I figured in the month where so many people around the world are joined in a challenge to write at least 50,000 words or so of a novel, now would be a good time to take on this myth. I love the challenge and the fact that it gets so many people writing, and writing quickly. But then when the month is over the myths kick in.

Book as Event is a huge myth that stops most everyone who has done the challenge from simply mailing their books to editors and doing it again the following month. In fact, I have already heard over and over from people who are finished with their book that they will put it away, never mail it, but they had fun. What??? Why not mail it??? Why not try to sell it and get it into print??? Ah, well.

The myth of Book as Event, put as clearly as I can. Myth: All books need to be events, need to be something special.

Hogwash, of course. All books must be written as well as the author can write the book, but just because the author spent blood and sweat on the book, or the author wrote it in twenty days, doesn’t make the book either special or not special. And it certainly doesn’t make it an event.

Hard and fast rule about writing:

THE PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE OF THE AUTHOR IN THE WRITING OF THE BOOK HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE FINAL QUALITY OF THE BOOK.

If you put that on your wall, you will always have a defense against many of the things I’m going to talk about.

When is a book an actual event? Let me answer that question before I move on to other areas of this topic, the deadly areas.

A book is an acutal event when an author finishes his or her first novel. Now, that’s something special and should be celebrated with friends and family with a good dinner, maybe cards, flowers, something special like a cake. Finishing a first novel puts the writer in a very small minority of writers. Most writers talk about writing, but never find the time to write, let alone to do what it takes to write an entire novel, working for weeks or months to do it. Finishing a first novel is a small event. Celebrate, then put the novel in the mail and get started on the next one.

Kevin J. Anderson sent me a great card after I finished my first novel. On the face of the card is four pictures of a very small mouse pushing a huge elephant up a steep hill. When you open the card, it shows the mouse, sweating, with the elephant at the top of the hill, and at the base of the hill is a herd of elephants just waiting. The caption says, “Great work! Now, do it again.”

Spot on the money.

Publishing a first novel is an actual event. It most likely won’t be your first novel written, but it will always be considered your first novel from that publication forward. My first novel is Laying the Music to Rest, which was the third book I wrote. That first publication should be celebrated, and I remember I did. It is very special, and that specialness needs to be acknowledged by both the author and everyone around them. That is an actual event. Enjoy it!

So why is making a book an event so bad (beyond those two actual events)? About a hundred different reasons, so let me start slowly into the thinking that kills author after author on this myth. And frighteningly enough, this is the myth that I fight the most. This myth has cost me years of my writing career.

Years, and I am not kidding.

—In the Beginning: None of us start out as novelists. No one. Sorry, doesn’t happen. We all learn to write in school, from teachers, from hundreds of people along the way. And often writers start by writing poems, short stories, things like that, even when starting into fiction decades after they learned to write their first sentence. Novels are those big, complex things in a beginning writer’s mind, that need to have a ton of time spent on them to do correctly. (See the myth about writing fast.)

Why do we all have this belief? Because before starting to write novels, we all read novels, and they seemed complex, they seemed long, they seemed just flat hard to do. We built them up to be something really special before we even wrote word one.

So here comes something like this November novel challenge going on now. Thousands and thousands of people manage to write at least 50,000 words in a month or less. Many of them found it easy, many of them had a blast doing it. But alas, to most of them it can’t be any good because it was fun to do, it was easy to do, and gasp, it was written quickly. The thinking is that novels have to be hard and complex and thus because it was fun and easy and quick, it can’t be good. Total hogwash, of course. Back to the only solid rule in writing.

THE PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE OF THE AUTHOR IN THE WRITING OF THE BOOK HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE FINAL QUALITY OF THE BOOK.

Book as Event thinking puts thousands and thousands of great books into drawers because the author had too much fun writing it.

Not kidding. Writers don’t mail books because they enjoyed writing it. This myth is that stupid. And that deadly.

— It Must Be Perfect: Book as Event really hits right here, kicking in the myth that everything must be rewritten to death before it can be good. A book must be worked over and over and over to make it “perfect.” Hogwash, simple hogwash.

So how do you write a novel? Simply do the best you can every day during the writing, finish the book, fix the mistakes a trusted first reader finds, and mail the thing and start the next book. There is no such thing as a perfect book and the more you work to make a book perfect, the more you turn it into a polished stone with no character or voice. Leave your book rough, leave your voice alone, mail the book and do another. There is no perfect book. Never has been, never will be. And you certainly won’t write the first one. Sorry.

Senator Ted Kennedy has a great quote my wife has on her wall in her office. “Never let perfect be the enemy of the good.”

But…but…but… Let me start with a few of the doubts I can hear creeping into this.

Doubt #1. “If I don’t write a perfect book, it will be rejected in this tough market.”

Wrong. Books are bought for story. Sure, keep the spelling mistakes and typing mistakes down to a minimum by having some trusted first readers, but your story won’t be rejected for a few bad sentences if the story is kick-ass. Books are simply stories, nothing more. Write a good story, mail it, write another.

Doubt #2 “But I want my story to be perfect, my characters big, my plot flawless.”

To do that, you have to trust your subconscious, and that part of your brain functions in fast, first draft mode. You come at your book from critical brain, and you’ll end up writing like your first grade teacher, without voice or anything original left in the book.

There are many more doubts, many more. I know, I’ve had them, and fell for some of them along the way. But for the moment, back to the bigger topic.

—This is too hard. If you feel that way in a book, you are trapped in a myth somewhere, more than likely Book as Event. When did writing a story become hard? It’s not, no matter what authors want to tell you at conventions and writer’s conferences and on their blogs.

The truth: Writing a story is fun. And those of us lucky enough to do it for a living have the best job in the world, period. I sit alone in a room and make stuff up and people pay me large sums of money to do that. What is so hard about that?

But when it starts feeling hard, when the voices start creeping in that the story sucks, that the plot doesn’t work, that even your first grade teacher will hate you when they see the crap you are writing, then guess what? You are trapped in Book as Event myth.

A book is not an event. It is just a long story. Nothing more. And nothing less. Tell the story, move on to another one. And have fun. You could be digging a ditch in the rain.

—It must be art. Oh, heavens, if that is your thinking, you are lost. Way, way deep in Book as Event. If you think every book you write must be art, stop writing now, which more than likely, you already have. There is no such thing as the “Great American Novel” anymore, and I sort of doubt there ever was, actually.

The truth is that every month thousands of publishers and imprints must fill a monthly list. Those lists must be filled to keep the machine of publishing going. And now, with electronic publishing, the slots needed for novels is increasing even faster. No book will climb above that crowd, at least not as art. Your book may climb above it as a bestseller, but if you are thinking you are writing art, I’m sure you look down your nose at bestsellers. Go study the history of the books that are considered art today and you might have a hope of getting over that, since most of the books studied as art today were the bestsellers of their time.

Art need audience. If you are selling your book that took six years to write to 1,000 people, you are not writing art. Sorry.

(Oh, that’s going to make some people angry. Sigh…)

—To sell more copies, my book must be bigger. I have to admit, I fell for this one as well for a few years, as did most of publishing because of the collapse of the distribution system in the mid 1990s. I even taught a class here on the coast in how to write a “Big Book.” Worst class I ever taught, and most destructive to writers. Sorry, those of you who took it.

The problem is with this big book aspect is that about half the agents working today (almost all the young ones who were editors at one point since 1995) believe this silliness, even though they are fully aware that most books on a imprint’s list are small books, niche books, category books. For a time, the focus of publishing and a generation of young editors who are now agents, became “big books only.” At least, that was all the talk. (Which is one reason agents have you rewrite stuff. See my posts on that stupidity.)

But thankfully now, publishing has regained its sanity. It still takes a special book to get sold, but it sure doesn’t need to have huge scope, larger-than-life characters, a complex, multi-viewpoint plot, and unique setting never done before. If you can do all that, fine and dandy, but if you can write a good story, a unique story (it will be unique if you told it, since you are unique, and don’t rewrite yourself out of the story), then you will sell if you mail it to enough editors.

But no matter what How-to-Write authors (who are agents) like Donald Maass and Albert Zuckerman tell you, it is not possible to plan big books. Just write your stories, stories that are important to you, and mail them.

—I have to promote my new book. This comes from Book as Event myth as well. Read my post earlier about self promotion. If a publisher asks and pays you to promote your book, do it. But otherwise, just stay with your web site and social networks and a local signing in your area to talk about your book. Let the publishers do their jobs and you do your job and write the next book.

—Eating the Elephant. That’s what Kris and I call the problem writers have when they can’t seem to start something. If you were standing beside a well-cooked elephant and your task was to eat every bite of the huge thing, you would say you couldn’t do it. But, actually, you could. One bite at a time, over a period of time.

Novels are the same thing. They are mostly impossible to hold completely in your mind, so when starting it looks like a huge task (book as event again) and thus it’s just easier to not start, easier to keep outlining and plotting and researching and doing all those things that are not writing. The key is to just start, write so much per day, stop when you find the ending, and then mail it. (Yup, sort of like many of you just did on this November challenge.)

This problem stops all of us at times. Even someone like me who has sold over 90 novels, and written more than that number. I have a sign over my computer that says simply “Trust the Process” and it’s right beside another sign. “Write Scenes.”

Scenes I can hold in my head. Write a scene, then write the next scene, and trust the process as the days and weeks go by.

This topic is so huge, and this problem so big, that I’m sure I’m missing areas of it. I will try to cover those areas in other chapters along the way.

But in short, the myth of book as event is the underlying problem most writers face all the time. It’s easy to start building up a book into something more than it really is, especially when people ask “How’s your book coming?” That question sort of underlines that the book is an event, and that it is the only book you have in you.

I once had a guy come up to me and say, “I hear you have a book coming out?” That year I had eleven novels coming out, just about one every month. So I said, “Sure do.”

Being a nice guy, he said, “I”m looking forward to reading it. What’s the title?”

I said, “Which one?”

He looked puzzled, like it didn’t make sense that I had more than one book coming out. To him, and to most folks, writing and publishing a book are huge events, so how could it be possible to have more than one?

When I said, “I have five books in the next five months coming out,” he looked horrified.

Right now, if you feel horrified by the idea that I published eleven novels in twelve months one year, if you are thinking that because I did that, they must automatically be bad, then you have an issue with the myth of Book as Event. And that myth will stop you in one way or another, at one point or another.

And if you just finished a book in November and are making up excuses to not mail it to editors because you had too much fun writing it, because it came to fast or too easy, or it needs a massive rewrite, you really have issues with Book as Event thinking.

Just because a book is fun to write, just because you wrote it fast, doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, it usually means it’s pretty darned good. Have fun mailing it.

———————-

Notice below that I have added onto this series of chapters a donate button where you can donate if you feel these chapters of this upcoming book helped you in some way and you want to keep me writing them and putting them up here. And if you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this article along to others who might get some help from it. Every week or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, research, rejections, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.

Thanks, Dean

I’m working on the next Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post, this one on Books as Events. This is, for me, the worst myth of all, and one that has killed years of my own career, so it’s a tough chapter in the book. Another few days and it should be done.

But in the meantime, I figured I might as well start a series of posts called Talking About Books. Over the years I’ve written some really fun novels, and some strange novels, and some just downright weird novels. Some of the books bored me, some were a blast to do, others were hard, others were easy. Every one of the 90 plus novels has some sort of story about it. So I figured I’d tell a few of the stories right here, from my old and sometimes scattered memory.

First up, a book I wrote under the name Edward Taft called Bump and Run.

The pen name Edward Taft came from two sources. Edwards is a family name, and Taft is part of Lincoln City, Oregon. You see, Lincoln City originally was five small towns that combined together to form one eight mile long town along the Oregon Coast. Taft is one of those towns. Nelscott is another, and my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, picked Nelscott to write under for a series of mystery novels. Kris Nelscott. So I figured why not and picked Edward Taft to write this book under.

Bump and run is a golf term, for you non-golfers. I used to be a golf professional, way back in what now seems like another life, and had always wanted to write a thriller about golf. But, as many writers before me have discovered, and anyone who hates watching golf on television understands, the terms golf and thriller do not go well together. I had failed a few times with runs at golf thrillers when along came a new press called Foggy Windows Books.

Yeah, that’s right, Foggy Windows. The press had a clear mission statement: To publish erotic novels with married couples (only sex between married couples in the books) to promote some sort of family values that to this day I’m puzzled about. But I won’t go there.

Foggy Windows hired a top editor and this top editor hired a bunch of us to do original novels. Six novels would be released at the same time every three months, one in each genre. My first contract was for a science fiction book, actually the first book in a three book series about three couples on a ghost spaceship that some day I might actually write. My book was to be in the third series of six books. (It never was written, see why in a moment.)

But then one fine day I got a phone call from the editor. The sales force for this publisher had no idea what these books were going to be, what they would look like, or anything like that, and they needed basically an Issue Zero. And they needed it fast. And it had to be a thriller with popular appeal.

Could I write them one, quickly?

As I normally do, I said, “Sure. How quickly?”

“Two weeks,” was the answer.

“Sure,” I said, “but it’s going to cost you.”

They paid, and I wrote Bump and Run by Edward Taft, an erotic golf thriller. It took me exactly two weeks (which is not my fastest book by a long, long ways. This book is only about 60,000 words long and I have written 90,000 word books in seven days, so this seemed easy, to be honest.)

I love the burning golf cart on the cover, because actually, there is a burning golf cart in the book. And sex on a golf cart, but that didn’t cause the fire if I remember right.

I wrote the book in the summer of 2000 and it came out late summer of 2000, light speed fast in old publishing terms. A number of months later the first six books came out, one in each genre. They were written by some fine writers, and the sales were above expectations. Way above, actually, and everyone was happy.

Then one day it suddenly ended. The publisher decided he wanted to go another direction, so they treated the writers great in the shutdown. We got to keep signing payments, we were paid for books that were turned in, but would never be published, and all rights were reverted to all the writers. Very solid and fair treatment to the writers. But all of us were bummed. The press promised to be fun, and I really enjoyed writing this one book, and a long novella for them that was published in three parts in their newsletter. (That one is a mystery that I will republish here at some point. I also wrote them a few short stories that will appear here later as well.)

So now, after nine years, I still haven’t done another Edward Taft novel and you can find Bump and Run in used bookstores and on Amazon as used. It’s a fun read, or so people tell me. I plan to write another Edward Taft book at some point, just not sure if it will be erotica or not.

It was a ton of fun being involved with Foggy Windows Books, and a sad day when they suddenly shut down after such a short life. And that’s the story of one of the 90 plus novels I have written. More stories to come.

Cheers, Dean

I’m sitting at my internet computer in my office, staring out over the Pacific Ocean, watching the huge waves left from yesterday’s big wind storm. As far as storms go here on the Oregon Coast, it wasn’t that bad for us.

What’s not bad in a storm with winds gusting over 90 mph? The power only went off for a short time and then just dimmed a few dozen times as the evening went on, so both Kris and I got a lot of work done. With the wind really pounding, we finally gave up the writing at midnight and retreated to watch the new Castle.

Kris’s new office is on the north side of the building, away from the wind, so her office remained pretty quiet. My office overlooks the ocean and my window was getting pounded by the rain and top winds, since we live on the top of a hill. It got noisy at times, I’ll tell you.

This morning, the damage was light around our compound. We lost the tops of three trees that came down across the driveway, and it took me some exercise to clear the driveway so we could get out for lunch. But today turned sunny and beautiful. Not a day for a walk on the beach, though. Really high tides and huge surf, cresting over 30 feet. Stunning to watch from a distance.

Last night during the storm I got up the start of a new web site for a pen name I just mailed a novel off under. The book hasn’t sold, but I figured I might as well start the site and have it ready. If you want to take a look, it’s Dee W. Schofield and I even put up a blurb I wrote for the book under that name. A science fiction romance called Subway Martians. I’ll shout if it sells. I have a second book written under that pen name I’ll be mailing out shortly as well. When I do, I’ll put up a sample chapter of the book on that sight.

Now, the news is telling us that a second storm is headed our way, as bad if not worse than the one yesterday. It’s due on Thursday. We can only hope they are wrong.

Is it worth living here overlooking the wild Pacific Ocean? Right now, the sky is bright pink, the huge waves pink with the sunset colors. Yeah, it’s worth it, even with the high winds in November every year.

The following picture is out my window, taken from my writing desk, just after I moved into this office, one beautiful night this last summer. The white cat is Walter White Kitty, a lost cat I rescued about a week before this photo and who now stays right with me most of the time. (He’s on my lap as I type this, actually.) Today, the colors are pink, not orange as in the picture, and the waves huge instead of calm as in the picture. But you get the idea.

Cheers, Dean

Scott William Carter was one of the writers at this last weekend event. Actually, he was the instructor, leading all us newbies through a ton of details on how to do web sites, Kindle editions of our stories, and so on. A fantastic day and I want to publicly thank Scott for the great work. Far above the call of duty. My poor old brain hurt, I learned so much.

Also, from that weekend, Scott got thinking about how much a writer should be online and he just finished and put up a great post, with graphics and everything. I agree with him completely. In the last year I’ve climbed up his scale from zero to maybe three or four, working to keep this all in moderation but yet use all these great new tools.

So go read Scott’s post since you are here, reading this, and clearly spend some time online. It will help give you some perspective on all this stuff.

Great post, Scott. And thanks for the great day of internet learning.

Cheers, Dean

Well, maybe not of the minds, but of the writers. Tomorrow about 10 professional writers are getting together here in a big suite at a local hotel and brainstorming a ton of different stuff about this great new world of publishing online we are living in.

All of us attending have figured out the standard older ways of publishing through New York, and are making a go of that, but over the last few years so much has changed and none of us want to be left behind. Besides, there is some money to be made publishing online and outside of New York at times.

Some of those attending are farther down the road in some areas than others when it comes to web sites, online publishing, epublishing, Kindle publishing, and POD publishing. So we’re going to combine knowledge.

It should be a blast.

I hope to make some changes here over the next few weeks spurred directly from this meeting. I do plan on putting up some original fiction here, and a few books serialized. So stay tuned for fallout of what I am sure will be a really fun and educational day for this old guy.

As for the writing side of things now that the big move is over, I had a pretty good week last week. Started and wrote and finished and mailed a short story called “Sighed the Snake” to Asimov’s. (Yes, same title as the Al Wilson song. I listen to too much 60’s music.)  I also wrote a proposal and added in some sample chapters from a novel called THE SLOTS OF SATURN that I have finished, and got that package off to six editors. It’s a Poker Boy novel, for those of you who have read some of my Poker Boy short stories. I’ll put one up here on this site at some point in the next month for those who haven’t.

So far this week I’ve finished some sample chapters and have a proposal ready to mail out for a book called MARTIAN LOVERS written under a pen name I’ll tell you all after it sells. A very strange and I hope funny paranormal romance.

What’s up for next week besides the changes from this meeting tomorrow? I have a new post in the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing coming up. This post is about Books as Events. I figured it was a good time to bash at that myth since this is the month so many people set out to write a book in a month. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dean

This topic post is the first for me of what many writers do on their sites, which is talk about books they are reading. I will move these posts in a week or so to a static page so that they can remain there in order.

I guess, a better way to describe this topic is recommended reading, but to be honest, many of the books I read and like are strange books, and I wouldn’t recommend them for everyone. But I won’t talk about a book I don’t like. No point, life is too short.

I just finished reading tonight a book called MASSACRED FOR GOLD by R. Gregory Nokes. This is a nonfiction reporting of Mr. Nokes’ attempts to discover the truth behind a massacre of Chinese on the Oregon side of the Snake River in Hell’s Canyon. More than 30 Chinese miners were killed and no one was ever caught or paid any price for the crime. Again, this is Nokes’ personal journey to research this event from 1887.

Since I come from pioneer stock in Idaho and Oregon, I found this book a fascinating look into the history of the Northwest. And also a clear, eye-opening account of relations between whites and Chinese in the West. For anyone fascinated by history of this country, told in a very personal way, I’d suggest this book.

MASSACRED FOR GOLD by R. Gregory Nokes. Oregon State University Press. 2009. For ordering information, click on the picture to go to Amazon.com.

John Scalzi did a wonderful post about this topic yesterday. Wonderful, and spot on in many, many ways, in my opinion.

In our master classes, and in other workshops along the way, Kris and I spend a vast amount of time trying to help writers with this very topic. Does that mean we are experts in money? Actually, we are. But we also (for some of the reasons John points out in his blog) make mistakes. We learn from the mistakes and move on. The key is to never make the same mistake twice.

Go read this blog by John to get a very clear sense of why you hear so much about money with writers. He is, in my opinion, spot on.

Find it right here.

Cheers, Dean

Today, I moved the last of the books. Never thought I would ever say that.

Kris and I are going from three buildings to one very large building, which means that everything in the other two buildings needed to be moved into the one building, which meant that everything in the big building needed to be shifted to fit better. After 13 years in the three buildings, we just got tired of the vastness of the place, I got tired of the upkeep, and we both got very, very tired of being anchored to this compound.

So, now, after a few more hours of work this weekend, we are down to one large house as most normal humans and the other two buildings will be going away on Monday. And I can’t begin to tell you have relieved I am. And how much I am enjoying my new office, which looks out over the Pacific Ocean just as my last office did, only this one is actually much more comfortable. As I write this, the huge waves from yesterday’s storm are crashing on the beach and a cool breeze is blowing in through the slightly open window. Doesn’t come much better.

Kris asked how many books we had and I didn’t want to even think about it until they were all moved, since I moved them all, either from the other two buildings, or shifting them inside this house. Now, as I take new pictures for the insurance, I have a basic answer. In this house we have just over 100,000 comic books and right at 100,000 books. The comic books take up a lot less room, but they still fill, in boxes, most of two bedrooms.

The books cover every wall in this twelve bedroom home. Every wall.

Our nonfiction library, which consists of around 8,000 hardback reference books, fills two bedrooms with library shelves. The thousands of digests (full runs of many major digests, like Astounding/Analog, F&SF, Amazing, IF, Hitchcocks, Queen, and so on) fill the four walls of one huge bedroom. One large room with library shelves coming out into the room from all four walls is used just for Kris’s extra copies of her books. My extra copies are in a storage unit. The mystery collection fills a huge room, the paperbacks fill hallways and parts of another room, and so on and so on. It is a twelve bedroom house after all.

At 100,000 copies, it’s more books than many small town libraries. Ah, the life of two writers who can’t seem to pass up a book.

So finally, after working on this since February, this is almost over. Today, I replanted nine trees to make a natural barrier between the big building and the other two. (A 59 year old man should not be replanting six-foot pine trees. At least my back is telling me that now.) I have about four more hours tomorrow of last minute clean-up to get the two buildings finally cleaned out.

I can’t begin to tell you all how happy I will be getting back to just writing and running.  And reading. Picking up one book at a time.

Cheers, Dean

I have noticed at times newer writers and a bunch of readers blaming the problems of a published book on the editor. As if the editor has much to do with it. Yeah, right. This thinking just shows a real lack of information about how editing and publishing works in New York publishers.

I was going to do a blog post about it, maybe one of the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing posts, but then I found a wonderful post by long-time novelist Laura Resnick exactly on the point.

You can find her home page here.

And you can find the blog on this very topic at Novelist Inc. right here.

And you can find the home page for Novelist Inc. right here. (Hint, they do some great blogs by experienced professionals such as Laura, and they even let me write guest blogs for them every-so-often.)

So go to the blog from Laura and learn why blaming the editor for a bad book is just silly thinking. The writer writes the book. Laura says almost exactly what I would have said. Frightening, just frightening.

And then always remember, it’s the author who is in charge. When a bad book gets into print, only the name on the cover is to blame. Or, as we tell our students over and over and over:

You are responsible for your own career.

Thanks, Laura, for the great post. Saved me a bunch of time.

Cheers, Dean

Way back last December, I did a number of posts about motivation, and then in January started a page here on this web site under the label “Streaks.” Then, at the beginning of every month (with a few monthly glitches on my part) I recorded the writing streaks people were reporting.

Numbers said they were starting and never did, a number of streaks fell to the retired side of things (see the rules at the bottom of the Streak Page), but a number of people have been reporting regularly around the first of the month for almost a year now.

That’s a stunning amount of consistency in writing, and I admire it a great deal, since I have been unable to be anything but a sprint writer over the years. Those of you who can hit regular page counts day in and day out are my heroes.

One writer, who has sold numbers of novels to different publishers, came to one of our master classes just over six years ago and left with the idea to start a writing streak, producing two pages per day without a day off. Her name is Pati Nagle and as of this month she has not missed a day for 2,222 days in a row. That means writing on Christmas, birthday, sick days, and travel days. For over six years.

Stunning, just flat stunning.

There is a real reason she is selling novels regularly. Check out her new book and web site at Pati Nagle.

Congratulations, Pati, and everyone else who has continued streaks this year. As I say with each response: Keep firing! You people are my writing heroes.

Cheers, Dean