Getting Ready To Start The Challenge

Doing All Sorts of Odds and Ends…

Mostly I worked to clean up things I was behind on, such as email. And I did some resting as well.

So the day was about the focus to get started writing short stories tomorrow. How do I get ready when I have no idea at all what story or stories I will be writing? I won’t even give any idea a thought until I sit down at my writing computer tomorrow. (Even if I did, my memory is so bad I would forget it by then anyway.)

Well, I cleaned up my writing desk. That is sort of a signal to me to clear the decks for what is coming.

I use title triggers to start writing, so I went up to a large room we have full of digest magazines starting in 1943 and forward. I grabbed some fun ones to pack in a box to take out to the bookstore to be listed on eBay. A I did that, I had a notebook and I looked at table of contents and took half titles, doing two columns of half-titles.

When I start writing, I’ll grab that sheet, smash together two half-titles that seem interesting and get typing. So I got that new sheet, one of about twenty I have now. (When I use a half title, I cross it off so some of the sheets have a lot of crossed off entries.)

I talked with Kris about timing some because I am going to bed earlier these days and getting up earlier. So writing until 6 am won’t do it anymore, so I need to start writing earlier. I made a promise to Kris that while I am up here packing the house and writing and doing workshops, I would eat three meals and get at least seven hours of sleep. Going to keep that promise as best I can.

And I did a bunch of detail stuff to get it off my mind.

So I suppose you could call what I did today just sort of leaning toward writing.

Tomorrow I fire up. Fun title for the blog series.

How to Write Thirty Stories In Thirty Days While Moving

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Femme Fatale Bundle

Also, I want to remind everyone of the fantastic bundle I am lucky enough to be in with a bunch of great writers.

It’s called the Femme Fatale bundle on Storybundle.

https://www.storybundle.com/thriller

It’s a mystery/thriller bundle with Femme Fatales in every book, in one form or another. Trust me, Kris’s novel The Perfect Man will mess with your mind. And you can never go wrong with Lawrence Block, O’Neil De Noux, or Libby Fischer Hellmann.

And you might even like my novel and Mary Jo Assassin.

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INSIDER’S GUIDE Workshops Now Available…

— Insider’s Guide to Selling Short Fiction in 2018/2019 (Starts April 8th)
— Insider’s Guide to Writing Successful Space Opera (Starts April 8th)
— Insider’s Guide to Writing Serial Fiction (2,000 word parts of a novel) (Starts May 6th)
— Insider’s Guide to Writing Detective Fiction. (Starts May 6th)

$300 each, limited to ten writers plus lifetime subscribers. One time workshops. They will not be regular. Sorry. These will fill so don’t wait for the last minute on these. And yes, you can use your credits.

I will be adding these onto Teachable tomorrow (Sunday).

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APRIL REGULAR WORKSHOPS…

Sign up directly through Teachable or if you have a credit, write me. Everyone who wrote me and signed up through me, I have sent out the letter with the code to get into each workshop. If you are using a credit for an April workshop and did not get a letter from me, write me.

Otherwise, you can sign up on Teachable.

And clearly the Time of Great Forgetting is kicking in. Many of these workshops have no one signed up yet.

https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com

Class #37… Apr 3rd … Think Like a Publisher
Class #38… Apr 3rd … Endings
Class #39… Apr 3rd … Point of View
Class #40… Apr 3rd … Writing Mysteries
Class #41… Apr 3rd … Speed
Class #42… Apr 3rd … Teams in Fiction
Class #43… Apr 4th … Depth in Writing
Class #44… Apr 4th … How to Edit Your Own Work
Class #45… Apr 4th … Character Development
Class #46… Apr 4th … Writing Secondary Plot Lines
Class #47… Apr 4th … Advanced Depth
Class #48… Apr 4th … Novel Structure