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Comments Have Been Interesting
My Best Advice I Can Give?… The comments over the past few days have been fun. Thanks, everyone who left a comment. I help a lot of writers learn in a lot of detail about specific areas of writing through the workshops. But if I had to boil it all down in some general way, here are my suggestions… 1… Read for pleasure. 2… Enjoy writing and telling a story. 3… Write only stories that you feel passionate about and that will entertain you. 4… Be passionate about wanting to keep learning. All the rest is a shrug. If you want my advice on the business of professional writing, that…
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Because of Last Night’s Comments
I Did a Tip of the Week… On how and why bestselling authors give bad advice to young writers. So in a very quick post here, I thought I would list a few reasons that come to me off the top of my head. 1… It was how the bestseller learned in the last century, so beginning writers should learn the same way, even though that is not how the bestselling writer actually works now. 2… It seems like a good way to train beginning writers (like the no adverb silliness). 3… The author is not talking to other authors, but to readers. (Writing as work and rewrite myth comes…
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The Threat of Perfect
The Voice Does It Again… I think almost every coach and a few of the guest coaches on The Voice have told a singer in one way or another that perfect is a bad thing. Wow, we were stopping the show the last few days every time a coach said that and we gave up after five or six stops just this week alone. I know most of you reading this will just shake your head and go away and wonder why we are watching a reality show like The Voice. The reason is that we learn a ton from it every season. We learn about drive, about technique, and…
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Intellectual Property
This is Called IP for Short… Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secrets. All are forms of IP. Writers deal mostly in copyright. That is what we license, but few writers know anything about what they license. And this post will not be a long, dull screed on copyright, I promise. In fact, it will be fairly short. I want to deal with value of copyright is all. A simple topic, right? Nope. “Patents, trademarks and copyrights generally have associated costs and are usually capitalized as assets on the balance sheet.” Oh, oh… So how do you figure the value of that asset when a copyright will last the life of…
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Last Call On October Workshops
I Will Be Switching Them Out… And if you have a credit from the recent Kickstarter, just write me and I’ll get you into an October workshop if you want. Or you can use the credits at any time into the future. This month might be one of the best months of workshop choices we have ever offered. Sign up at Teachable.com And there are lifetime subscriptions available on Teachable as well if you decide to get serious and really try to take as many as possible. Class #37… Oct 2nd … How to Study Writing Class #38… Oct 2nd … Endings Class #39… Oct 2nd … Point of View Class #40……
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Stunned By The Voice
A Detail About The Voice That Flat Amazed Me… One young woman was back after failing last season to get a chair to turn. (She got two this time.) And in the conversation about her courage to come back, and how she had gone away and worked really hard, it was revealed that any time a judge told someone who failed to get a chair to turn to come back, that person had an automatic invite back. That’s right, all a judge had to do was say “come back” to a singer who failed and the invite was automatically there. And then the detail was mentioned that almost knocked me…
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All October Workshops Started
Still Time To Get In… And if you have a credit from the recent Kickstarter, just write me and I’ll get you into an October workshop if you want. Or you can use the credits at any time into the future. This month might be one of the best months of workshop choices we have ever offered. Sign up at Teachable.com And there are lifetime subscriptions available on Teachable as well if you decide to get serious and really try to take as many as possible. Class #37… Oct 2nd … How to Study Writing Class #38… Oct 2nd … Endings Class #39… Oct 2nd … Point of View Class #40… Oct…
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Switching the Schedule To Daytime
Started Today… To get to writing and making things possible for me to write enough hours to do this ten novel challenge, Kris and I decided I needed to switch my schedule to writing during the day. It just fit everything about living here in Vegas. Just as writing late into the night fit everything about living on the coast. So today I got up a little before 7 a.m. and Kris and I were going across the starting line of a 5k race at 8 a.m. Now some of you know I have been trying to lose weight and I want to run a marathon in the middle of…
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Creating a Habit of Writing
How to Do It?… Make a schedule and stick to it. Pretty soon the schedule becomes a habit. That’s how. It really is that simple, but that difficult. First of all, I needed to want to write again. Got that going with the challenge. Forced my own hand there, maybe a little sooner than I should, but ah well, it’s going. Second, I had to get used to this new place and Kris’s world here since I have spent most of the last six months in Oregon cleaning out the house we lived in for 23 years. Spent the last six weeks plus learning to live and love this wonderful…
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Writing Habits
Habit of Writing Makes Everything Easier… I have, regularly, over the years, written out of habit, meaning I write at the same time every day. And when doing that, and managing a decent amount every day, the writing just gets easier. And I get a vast amount done. In fact, when I am in that habit state, I wonder why I ever have days I don’t write. So now, in my new place in Las Vegas, away from a house I lived in for 23 years and all the normal habits it gave me, I am finding it fascinatingly difficult to figure out a new writing habit. I have a…