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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…
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Topic of the Night: Learning in the New Year
At the professional writer lunch today, a lot of the conversation on writing turned to how the industry is changing, bookstores, and so much more about the future. Great conversation. And tonight on a nifty program on the Travel Channel, I learned a little about how books were sold door-to-door after the Civil War and up into the last century. It was a major way books were distributed, and publishing company sales forces were basically door-to-door salesmen. When I came into the business in the early 1970s, the major publishing sales force had morphed into selling to bookstores, and only encyclopedias were sold door-to-door. Wow, has publishing changed. (grin) Now…
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The New World of Publishing: The Learning Must Continue
Strange world we live in these days. I have run across a number of writers lately that think they have this all down, that they know what they are doing, and they are happy with their sales. And some of them should be, I grant that. But thinking they know what they are doing just sort of makes me laugh. The one thing that is an absolute in publishing and the art of storytelling is that the learning never stops. It’s not even a rule. It’s just a fact. So for a post here, I thought I would tell a story about myself and my golf days that will illustrate…