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Paying Attention Sale
Holiday Here In the States… The holiday here is called Memorial Day which honors those who served in the military and also family members who are no longer with us. And it is a time where people take vacations since it is a three-day weekend, or they spend time with their families in picnics or other activities. Experts also say that today is supposed to be the busiest travel day of the year as well. And for writers, this tends to be the first major weekend of the Time of Great Forgetting. Writers just forget about writing and learning and publishing and often don’t come back to paying attention until…
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Just Writing Fiction Tonight…
The City is Quiet… My email is quiet, and I want to do some reading tonight of stories I am behind reading, and Kris’s new novel. But first I’m going to spend a few hours just writing my own fiction. To be honest, that feels weird. I normally have so many things that must be done yesterday, so much so that I work in the fiction writing late at night. But tonight I am going back to my schedule of getting to the fiction by midnight and if I can do that regularly, I will be back up to my old speed. So during this time of forgetting for most…
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June Workshops Now Available…
Yeah, May is Almost Gone… I have all the June Regular Workshops now ready for sign-ups on Teachable. Using Tags in Your Fiction is the Resurrected Classic Workshop this month. (It is still a Classic Workshop, but for one month you can get feedback from me on it as a regular workshop.) As we move through the more Advanced Craft Workshops, tags are slowly emerging as more important than anyone realizes. They are a powerful tool. Invisible to most writers, but powerful when you know how to use them. I figured it was time to bring it back for a month. Here are the June Regular Workshop classes… (If you…
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Day Off… Sort Of…
As Much of a Day Off As I Ever Take… We had our wonderful cleaning crew here starting just after I got out of bed, so Kris and I wished the cats good luck and headed off to a fun lunch at a place called the Black and Blue Diner. Then we had an adventure. We went looking for vegan cakes. Kris had a list of seven or eight she had found online, and we managed in three hours to hit four of them spread all over one part of Vegas. We were so far away from our place to the West, I swore if we drove much farther we…
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Decisions…
We All Make These Kinds of Decisions Every Day… I have spent the entire day on errands and then recording some videos and then doing assignments and answering email. It’s a Monday. It is now 2:20 AM and I have not gotten any writing done. So instead of spending my last waking hour tonight doing a long blog, I am going to shut this business screen down and go to my computer and get at least an hour of words done. There, I lead by example.
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May is Screaming Past
Time of Great Forgetting is in Full Force… Amazing how every year at this time a vast majority of new fiction writers and early professional fiction writers just forget everything about their writing goals and ambitions. Professional fiction writers and those writers working hard to get to that place do not have this trouble. But it happens every year to more than I can count. About the last of April, the attention is drawn to other things besides writing and by now (end of May) writing has mostly been forgotten, or something to be done later. Spring is at hand and everything that means for each person. This forgetting goes…
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Writing and Recording…
Spent Most of the Day Doing Both… So by the time I turned my attention to this blog, I was way too tired to think about more myths and more choices. So how about a cat picture instead? A picture of the beautiful Miss Suzy who lives with the writers Chris and Steve York, or from what I understand, she allows them to live with her. And the little orange guy is our Gavin, He is now 21 pounds and a love and a main member of promotion central. This was a picture taken a few days after we rescued them both.
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 9… More Myths
Myths on Both Sides… Part Two… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era…
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Last Day of Workshop Here…
No Time Again to Do a Long Post… Mostly for me because of WMG meetings and I would like to spend some time writing. So this short little post is only to keep my daily blogging streak alive. And to say it was fun doing the Study Along part of the Romantic Suspense class. I got to read some really great stories that I am sure I will see in the top magazines at some point.
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 8… Myths
Massive Numbers of Myths on Both Paths… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new…