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Workshop Questions and Day Four: Writing a Novel in Half a Month
Some Workshop Sale Questions Answered First… Before jumping into the first post for Day Four, Chapter Four… Questions About Classes for the sale… Yes, you can still jump into the Shared Worlds class. Lots of videos to catch up on, and just last night I put out a call for another Cave Creek story. I am sure there will be more calls for stories in the Cave Creek shared world, but if you do jump in, watch all the videos first. Again, there are a lot of them. Licensing Class and Decades Ahead Classes will be going for another full year. The Pandemic ground them to a halt because Licensing…
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Workshop Sale AGAIN!!
Back to School, AGAIN… Workshop Half-Price Sale As I said two months ago, I honestly never would have predicted this last spring. Not in a million years. Not many did and those who did warn us of this, none of us listened to. We just couldn’t imagine being locked up for a year. But at least now we have some hope on the horizon with the vaccines going out. But they won’t do much good especially over the coming months. Back when WMG Publishing did what we all thought here would be the last workshop sale way back in May, 2020, we had an expectation that as things opened up,…
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Day Three: Writing a Novel in Half a Month
Chapter Three: Day Three Again another regular day so far. Last night, after I signed off here, I worked on reading a little and ended up going to bed at 4 am. Day Three, Entry One. 11:30 am. Rolled out of bed and got to this computer around 12:30 pm. Worked on emails and workshop stuff for an hour. April workshops all posted now. New workshop sale will start tomorrow. 1:30 pm. I headed down to our office and loaded 16 very heavy boxes of books into our SUV to take to the storage unit. Amazingly windy day, gusting up close to 40 mph, but sunny and clear. So with…
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Day Two: Writing a Novel in a Half Month
Chapter Two: Day Two … Standard day so far. I will keep doing the hourly breakdowns of the day as I go forward. I’m keeping little notes on a scratch pad so I remember exactly. Last night, after I signed up, I worked on reading Cave Creek stories for about an hour before at 3 am going to watch some television. Ended up getting to bed around 3:30 am. Day Two, Entry One. 11:30 am. Rolled out of bed and got to this computer around 12:30 pm with my breakfast protein bar. That is pretty standard for me these days unless something strange is going on. I spent one hour…
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Day One: Writing a Novel in Half a Month
Chapter One: Day One I will be returning here numbers of times during the day to update this chapter. That way I don’t miss anything along the way. At least I hope I don’t. Also, I will be able to talk about my moods, what I am thinking about something. Much better than trying to recreate the entire day at the end, when I am tired. So onward with this. Day One, Entry One 11:10 am. Rolled out of bed just about at my normal time these days and with my breakfast bar, made it to my internet computer around noon. I worked on email for a while, then spent…
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Writing In Public…
Prologue Decided to do it. Write a novel in public again, detailing it out in blog posts every night. Totally insane, but great fun, which is why I am doing this. The last few days were interesting. The more I looked at the next ten to twelve days, and looked at deadlines, and publishing and other writing projects I will be doing, the more I realized how much I had to do. So the sane thing would be to just push off trying to do a novel quickly and in public. I’ve failed a number of times trying this because of scheduling issues the first year I was here in…
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Smith’s Monthly #46 Out Tomorrow
In Theory… That means that I will have gotten two months out in a row, and already working on Smith’s Monthly #47 layout (March issue) and putting #48 together (April issue). As I do covers for short stories, I’ll post them here. But I have a desire to do a novel quickly, so I may do one of those books that I talk about the writing moment-by-moment each day for 10 days. The reason I got onto this idea was way back (years and years ago) I did that here, put all the blogs together into a book called Writing a Novel in Ten Days. Well, that book is in…
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Downside of Being Disorganized…
Just Because I Like to Write… Yup, me and Heinlein’s 4th Rule have a sort of love/hate relationship. As I have said often, I have no idea how many short stories I have written. Number ranges from 400 and up. Maybe way up. Over 200 have been published in Smith’s Monthly alone. So while putting the next issue of Smith’s Monthly together, I had a story manuscript in paper, but could not find the file anywhere. So a few days later I had my writing computer basically give up the ghost (lost nothing but the mouse said “Nope” and I tried three different alternatives and all of them said, “Nope.”),…
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Holy Smokes!!! Was That Fun!!!
And a Lot of Work… Tonight, for the last three hours straight, without a break, I have been doing a master class in putting collections together. That’s right, tonight I finished up putting sixty of my science fiction stories into six volumes. Kris had already done hers and she had already divided her stories up into the six volumes and sort of labeled then with a rough idea header that she used. But as those of you who watched the video on the Kickstarter can tell, Kris’s idea of a rough header and mine do not often match in thinking. But I did the best I could since she got…
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Herding Cats (Writers)
Totally Insane… I have learned this lesson now over 15 years of trying to help writers with workshops and other projects. And I learned the lesson way before that, back in the late 1980s as an editor. The lesson? Writers as a class are pathologically incapable of following even the simplest instruction. When it comes to writers, I do try to be clear as much as I can. The other day I talked here about manuscript format and just a surface reason for it in fiction. I even went so far as to give a link. Made little to no difference even on manuscripts I am getting for classes since…