-
Good Time for a Challenge
Beginning of July… Six months until the end of the year. Always a great time to start a challenge. I’m going to fire at 12 novels in six months. And yes, already got started on the first one tonight. Got four challenges on Teachable. Write six novels in one year (one every two months), write a novella per month, write a short story per week, or publish a major book every month. All four of those challenges will really make the second half of this year be a focused and good one. (I just looked at those and went “Doing all four at the same time would be great fun.”…
-
Challenge Mixed Bag
Didn’t Hit It, but Still All Right… My challenge starting in 2022 was to write a short story per day. 365 days. I knew clear back in November when I finished the 70 Books in my 70th Year and started thinking about this challenge again that I would have trouble with it. And not for most writer’s reasons. I knew I would have trouble keeping track and doing something with all the stories. I thought I had that solved. Nope. I wrote 31 stories in January and a story every day in February and a story per day for the first half of March… Going fine, having no issues other…
-
Keeping Track
So Much Stuff To Keep Track Of… I have been talking this last half year with the challenge about how not being able to keep track of a lot of stories has flat stopped me a number of times. And two days ago I was looking for a Poker Boy story I remember writing, but it was not in my Smith’s Monthly spread sheet and I ended up finding two other Poker Boy stories that I had written and lost in files that had never seen the light of day, but still did not find the story I have a memory of writing. Sigh… And then there is keeping track…
-
Finished Kris’s New Fey Novel
Stunningly Good! I’m not going to say anything about it in detail, because I don’t want to ruin it for all the fans, but I will just say this: It is amazing and I can hardly wait for her to finish the next one (third one). And now the first novella makes a ton of sense. How she does it is beyond me. Bunch of stuff coming out this coming week. A new Smith’s Monthly and a new issue of Pulphouse Magazine, among two of them. And working on a new Pulphouse Magazine Kickstarter subscription campaign that will be out in a few weeks. That will be a fun one.…
-
Fun Having My Own Monthly Magazine
I CAN DO WHAT I WANT… So tonight I just finished laying out Smith’s Monthly #62 and decided I wanted to do something fun in #63. I wanted to focus on jukebox stories. About forty years ago, I wrote my first jukebox story about a jukebox in a bar that actually takes a person back to their memory of a song while the song plays. Over the years I wrote a lot of jukebox stories, the first being published in Night Cry Magazine in 1987. The most famous of them all was the story “Jukebox Gifts,” published first in F&SF. That story has been reprinted all over the place, optioned…
-
Example of Writing Levels…
Stage Three vs Stage Four Writers… What I am about to show you is not always the case. A lot of stage four writers, me included, often write simple, clear sentences when the character or the type of story, or the moment in the story demands it. But I wrote this as a response to a writer working in the Power Words workshop. Young professional writers flat don’t know what Power Words are and often, because of workshops, think they are overwriting when they use them. Early professional writers, stage three, can’t even see Power Words most of the time. So first let me give you an example of a…
-
Blogging and Bill…
August 21st, 2011… My close friend, Bill Trojan, book dealer, died suddenly on the last day of the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno. I spent most of the next year working on his estate, which was why I ended up losing the vision in one eye. But I made a promise to Bill to honor what he had spent his life doing, and that was collecting. (Bill was a hoarder, but it is commonly known that you are not a hoarder when you collect books, comics, stamps, coins, art, and very high-priced pulp magazines, even when there is nothing more than a path in your three-bedroom home and in…
-
Half-Price Sale
Going On Now… All things on WMG Publishing Teachable are half price. Just over one week. Code to get a class or workshop or anything else on WMG Teachable at half price is: SummerHoliday Just hit the one you want, then put in the code and hit apply and the price will be half. I know this is the time of great forgetting, but a workshop or class just might help you get a little more done during this time. Also, you can get workshops, classic workshops, pop-ups, and lectures for the future. You can get three of each at a discounted price and then get half off that discounted…
-
Two New Workshops and Sale!
A Summer Holiday Sale… I am putting up the July workshops, as well as a few others, and June workshops start on the 7th, so we figured we would give everyone a chance to get a workshop they want for the summer at half price. So the half-price sale will go from today, May 29th until Thursday June 9th. The code to get anything on WMG Teachable at half price is: SummerHoliday Two new regular workshops will be starting in July (They will be added to the Lifetime Workshops in a day or so when they are launched.) The two new workshops are MEDIA KIT WORKSHOP… A six week workshop…
-
Getting Things Cleaned Up
Licensing Next Week… So got to get a lot of things done ahead of time this weekend. That includes getting Smith’s Monthly #61 laid out and back to WMG so they can fire it out. And recording what I need to record for the week. Tomorrow (Saturday) I will post some recordings in the Master Business Class on the how and the why of the Licensing Expo and details about the WMG Suite. So watch for that later tomorrow. And I did a bunch of business stuff today to get it all out of the way as well. Allyson will be here Sunday, which is the first time in 2.5…