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Fantastic Writing Advice by Keith Johnstone
Maybe Worth Really Looking At… I found it amazing. This advice came from a blog post Johnstone did back in 2020. Sadly, since that time he has done very few. He is 87 years of age and no longer teaching as far as I can tell as well. But he is an actor, a writer, and is known as one of the pioneers of improvisational theater. In essence, he is amazing. One of his many thoughts in this random blog post of misc. stuff was called Five Ideas. You can read the entire post here… https://www.keithjohnstone.com/post/_misc I was sent this part of the post and think it is amazing. Thanks,…
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A Signpost Along the Road…
We All Have Them… Just like driving on any road, sometimes you notice the sign telling you where on the road you are at, sometimes not. For the last number of decades, I have paid little attention to the signs on my writing road. But my first decade or two, I sure watched the signposts, tried to figure out if I was even still on the correct road at times for where I wanted to go with my writing and publishing. And over the years, stretching this sad metaphor a little more, I fell off the road and took some bad turns that just took longer to get back on…
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Master Business Class Officially Online
To No One’s Surprise… The 2021 Master Business Class was to be held here in Las Vegas in October, but now has been moved online. And we will never have another Master Business class in person. The 2020 one was scheduled to be the last one, then because of Covid we moved the last one to October 2021. But folks, even with the miracle of the vaccines, October is still too early. And, of course, we have idiots out there who will not get vaccinated and Kris and I and WMG Publishing can’t force everyone attending to be vaccinated and prove it. And those of you jumping on planes can’t…
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Day Eleven of Writing a Novel in Half a Month
Chapter Eleven: Day Eleven of Writing a Novel in Half a Month Last night got to bed at my normal 4 am time, still woke up exhausted at 11:30 am, but realized after a bi that was because of the crazy level of allergies that the winds are kicking up. Yikes. So feeling better after a bit. (Better living with drugs.) Day Eleven, Entry One. 12:15 pm to 2:00 pm. I worked straight through on email. Today is Sunday, which is a lot of deadlines for stuff, and writers always wait until deadlines, so email today has been brutal. So spent the entire almost two hours just cleaning that up.…
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Half Price Workshop Sale In Case You Missed It..
Yes, We Are Doing It Again… I talked about this in full the day after Christmas, because Covid is just as bad, if not worse, than earlier. So we are going to do one more sale of everything on WMG Publishing’s Teachable. And we really, really hope never again. 2020 will be over and with it we hope these sales. We want us all to get through this virus and go back to at least a new normal as soon as possible. But, we are not there yet and there are dark months ahead of us in the first of the new year. And WMG Publishing wants to help you…
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Sort of Rest and Errands Day
Yup, New York Times Bestsellers Just Do Regular Stuff… I have sold more millions of books than I want to think about and last time I counted was five years ago now. And here I talk about workshops and helping writers and doing posts with observations and about my running or bundles my books are in. But this is a filler blog about my day. Feel free to jump to tomorrow. So today was errands. And rest. So I am wasting your time, you know, to show how writers are just normal folks, as you all know. I wanted to rest today because, to be honest, I just sort of…
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So Today This Started…
A Twist of the Knife… A Mystery/Crime Bundle – Curated by Dean Wesley Smith This is the blog I wrote for the Storybundle you can get at https://storybundle.com/crime Every Type of Mystery and Crime I love reading mystery and crime stories. I write mystery and crime stories. I edit mystery and crime stories. In fact, in every issue of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine that I edit, I try to have at least two or three mystery or crime stories of various types. And since the readers of Pulphouse look for something different, the types of mystery and crime stories range across the entire spectrum of the mystery genre. I really noticed those differences when…
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Time Travel Story Bundle
I LOVE TIME TRAVEL BUNDLES… I have one of my Thunder Mountain time travel novels in this bundle. It is called Warm Springs and might be the most complex time travel novel or story I have ever written, and that is going some. And I am not curating this one, Kris is, which makes it even more fun since her take on Time Travel and my take on it are very different. So here is her blog introducing the time travel bundle called The Big Time Bundle… It is her words from here on out… Call it a guest blog, sort of… ——- The Big Time Bundle – Curated by…
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Visions of the Future
A Storybundle… I grew up reading science fiction way back in the 1950s. And from those early years, I loved it, how it showed me possible futures, places to escape to, wonderful visions, and dark possibilities. Science fiction took me out of a bad childhood and let me escape, not only from my home, but from this planet. And then, when I was in high school and college, Original Star Trek, in its first run, allowed me to escape into a wonderful future of hope and dreams, where the good guys won. To say I loved science fiction would be a gigantic understatement. And for the last six decades, I…
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Invested In Not Writing
Amazing How Common This Is… Basically put, writers, over time, develop a real and crippling investment in not writing. And, at the same time, often claim they want to write. These writers cross the spectrum of types. — Teachers who always wanted to write, teach writing, but now feel inside that they just flat don’t dare expose that they are still beginning writers at their core. — Burnt out writers who have made writing so important (because they have had a few successes in the past) that they don’t dare write anything more. Failure is a very high platform that these writers in their minds don’t dare jump from. —…