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Future Workshop Series
Fourth In The Series Starts Next Wednesday… Futures: Patience…. Pacing a Career. How, When, and Why? In this Future series for writers, we have available now (1) Refresh and Renew, (2) Opportunities, (3) Structure, and soon (4)Patience. You can sign up for them on Teachable at any point you want and go through them at your own pace. But this fourth one, Patience, will be paced like a regular six week workshop this first time through, starting next Wednesday. And we have a bundle available to get a discount if you buy all four. All four Futures Workshops are in the Lifetime Subscription as well and anyone with a Lifetime Subscription…
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Fantastic Writing Advice
“Write like everyone you know is dead…” Joe Lansdale said that in the post that he allowed me to copy here last night. And I wanted to point out that one simple things he says. Here is what he said on the topic in total: “Write like everyone you know is dead. To hell with everyone else’s opinion when you write. Write for yourself. I don’t have a perfect reader in mind. That works for some, but it makes me write for them which means I might not be writing for me. I have no idea what anyone else will like. I only know what I like, so I write…
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Great Advice from Joe Lansdale
Joe Allowed Me to Reprint This Here… It is an amazing post. Very clear and to the point. Worth the read. Thanks Joe, for saying this on Facebook and then allowing me to reprint it here. ———— Facebook Post April 23rd from Joe Lansdale: Each to his own, but the idea of multiple drafts is not necessarily a good idea. A writer can get lost in all those drafts, and think the more drafts the better the book. I polish as I go, so there’s essentially one draft, though by polishing as I go, I’m doing a lot of little daily rewrites. I don’t outline or plot, except subconsciously, I…
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Hint: Don’t Wait Until Sunday
At Least Not Very Often… Folks, deadlines are a fun thing and they really help us all at times get writing done we might not have gotten done without the deadline. That is what The Great Challenge is all about. Deadline. It is a no-lose challenge, where even if you miss a week, you get the money you paid for the challenge in credit toward anything we do in workshops. And the reason is to give each of you a deadline to get a story finished and to me each week by Sunday night. Second week now. Not everyone has started yet, and there is still room to jump into…
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Thinking of a New Pop-Up
Character and World Building While Writing into the Dark… Seems like a fun idea to talk about for a bunch of videos in the Pop-Up series, including techniques on how to do both character and world building while writing into the dark. Especially complex world and character stuff. I get a bunch of questions about this regularly, actually. Anyone even interested? It would open up in mid-May somewhere. In the meantime, Kris and I have a bunch of homework to do between writing to get ready for the licensing expo here in June. Going to be great fun and I hope to learn a ton and maybe make a few…
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Some Real Basics
Manuscript Format… Yup, doesn’t get any more basic than that, but so many newer writers have no clue what that even is. So I made it a requirement of The Great Challenge. I will count your story but not read it if you don’t have your story sent to me in a doc or docx attached file in manuscript format. A simple Google search will get you what it looks like. In fact, go to this link and there is even a picture of the first page of a manuscript exactly. https://www.shunn.net/format/story.html I found that link and others with a two second Google search. Oh, the horror… Point, I do…
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Reading Stories
Going Slow… There are few enough in the Great Challenge writing a short story per week (a number haven’t started yet), that I can just read a few stories each day during the week and really enjoy the process. A couple of the stories turned in that I have read today really worked, a few didn’t end. But that’s pretty standard. I am really going to enjoy this. The key is going to be the writers keeping my voice out of their heads and me out of their writing offices. Here is how that problem goes… — If I liked a story, the fear then crops up that the next…
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Never Give Up
A Very True Story… Some of you have heard me give the scary warning about Topanga Canyon, a writer who was so, so, so close to breaking in during the late 1980s and early 1990s. His real name is Preston Dennett. Well, I got to meet this wonderful writer and great person finally, after all these years, when he won in Writers of the Future. In fact, he and I share a table of contents, since we both have stories in Volume #35 of Writers of the Future. So John Goodwin, the publisher of Galaxy Press, thought it would be a good idea to have the two of us tell…
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Wrong Direction
Not One, Not Two, But Three Writers… Just today, when telling me for one reason or another about a project that they were working on said that they had gone in a wrong direction and had to toss out a bunch of writing. One person said almost a hundred pages. I seldom say anything when a beginning writer or early-stage writer says that to me. But I figured I could say something here. So if I did say something when someone made that “I went in the wrong direction on my novel…” comment, here is what it would be… First off, how do you know? Now every writer when asked…
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Filler Post to Keep the Streak Alive
I’m Not Even Doing Email Tonight… I’ll catch all that up tomorrow. Saw a fun movie tonight (Shazam) and had a good dinner and then Kris and I walked all over the downtown Las Vegas area watching tourists to get our steps for the day. Beautiful night, perfect temps with a slight breeze. And the tourists were in rare Saturday night form. Well, maybe not so rare. Normal Saturday night form, with too much booze and not enough clothing for people who should be wearing it. And we didn’t even get near Fremont Street, which looked far too packed to think about walking along. So now off to get some…