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Perfection and Writing
Some Tough Topics Tonight… I spent most of the day today at my friend’s house, going through stuff. Two great writers and friends, Chris and Steve York also spent their evening with me, going through stuff. Our main goal was to get things ready to be donated to the women’s shelter and to other charities around town. Thanks Chris and Steve!! They were also friends with the woman who died. In letters today I got numbers of questions about estates and wills for writers, but I want to deal with two quick questions tonight before I vanish into bed. The questions are related, so hold on. They are both about disease. And about…
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Throwing Away A Life
Estates and Writing and Some Observations… Today I found myself back in the position once again of going through someone’s personal papers and tossing them in a black bag. Old financial records, old pictures of her and her husband, a few journals, 4-H ribbons, letters from home during the Peace Corp years. You know… details about a life well-lived. Just over five years ago, I found myself doing the same thing for another friend. His name was Bill Trojan and was a well-known book dealer in the sf world. I realized he had numbers of degrees. I tossed away his old wedding pictures and all his medical records that told…
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Logic: The Lost Art in Being a Fiction Writer
Don’t Try Logic… Dangerous to Your Myths I have been going on now in numbers of posts about how we fiction writers sabotage ourselves. Fear without real cause is the normal reason. But I have another deeper reason tonight. Lack of logic. In a few posts I used math to try to make sense of the silliness of a few myths. Math tends to be very logical. Simply put, fiction writers, when it comes to the very basis of being a fiction writer, toss all logic out the window and listen to people who have never written or published a book. This goes on from the very beginning of every writer’s career.…
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Nifty Bundle from BundleRabbit
The Haunted Bundle… In case you folks are not familiar with Bundlerabbit, you should be. They are doing some really interesting new things. Get on their mailing list for some amazing deals from top writers. I am part of a bundle there called the Haunted Bundle. You can buy the bundle not only through Bundlerabbit, but through Kobo, Amazon, and other places. Nifty, huh? Twenty stories. Kris has a story in the bundle as well. (The story I have in the bundle is a “Ghost of a Chance” story that originally appeared in Stories from July.) One nifty feature of the site is go to the location of the bundle…
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Workshops and Stuff
Worked on Online Workshops… I did that until around 7 p.m. today, along with the standard errands and stuff normal for a Friday. Then home, cooked dinner, napped, and went back to writing. Great fun. And then a bunch of reading, which I will be doing all month for the coming anthology workshop. Tomorrow I will start back on the book I left off before the trip. I hope to finish that one and get to some short fiction at some point soon. Or maybe do some short fiction and then finish the book. I don’t know. We shall see. Another Smith’s Monthly got out. Patreon supporters and subscribers should have…
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Writing and Lost Track of Time
You all know how that happens… I planned tonight to write one of the longer blogs on one of the questions from last week. So I’m banging along on a fiction project and I had taken a few breaks, but didn’t think to look at the clock until I realized it was 5:30 a.m. Those longer posts take me an hour or more, and a clear mind. Not happening at this moment. (grin) So soon. Time… when you are writing a story and having fun, it sure zips past. (grin) —————- FEBRUARY ONLINE WORKSHOPS Workshops start next Tuesday and Wednesday. Yes, it is February already. Still room in all of them, but…
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A Very Different Day
Wow, was today a different day than normal… Started off out at our south store moving a couple of bookcases for Allyson and also moving an antique beautiful 11 foot long old candy counter into our south store. That took four of us. Then moved the wonderful shelves into Allyson’s place. Then Kris and I headed into the valley to have a nice lunch, see Rogue One, have a nice dinner and pie, then back home by 1 in the morning. In the process, after the movie, I also got from the theater for our north store the standee for Rogue One and another one. Took a ton of work…
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End of the Month Catching Up
Time for some writing numbers and regular stuff… Going to catch up all the numbers here, since the last time I did this was almost three weeks weeks ago. January turned out to be a pretty good month for writing. And as things get slowly back to normal again, I will start back up the “thing I learned today” feature. That was fun. I still did it every day over the last three weeks, but not going to spend time here going over them. I wrote about 125,000 total words during January, with everything except post comments counted. Decent amount of fiction. Working to ramp that up. Totals are below.…
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Official Approval Fear
Did I Get it Right?… What a stupid, silly, useless question when it comes to writing stories. And yet… That one question covers some of the largest fears that fiction writers have. I got some of these expressed in the questions from last week. Thanks everyone. So let me see if I can make some sense out of all this… —Wondering if they got it right (fearing that they didn’t) makes beginning writers often spend thousands on book doctors or some other editor term, almost always from a person who has never published a word. —Wondering if they got it right (fearing that they didn’t) makes beginning writers rewrite the…
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The Fear of a Real Paycheck
Economic Basis for Fear… Last week I asked some basic questions, the premise being that I am questioning why I made simply writing for five days on that last novel something special. And on Thursday I asked a number of questions that got some fantastic responses. It is pretty clear that it is fear in one form or another stopping or slowing down or influencing most fiction writers these days. In all sorts of areas. Lots to talk about this week. And I believe some of the fears are just bogus and some have some pretty solid basis in reality. So I want to address a fear I have fought…