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New Year Starting…
Writing This Safely From Home…. …On New Year’s Eve, after midnight. 2020 has left the building. 2021 shows ugliness to start and promise over time. So thought I would talk about the writing challenge I am going to set for myself and some thoughts on how you could ramp up a writing challenge in the New Year. Here is how I would suggest you come at doing a writing challenge in 2021. Decide where you want to be at the end of 2021 with your writing. Some people use word count, I use project or story counts, but I do track words just for fun as well. On good years…
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An Idea For Balance for the New Year…
Combining Challenges… This is sort of a simple idea, but it has some catches to it. A lot of writers I know are setting writing goals for the new year. And publishing goals as well. I have my publishing goal half set, my writing not so much. And I have been focusing on exercise and on losing a few more pounds. (How cliche is that for a New Year’s goal?) So need goals there as well. So here is how I have been looking at each segment. Time. Exercise… I want to get back to 10,000 steps a day streak. For me that’s five miles. One to two miles are…
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A Challenge For Everyone for 2021…
My Challenge of 70 While I Am 70 Pushes Me… So I got a comment about structuring a short story publishing challenge for 2021 for others, especially writers just starting out. And I think it’s a great idea for a bunch of reasons for most writers. So I thought I would go into the reasons and the idea here. Challenge: Publish 52 Short Stories Stand Alone In 2021 Note, I did not say write, I said PUBLISH. Stories would have to be stand-alone, most selling for $2.99 electronic and $4.99 paper. (Under 3,000 words sell it for $1.99… never 99 cents.) A lot of writers I know have collections published…
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Well, I Did It… 26.2 Miles…
In My 70th Year on the Planet… I completed the Revel Mt. Charleston Limited Edition Marathon. Picture of my medal below. And sometime this week the race will post pictures from the run and I will post some here. As I said, I completed it, but not well. For years I had been working toward a marathon in November when I would turn 70. But all my great planning went out the window like so much other stuff last April with Covid. I did not dare go to a gym to run at my advanced age and the summer here in Vegas was the hottest ever recorded in the history…
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Card Sharp Silver… Day 18
One Month Since Day Seventeen… Wow, just as all of us had a crazy last month, mine was no different. Some people have been working harder than ever with this virus, others are laid off and killing time or trying to focus. I have been in the bunch working harder than I can remember. But now, thankfully, returning to my normal level of freelance work, so I started a new short story series in the last few days and today got back to writing on the Cave Creek novel. So as I did for the first seventeen days on this, I will detail out the general nature of my day…
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Licensing… Oh, My…
Taking A Day Or Two Away From the Novel… I will be back on Monday talking about my regular routine, but for today and tomorrow I don’t want to have to push the book into a small place and time as I have been doing. I want to give it more time. So going to get a ton of workshop and business stuff done first, then focus on the run to the end of the book. But in the mean time, licensing… It has now been suggested that we all wear face masks when going out. Now that “suggestion” from medical folks doesn’t mean we should all go out and…
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Card Sharp Silver… Day 14
Ramping Back Up… The day was swallowed by a ton of detail stuff, mostly business. Made it to this computer around 11 am and did email and some details on this web site fixes. Also some work on the Cats Bundle (see below) and some work on the Cave Creek Kickstarter, which ended successfully. Yeah! And thank you, everyone, for supporting that project. I promise it will be some fun. And surveys will go out soon. Then Kris and I headed out around 1 pm for a long walk (about four miles total) to run an errand and then picked up take-out lunch on the way back. A ton of…
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First Of The Month!
Good Time To Start A Challenge… Publishing Challenge, Short Story Challenge, or Novel Challenge. All are open and a great way to keep your goals on track for the year. And a number of writers are in sight of lifetime subscriptions on the short story challenge, one on the novel challenge, and one has already gotten a lifetime subscription on the novel challenge. Keep going, folks. Only four people are signed up for the Publishing Challenge. That one seems to scare hell out of writers. (grin) This weekend I will be doing a bunch of posts about the first of March in the Decade Ahead class. And also a bunch…
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Lost Five Challenge Writers
Five Short-Story-Per-Week Writers… They didn’t make it through the holiday season. And actually, that is fewer than I would have expected to lose. Middle of the winter, flu and cold season, holiday, travel, and who knows what else. A ton of reasons to not complete a story in a week, or even think about writing for a few weeks. And this year, with the holidays smack in the middle of the week so none of us had a clue if it was Monday, Tuesday, Friday, or what? Sunday deadline just seemed alien to many, me included. And what was amazing is that all five writers that dropped out over the…
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Fear and Publishing
Did Not Expect Some Comments… On the Great Publishing Challenge. It seems that writing and doing challenges on writing is popular, but not so much publishing. In fact, I got a number of comments about the fear involved. And I know for a fact that the fear comes from myths. And the fear of what might happen if you did it wrong. Well, you will do it wrong. I sure did when we started into indie publishing. I spent nine months putting up over 200 titles as fast as I could. I worked at it day and night. Mostly short stories, a few collections, some nonfiction, and a bunch of…