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A Look Back… Twice
I Put Part of This Up On a Blog in 2013… Ten years ago. But tonight I was also thinking about the decade ahead class that is in its last ten weeks (you can sign up for it and go through it at any time, just ten more weeks of new stuff but all weekly videos are all still there.) Ten years ago I put this blog up about a time in my life fifty years ago. I am a lot of decades ahead from 1973, thats for sure… There is also a brand new five-story driving range opening up within a mile walk of our place, so I am…
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Nora Roberts Had 204 Books Stolen…
By ChatGPT… Without permission, without payment, just 204 novels stolen whole cloth and used to train the AI stuff so lazy-ass writers can use her work to pretend to make their own crap better. Nora just discovered this and is not happy, to say the least. I stopped counting when I got to 28 of my novels stolen without permission or payment. What is bringing this up tonight is that tomorrow I will be pushing a bunch of Kickstarters by writers that are going now. I will put them on the Kickstarter free class and send out a letter to all of the writer’s signed up in that class, all…
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Learning Copyright…
What Does “Learn Copyright” Mean? I’m talking about one tiny area of this on the Bite-Sized Copyright class this week. But much deeper than I will do here. When I tell a writer to learn copyright, I not only mean the Copyright Handbook, which is a great place to start, but I also mean following and understanding what is happening now in the culture when it comes to copyright. Everything from reading the recent copyright suits to reading the WGA settlement agreement. All kinds of copyright stuff. But I also mean learn the history of copyright because most writers have gotten stuck in time at one point or another with…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…