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Curriculum for a Career
Strengths Workshops Function as a Curriculum of Study for a Commercial Fiction Writer… At least that is our intent. Let me see if I can explain as I did this afternoon to a couple of other writers who were interested. As writers, looking into the future, the biggest question is always “What do I do next?” Second biggest question is “How do I get there?” Now Kris and I have been crazy enough to try to lay out that path just as someone going into a college would get a path through courses to get to a certain resulting education in the end. Only in these workshops, we also test…
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A Giant Ape Kind of Day
How was that for a silly blog title?… But that’s what it sort of was, actually. Kris and I decided we needed a day doing something different. Can’t call it a day off when our job is having fun writing and playing in publishing. But we do need to do something different at times. So we drove into the valley and saw King Kong: Skull Island. Fun. Exactly as expected. I ate too much popcorn. Then we had a nice dinner, found a good pie shop for pie, then headed home after walking around a big discount store for a time to make sure we had our steps. When we…
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Strength: Regular Business Now Available
The Strength: Regular Business Workshop is now available and live… As I said a few days ago, Kris and I will be looking at writer’s work and testing writers to help each writer personally find out where they are at and what they need to learn going forward. So now the Regular Business workshop is up, focusing on Copyright, Money and Cash Streams, Business Structure, Time Management, Wills and Estates, and a ton more. Find out how much you know about all those topics and also where to find help for what you don’t yet know. THE POINT… All the Strengths Workshop are designed to help you understand story craft, business,…
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More Information and Some Questions on Strengths
We got some great questions today about the Strengths workshop. So thought I should spend a little time here tonight answering those. Remember, we will have six of these workshops when all loaded up in about two weeks. Regular Craft is up now. Regular Business will be up on Sunday. And so on. (See yesterday’s post for all the details.) — First off, we are only limiting the sign-up time for these six Strength Workshops. But once you sign up, you can take your time, clear into the fall or next winter if you want. The speed you take the workshop is completely up to you, in your control. Videos…
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Strengths Workshop Starting Up!!!
We All Wonder How We Are Doing… Now is your chance to find out. Kris and I are doing the Strengths Workshop again after almost two years. We are doing it differently this time. More intense (if that is possible) and more focused so we can give each person better help. THE POINT… Strengths Workshop is to help you understand in story craft, business, and sales where you are at at this moment in time. We will tell you where you are strong and where you need to work. And we will give you help on how to find ways to improve in each area. We will do this in…
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March Online Workshops Starting
March Online Workshops Starting… Still room to jump in. Also, in the next day or so I will announce something Kris and I are doing once again, against our better judgement, but because we got a great deal of requests to do it again after two years. Strengths. Only this time we will be doing it more extensively in a series of workshops to figure out where you are at and what you are strong at and areas you need to work on. The four areas will be Craft, Business, Sales, and Genre. Both basic and advanced in all four. (I’ll explain it all.) They will be very similar to a…
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More Interesting Conversations
Even More Really Interesting Conversations… Not only did I have a fun conversation at lunch today with three other professional writers, but tonight four of us found an area off to one side of the Anchor and talked for almost two hours. All about business. The workshop has a policy of no blogging about the workshop until after it’s over, so thus the vagueness of these posts. But one more day of fun, then back to normal here. And to some fun posts and announcements that might just surprise a few of you. I know it’s been fun here. ————— March Workshops Start Tuesday and Wednesday!! Below is the list…
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Full Workshop Update
ONLINE WORKSHOPS… The letters for those taking an online class in February have gone out. If you are signed up for a February online workshop and didn’t get the first preliminary letter, e-mail me off list. Of the February classes, a couple are close to filling. Point of View, Mystery, Speed, Teams, and Writing Secondary Plot lines all have just one spot open each. They start on Tuesday and Wednesday. The rest have two or three spots open. COAST WORKSHOPS… (2017 anthology workshop has all writing is done and everyone is reading. Science Fiction in April 2017 is full and everyone is reading.) — Mystery workshop in September 2017 has…
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Two New Online Workshops Announced!
TWO NEW ONLINE WORKSHOPS ANNOUNCED… That’s right, not one but two. Writing Endings will start in January and Writing Secondary Plot Lines will start in February. And above this is the announcement for a special on online workshops because so many people missed the Kickstarter we did a few months back. It’s a one week special, so don’t miss it. We won’t do anything like it again until the next Kickstarter campaign two years from now. Besides that, the online workshop schedule is posted now for December through May to help with planning into the new year. You can sign up for any of the workshops on the list at any…
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Point of View
Point of View… I’ve been having a really fun discussion about point of view with a writer who took the new point of view online workshop in October. We have been talking about how there is no omniscient in fiction writing and how summary openings that feel omniscient have viewpoint, both author and character, often combined. For me, putting the point of view online workshop together was really fun. I was able to get past the basics in the first week and really start working on other deeper skills with writers. The point of the POV workshop was to not only give writers new tools, but make writers aware of the…