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This Has To Be Short Tonight…
Not a Lot of Eye Left… I have been doing very detailed work on laying out the paper and PDF version of Smith’s Monthly #47 which will be out in a week. Should have it done by tomorrow which is my deadline. Yay. Honestly, it has been a blast doing this. Also I spent a bunch of time this week on other deadlines, but also getting ready to launch RETURN OF THE FEY Kickstarter campaign, which will start on Tuesday. That’s right, Kris is back working on the Fey after twenty years. How amazingly cool is that. In fact, there is a “Coming Soon!” page you can click a link…
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Lots of Fun Reading This Week
Got Cave Creek Stories In… I need 30 stories for the three books. Ten per book. And got just about that number in total not spread that evenly over the books. So looks like I will have a second call out to those in the Shared World Class. I had no doubt that would be the case, but was surprised at the low number. Also, a note: The Shared World class originally said nine months, but now it will be going for at least another year. Lots of stuff already there, more videos on putting these together, and more anthologies down the road. And yes, it is still possible to…
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Downside of Being Disorganized…
Just Because I Like to Write… Yup, me and Heinlein’s 4th Rule have a sort of love/hate relationship. As I have said often, I have no idea how many short stories I have written. Number ranges from 400 and up. Maybe way up. Over 200 have been published in Smith’s Monthly alone. So while putting the next issue of Smith’s Monthly together, I had a story manuscript in paper, but could not find the file anywhere. So a few days later I had my writing computer basically give up the ghost (lost nothing but the mouse said “Nope” and I tried three different alternatives and all of them said, “Nope.”),…
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Holy Smokes!!! Was That Fun!!!
And a Lot of Work… Tonight, for the last three hours straight, without a break, I have been doing a master class in putting collections together. That’s right, tonight I finished up putting sixty of my science fiction stories into six volumes. Kris had already done hers and she had already divided her stories up into the six volumes and sort of labeled then with a rough idea header that she used. But as those of you who watched the video on the Kickstarter can tell, Kris’s idea of a rough header and mine do not often match in thinking. But I did the best I could since she got…
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How I Did In January… My Challenge
I Learned and Did Fine… In my opinion. Here is what I said I wanted to do in 2021 on January 1st. (You remember, before the insurrection.) “So my challenge for 2021 is to write a story per day for the year, plus write a novel per month, plus publish over 70 major books.” Well, so far, so interesting. I managed 6 short stories in January, right up to January 6th, then got distracted for a few days. Then as I went back to it, I realized that my tracking systems for short stories sucked beyond words and I couldn’t even remember much about the six I wrote a few…
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Cover Fun
Got Playing Around… I’m going to be putting out some collections this spring and through the summer and fall, so tonight I got playing around with some covers. I managed to do both of these, both wrap for paperback (except for spine… got to have page count first) and epub covers. It took me just slightly over 45 minutes to do both, and that included finding the art work, which is always the hardest part in my opinion. So thought you might like to see two of my collections that will be out over the next month or so. I’ll do more covers later for more collections. The first collection…
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A Blog Post Worth Reading
From a Bestseller Going Indie… Interesting stuff. Worth the read. They have been hybrid for a while, but looks like the math got them finally on the side of indie. (grin) Math can do that. And note they kept saying “Forever” when talking about rights. Anyhow, nothing else tonight except I have Smith’s Monthly #45 headed for publication and I almost have #46 together. So here is the link that you really should, for fun and education, go read. Flowers and Questions
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New Challenge Update
Nothing Changed… Just Some Focus… With all the world events, it has been damn near impossible for most of us to focus over the last two months. Still, going into 2021 with the vaccine coming on and the chaos-in-chief leaving, I figured the future was solid enough to make some goals and to push myself for 2021. And I still believe that. Just didn’t know that 2020 was going to have a 13th month. So lost a bunch of days and a bunch of focus, as many of us did over the last 20 days. And the waiting and wondering what was going to happen next just puts an underlying…
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Quick Blog
Web Site Acting Whacky… So going to post this quick to keep my streak alive in case something goes wrong. Plus I am late tonight. I got late because I finished a short story after all the assignments from the workshops. Then I spent a couple hours on the Cave Creek novel. So good progress on writing today, and I spent a bunch of hours down in our office working on getting stuff in order down there while we had cleaners up here. And a couple hours out looking for supplies to use for my marble collection display and sorting. Found some. Busy day. Productive. And Kris and I watched…
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That’s Annoying
Just One of Those Things… As last night, another annoyance caused by epic disorganization. And I do mean epic. Fixable, but annoying. This today comes from my inability to get organized in a meaningful and long-term fashion with my writing and publishing. And this concerns Smith’s Monthly. Today, I really dug into the layout of Smith’s Monthly Issue #45. Now understand, Issue #44 came out in the summer of 2017. I have a ton of ads and promotions about a lot of my books in each issue. You know… filler. Since the magazine is all mine, might as well promote some of the other stories and series and such I…