain?”…
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Making A Living With Short Fiction 2018
Back By Popular Demand… Actually, I am bringing this forward from May 2016 and it is mostly unchanged. I will put in BOLD ALL-CAP ITALICS when I have changed something. ———— Can You Make a Living Writing Only Short Fiction? Every year or so I look at this topic once again, do the math, see if anything has changed over the last couple of years. And now, here in May 2016, things have changed some, but in my opinion it would still be possible to make a decent living writing only short fiction. Why do I like this topic? Actually, because I love short fiction, meaning any story under around…
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In The Heart of Forgetting
This Week Is Smack In The Middle… …of the Time of Great Forgetting. Actually, might be a little closer to the end, but it clearly is the worst week. I can see it in the number of assignments turned in, in the number of comments about posts, both in letters and online, and in the lack of chatter about writing on different lists. For those of you who have not heard me talk about this fascinating time for writers, it is when all thoughts of the New Year’s Resolutions have vanished and when writing seems to be something you will do tomorrow. It starts early May and runs through late…
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What I Learned
A Very Quick List of the Main Thing I Learned from Different Writers… Just the main thing I learned from each of them that sticks with me… I learned much more from each one, of course, but this is the main thing from each that shaped me into the writer I am today. Why I remember each of these lessons is because I learned them deep. Very deep. Ray Bradbury… I learned from Ray that writing stories one-a-day or one-a-week does not lower the quality of the story or its value. Harlan Ellison… As I said last night, I learned it is possible to write clean, one-draft award-winning fiction. Algis…
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Harlan Has Left The Building
Harlan Ellison Died In His Sleep… I am sure that over the next few days you will hear good and bad things about Harlan, and a ton of Harlan stories, as people like to call them. I have my share as well. Not going to give you many. At least not here. I considered Harlan a friend. Kris and I got to know him in 1987 when we started up Pulphouse and he was a friend and mentor to us for a lot of years. And I had read his writing for years before that, including The Glass Teat columns. We were not in touch much the last decade because…
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A Great Take On Writing Into The Dark
Writer Michael La Ronn Video… Michael La Ronn, a fine writer of a lot of great books who also does a great podcast, is doing a series on YouTube about writing books, and he featured my book Writing into the Dark. At first I thought this would be a sort of review, and since I don’t tend to read or watch reviews, good or bad, of my own work, I had thanked him and not watched what he had done. Then a friend watched it and said it was so much more than a review and I needed to watch it. So I did. And it is so much more…