Over in the second column, or up at the top of the page, you will now see links to Sandy Schofield and Kathryn Wesley. Neither page is finished yet, but they will be shortly, I hope. I figured putting up those two would be a good test run on learning this program. And it has been. I’ve run up against a few blocks, but I am getting them figured out slowly.

Sandy Schofield and Kathryn Wesley have nine novels between them, so far. I actually wrote four young adult books under Sandy Schofield this last year, but the publisher has sort of gone on vacation for a short time and I’m just waiting to see if they will ever get published. A picture book taken from one of my young adult books, with the name Sandy Schofield on it, was published in a test run, but I never saw a copy of it either.

Most of the time, those two pen names were for Kris and I writing together. And, since we haven’t written any books together in six years, both of these writers/names were on vacation until I used Sandy for the young adult books. On each page I will put up pictures and links to buying the books and give a little story about the writing of each book. And why the two names in the first place.

But right now, the books that Sandy and Kathryn wrote are there in short-hand form as I work to put together a bibliography of all these books that will be on that page.

There will be lots of talk about pen names on this site. That should be fun as time goes along. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dean

I just managed to learn how to upload a picture to the side bar, so I posted another anthology that has a story of mine in it. Click on the picture to link to Amazon for the book.

The anthology was edited by Mike Resnick, who asked 29 of us to send him the story we thought was our funniest.  Over the years I have written a lot of humor, including the only two original “Men in Black” novels and an entire satire on the gambling industry. Many of my short stories range from weird to funny.  Very few are serious stories, actually. So for me, picking my funniest short story was difficult until Kris reminded me of the story I originally wrote for an Esther Friesner anthology called “Alien Pregnant by Elvis.”

The story has a story all its own.  Back in the early days of the Sci-Fi television channel, they had a science fiction news program, and just after the anthology came out, Kris and I were watching the news program when the moderator held up the anthology and made a joke about the title of my story. I just about rolled off the couch in surprise.

Now, understand, the title of my story is simply In Search of the Perfect Orgasm. Actually, the full title is In Search of the Perfect Orgasm or Doing It with a Big Lizard Can Be Fun.  Is it any wonder that out of all the stories in the book the moderator of the news program picked mine?  Again, the value of a good title.

To be honest, the story is head-shaking silly, and very short, but as the years go by I have stayed very proud of the little thing that Esther Friesner had me write for her book. And I’m very glad Mike Resnick asked me to be in his book with my goofy story.

The book is worth every penny to buy.  Besides my story, twenty-eight other name authors pick their favorite funny story and say a few words in an introduction about it. Worth the cost from the small press Benbella. I sure enjoyed reading it and am proud to have been asked to be in it.  Thanks, Mike.

Cheers, Dean

A quick word about what’s coming up shortly, as soon as I learn a few more tricks of this program.  Always a challenge to an old writer like me.

In short order, I’ll update the biography and the bibliography.  With 90 novels now, that second part will take more time, and the published short fiction will even take longer, but I will work at it regularly to finally get all the books I can legally claim to have written up here.

I will continue to put up regular posts about writing, the craft of writing, a story about something that happened with writing, or some other such thing.  Those posts with writing hints will be gathered in the On Writing section as the months go by.

Every few years, Kris and I decide to do the professional writers workshops again here on the Oregon Coast, trying to help young professional writers make a jump forward.  Right now we’re in one of those years, so at times, in a workshop section, I will talk about those as well, especially if there are things that happen that I feel a more general writing public would be interested in.

Of course, I’ll do the standard writer things like announce new books when I can, announce new publications of stories, and so on.  Some of you might be surprised at the range of novels I write.  And questions about writing are always welcome.  This will never be like the old forum, but I do tend to answer things the way I see them, which always tends to lead to some discussions.  And right now, with the publishing industry changing so fast, discussions are always a good thing.  We all learn from them, me included.

I will, if the program allows, put up some small samples of work I am doing on yet unpublished novels.  And talk about the books and the process of selling them for a novelist at my level.  I will have to be cautious in this area, since I do want to sell the books.  But I figure for a learning example for some younger writers, it might be worth doing.

I also have two hobbies that I will talk about regularly.  I love to go out and treasure hunt for all kinds of treasures, and when I do that, I will post here in a special treasure hunt category.  I also play no-limit hold-’em poker at a semi-professional level, so at times I’ll post details about a tournament or a live game I got into that taught me something or had something cool happen.  And, of course, if I hit a TV table at some tournament, I’ll shout out.

But most of all, this is a professional writer’s site.  I’ve been making a living at this business for over 20 years now.  And I’ve been an editor for a number of different formats over the years.  And I have worked some with Hollywood.  So this site will talk mostly about that kind of thing.  And I hope I can pass along some of the knowledge about writing that I have gained in all these years.

So drop back regularly.  I’ll try to keep this place fun and entertaining and informative.

Cheers,  Dean

For those of you like me who often start stories from titles, finding titles that really spark the imagination is not an easy thing at times.  So I have a few tricks to get titles before starting a story.  This post details one of those tricks.  Or better put, a writing exercise.  Challenge yourself to do this once and see how it works.

I’m not sure who suggested this trick, but I’ve written many stories from it over the years, including a Nebula nominated story called “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.”

A couple things are needed for this to work.  A large digest or magazine collection.  A notebook.  And an hour of time.

Start by opening a magazine, digest, or old pulp at random to the table of contents and scan down the titles.  You are looking for a title that can easily be divided in half, a title with two clauses.  Do NOT look at the stories.  Just the titles.  Nothing more.

Take half of one title and write it in a column in your notebook.  It can be the first half or the second half of the title.  Doesn’t matter.  But only write down half the title.  (And remember, titles are not under copyright protection, so you are doing nothing wrong here. <g>)

Once you have an entire column of phrases, which will take maybe a dozen or more issues of a magazine, put that sheet away, find a different magazine or at least another decade of magazines and start a second sheet of paper with a column with more half titles.   The reason to try to find a different magazine or a different decade is that titles run similar in magazines and similar in decades.  Old pulp magazines are really great for this if you can find some.

When you have your second list done, then put it beside the first list.

Take half of a title from one list and combine it with half a title from the other list in one way or another and then write the story.

For example, my story “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man” came from this exercise.  “In the Shade…” was half a title.  “Slow Boat” was the other half.  I added the word “man,” and linked the two with “of the,” then made slow boat one word, and ran with it because it was so weird.

Again, this is a writing exercise, like finding three words in a dictionary and writing a story using all three.  But I use this title exercise a lot, especially when I am stuck.  I have dozens of sheets of paper with half titles on them and when searching around for a story to write, I take two of these sheets down from my board and jam two half titles together and sit down and write.

The muse never comes to you.  Sometimes you must run out and grab it and bring it kicking and screaming into the office.  This exercise is nothing more than a way to do that.

Cheers,  Dean

Notice down in the column on the right of this one, there are two book covers.  One is for the new anthology of stories edited by Denise Little called Mystery Date.  It came out from Daw Books in February.

The story I have in Mystery Date is called “Me and Beans and Great Big Melons.”  Yup, that’s the title.  Which brings me to what I’m going to talk about from time-to-time here on this new site:  Writing and the origin of a story or novel.

More times than not, I will start a short story or a novel simply from a title.  I have no idea what the story will be about, no idea of even the genre.  But somewhere during that day, I have heard what I think would be a good “Dean Title” and off I go to my writing office.  I type the title onto the page and then just sit there for a moment staring at it.

After a few of these long moments, I get bored and start typing, often about something the title suggests.  In “Me and Beans and Great Big Melons” I started typing about a guy who hates beans standing in a grocery store in the bean aisle.

Now understand, this had nothing at all to do with where the title came from.  The title was given to me by some writers late one night in the kitchen of what was then our workshop house.  Kris and I have a cat by the name of Thor, and Kris added the name “Beans” to him for some reason lost in time and silliness.  So we have a cat named Thor Beans.

On the night I committed this strange story, one of the writers at a workshop that late night was cutting up a large melon of some sort for a snack when I walked into the workshop house kitchen and said, “I need a title.”

Being that it was very, very late at night, the writer held up the melon.  “Melons.”

“Sucks,”  I said.

“Write a story about one of your cats,”  another writer said.

“Sucks,”  I said.

“So what about your cat Beans?”  another writer said.  “You could write a story about you and Beans.”

“And melons,”  the first writer said.  “Don’t forget the melons.”

At that instant I knew I had my “Dean Title.”  So I went back next door to my writing office and typed in “Me and Beans and Great Big Melons” and started typing.  The story turned out to be about a guy who has two romances right there in the bean aisle of the grocery store.  One is with an alien.  Kris calls it my “redneck romance” and I will let you read the story to determine how the melons come into the picture.

And thus I have just shown how really silly writers can be when it comes to creating great works of art.  And if you don’t believe me that “Me and Beans and Great Big Melons” is a work of art, you just haven’t read it yet. <g>  Go buy the book.  Trust me, there’s no cat in the story.

Stay tuned as this site gets up and running.

Cheers,  Dean

Welcome, everyone to my new site.  Not much here, yet, but there will be.  For the moment, to see how this will look at some point in the future, go take a look at my wife’s web site .    She’s ahead of me on this.