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Reading Fey Novel
So This Will Be A Short Post… This is the second full NEW novel of THE FEY that Kris has finished since the Kickstarter. (Plus the novella, of course.) And she has finished the book about writing of the Fey and is almost done with the videos, so we can get that up and out. (I will do a Kickstarter Update this coming week.) I have been trying to hold myself to only reading three or four chapters a night because of my eyes. But that failed tonight (as I should have expected with Kris’s great writing combined with it being THE FEY.) So it is now going on 3…
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A Look Back
To Another Challenge I Finished… 70@70 Challenge. I wanted to publish 70 major books in my 70th year on the planet. Basically from the middle of November, 2020 to the middle of November, 2021. And with the fantastic help of the crew at WMG Publishing Inc, I somehow managed it. Yeah, I know… I am that crazy. I considered a major book as any novel or novella or something I edited like a magazine or collection, or any major novel or book that had to be redone from scratch. It had to have my name big on the front cover. It had to be my book, in other words. I…
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Fun Having My Own Monthly Magazine
I CAN DO WHAT I WANT… So tonight I just finished laying out Smith’s Monthly #62 and decided I wanted to do something fun in #63. I wanted to focus on jukebox stories. About forty years ago, I wrote my first jukebox story about a jukebox in a bar that actually takes a person back to their memory of a song while the song plays. Over the years I wrote a lot of jukebox stories, the first being published in Night Cry Magazine in 1987. The most famous of them all was the story “Jukebox Gifts,” published first in F&SF. That story has been reprinted all over the place, optioned…
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Example of Writing Levels…
Stage Three vs Stage Four Writers… What I am about to show you is not always the case. A lot of stage four writers, me included, often write simple, clear sentences when the character or the type of story, or the moment in the story demands it. But I wrote this as a response to a writer working in the Power Words workshop. Young professional writers flat don’t know what Power Words are and often, because of workshops, think they are overwriting when they use them. Early professional writers, stage three, can’t even see Power Words most of the time. So first let me give you an example of a…
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Some More On Licensing Expo
Dates Are Set for 2023 Licensing Expo 2023 will be at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center from May 23rd through 26th. That is Tues-Wed-Thur. Now, as I have said, I tried my best in the smaller show this year to see everything in three days. I walked the floor right up until the last hour the last afternoon. I was looking for everything I could see, every idea, every type of branding and licensing, and I ended up with a number of preliminary meetings with some. But my goal was to see everything if I could. I thought I had done a pretty good job, to be honest. So this…
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Smith’s Monthly #62
Laying It Out Now… June issue. It will be out later in the month. Yes, issue #62 of a monthly magazine that has about 70,000 or so words in it every month. All written by me. No one else. Do the math. That’s is over 800,000 words per year in just Smith’s Monthly, not counting anything else I do. Except for a light copyedit and the actual loading to the accounts, I do everything else on this magazine. I do all the covers for the short stories and the rest of the contents and the magazine itself. I do the layout into trade paper in a two-column format in InDesign.…
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THREE DAYS LEFT FOR STORYBUNDLE
Great Books and Reading in This Bundle! I curated a new Storybundle called VISIONS OF THE FUTURE. Some really, really fantastic science fiction from a lot of writers. Since I sort of buried this the first time under talking about a ton of steps I did, here is my initial blog once again about the Storybundle. I am very excited about this one. Great writers, great stories. But only three days left to grab this one. VISIONS OF THE FUTURE BLOG… I knew, without a doubt, I was going to really enjoy putting Visions of the Future together as a StoryBundle. I just love science fiction of all types, and any form…
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Blogging and Bill…
August 21st, 2011… My close friend, Bill Trojan, book dealer, died suddenly on the last day of the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno. I spent most of the next year working on his estate, which was why I ended up losing the vision in one eye. But I made a promise to Bill to honor what he had spent his life doing, and that was collecting. (Bill was a hoarder, but it is commonly known that you are not a hoarder when you collect books, comics, stamps, coins, art, and very high-priced pulp magazines, even when there is nothing more than a path in your three-bedroom home and in…
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Trademarks…
Something to Learn… At the Licensing Expo, you often hear about trademarks. And just about every writer I know has no real understanding about trademarks. Sadly, fiction writers know little to nothing about copyright, let alone a trademark. Trademark is something that you have been making money on. It is a business tool to protect something you have been making money on, such as a business name. So here are some really, really basic things a writer needs to understand without me writing a book trying to explain the details. (The TRADEMARK book by Fishman from LOLO Press will give you a basic, bare-bones start, which is all you need…
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Embedded Technology Conference
About As I Had Expected… And was warned about. Since it was free and about a mile or so from where I live, I decided to go look around, see if I could find anything that had any kind of future application to publishing. Nothing direct, and I walked the entire show. They had six stages with speakers on five of them, all giving presentations of a product. I listened to a few, but like any business, a lot of hype, which means the speakers were good. (Yeah, I know, writers don’t like hype, which is why they don’t sell more books.) Frighteningly, I understood a lot of what I…