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Examples R’Us…
Three Examples in Four Days of Mindset Issues… This just had me shaking my head. Now granted, most don’t know we just started a Mindset workshop, and even if they did, many flat can’t afford it. Totally understand that. But three different writers wrote me with very serious questions. And every one of the questions was based on faulty mindset. Two said they could not afford someone to do their covers and had no artistic skill to do it themselves or afford the art if they could. Mindset totally off combined with total lack of research and a wealth of bad information. — Professional art licensed standard for book covers…
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Learning Curves
Pacing Myself… Learning One Major Thing Per Day… With Steph being gone, there are a number of things I just never got around to learning over the last number of years. (Sort of like many of you with copyright… Sorry, too easy…) She just did the tasks in her wonderful way. Today I learned, with the help of Chris York who has better eyes than I do, the inner workings of Zoom and recordings for webinars and so on. Plus today I did a couple covers in InDesign (Canva is a coming learning curve for me…) and also put most of a collection together to get ready to put into…
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Writing for the Anthology Workshop…
I Got a Question… Someone wanted to know why it would be worth while to spend $150 to try to write for an anthology. I realized with that question that I was not clear on what each of those classes that go with the Anthology Workshop were. You are not paying to write for an anthology, the classes are a CLASS for learning. And we are doing them to help the writers who are attending in person. We just decided to open them up because we thought it would be fun. Not only will each class have a short Zoom from the editor, but there will be 10-12 videos talking…
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50 Years…
Sold My First Two Short Stories 50 Years Ago… I just finished recording and putting up on Teachable a nine-week class called A FIFTY YEAR PERSPECTIVE OF LEARNING. Five videos each week for nine weeks talking about what I learned from my mentors over the years, and from others along the way, that got me to this place fifty years down the road. Tonight, as I was recording a topic on both the weekly CREATIVE SURVIVAL and MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY classes, I got thinking about the idea of doing a class that would talk about what I learned in fifty years from crashes, mistakes, and setbacks and what I learned from…
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Editing and Reading Observations… Part 3…
I Got Surprised… Really surprised, to be honest. You see, every writer who sent me stories for each month this fall is a Pulphouse Fiction Magazine subscriber. Just to send in stories you had to have backed the Pulphouse Kickstarter campaign. Now, I grant you, there is no way to figure out what kind of story I might buy because I pride myself on making sure that no story in Pulphouse is like any other story. You never know what you are going to get in topic and genre from story to story. And I love to be surprised on topics just like my readers. But one thing is for…
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Learning In Writing
Not Like Other Skills… This came from a fun conversation with other writers today at lunch. When you learn something in fiction writing, you can’t just take that learning and apply it like learning how to fix a pipe or do something in Photoshop. I wish sometimes it worked that way, but alas it does not. So when you learn something from a writing book, or another writer’s work, or a workshop like we teach, you must do your best to understand it while learning it, then go back to writing and forget what you learned. That’s right, forget it. When you learn something about a craft area of writing,…
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Lots of Learning
Amazing Week of Conversations and Learning.. Pretty exhausted after four days of getting up very early. But wow was it worth it. Major areas I have learned stuff about… Kickstarter… I will be sharing a bunch of this over time as we test some of it out, and also sometime this winter I will be updating the free Kickstarter class with a bunch of new suggestions. I will alert you here and over that class when we get it done. AI in Publishing. So, so many ways AI change indie publishing and our lives over the next five years. Art, audio, and text. Just amazing. I will do updates regularly…
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Learning is Forever…
In Writing and Publishing… Kris and I were talking today on the way back from lunch about some of the writers who have just faded away. And the more we talked, the more we realized that we knew the answer on what happened to most of them. They all just stopped learning. They reached a level that they were happy with their writing and stopped learning for a dozen different reasons. That is flat deadly in just a few years. The reason I hear the most and understand the least is the fear that learning something will upset some perfect balance in their writing and they will never sell again.…
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Special Stories
This Came From A Question I Get A Great Deal… In fact, I think some form of this question is the most common question I get overall. The question basically boils down to this… A writer has learned something new. Should that writer go back and fix some old stories or novels to make them better? The last two times I got this question (just yesterday and today) caused me to flash back to a memory. (Might have been being so tired from CES, but either way, here came the memory.) I remembered clearly how when I finished a story back in my “rewriting” days it was something special. And…
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Writing Books Bundle and Lecture
This Is A Good One… Kris put together a fantastic bundle of writing books, plus one free $75 lecture. And you get it all on Storybundle.com for $15 or so. Amazing. Let me give you what Kris says about the bundle. 2018 Writing Story Bundle by Kristine Kathryn Rusch I am so excited about this year’s spring writing bundle. Out of all of the nonfiction bundles I’ve compiled, this one has the largest number of books that appeal to me. I’ve been writing and publishing for a long, long, long time. Sometimes I feel like no one can teach me anything about writing. So, in the past, when I’ve compiled…