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Blast From The Past To Help With the Future
(I wrote this blog in response to a letter I got after doing a novel in seven days. This might help clear out some stuff going into the new year about writing at your own pace. No matter what that pace might be.) The Blog That Destroyed an Art Form I got a great comment from a guy this morning. I didn’t put it through because the guy called me some pretty good names. *ss*ole was only one of them. One word I had never been called before. Creative. But he said he had liked my writing. (I think the operative word there is “had.”) So why was he so…
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Dare To Be Bad Revisited For 2017
Dare to Be Bad (I initially published this blog back about six years ago. I have updated it a little to fit going into the new year.) Kevin J. Anderson credits me with coming up with the phrase, but it was a catch phrase that Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I used in our early years of our short-story-per-week challenge. I think Nina might have said it first, but it was our chant. And I have repeated it over and over during the last few decades. Both to myself and to other writers. Now in this new world of publishing, it still applies, maybe even more. Back in my early years,…
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Pulp Speed Writers
Pulp Writers’ Abilities… (I first wrote this blog back in May of 2016 and figured it might be a good one to put here at the end of the year.) I got a great question today about some of the basics the really prolific pulp writers did to be so productive. And how to go about finding out about a lot of their styles. How I have learned about so many of the older pulp writers is by reading book about them in their own words, reading books about the era, and just finding anything I could to read about the pulp writers of the 1920s to 1950s. A great…
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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…