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Challenge Mixed Bag
Didn’t Hit It, but Still All Right… My challenge starting in 2022 was to write a short story per day. 365 days. I knew clear back in November when I finished the 70 Books in my 70th Year and started thinking about this challenge again that I would have trouble with it. And not for most writer’s reasons. I knew I would have trouble keeping track and doing something with all the stories. I thought I had that solved. Nope. I wrote 31 stories in January and a story every day in February and a story per day for the first half of March… Going fine, having no issues other…
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Too Much In One Day…
I Managed A Ton of Stuff Today… But unless I get going now, going to miss the night’s story. Worked on Smith’s Monthly layout and recorded a bunch of the lectures from Kris’s class this coming week for the Study Along class online, Exercised some while Kris was using my computer to record videos for the Study Along class online. Cooked dinner, and then worked on the books for the challenge and more on Smith’s Monthly. I finally came up with a name for the entire series of books that will hold all the stories. Challenge Accepted Each book will have 33 stories in it, plus an introduction. If I…
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May 1st Restart
Some Months Make More Sense Than Others to Restart… For me, I am used May 1st to restart a number of things. First, I am restarting my minimum milage per day. I clock steps and for me 2,000 steps on my Fitbit is almost always exactly one mile. So starting May 1st I am going to hit 3 miles (6,000 steps) per day and then every week increase that by 500 steps. I need the exercise and why May 1st is a good time to do that is because as the weather warms up here in Vegas, I will be spending a lot of time daily at the gym, which…
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Catching Up… To Do or Not To Do?
A Great Question… I got that question from a writer just today and I had a pretty simple answer for him. But there is more to my answer than what I was able to give him at the spur of the moment. I said this: Try to catch up if doing so is possible and will be challenging. If impossible to catch up, then simply reset the challenge and start fresh. Sounds simple until you start figuring out if something is impossible or not. Sometimes you just know you have screwed the pooch. No catching up is possible. Reset and restart!!! But other times the added challenge makes it even…
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Four Challenges Now
They Are Designed to Help and Be Fun… On WMG Teachable, you can find four challenges now. The Great Challenge… Write one short story a week for one year. The Novel Challenge… Write one new novel over 30,000 words every two months for one year. The Novella Challenge… Write one novella (15,000 to 30,000) words per month for one year. The Publishing Challenge… Publish one new major project per month for one year. (Novel, novella, collection, or omnibus all count.) The cost is $600 to buy in ($300 during the sale this next week). You start at any time, but once you start, the clock is ticking. If you miss,…
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I’m Up Late
So Not Much of Anything Tonight… I got a late start at the entire evening, so didn’t even get back to writing until 12:30 am. So finished the story about a new superhero character by the name of Skip Keepers. Basically a treasure hunt story for a marble. Yeah, we shall see. 2,400 words in two hours plus a break. About normal for me. So February is up and running. Onward I go. With luck I will have time tomorrow to do more stuff. Just got buried today, but still got the story done, something that would not have happened without the challenge. Here is an image of the treasure…
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Challenge Still Going Strong
27 Short Stories in 27 Days… I will start tomorrow doing covers for them and getting the raw manuscripts up on Patreon. And finally get all that done there, including issues of Smith’s Monthly. But going to take through the weekend because I still have other stuff to catch up. A number of times my critical voice (which only exists in the form of “Why am I wasting my time.” I have all other critical voice wiped out.”) came roaring up. A few days I was just too tired, but wrote a story anyway. So just getting each story done each day and having fun writing. I talked about all…
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Six Weeks of Motivational Mondays…
I’m Having Fun With Them… And the “Pithy Comment” each week as well. Six weeks so far since I started back in December. 3 videos plus the comment each week. So each quarter there should be 39 videos and 13 Pithy Comments. (More this first quarter since I started early.) You can jump into them at any point. I hope those of you in there are enjoying them. So tonight, for the 23rd story this month, I did another Bryant Street story and for the first time in the hundred or so Bryant Street stories I have written, this is the first one that could easily be a novel and…
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Patreon, Master Class, and More
A Bunch of Stuff… First off, for those of you who are supporting my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/deanwesleysmith, I have attempted to put up in raw form the first two stories from the challenge with covers. No clue if it worked and if only the correct tiers can see the posts. I will be putting up some Smith’s Monthly issues shortly for all supporters. But tonight trying to learn the ropes on this. If some of you who are familiar with Patreon would let me know how I did, that would be appreciated. Thanks!! Master Business Class Finally it has all 13 of the first basic foundation classes up. That is…
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Challenge Still Going
Brain Still On Novels For example, tonight I wrote a 3,600 plus word Thunder Mountain story called “Lost Canyon.” (Saw the phrase on some woman’s sweatshirt tonight at dinner and figured it would be a good Thunder Mountain story. So I wrote it.) Story works great and I wrapped it into a short story just fine and dandy. And if you don’t look too closely after the cute ending, you don’t ask too many “But what happens next?” I sort of explained in the story what happens next, sort of. Or I pretended I did, but in the novel it wouldn’t work out that way, of course. But that wraps…