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Colliding Worlds Five Volume Set…
100 Science Fiction Stories… Fifty from Kris, fifty from me, in a five volume set. Colliding Worlds We are slightly over halfway through the campaign and it is doing great. We hit the third stretch goal, so everyone gets more books and two classic workshops. Basically, tThis is us having a great time. We have also talked about doing joint collections of some sort of another, and then Gwyneth came up with the idea of us putting 100 of our science fiction stories in the same set of five books called COLLIDING WORLDS and both Kris and I loved the idea. Really, if you have a few minutes, watch the…
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A Blog Post Worth Reading
From a Bestseller Going Indie… Interesting stuff. Worth the read. They have been hybrid for a while, but looks like the math got them finally on the side of indie. (grin) Math can do that. And note they kept saying “Forever” when talking about rights. Anyhow, nothing else tonight except I have Smith’s Monthly #45 headed for publication and I almost have #46 together. So here is the link that you really should, for fun and education, go read. Flowers and Questions
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One More Distracted Day
Totally Expected… All good stuff today, of course. And by the time the world let go of me enough, and I had a nap to catch up on missed sleep, there wasn’t a lot of time and focus. But since I had just finished a novel yesterday, I spent today’s free time on Smith’s Monthly #45. I am basically done with it, a few ads to fill out, want to double check some stuff, then off it goes tomorrow to get published. Yeah! Soon as available, I will announce it here and the subscriptions to the electronic will go out, and the paper will follow when the paper issues are…
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New Challenge Update
Nothing Changed… Just Some Focus… With all the world events, it has been damn near impossible for most of us to focus over the last two months. Still, going into 2021 with the vaccine coming on and the chaos-in-chief leaving, I figured the future was solid enough to make some goals and to push myself for 2021. And I still believe that. Just didn’t know that 2020 was going to have a 13th month. So lost a bunch of days and a bunch of focus, as many of us did over the last 20 days. And the waiting and wondering what was going to happen next just puts an underlying…
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Colliding Worlds Kickstarter Doing Great!
Hit Second Stretch Goal… And headed for the third. Kris and I are very pleased because we really love this idea of having a joint set of collections. Five books with fifty of her stories and fifty of mine to make 100 science fiction stories in total. That’s right, all science fiction. And all types of science fiction. All with the title Colliding Worlds. All of these have been published before, but I guarantee not one person out there besides the crew at WMG Publishing will have read them all. Or even a quarter of the 100 stories. Some of mine have only seen print in early volumes of Smith’s…
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Working On Smith’s Monthly
Taking Longer But Almost Done… Maybe two more days before it is finished and heads for print, the first issue since 2017. Then I am going to start at once on the February issue and get out ahead. March right behind that. Why talking longer is the learning curve on InDesign complex magazine layout. Two columns with ads and everything. And second instead of being able to use some of the ads from the first 44 issues, I am rebuilding every ad. That is taking time, but that will get quicker as each issue goes by. So my work schedule is holding on both the last few chapters of the…
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Some Updates
On Different Streaks, Challenges, and Exercise… — Today is 3,084 straight days I have done a blog a day here without missing. Yup, that’s nuts. — I am slowly ramping back up my exercise, gaining a little bit more a week on a walking streak. I let myself relax and not push after the marathon because I wanted to just not think about it over the holidays. So going to take me another month or so to get the steps back up to pre-marathon levels. And maybe two months to drop the weight down to marathon level and then keep it going down. So all fine there. — I’m a…
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That’s Annoying
Just One of Those Things… As last night, another annoyance caused by epic disorganization. And I do mean epic. Fixable, but annoying. This today comes from my inability to get organized in a meaningful and long-term fashion with my writing and publishing. And this concerns Smith’s Monthly. Today, I really dug into the layout of Smith’s Monthly Issue #45. Now understand, Issue #44 came out in the summer of 2017. I have a ton of ads and promotions about a lot of my books in each issue. You know… filler. Since the magazine is all mine, might as well promote some of the other stories and series and such I…
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Story #1 of Challenge
I Promise I Won’t Do This Every Day… But for the first story, I figured it was worth mentioning. And more than likely I’ll talk about the challenge once a week or so as it is going on. And post small thumbnails of covers. So for story #1 I wrote a story I needed to write for the Year of the Cat #11. It is called “Cat Running Wild” and it is a Pahket Jones story, who is a spin-off of my Poker Boy and Ghost of a Chance series. I have done 7 Pahket Jones stories so far. She is a superhero in the world of cats. Story was…
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Math is the Friend of Prolific…
And the Enemy of Excuses… Writers who want to hold dearly to the myths of writing must stay away from math. Math can be super deadly to writer’s fears and myths and beliefs. Math, after all, is just numbers. So let me point out where this is glaringly clear in a simple example. You write 250 words of fiction a day, shorter than many of your emails. Most writers can do that in 15 minutes or less. So you do that every day, you manage to make your writing important enough in your life that you carve out 15 minutes a day to do it. 250 words x 365 days…