-
A Fun Interview
I Got Interviewed about Writing a Novel in Ten Days… That book is part of a great writing bundle at the moment, so Jamie Ferguson (who has a book in the bundle as well) interviewed me and it came out pretty nifty. Thanks, Jamie. She even put the covers of all twelve of my Thunder Mountain novels in there. I honestly, until that point, had never seen them all together or even realized there were twelve of them. I just write them, I don’t count them. (grin) But they look pretty darned cool. You can find the interview at: Posted by Blackbird Publishing on Thursday, October 11, 2018 Or if you are…
-
Intellectual Property
This is Called IP for Short… Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secrets. All are forms of IP. Writers deal mostly in copyright. That is what we license, but few writers know anything about what they license. And this post will not be a long, dull screed on copyright, I promise. In fact, it will be fairly short. I want to deal with value of copyright is all. A simple topic, right? Nope. “Patents, trademarks and copyrights generally have associated costs and are usually capitalized as assets on the balance sheet.” Oh, oh… So how do you figure the value of that asset when a copyright will last the life of…
-
Last Call On October Workshops
I Will Be Switching Them Out… And if you have a credit from the recent Kickstarter, just write me and I’ll get you into an October workshop if you want. Or you can use the credits at any time into the future. This month might be one of the best months of workshop choices we have ever offered. Sign up at Teachable.com And there are lifetime subscriptions available on Teachable as well if you decide to get serious and really try to take as many as possible. Class #37 Oct 2nd How to Study Writing Class #38 Oct 2nd Endings Class #39 Oct 2nd Point of View Class #40 …
-
Getting To Some Writing
Yes, Still In the Challenge… But way behind because life has just jammed up over the last few weeks with far, far too many things that must be done. And exercise is one of those things. But I have not given up on my challenge just yet. Yesterday I got back into the book and tonight I’m going to give it writing time. So a short post because for tonight writing comes ahead of this blog. Go figure. So instead of something worthwhile, you get a picture of me standing in front of a sign before a 5k charity run a few days ago. And no, that is not my…
-
B&N In Trouble
The Sky Is Falling… Finally…And Again… Ever since the beginning of the ebook revolution, and then the collapse of the poorly run Borders, Chicken Little has been running around saying the sky is falling when it comes to Barnes&Noble. It wasn’t. For years B&N was fine, but clearly having issues and going the wrong way and not responding well at all to disruptive forces in publishing. (Huge understatement there.) But it was a sound business until one day this last year, it wasn’t. The bad management, too many losses, no direction, and too many CEOs finally caught up with it. Now some reports have B&N living on a $750 million…
-
Sad News About David Willoughby
We Lost Another Great One in the Book Field… David Willoughby lost his battle with cancer. Now I did not know David that well at all. But I loved to see him coming toward me at a convention or a signing table. He was always cheerful and sometimes knew more about my books than I did. Actually most of the time. And this went on for decades. When he kept digging those books out of one of his bags for me to sign, it was always a joy. And he always felt bad that he had so many. I laughed at that and usually said it was because I wrote…
-
Stunned By The Voice
A Detail About The Voice That Flat Amazed Me… One young woman was back after failing last season to get a chair to turn. (She got two this time.) And in the conversation about her courage to come back, and how she had gone away and worked really hard, it was revealed that any time a judge told someone who failed to get a chair to turn to come back, that person had an automatic invite back. That’s right, all a judge had to do was say “come back” to a singer who failed and the invite was automatically there. And then the detail was mentioned that almost knocked me…
-
All October Workshops Started
Still Time To Get In… And if you have a credit from the recent Kickstarter, just write me and I’ll get you into an October workshop if you want. Or you can use the credits at any time into the future. This month might be one of the best months of workshop choices we have ever offered. Sign up at Teachable.com And there are lifetime subscriptions available on Teachable as well if you decide to get serious and really try to take as many as possible. Class #37 Oct 2nd How to Study Writing Class #38 Oct 2nd Endings Class #39 Oct 2nd Point of View Class #40 Oct…
-
Switching the Schedule To Daytime
Started Today… To get to writing and making things possible for me to write enough hours to do this ten novel challenge, Kris and I decided I needed to switch my schedule to writing during the day. It just fit everything about living here in Vegas. Just as writing late into the night fit everything about living on the coast. So today I got up a little before 7 a.m. and Kris and I were going across the starting line of a 5k race at 8 a.m. Now some of you know I have been trying to lose weight and I want to run a marathon in the middle of…
-
Creating a Habit of Writing
How to Do It?… Make a schedule and stick to it. Pretty soon the schedule becomes a habit. That’s how. It really is that simple, but that difficult. First of all, I needed to want to write again. Got that going with the challenge. Forced my own hand there, maybe a little sooner than I should, but ah well, it’s going. Second, I had to get used to this new place and Kris’s world here since I have spent most of the last six months in Oregon cleaning out the house we lived in for 23 years. Spent the last six weeks plus learning to live and love this wonderful…