In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Welcome
* No Joy on “The Hell Minder”
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Theodore Levitt
Welcome
Welcome to Irene M, Bella G, and any other new subscribers or readers of the Journal. I hope you will find it useful.
Get the Archives and other free downloads at the Journal website. And I don’t do the ambush thing requiring an email address. Just click the links and a PDF will download in a new page.
If you wanna see my tired old mug, here’s a video where Vin Zandri and I are chatting about writing and a bunch of other stuff.
No Joy on “The Hell Minder”
Well, I was wrong. See the quotation marks around the title? That’s a hint.
“The Hell Minder” doesn’t have the legs to be a novel, or even a novella. Probably never did, but it became apparent soon after I started writing it. It wrapped yesterday afternoon.
Turns out it’s a short story. So this one won’t be going live on the Writing in Public website, but it will appear eventually in the Stanbrough Writes (a new short story every week on Friday) substack at some point in the future.
Today’s story — “By His Own Bad Mind” — is already set to go out at 10 a.m., and it’s as appropriate for this time of year as “The Hell Minder” is.
Today I’ll move into another Blackwell Ops novel. Seems entirely appropriate to start the 13th novel in a series during October. (grin)
To begin the paragraph above, I almost wrote “With a little luck.” But we all know luck has nothing to do with it. Here’s the equation: Butt + Chair + Fingers on Keyboard = Writing Fiction.
And I’m anxious to get started, so a short post today.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
John Carpenter suspends natural law until the end of October All about Horror.
Eggcorn Like “plodder” for “plotter.” Grin.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 310
Writing of “The Hell Minder”
Day 1…… 2830 words. To date…… 2830
Day 2…… 3178 words. To date…… 6008 (done)
Fiction for October…………………… 83561
Fiction for 2023………………………… 301103
Fiction since August 1………………… 186556
Nonfiction for October……………… 24670
Nonfiction for the year……………… 223010
Annual consumable words………… 524053
2023 Novels to Date……………………… 6
2023 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2023 Short Stories to Date……………… 7
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 77
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 235
Short story collections…………………… 31
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Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.