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Catching Up… To Do or Not To Do?
A Great Question… I got that question from a writer just today and I had a pretty simple answer for him. But there is more to my answer than what I was able to give him at the spur of the moment. I said this: Try to catch up if doing so is possible and will be challenging. If impossible to catch up, then simply reset the challenge and start fresh. Sounds simple until you start figuring out if something is impossible or not. Sometimes you just know you have screwed the pooch. No catching up is possible. Reset and restart!!! But other times the added challenge makes it even…
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RESCUE TWO KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN NOW LIVE!!!
ALL KINDS OF GREAT STUFF!! Including a ton of different workshop stuff, and with every award you get a copy of my new Seeders novel RESCUE TWO. Rescue Two Kickstarter. The two special workshops are on science fiction. — WRITING IDEA FICTION Special Workshop. All the ins and outs of writing idea fiction and how to do it and how to come up with ideas. You can take it starting April 12 or May 3rd. And remember, this is the only place to get this workshop. — WRITING ABOUT TIME Special Workshop. All the ins and outs of writing about time while in space and how to do it and…
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Brandon Helps Us All Once Again
Brandon Sanderson’s Second Kickstarter… Brandon’s campaign is about to break the record for the largest campaign in Kickstarter history. It is over twenty million as I start to write this and still climbing. And he is doing this in the FICTION category with four books. Three years ago Loren Coleman and I got it in our heads that Kickstarter could be another sales-of-books source, like a bookstore for preorders. We started a free Kickstarter for Fiction Writers place on Teachable, and Loren wrote an entire book on Crowdfunding for Fiction Writers, which is basically the bible. Our intent was to make Kickstarter pay attention more to the Fiction category like…
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Last Day of the Workshop Sale
Ends Late Tonight… Tuesday Night Everything on WMG Teachable is half price. Just hit purchase on what you want, then put in the code: YearEnd And you can get it for half price. Starting right now are the Regular January Workshops. February Regular Workshops are also available for the sale, but the January ones are starting right now. They are normally $300, but for the sale they are $150 with the code. They last six weeks and take about three hours a week at your own time. The dates are the starting dates. Start with Depth in Writing if you have not taken one before. Class #1… Jan 4th ……
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MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY
We Finally Pulled the Trigger… Motivational Mondays have been launched on Teachable and our now live. Kris and I have been talking and planning this for some time and we think it’s going to be great fun and very valuable for those getting it. Here is how it works: Every Monday on Teachable (actually Sunday night late so you can view them on Monday morning), Kris and I will put up at least three videos on some motivational topic or another concerning writing, publishing, and all the stuff around writing and publishing. See the partial list below of topics. The idea is to help writers stay on track, get unstuck,…
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More On Challenges For 2022
A Goal vs A Challenge… Right about now, here on the 6th of December, it is a great time to start looking at the year ahead. For many writers, setting a challenge is not a good idea. But in any business or art, setting a goal can really help. So tonight I thought I would talk about the difference between a goal and a challenge. I believe both are good. And by setting a challenge, you are also setting a goal. But often goals are not challenges. Last night I listed four things that I thought were important when deciding on a challenge. They are: 1… It actually has to…
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The Wet Blanket Reality… Chapter Two
Chapter Two… The Query This book is a travelogue through the steps it takes in 2022 to become a traditionally published fiction writer. So please read the Introduction and First Chapter before this one. You do that, this chapter will make more sense, as much as this chapter will ever make sense to a sane, thinking person. (Writers are neither sane or thinking at this point in this process.) So after years of work, you declare your novel masterpiece finished and have a party. So what next? EVERYONE KNOWS (stupid common knowledge and not true, but we’ll go with the myth here) that you must have an agent to sell…
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Fun Box of Books
A Very Heavy Box Arrived Today… Turns out it was 47 of my novels. Not copies the same book, but 47 different novels. One copy of each. Not at all sure which books I am missing still. I will have to go back through and compare them to Smith’s Monthly, which has 52 books out at the moment that were in there. (Actually 53.) I know I don’t have the two of the last three. But still missing a few besides those. But still a really fun sight. Very large piles of COLD POKER GANG NOVELS with the new covers and branding. Very nifty. Another bigger pile of THUNDER MOUNTAIN…
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Come Looking For Anger
Trolls Are Everywhere… But seems for me, they have to come looking. The reason is that I just ignore them and eventually, because they are starved for attention, they go away. Now, I know clearly that my opinions of professional fiction writing are only based on how it is really done, not on how some beginning writers think it should be done. I actually write and publish and make a lot of money, and that just pisses off a large part of the younger writers as well. But if a person doesn’t want to hear how it is really done, they tend to stay away from this blog and anything…
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Learning is Forever…
In Writing and Publishing… Kris and I were talking today on the way back from lunch about some of the writers who have just faded away. And the more we talked, the more we realized that we knew the answer on what happened to most of them. They all just stopped learning. They reached a level that they were happy with their writing and stopped learning for a dozen different reasons. That is flat deadly in just a few years. The reason I hear the most and understand the least is the fear that learning something will upset some perfect balance in their writing and they will never sell again.…