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Very Tempted…
To Say I Told You So… But that would be petty. (Grin) Yes, this is a post about book agents. You see, for the last decade or more I have been trying my best to talk sense into normally very intelligent people when it comes to agents. But the myth is so powerful that really smart people do the stupidest things when the word “agent” is mentioned in publishing. Example… Writers allow agents to tell them how to write a novel, even though the agent has never written a novel in their life. Yet writers will rewrite and rewrite to try to please some agent, spending years of time. Example……
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Long Day…
And A Short Post, Plus Repeat of Workshop Information. I am headed to Vegas once again, this time with Kris and my books and art in a uHaul Truck. Two great and very strong young guys packed the truck this morning in Lincoln City and I headed toward Idaho to go down through Salt Lake and to Vegas. All freeway that way and easy. Best with a truck of books, shelves, and art. I hope to have another blog on writing tomorrow night because, barring unforeseens, tomorrow is my easy day on this trip. I’m going slow because it’s been seven years since I drove a uHaul. And, yeah, I’m…
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Got Lost In Time
Blog Time Got Lost Tonight… Between doing assignments, watching the Voice finals, and packing boxes of books, time just got away from me and now I need to go get some sleep. So here I am again doing a filler post because of the blog streak of doing a blog every day. I think I am over 2,000 straight days now without a miss. I would have to figure it out. And that shows the power of a streak. ——————– So Here, Once Again, Is Workshop Information… Easy to cut and paste. (grin) But two offers have ended as of yesterday. Vegas Workshop Special ended and the Webinars closed off.…
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Time of Great Forgetting Special Offer
Yes, We Are Smack In The Middle Of The Time Of Great Forgetting… This time of the year, writers sort of forget about their writing with all the distractions of life, summer, vacations, graduations, and so on. All the wonderful writing goals set early in the year are just sort of pushed aside. This Forgetting time period lasts from late April until late July. Then writers sort of wake up, try to get restarted, and wonder what happened to all the goals of the year. Very disheartening and it happens to many year-after-year. And it is very, very hard to restart at that point. Since we have a bunch of…
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Some Observations and an Idea
Product Focused Might Be Truly Evil… (grin) Not really kidding that much. The more I think about how being product focused causes so many writing issues, the more I see how it has invaded just about everything in fiction writing the last few years. And I was no exception to that at times in how I phrased my challenges and such. It’s just so darned easy to keep score with numbers of books done, numbers of short stories finished, and so on. But I have trained myself to stay out of the critical voice issues that kind of focus brings up for almost all writers. So coming up as I…
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Product Focused vs Process Focused.
A Nasty Problem of Early Writers… I hear this all the time. Writers, especially indie writers the last few years, have focused on the finished product. And I must admit, that is how we keep score in this new world. Numbers of books and stories equals more readers and more money and so on. But in most of our workshops, except a few of the business ones, we focus on the process of writing. To long-term professionals, the process of writing is where the focus is, or at least in a balance on both sides. We would all have not made it for 40 or more years of writing without…
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The Reader Perception
Never Tell Anyone That You Write One Draft Clean… But Dean, why do you say that because you teach it here and talk about it all the time?? The reason? This is a writer-focused site at the moment. And writer’s seldom buy my books (except to see how bad it really is because I wrote it in five days while traveling.) So I am safe. And it is safe here for you to all talk about this stuff in the comments that we have been talking about this last few days. (Comments are still going in the comments sections of the two posts and the comments are wonderful.) Here, on…
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Interesting Comments and Other Business
Comments Were Great on the Last Two Posts… Had some great experience stories and only a couple writers trying to rationalize their way of doing things. Some good discussion and ideas, so might be worth checking out the comments. And thank you, everyone, who did comment in public or wrote me a letter. Very much appreciated and fun. —————– Amazing Writing Bundle About to End!!! This is a bundle that I would get something out of every book. And I have already recommended a few of them here before. And don’t miss Kris’s brand new book Creating Your Author Brand. Plus you get Heinlein’s Rules lecture, worth $75.00. Plus Steven…
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Dangers of Not Trusting The Creative Voice
Things Stop When You Lose Faith In The Creative Voice… I watch this loss all the time and hear about it from hundreds of writers over every year. Not trusting your creative voice is deadly. This came up a couple days ago when I talked about writing clean first draft work by cycling. And how that keeps the creative voice in control and eliminates the need for a critical-voice second or third draft. Got some great excuses. Fun to read. I just sort of felt sad, actually, because that’s like knowing when a person will die. I can see, over forty years, exactly how long it will take some of…
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Because It Got Late
I Started a Blog on the Danger of Not Trusting Creative Voice… And I will finish it on Sunday for Sunday night. But it got late and I have some webinars to do tomorrow morning and I think the fine writers who will be listening in would like me to be awake. One detail of workshop business. We offered a “limited time” offer of buying four cost workshops (to take any time over four years) and getting the Kris and Dean Show or two online workshops free. Well, we got around to finalizing some costs on these workshops in Vegas and realized we couldn’t do many of these and keep…