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Fun Writing Project!
This Will Start in the New Poker Boy Kickstarter… It has been decades or more since I Turckerized anyone. Tuckerization was mostly started when Wilson “Bob” Tucker would put his friends and other writer’s names into his stories and books as a joke or as a shout out to them. He did it so often, it became known by his name. (Bob was a very friendly guy and I was lucky enough to spend time with him in the early 1990s.) In this modern world, you never do that without asking the permission of the person being Tuckerized. For example, in one Star Trek book Kris and I wrote, we…
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Restart Challenge
I Love Restarting… Everything feels fresh and I can pretend that the problems earlier didn’t happen or don’t exist. I have missed about two weeks of stories total in my Write A Story A Day challenge. Not bad, but now I am starting fresh, making sure I get a story per day done, and when I have some extra time, finish a second one to catch up. But the challenge for me this next three months is to write a story per day, and maybe catch up four or five of the days I missed. Totally possible. But it would not be possible without the attitude of restarting. Three years…
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A Question About My Challenge…
“Am I Running Out of Ideas?” That was the question and it is a good question if you believe in all the myths of fiction writing, as we all do and did in our early days. For me, just to be clear… I never write down ideas. I mostly just ignore them. I never know what I am going to write ahead of time. I sometimes don’t know until the end of the story. I finish all stories I start. I use a trigger like a title of a phrase or image of a character to start my stories. I write stories only for myself and no one else. And…
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Story #28… Poker Boy
I Will Do a Full List After the 1st… But still going… Story #28… Two title halves were “Who You Calling…” and “Sweet Cheeks…” No idea what “Who You Calling Sweet Cheeks?” was going to be about until I started typing and up popped Poker Boy. Started it in the afternoon this time, got about 700 words done and the rest about 1 this morning, finishing fast and easy. Love stories that do that. I just kept typing until I found the end. I will do a word count as well, and I got to do an introduction and covers to the first collection. Kris has now read eleven of…
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Story 18 and Clean Up…
A Writing Day… With some football watching just for fun. And naps. Two napes to be accurate. But mostly the focus was on writing. After coming back from lunch, I spent a few hours this afternoon spell-checking five of my stories to have them ready to go to Kris. She read the first one and liked it and asked for the novel. It is a stand-alone story just fine, but it clearly leaves room for another Thunder Mountain novel. Next year. So anyhow, did that and then found a couple half titles and typed them in and nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. So I tossed half of that title away, kept…
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Story 17 and Last Day of In-Person Workshop Sale…
UPDATES ON IN-PERSON CLASSES This is the last day of the In-Person Early Bird Sale. Here are the spots remaining in the In-Person classes coming up…. Gothic May 5-8th, 2025… 1 Spot Left Time Travel October 13-16th, 2025… 2 Spots Left Adventure January 12-15th, 2026… Waiting List World Building May 4-7th, 2026… 1 Spot Left Detectives. October 12-15th, 2026… 2 Spots Left So until late today (Saturday), as an early-bird discount, the normal workshop fee of $750 is $600. If you sign up and pay today. Save $150. Also, for the first…
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My Story A Day Challenge…
Going Okay, But… The “but” is coming from critical voice, of course. It has been a stupidly busy first two weeks of the month and I got into a bad habit right out of the gate of starting the story too late at night. Way, way too late. Problem with that is being tired I tell my creative voice to do something short, and a lot of my Marble Grant stories and Bryant Street stories are in the 2,000 word range, so even though I never plan it, I default back to them. Amazing how powerful the creative voice is. It wants me to finish a story a day, but…
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Deciding on a Challenge
Setting Writing Goals for the New Year… I have noticed this year that I seem to be very shell-shocked, for lack of a better way of putting it, when it comes to setting a goal for 2025. Never remember having this issue before. I am not afraid of failing with a challenge. I always fail to success with every challenge, and failing is a part of publishing. Just nature of the beast. So no worry there when setting a goal. But these last two years have been brutal in life events for me. First I lost vision and only regained a part of it, then I smashed up my shoulder…
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Some Interesting Plotting
Watching the Old Magnum… For an hour or so each night, to relax, Kris and I watch television, and for some reason we got going on the old Magnum shows. We’ll stop when we find other shows or some network television returns. But tonight we had worked our way through season seven, which was supposed to be the last season. And I wanted to watch that show ender. He’s a ghost through most of the show and at the end walks into the clouds. Really well done with John Denver music. Then they decided to have a season eight because of the ratings and the money and had to get…
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Scheduling the Impossible…
Scheduling Is Something We All Get Used To… Indie writers at some level or another all get used to scheduling publishing projects. Nature of this new world and actually for me, I had so many deadlines in a year in the old traditional publishing days, I had a massive yearly schedule for writing and travel and deadlines and money flow. In indie publishing, scheduling is just something we all do at one level or another. And then there is the WMG Publishing schedule master, Kris. Two major ongoing projects (Pulphouse monthly) and Holiday Spectacular (More moving parts than you can imagine) are year-long things. Plus for our books and such,…