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Pen Names…
Some More On Pen Names… A friend wrote me and pointed out that I was a little harsh on not needing pen names in the indie world in a recent post. He reminded me that there are many reasons to use pen names, something I know and tell people all the time. Reasons to use pen names in indie… You write erotica and other stuff. Keep the erotica under a pen name. You are a doctor or some such thing in real life and don’t want the fact that you write fiction out to your clients. You work in law enforcement or law and write mystery or crime or thriller.…
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Zero-Sum Game
Publishing is NOT a Zero-Sum Game A zero-sum game comes out of game theory and basically means that when one person wins, another must lose. Writing and publishing does not work that way. There is not a finite number of readers who can read one book a year or a finite number of readers who read fifty books a year and everything in between. And readers come into genres, read for a while, and then go away, or new readers every year are grown and others die. A niche explodes, a niche dies. Nature process of reader’s tastes. No one book in the history of the world has reached every…
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Excuses…
Wow Can Writers Make Excuses to Not Write… Of course, those who have taken the Killing the Critical Voice workshop we offer every month know that if something you have made up in your head is keeping you from writing, that is critical voice winning. Critical Voice has one job, and that is to stop you from writing. Creative Voice is always positive. Critical Voice is always negative. So for some reason lately, I have been hearing some amazing excuses to not write. Now granted, we all have health and family issues that stop the writing. Those are not excuses. Those are reality and we come back to writing when…
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Paying Attention Sale
Holiday Here In the States… The holiday here is called Memorial Day which honors those who served in the military and also family members who are no longer with us. And it is a time where people take vacations since it is a three-day weekend, or they spend time with their families in picnics or other activities. Experts also say that today is supposed to be the busiest travel day of the year as well. And for writers, this tends to be the first major weekend of the Time of Great Forgetting. Writers just forget about writing and learning and publishing and often don’t come back to paying attention until…
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Just Writing Fiction Tonight…
The City is Quiet… My email is quiet, and I want to do some reading tonight of stories I am behind reading, and Kris’s new novel. But first I’m going to spend a few hours just writing my own fiction. To be honest, that feels weird. I normally have so many things that must be done yesterday, so much so that I work in the fiction writing late at night. But tonight I am going back to my schedule of getting to the fiction by midnight and if I can do that regularly, I will be back up to my old speed. So during this time of forgetting for most…
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Decisions…
We All Make These Kinds of Decisions Every Day… I have spent the entire day on errands and then recording some videos and then doing assignments and answering email. It’s a Monday. It is now 2:20 AM and I have not gotten any writing done. So instead of spending my last waking hour tonight doing a long blog, I am going to shut this business screen down and go to my computer and get at least an hour of words done. There, I lead by example.
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May is Screaming Past
Time of Great Forgetting is in Full Force… Amazing how every year at this time a vast majority of new fiction writers and early professional fiction writers just forget everything about their writing goals and ambitions. Professional fiction writers and those writers working hard to get to that place do not have this trouble. But it happens every year to more than I can count. About the last of April, the attention is drawn to other things besides writing and by now (end of May) writing has mostly been forgotten, or something to be done later. Spring is at hand and everything that means for each person. This forgetting goes…
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Another Day of Needing to Write
Romantic Suspense Workshop In Town… I honestly am doing nothing with them, but I am recording the study along videos and reading the stories from those assignments for those taking the Study Along. It is not many because this is the time of great forgetting.. And Allyson from WMG is here and we are having great meetings and such as well. So no long post tonight, but soon. Again, questions on the first seven parts of the series, feel free to ask. Or something I have not talked about and you would like me to, feel free to ask on that as well. Off to write.
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Writing Tonight…
Writing Fiction Instead of Nonfiction… Got a late start today, so going to spend the next numbers of hours writing fiction tonight. The series I have been writing has a number more parts to it. So if you have questions, feel free to ask. Kickstarter Updates will be happening in the coming days as well, so if you have kickstarter questions about one we have done, hold off on those. So now over to writing fiction. So much more fun than writing nonfiction, that’s for sure. Hope you are having a great weekend.
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Writers Often See The Dark Side…
At Least Beginning and Early Stage Writers… I have noticed this over the years, but a couple things over the last few months really brought this concept home. This functions in two ways. For example, in the Depth workshop, one of the assignments is to see an ex-spouse at the end of a setting assignment. 99 out of 100 of those assignments are negative, hateful, full of loathing or disgust or fear of the ex-spouse. Fiction folks. You have a choice to move away from the cliche and the negative. Writing topics in other workshops go along with this trend. If there is a choice between positive outlook and a…