Dean Wesley Smith

Yup, A Romance Movie… Got stuck right at the “meet cute” of the move called A Christmas Prince staring a bunch of actors I didn’t really know. Stayed with it because I knew every detail that was going to happen and I wanted to see if I would miss. I didn’t. Still a movie nice enough to watch as well. If you want to study either the romance plotting structure or romance team structure, this is a perfect movie to study. No theme deep enough to get in the way, standard romance troupe of hidden prince, standard heroine, everything. And they hit every detail in the plot structure as they…

Last Night’s Post Got Me Some Private Letters… All good ones, all asking about sales blurbs and why they are so bad from New York publishers, for the most part. And got a few comments on the blog as well on the same topic. I thought a couple of the other shots-in-the-foot would get more attention and feedback, but nope, all sales blurbs. No one mentioned that one at all the first time I posted that in 2011. Things have changed I guess. And do read the couple comments on last night’s blog. I gave a few quick lessons. The reason sales blurbs are so bad on most books from…

This Was a Fun Post in Late 2011… Still all true going into 2018. Sadly. I actually did two posts on this topic because I had to shoot off all ten toes of indie writers. But for a bring forward, this one is the fun one. See if this almost completely holds up after six years. I think it does and I find that amazing. —- I started noticing how indie writers shoot themselves in the foot as far as sales. And not just once, but often so many times that it guaranteed that no sane reader (past family and friends) would pick up their book. And they did it…

New Year Making Me Look Back… Plus I was cleaning up things, killing some old posts, and I ran across this post that was originally called “The Death of an Indie Writer.” How’s that for click bait? (grin) I wrote it in July 2011, way back in the start of all this craziness. And frighteningly enough, I was right on almost all of it and I am still seeing this same thing today, even though most new writers coming in have lots of information and this new world is pretty stable. That doesn’t seem to be helping. So here is the long post, updated only slightly to 2017. I thought…

That Sounds Strange, huh?… It actually is sort of a strange circumstance. For a dozen years Sheldon McArther owned North by Northwest Books and Antiques. And Shelly is a picker extraordinaire. Especially with books and glassware. And he knows something has value when he sees it. So much of the extra books and stuff he found over the years ended up in this large back room of the bookstore in boxes and then when he sold the store to his manager, she cleared out stuff she didn’t want to carry in the store and stuffed it in the back room as well. It was impossible to even go in that…

Everyone Thinks I Am So Busy… And sometimes I am. Sometimes, I just putter through the day, going out to the stores, doing some workshop stuff, cooking dinner, taking a nap, doing some reading, taking a nap, watching television, doing more reading. I think there was another nap in there somewhere. And that was the day. Not sick, so nothing to worry about. Just getting caught up and taking it easy at the moment. And I wouldn’t even be posting here about today if I didn’t have this running streak of days posting. (grin) —————- Ghosting Novels Over the last few days I have gotten the same basic question twice.…

Usually Don’t Need Time Off… Mostly because what I do is not really work in any form. Sure, it’s tiring at times, but I get to write as much as I want, work with other writers in workshops to help them advance, and play with collectables. Nope, not work. This last three or four weeks have been pretty nonstop, so I just decided today to stop for a bit, do something slightly different just to break the routine. I headed into the valley to do some picking by myself. Took my time getting back. Nap, cooked dinner, watched The Voice, another nap, did a few assignments I hadn’t gotten done…

And Once Again I Had a Blast… Spent from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. at the store, mostly talking with people. The rock shop owner across the parking lot outed me as a writer to a few really nice young people who were science fiction fans. It was a joy to talk with them, actually, because they were fans of reading. Kris showed up on her walk after a time and they got to talk with her as well. Really nice people. They had no idea who we were actually, but they were sf fans and loved Star Trek and Star Wars. I headed back to my office at WMG…