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Failure Must Be An Option
FAILURE MUST BE AN OPTION (I first did a version of this post in 2012, then brought it forward and updated it for 2014, and now updated again, here it is as part of this year-end flurry of posts to help get ready for 2017.) I’ll bet a few of you got very uneasy by me starting off a blog post with: “Failure Must Be An Option.” This post is about how to move forward with your writing. And to do that, you must fail, over and over to become an artist in this business and to just survive. And that’s normal and perfectly fine. (I really should repeat that last sentence.)…
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Blast From The Past To Help With the Future
(I wrote this blog in response to a letter I got after doing a novel in seven days. This might help clear out some stuff going into the new year about writing at your own pace. No matter what that pace might be.) The Blog That Destroyed an Art Form I got a great comment from a guy this morning. I didn’t put it through because the guy called me some pretty good names. *ss*ole was only one of them. One word I had never been called before. Creative. But he said he had liked my writing. (I think the operative word there is “had.”) So why was he so…
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Pulp Speed Writers
Pulp Writers’ Abilities… (I first wrote this blog back in May of 2016 and figured it might be a good one to put here at the end of the year.) I got a great question today about some of the basics the really prolific pulp writers did to be so productive. And how to go about finding out about a lot of their styles. How I have learned about so many of the older pulp writers is by reading book about them in their own words, reading books about the era, and just finding anything I could to read about the pulp writers of the 1920s to 1950s. A great…
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Step One of Getting Ready for a New Year
Looking Back (for only a moment)… Step one of planning ahead is to spend just a little time looking back at the past year, see how you did, how the actual production matched up to your goals last January. I did that as much as I needed to. I know, without even looking hard, that my year sucked by my standards. For the first time in three or more years, my total word count approaching the end of the year is just under a million words at around 970,000 words. So the final total will depend on what I do this last week. Not sure if I can hit thirty thousand words…
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Artistic Freedom and Being a Victim
Getting Tired… You would think that eventually fiction writers, as a group, would start getting tired of being victims. I mean really tired. One of the wonderful things that this new world has given all writers is artistic freedom. We’ve talked here about some of the ramifications of how writers use that freedom over the last few weeks. But another aspect of the freedom writers have is to make choices in the areas of how they will work, who they will work with, and so on. These choices are very much aspects of artistic freedom. In the old days of traditional-publishing-only, I used to scoff at writers sitting in bars…
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Artistic Choice and The Voice Finals
ARTISTIC CHOICE AND THE VOICE… In case you missed The Voice finals tonight, you should really find it and watch it. Some amazing music. And great interviews. Completely entertaining. But as you are watching it, put on your writer hat. Not your creative hat, but the hat that observes and sees patterns. Over and over and over again the three judges with artists left praised how their artists were original, not like anyone else in the world. The judges kept saying that their artists were doing their own things, had their own way of approaching music. It was a mantra and clearly the most important thing to the judges. They kept…
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Belief and Artistic Choice
Belief Can Cause Interesting Results… Sometimes Wrong… Another post in this loose series of posts about how writers have artistic freedom in this modern world. And about the choices artists make with that freedom. I have noticed an interesting pattern over the last four or five years about belief and the choices writers make because of a belief. And I am not talking some religious or political belief. Nope. But I am talking about belief based on little-to-no information or facts. And decisions based on myths that appear true to the observer, thus making the observer believe them. Now I have done a number of books beating on some of…
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Artistic Choice and Making Money
I Love Making Money with My Fiction… For some reason, not sure how, some people have thought I am against making money with fiction writing. Never ever said that. In fact, that is so far from the truth as to be laughable. I make great money with my fiction now. Not as good as many, but better than I ever did when I was writing for money as a ghost and media writer. But for some reason I use the term “artistic” and “choice” and then suggest that writers should take the long-term goal and write what they love and people automatically knee-jerk reaction that I am against making money…
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Sales vs People vs Artistic Freedom
Sales: A Horrible Way to Think About Readers… That’s my opinion and I wish I could say I always believed that, but I would be lying. When I was working traditional publishing, I only looked at sales numbers, copies shipped, and numbers on royalty statements. About eight or nine years ago, right at the start of the indie movement, I did yet another count of the numbers of books I had sold. Just over seventeen million. That’s right, I had seventeen million copies of my books in print as of eight or so years ago. And I have been selling steadily since. Both the traditional books still sell and my indie books chug…
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An Interesting Assumption
Thinking and Knowing Are Two Different Things… Over the last week or so I have been talking about having the freedom, the artistic freedom, of being able to write what we want to write in this new world. Both the good side of that freedom and the side I see as a problem. And the area that the most people seem to get stuck on is my suggestion to write what you love, not to market. (You can go back and read my points on that topic over the last week. Read the comments as well.) But tonight I wanted to point out one simple problem the people who write…