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Step One of Getting Ready for a New Year
Looking Back (for only a moment)… Step one of planning ahead is to spend just a little time looking back at the past year, see how you did, how the actual production matched up to your goals last January. I did that as much as I needed to. I know, without even looking hard, that my year sucked by my standards. For the first time in three or more years, my total word count approaching the end of the year is just under a million words at around 970,000 words. So the final total will depend on what I do this last week. Not sure if I can hit thirty thousand words…
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Artistic Freedom and Being a Victim
Getting Tired… You would think that eventually fiction writers, as a group, would start getting tired of being victims. I mean really tired. One of the wonderful things that this new world has given all writers is artistic freedom. We’ve talked here about some of the ramifications of how writers use that freedom over the last few weeks. But another aspect of the freedom writers have is to make choices in the areas of how they will work, who they will work with, and so on. These choices are very much aspects of artistic freedom. In the old days of traditional-publishing-only, I used to scoff at writers sitting in bars…
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Working on the Cache Problem
Spent a number of hours tonight with great tech people, first at Bluehost, my provider and then with an indie tech guy who went above and beyond the call of duty to fix this issue. So at the moment, it’s going to take a little time to clear out the old code, but once you hit refresh, the old problem will vanish going forward for you. And everyone who doesn’t hit refresh (or go to a different page on the site) will be out of this in a week which is how long the cache holds stuff. Suddenly all the new posts will just appear for them. (grin) Thanks for…
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Back from the Cache… Part Three (first two posts deleted)
Working on the problem… off and on all night. The fine techs at my host provider have been working on what they say is a very strange problem. We have been back and forth on the phone now for a few hours tonight. (They are wonderful and WordPress experts.) They have made a few changes in some code that might help and we turned off a thing called Varnish that might have caused part of the problem. But it seems, for the moment, some visitors are going to have to hit refresh on certain browsers. I go to this site on one browser and it comes up fine with the most…
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A FUN CHRISTMAS PRESENT
A GUEST ESSAY…SOME FUN FOR EVERYONE… Those of you following this blog know I never do anything with guests and don’t ask me to because I will always say no. Always. But in this case, I read Judge Bubba’s most recent Christmastime Essay/Letter and got such a kick out of it, as I have with all his letters, that I asked Judge Bubba if I could do this and he graciously said, “Sure, why not?” Some background. When I am in Boise visiting friends, I tend to hang around with lawyers and judges. I am not sure why they let me tag along at times. I only have three years…
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Artistic Choice and The Voice Finals
ARTISTIC CHOICE AND THE VOICE… In case you missed The Voice finals tonight, you should really find it and watch it. Some amazing music. And great interviews. Completely entertaining. But as you are watching it, put on your writer hat. Not your creative hat, but the hat that observes and sees patterns. Over and over and over again the three judges with artists left praised how their artists were original, not like anyone else in the world. The judges kept saying that their artists were doing their own things, had their own way of approaching music. It was a mantra and clearly the most important thing to the judges. They kept…
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Belief and Artistic Choice
Belief Can Cause Interesting Results… Sometimes Wrong… Another post in this loose series of posts about how writers have artistic freedom in this modern world. And about the choices artists make with that freedom. I have noticed an interesting pattern over the last four or five years about belief and the choices writers make because of a belief. And I am not talking some religious or political belief. Nope. But I am talking about belief based on little-to-no information or facts. And decisions based on myths that appear true to the observer, thus making the observer believe them. Now I have done a number of books beating on some of…
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Artistic Choice and Making Money
I Love Making Money with My Fiction… For some reason, not sure how, some people have thought I am against making money with fiction writing. Never ever said that. In fact, that is so far from the truth as to be laughable. I make great money with my fiction now. Not as good as many, but better than I ever did when I was writing for money as a ghost and media writer. But for some reason I use the term “artistic” and “choice” and then suggest that writers should take the long-term goal and write what they love and people automatically knee-jerk reaction that I am against making money…
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Sales vs People vs Artistic Freedom
Sales: A Horrible Way to Think About Readers… That’s my opinion and I wish I could say I always believed that, but I would be lying. When I was working traditional publishing, I only looked at sales numbers, copies shipped, and numbers on royalty statements. About eight or nine years ago, right at the start of the indie movement, I did yet another count of the numbers of books I had sold. Just over seventeen million. That’s right, I had seventeen million copies of my books in print as of eight or so years ago. And I have been selling steadily since. Both the traditional books still sell and my indie books chug…
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An Interesting Assumption
Thinking and Knowing Are Two Different Things… Over the last week or so I have been talking about having the freedom, the artistic freedom, of being able to write what we want to write in this new world. Both the good side of that freedom and the side I see as a problem. And the area that the most people seem to get stuck on is my suggestion to write what you love, not to market. (You can go back and read my points on that topic over the last week. Read the comments as well.) But tonight I wanted to point out one simple problem the people who write…