-
New Halloween Story Bundle
This Just Launched!!! And this new bundle is a great one, curated by Kris. And with great writers in it. I would grab this one quick at Storybundle.com. Here is Kris’s full blog she wrote about it, explaining the books and writers in it. THE HALLOWEEN BUNDLE Curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch I love Halloween. I like it much more than the winter holidays, including Christmas and New Year’s, even though I edit annual winter holiday projects. If I’m going to buy holiday merchandise, I’ll get Halloween merchandise. I love a good Halloween short story too. Because scary stuff is fun. Unless it’s real life scary stuff. The people of…
-
Write Only For Yourself…
Something I Teach All The Time… The great artist Bob Eggleton put up a post on Facebook tonight. A quote from Andre Malraux the French novelist (among other things he did.). Malraux said, “An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.” I am constantly talking with young writers who are doing a number of things that I try to convince them are not critical. And often deadly. 1… Writing to market. (What is supposedly hot in sales, what you have already done, what others tell you to write.) 2… Write for beta readers or first readers or workshops. Just pretty silly when you stop and think…
-
The Life and Times of a Copyright…
How One Short Story Made A Lot of Money… So many writers do not understand the value of a single piece of copyright. In this case, let me tell you the story of the life (so far) of a short story titled, “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.” Back in the early 1990s, about thirty years ago, I was invited to write a story for a vampire anthology and like a fool I said yes. I hate vampires. So I put it off until a writing retreat on the Oregon Coast with eight other writers in one house for the weekend. I sat down at my then-massive computer sitting…
-
Reaction To Failure Post Brought Forward
Number of Requests for “Fail to Success”… So I brought this post which I think says it perfectly from 2018… No memory of the challenge I was talking about, or much else from 2018 since Kris was so sick and we moved to Vegas about that point. But somehow I managed this post, so hope it helps some… Maybe One of the Best Quotes from The Voice Ever… On Tuesday, while talking to and encouraging a young woman who didn’t get a chair to turn, Adam Levine said to her out of nowhere, and I quote, “It’s your reaction to your failures that make your success.” As many things on…
-
Stories We Buy At WMG…
Pulphouse, Holiday Spectacular, Other Projects… If a story comes to us, such as through the Pulphouse Kickstarter, the author warrants the following… If you submit a story, you warrant that you are the legal representative for the story, and that it was not created by or with the assistance of “AI” machine learning tools, such as ChatGPT or others, and that it has not been previously published in English, and that it is not under consideration by any other publishers. And we have a similar, more legal-sounding clause in our contracts now. Why? Because simply if you use one of the AI writing services, you are taking other writer’s work (and we hate working…
-
The Myth That Writing is Hard…
I Wrote This in 2009… I have updated it for 2023… It is long but I thought it needed to be said again. And note, this was written before I was doing a blog per day. ————- This myth comes in many forms and has many faces, but let me put it as plainly as I can to start. Myth: To be Good, Writing Must Be Hard. (And it can’t be fun.) Total hogwash, of course, yet it is stunning how many new writers believe this, and how readers, when they bother to think about it, believe the myth as well. And, of course, almost everyone who teaches creative writing…
-
Started Another Streak
I Have a Monster Streak Going… That is the one I wrote about blogging every night here for over 11 straight years without a miss. So I know how to do a streak successfully. And over the years I have started a lot of streaks and challenges for myself. Some are writing streaks like a short story a day for over a hundred days that I did in 2022. That was fun. And I have started a ton of streaks that just went nowhere for one reason or another. Mostly I gave them no power, or they had no end goal. I think a solid goal is maybe the most…
-
Weird Feeling
No Printer… Finished a short story tonight and couldn’t print it up. So it still feels unfinished. Amazing the power of a habit of over 30 years. For all that time, when I finished a story or novel or anything, such as an introduction to a book or issue, I would print it up almost immediately. Within minutes. Manuscript format. And I would give it to Kris to read. That made the story finished for me, solid and on paper, and I seldom (like never) looked at it again except to correct typos Kris found. But Kris’s printer went crazy a week or so ago, and I was busy with…
-
AI Not Protected Under Copyright…
Decision Upheld on Friday… Here in the States, and in different forms in Europe and other countries as well, all forms of AI generated art and text cannot be protected under copyright law and the Berne Convention and thus hold no copyright. You can’t own it. No one does. Last March the copyright office issued decisions on that, and a Federal judge on Friday stood with the copyright office. This is an oh-oh of major proportions for any of you using AI for art or text. To own a piece of work, it must have human creativity. You have an AI cover on one of your books and yet you…
-
Some Questions About Details Classes…
First Two In Each Series Now Available… In fantasy, the first two Down in the Details classes are 1) Magic Shops and 2) Portals. In mystery, the first two available are 1) Unsolved Crimes and 2) Locked Room. In science fiction, the first two are 1) Invasion stories and 2) Exploration stories. Each class has a prompt for a story to write and send it to me for original anthologies in each genre. But I have gotten questions as to why I tell writers to not send the stories to me first. Yes, I pay 6 cents per word, and yes it will be original anthologies, and yes the writers…