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It Was A Monday
So To Hit My Streak… I am only putting up the listings of the January regular workshops that are starting tomorrow and Wednesday. And those signed up for the How to Write a Holiday Story in January from the Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter, it is also starting tomorrow, so don’t forget that. Here is a list of the workshops: The regular workshops last six weeks and are $300. Some good workshops this month. And Writing Romance is brand new. Class #1… Jan 7th … WRITING ROMANCEClass #4… Jan 7th … Writing into the DarkClass #5… Jan 7th … Writing Sales CopyClass #6… Jan 8th … Depth in WritingClass #7… Jan 8th…
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Lost Five Challenge Writers
Five Short-Story-Per-Week Writers… They didn’t make it through the holiday season. And actually, that is fewer than I would have expected to lose. Middle of the winter, flu and cold season, holiday, travel, and who knows what else. A ton of reasons to not complete a story in a week, or even think about writing for a few weeks. And this year, with the holidays smack in the middle of the week so none of us had a clue if it was Monday, Tuesday, Friday, or what? Sunday deadline just seemed alien to many, me included. And what was amazing is that all five writers that dropped out over the…
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January Workshops Starting
Romance Workshop and Others… On January 7th and 8th, the regular workshops for January are starting. And that includes the brand new How to Write Romance workshop. Besides the Lifetime Workshop Subscribers who can take a workshop when they like, only one person has signed up for the Romance workshop. But I am still going to record it and have fun doing so. I want to work through it myself, to be honest, to nail down some points for my own writing. Plus a number of the Lifetime Workshop Subscribers have said they are interested, so will do it for them as well. The regular workshops last six weeks and…
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Six Decades
Now I Officially Feel Old… Thanks to the great writer Mel Odom, who pointed out on a post that he will have published in five decades when his new book comes out later this month, I was forced to do the same calculation. Sigh… When my next book (a large collection of 33 stories) is published on January 15th, I will have been published in six decades. I think I have that count right. 1 — Published my first short stories in 1974, and forty or fifty poems to literary magazines, so that counts the 1970s. 2 — Published a ton of stories and my first novel in 1988. 3…
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Book Birth Day
Kris Did An Awesome Post… And an important one. In fact, she and I have been thinking this way for a long time, just having a name for it now is really, really helpful in the attitude change that is required for this new world of writing. And as Kris does so well, she explained this attitude shift perfectly. So go read her post. You can find it at Book Birth Day. Might be a piece of advice that will save your career if you have been locked into the launch mentality of old publishing. Time to crawl out of the last century if you are and join 2020. Books…
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First Day New Year
A Good One Here… Actually, we started the day off watching the fantastic fireworks over the Strip here in Vegas. Nice night, not too cold, great fun. This this morning we were out toward Summerlin in a park, running a 5K charity run. We ran in the same park on New Year’s Eve in the early evening. So two runs in about 18 hours. I did fine on the first one, but I have a hip injury that slowed me down on the second one this morning. But I made it just fine. Slow, but fine. Now to give the injury a few days to heal before running again. However,…
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The Demands of a Streak
You Are Seeing It Tonight... It’s two hours into the new year and because of my blog streak of not missing a day in seven and a half years, I am typing this now. Now that is power. But I had a good New Year’s Eve. Got a bunch of things done earlier in the day, then Kris and I did a 5K fun run at 4 pm. Then more work in the evening, then we went to what is called the “wine deck” in our building that faces the Strip and watched the fireworks at midnight. (Our condo faces downtown.) So great fun, relaxing day while getting a bunch…
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What WMG Publishing Did
In 2019… A wonderful year-end summary of 2019 at WMG Publishing by the associate publisher, Gwyneth Gibby. I knew we had been busy, but wow. You want to know about everything WMG related in books and such, go to: WMG Publishing Inc. ———————————– How do you measure a year? Sometimes it feels like the song from Rent, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” and every one of them goes by at an excruciatingly slow pace. Or, as in 2019, suddenly you realize that 525,600 minutes of life and work and growth have passed by in a blink! WMG has launched multiple big, new projects; published new novels in multiple…
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My Own Getting Ready
Charts, Graphs, Planning… So much to do to get ready for this coming new year. And I am honestly having a blast. For example, tonight I did a 20 week chart to track my steps, my running, my weight loss, calories in, that sort of thing. (Basically a spread sheet.) But I printed it out by the week and every day I write down exactly what I managed the day before. For each week I have a goal for weight, a goal for total steps, a goal for total running miles. Going to build running slowly until May, steps stay the same at 12,000 a day, seven days a week.…
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Playing With Covers
Having Fun On This Saturday Night… I did three covers tonight in just about 45 minutes, and that included looking for art that sort of matched for the three collections. That’s right, 45 minutes for three wrap-around paperback covers. These will need the spines on them, of course, where the black bar is at, since they are larger than my normal short story paperbacks. But the front covers can be chopped and used for electronic book covers as they stand now. I did them in InDesign. And I am still learning that, so a few minutes was spent a couple times looking for how to do something. (grin) These covers…