-
Four Challenges Now
They Are Designed to Help and Be Fun… On WMG Teachable, you can find four challenges now. The Great Challenge… Write one short story a week for one year. The Novel Challenge… Write one new novel over 30,000 words every two months for one year. The Novella Challenge… Write one novella (15,000 to 30,000) words per month for one year. The Publishing Challenge… Publish one new major project per month for one year. (Novel, novella, collection, or omnibus all count.) The cost is $600 to buy in ($300 during the sale this next week). You start at any time, but once you start, the clock is ticking. If you miss,…
-
Workshop Sale and Curriculum Update…
THE HALF-PRICE WORKSHOP SALE HAS STARTED!! Go to https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/ Then hit “See All Courses” and find the course you want. It will be half price by hitting Purchase and then on the top of the next page put in the coupon code: MidWinter That will get you the class, the workshops, the lecture, or Pop-Up at half price. And you can buy as many as you want, but you have to do it one at a time since Teachable does not have a shopping cart. The MidWinter sale will last until Thursday, February 24th at 7 pm. In essence ten days total. And yes, all the challenges are half price…
-
Cattatude Story Bundle
Don’t You Just Love Cats? I have always been owned by cats. Actually all my adult life except for a few years when I was traveling too much. I love cats, so I did a bundle with all cat stories in it and a bunch of really great cat writers. This is my blog for that bundle at https://storybundle.com/cats Being a writer, it seems being owned by cats is almost like a requirement for the job description. What do you do for a living? Fiction Writer. Owned by cats? Yup. And one of the great elements of cats and writers is that writers tend to write stories with cats in…
-
Writing and Workshops and Smith’s Monthly
Scary Busy Day… I finished getting an issue of Smith’s Monthly to WMG publishing for copyediting. Then in a few days I will need to lay it out. I wrote a good 2,000 words in introductions and stuff for the issue. Also had an hour-plus meeting with WMG on different stuff. I also did a ton of workshop stuff today. And a lot of assignments. (I don’t count all those words and letters in my total.) And tonight I wrote a 3,000 word Thunder Mountain short story called “Yesterday’s Cold Grave.” So wow are my eyes tired and I need to keep this blog short. So just going to tell…
-
MidWinter Workshop Sale Starts Now!!!
Blogging Early Tonight… Wanted to let everyone know about the sale starting now. Go to https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/ Then hit “See All Courses” and find the course you want. It will be half price by hitting Purchase and then on the top of the next page put in the coupon code: MidWinter That will get you the class, the workshops, the lecture, or Pop-Up at half price. And you can buy as many as you want, but you have to do it one at a time since Teachable does not have a shopping cart. The MidWinter sale will last until Thursday, February 24th at 7 pm. In essence ten days. And yes,…
-
Didn’t Run… Slept!
Kris and I Both Slept In… We figured we needed the sleep more than we needed the three miles. And boy were we right. And I took another hour plus nap later before finally feeling rested. Don’t buy any workshops tonight or in the morning until I give the go-ahead. We have decided to do a Mid-Winter sale. (Actually the code will be MidWinter to get half price.) That said, when the sale starts, I do have all the March workshops up, including the new one SECRETS IN CRAFT. It is a craft workshop talking about the secrets of writing better fiction. Might be one of the best craft workshops…
-
Going to Try For Sleep
Got a 5K Run Early… So got my story done early, going to rest for a bit and go to bed a couple hours early. Still won’t get a full night’s sleep, but will help. The course tomorrow has a pretty good hill on it, but I am still going to try to break 40 minutes. Now my fastest is 31:19, but won’t get close to that since that was two years ago and I was five pounds lighter and it was a flat course. So 40 minutes is my goal. I know, for you runners, that’s slow, but I’m old, and if I do that I should win my…
-
Story Tonight Was Novella
Seven Stories plus Transitions and Fillers… I spent all evening doing this, making sure information was not repeated too badly from story to story, lining it all up as 19 chapters, adding transition to keep the main story line moving through it all. Seven stories are the core. I wrote almost 3,000 new words tonight, more than equal to a short story. So counting this novella called BIG EYES as my story for the night. It will be the lead story in Smith’s Monthly #58 which will be on Patreon and out to subscribers in a week or so. Plus next week it will be part of a cat bundle.…
-
Tried Something New For Me…
Flipped Viewpoints in a Story… Now, this would have been so much easier to just write a new story completely, but since I am doing this challenge, and I was in a spot that it made sense to do this stunt, I thought I would try it. My suggestion… Don’t. I had a Poker Boy story called “Mystery Cat” that also had in it Pakhet Jones. But it was a Poker Boy story, and Poker Boy is first person. I wrote it about two years ago or so and published it in Smith’s Monthly back about a year ago. Pakhat Jones stories are also first person. But in the Poker…
-
Finished a Short Novel
Might Only Be a Novella Tonight I finished another Pakhet Jones story. Now basically I have written an entire larger story in six or seven short stories over the last month and a half. The one last night that I didn’t think stood up that well as a short story, only Kris said it did. Go figure, I’m only the author. I don’t know anything. And I mean that honestly when it comes to my own work. So tomorrow I am going to take all those stories and do the connecting tissue and a bunch more depth and see if it climbs solidly into novella length and maybe short novel…