• Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    February Workshops Now Up

    They Are Live On Teachable… A good list of workshops for February. And a few of the January workshops are still live as well if anyone wants to jump in late. But they won’t be still available by Monday. Also, anyone can still get the Lifetime Workshop Subscription that gives you complete control over when you can go through a workshop. Also, the first Futures workshop is available and the second one is available and going right now. There will be four in that series by the time it is all done. http://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/ Class #11… Feb 5th … Endings Class #12… Feb 5th … Point of View Class #13… Feb 5th … Writing…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    No One Cares

    And No One Will Notice… I constantly get comments and questions from writers worrying about putting out a book that someone might hate, or that might have a mistake in it, or whatever other excuse they can think of to not take a chance and put a book out on the market. All based on fear. All excuses. This sort of continues the last post about always wanting to go back and fix something you put out earlier. You think someone might care if you did that to your book, that someone might notice. Or even more stupid, they might notice that you didn’t fix it. Gadzooks!!! This area, among…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Fun First Day at CES

    But Only 1,000 Words of Writing… The day chewed up my time completely, but a lot of fun. I did manage 1,000 words tonight on the book, but under my daily goal, but that’s all right. CES is only once a year. Kris did a really good blog on her Patreon page about our first day, so figured I would just add a few pictures and call it a night. Got to leave the condo tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. so another long day. I will talk more here about the cool stuff I am learning as I get it sorted out. Going not only as a SF and Mystery…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    The Book With Baggage

    An Idea for a Series of Posts… Or maybe a Pop-Up. Or a new writing book. Or all three. This came about when a number of professional writers were talking and writer J. Steven York mentioned a book he was going back to that he had struggled with. And then we got talking about that book (or two) that we all had that carried so much baggage with it, we either couldn’t finish it or don’t want to think about it ever again. I have never met a long-term professional writer that doesn’t have a book-from-hell story. Or a book so hard to work on that it is  just not…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    CES Show

    Kris and I Are Both Going… For at least as long as our brains hold out from all the crowds and things to see. For us it starts on Tuesday. We are only planning to be there during the days, but my gut sense is that by Thursday we might both be burnt out. I might be wrong. The entire Consumer Electronics Show is spread over the entire city and I am not kidding. There had to be thirty or more places to pick up badges. We walked a few blocks downtown and got ours in the lobby of a hotel there. Free shuttles leave the four major downtown hotels…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

    A Crazy First Five Days

    Workshop and Mentor Stuff… It has been a wild and crazy five days for me, both in ramping up the writing and exercise, but mostly in the WMG Publishing side of work. You know, first of the year business stuff. Longest five days I have had in a long, long time. But now things are smoothing out. And tomorrow I even turn in two book projects to WMG Publishing. One on time, one ahead of time. (They might faint.) So to get some rest and make tomorrow my best fiction writing day in a long time, I am just going to give you the information I gave out earlier in…

  • Challenge,  On Writing

    A Typical Day

    I Got A Question… And I had no answer at this point. The question was what is my typical day? Seems like such an easy question, except it is not easy when you have no typical day. And I have not had a typical, normal series of days for almost all of 2018. But I want to have a regular typical day and I want to set some schedules for writing and exercising and that is what I am working on these first days of the year. So far I have pretty much averaged 10,000 steps a day, but at different times each day. Not good. No typical schedule even…

  • Challenge,  On Writing

    My Challenge

    Off To a Decent Start… I am working to write ten novels in one-hundred days. That is my challenge to start this year. Same challenge I tried to start twice this fall and didn’t even get off the ground. But this time I am gaining speed just fine. My goal is to get up to a minimum of 3,000 words a day. Some days will be more because that is the way it works for me, but I have to have that lower limit every day. And to get to that lower limit, I needed to ramp up. So on January 1st I wrote 1,000 words on a project that…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Mentoring and Workshops

    First of the Year is Here… Four things tonight to make sure you all know about if interested. First… I have one spot open for anyone interested in having me be a mentor this year. I had one person drop out due to a nasty health issue that does not sound like a good way to start a year. So one spot open. I am just starting to get going with the other two in this program. All the details are in the post here. Second… I have decided to do the challenge again. You can write either three novels in three months or thirty short stories in two months.…

  • On Writing,  publishing

    Public Domain Day

    I Know… Copyright!… But hang on, it’s interesting, honest, because for the first time in a lot of years, major works are entering the public domain. Now granted, for some countries, this is a normal thing. For example, in Canada, any author who died in 1968 has works entering the public domain now because of life plus 50 year rule. But the United States has had some pretty messed up copyright laws since it was founded and copyright was put in the Constitution. Now finally, everything from 1923 has dropped into public domain and that will continue to move forward each year, one year at a time, until it catches…