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Cover Fun for #52 of Smith’s Monthly…
Five Short Stories and the Issue Cover… I was having fun working on these covers, stopped for dinner, came back and my InDesign had blown a fuse. Not kidding. It wanted me to sign up for a seven day free trial. Well, I had been using InDesign for decades. I tried everything, and considering this is Saturday, I was going to be out of luck until I could get help from Allyson and Josh at WMG on Monday. But Kris convinced me on late Saturday night to call Allyson, that she was still up because Kris had just gotten a text from her on another matter. So I did and…
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Cosmic Visioinaries
A Spin-Off of Space: 1975 If you did not get the anthology Space: 1975 edited by Robert Jeschonek, you might want to grab it in this bundle. Fantastic and crazy stories that are space opera with a 1975 slant or theme or something 1975 in space. In my story I used a giant disco ball that was an alien spaceship the size of Jupiter coming in from another galaxy. And two old people from an Earth nursing home need to stop it. Yeah, that kind of crazy. And when Bob asked me into this fantastic bundle (Cosmic Visionaries), I asked if I could continue on with the same story and…
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Learning is Forever…
In Writing and Publishing… Kris and I were talking today on the way back from lunch about some of the writers who have just faded away. And the more we talked, the more we realized that we knew the answer on what happened to most of them. They all just stopped learning. They reached a level that they were happy with their writing and stopped learning for a dozen different reasons. That is flat deadly in just a few years. The reason I hear the most and understand the least is the fear that learning something will upset some perfect balance in their writing and they will never sell again.…
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Study Along Online Classes…
They Go with the In-Person Classes… Study Along workshops are held at exactly the same time, with the same reading list. as the in-person classes here in Vegas. The In-Person workshops start in March and we have another every two months until January 2023. These are hardcore craft workshops. We are holding the in-person Vegas classes to 15 writers and everyone must be vaccinated, so we are very certain they will take place. So at the same time as each workshop here in Vegas, there is a study-along class by the same name that is online on Teachable. It will be held from Monday through Thursday with the same story…
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Power Words
Time To Consider Them… Power words, just their existence, baffles writers. Actually, most writers never consider them. Writers who know how to use them, just use them. If you don’t know how to use them, it still happens by accident at times, just no control or focus. Kris and I have been talking about doing a Power Words workshop for a long time, just like we talked about a Depth in Writing for a long time before we actually launched it. But the idea that it was too advanced kept us from even trying it. Knowing about power words and using them in the right situations will jump your writing…
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Last Day of the Cattitude Bundle
On Story Bundle… Ten great books of cat stories. This ends on Thursday, so this is the last full day. I have a Pakhet Jones short novel in there called THE BIG TOM that is kind of fun and cool. And I edited the title collection of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine stories called CATTITUDE. They are truly whacked out as you can imagine a Pulphouse cat story might be. An entire book of them. Kris put this incredible bundle together and to be honest it sort of surprised me that there is only one day left. For $15 bucks you can get all ten books of cat stories. This is the…
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Doing a Half-Price Sale Again…
SUMMER SETBACK SALE… For all the details as to why we are doing this again, check yesterday’s post. But the short of it is that if you use the code SETBACK on any class or workshop, you will get it for half price. But remember, this is a short-term sale. Considering how open and once again free we were all feeling here in the States about this pandemic in May, where we are now with the pandemic is a setback in any terms. We are now all better off just staying in and letting this pass over us. Even those of us vaccinated. So lots of classes to take while…
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Summer Setback Sale
We Had No Plans To Do This… But yet here we are. Back at the beginning of June, when we started what we called THE LAST SALE, we really thought it would be. Even though there was a long ways to go with the pandemic, the US had opened back up, and the vaccines were working like gold. All we had to do was just keep up the vaccination pace and the US would be out of this and then, as we tend to do, we could help the rest of the world. But over the next months, Kris and I and half the rest of the population, looked on…
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Collections
Of My Own Stories… I have 51 Issues of Smith’s Monthly published and #52 turned in. Those are, in a way, collections, since it is all my work. Novels, nonfiction, short stories, and so on. But I have also been maintaining a spread sheet of all the short stories I have published in Smith’s Monthly. The spread sheet is so I don’t duplicate any story and I have about 240 stories on that spread sheet. (Found a Poker Boy story tonight not published in there, but in one of my two Poker Boy collections.) Yes, I have two Poker Boy collections. They are called PLAYING A HUNCH and LUCK BE…
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A Success!
Support for a Lot of Writers… That’s what the success of the Pulphouse Fiction Magazine Subscription Drive means. A lot of writer’s stories get published over the next year in six issues of the magazine, and in six different collections as well. In total, over the next year ,we will publish about 180 short stories from top fiction writers. And more readers get to read the writer’s work. Maybe find it for the first time. Another win for the writers. Let me give you just a basic breakdown of costs. Each issue costs around $4,000 in just author costs. Let me repeat that… Just author costs… Sometimes a little more,…