Over the last month, this country and the entire planet has seen some really amazing times on the financial side, and I’m with everyone else when I believe we’re not anywhere near done with cleaning up this mess.

But for the moment, since writing is my business, it’s interesting to wonder about how this mess will impact the publishing world. “Interesting” meaning something I had better be thinking about just like anyone with a job needs to think how this will impact their job and their business. “Interesting” like wondering where the money will come to pay the bills that never seem to stop.

You know, REALLY interesting.

The common knowledge is that publishing is recession proof, and in a general way, I tend to believe that. When it costs a couple with kids over $100 bucks to go to a movie and a cheap meal, the price of a book looks really cheap for the same amount of entertainment. So I tend to buy into this common knowledge for the most part.

But this industry, because we are corporate, will have cutbacks and layoffs and list cuts and such. But not that much in comparison to most areas of the corporate world. And since the business moves at the speed of a glacier, most authors won’t even notice unless it hits them directly in some fashion or another.

For me and Kris, we have a ton of projects bubbling right now, some of which I will talk about when they happen, others I will be unable to talk about because of contract issues. But I will shout out when I sell my 100th book, and that time is close, with luck sometime this winter. So things are looking up here, mostly because while the rest of the planet was going along just fine over the last two years, we were in a down time for us.

Did anyone notice? Nope. Every writer goes through down times in careers, when they have to start over, reinvent parts of their writing, continue on. Most writers, who sell a half dozen or more books and then have a down time, never rebuild. But those of us who have been around for more than a few decades know that down times are normal and rebuilding is normal. We tried to teach that a little in the master class, to let the new professionals at least know that dips come with the business and the key was to just keep working through them. But alas, most never will, which is why there are so few really long term professional writers around compared to the number of books being published.

So here, I’m watching with “interest” the world problems and writing like crazy at the same time, rebuilding my career, just like the world will have to rebuild over the next few years. It’s just a cycle. The key is to understand it and just keep going.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving and tomorrow I cook for a few of the writers in the area. I’ve been cooking my own Thanksgiving dinner now since 1973, when my step mother, visiting with my father, insulted me by saying I couldn’t cook. I was a golf professional at the time and I guess she figured I had never been in a kitchen, even though I lived alone. She then proceeded to force us to go out to the worst Thanksgiving Dinner I have ever had to try to choke down.

I was so angry, I stopped at a store on the way home, bought a small fresh turkey and some dressing and some gravy mix and some potatoes, asked the lady at the check-out stand how to cook the turkey, and went home and cooked it and had a great meal late that night all by myself. I swore that night I would cook my own Thanksgiving turkey from that day forward.

And I kept that pledge to myself. Every year I cook exactly the same thing and invite whoever is close by to join me and I haven’t missed in 35 years. One year there were 26 writers I cooked for, other years just me. This year it’s just the coast writers coming by.  A fun time with close friends.

I hope everyone else has a great holiday feast, no matter what the fear and worry of the world around you.

And don’t forget to take a little time to write as well.

Cheers, Dean

Under the Bibliography topic, I have listed a bunch of the books I have written that I can claim at this point. A pretty long list. I just had a book out this month that I can’t claim, but I wrote. You won’t see that book on the list. Or another one coming out next spring. But a large percentage of the almost one hundred books I have written are on the list.

Cheers, Dean

Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I posted here anything of value to anyone. The two weeks of teaching the Master Class just toasted the writing brain, at least the part that has a desire to talk about the process and the business of writing.

Let me talk for a minute about that Master Class.

This year, the first master class in four years, we had 16 writers attending, all housed in this really wonderful hotel.  The Anchor Inn is just made for writers and is one of the nifty places on the planet. Each writer had a two room suite and we had a wonderful meeting room that felt like a living room, with old over-stuffed couches and chairs. They got free breakfast every morning and there was also another huge lounge to go write if they wanted to get out of their rooms. The beach was also just a block or so away.

We met every morning at 10 and the class, taught by me and Kris and Loren Coleman went for four hours every day, all 15 days. Then in the evening, they were back in class at 7 to be taught be me and Loren Coleman and Christina York with help from Steve York as well. That class also lasted 4 hours. Scott Carter came in one evening and helped out on marketing and Mary Rosenblum helped out on another night with a great genre discussion. And then New York editors Ginjer Buchanan and John Douglas came in for the last three days as well and did a fantastic job.

The writers also had a lot of writing and exercises to do, along with other smaller questions and assignments to answer. So the 16 writers who attended, all published in one way or another, were jammed busy as we poured information at them and forced them to work. Someone totaled it up and said the writers attending wrote almost 400 thousand words of short fiction, novel queries, and assignments in the two weeks while attending eight hours of class for 15 straight days.

And all of them made it through with flying colors. Tired and exhausted, but full of more information than they will ever remember.

As for the instructors, well it darned near killed all of us.

Loren Coleman, editor, publisher, and author of over twenty novels, stayed in a room beside the meeting area and helped glue back together everyone at one point or another. He got maybe three hours of sleep per night. Maybe.

Kris taught in the morning and then spent the entire rest of the day carefully reading the fantastic amount of writing, exercises and other production that the 16 writers turned in. Her job was to help them find the weakness and the strength in their craft and then help the writer solve the issue. She had the toughest job of all of us in my opinion.

Chris York was on book deadline during the master class and also works this wonderful job at another hotel, yet she still came in every evening for 5 hours to help me and Loren with the business. She even managed to get pages done on her book deadline, but she was as tired as we all were when it was over.

My job was to do all the detail work, hold the entire thing together, and be the lead instructor for both sessions, putting some sort of form and logic on all the information. And read the short stories and about six thousand query and novel blurbs the writers were constantly turning in. And run the writing business simulation we put the writers through called The Game. Teaching for eight hours a day, basically on every detail of the business, was draining to say the least. And when everyone finally left town, the idea of talking about writing here on this blog just didn’t seem attractive to me for some reason.

But now time has passed. There is the time before the Master Class and the time since the Master Class and they seem to be divided by this void in my mind. So if you asked me a question about writing before the Master Class and I didn’t get to it, ask it again and I will now. The brain’s interest in actually thinking about writing is coming back again, along with other details of life that I tended to space over the last two or three weeks.

Now I remember why it was four years since the last master class. It took that long to forget how hard they really are to teach.

We pushed the marketing workshop that was supposed to be ending right now back to March and the next Master Class back to next October. So if you are interested in any of the classes, the new schedule is under workshops here on this site. Don’t hope or expect us to teach any after the ones listed. We’re getting burnt out again.

And besides, I have novels to write as well. And so does Kris. And that’s how we make our living. Thankfully, the book industry is mostly recession proof.

I’ll be back to these posts regularly now.

Cheers, Dean