In Today’s Journal
* A New Short Story
* Reminder
* Boring Stuff Re the Ongoing Drama…
* Copyediting
* The Numbers
A New Short Story
“Dave” went live yesterday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out.
As always, if you enjoy this strange story, please tell Everyone. If you don’t, shh! (grin)
Reminder
Today is Saturday. Remember to get your Bradbury Challenge story info in to me before the Journal goes live on Monday.
Also, if you’re in the November or Stephen King Challenge of 1000 words per day, tomorrow is the last day of the reporting week. Please report your weekly numbers to me late on Sunday or on Monday morning.
Boring Stuff Re the Ongoing Drama…
of figuring out how many novels I’ve written….
And oops. I meant to post this before I posted the bit about The Myths of Fiction Writing.
But that ship’s sailed. Still, better that it sailed early than was torpedoed and sunk.
Anyway, sometimes I love numbers, like when I’m setting goals, etc. But sometimes I don’t care for them. Like when I’m trying to keep track of my IP.
On Wednesday, I posted “An Adjustment” to the cumulative number of short stories and novels I’ve written. Um, the adjustment was wrong.
But something didn’t feel right, so on Thursday, just to satisfy my own curiosity, I opened each of my genre folders. Each genre folder contains subfolders for all of my novellas and novels.
The title of each subfolder, if it contains a novella instead of a novel, is preceded with AA, so that those don’t count as novels.
Then I counted the novels. Three times.
As it turns out, I don’t have either 98 or 99 novels. I have 101. Which frankly is a little disconcerting. I had planned to celebrate in some minor way (maybe dining out or something) when I wrote my 100th novel.
But I guess I flashed past that with Blackwell Ops 30: John Quick Returns. Blackwell Ops 31: Jack Temple, is overall novel 101.
Here’s the actual novel count by genre:
Blackwell Ops series……………… 31
Other Thriller & Action-Adv….. 10
Wes Crowley & Westerns………. 24
Journey Home Saga……………… 10
Other SF……………………………… 13
Stern Talbot Pulp PI…………….. 7
Other Mystery & Pulp PI………. 6
Total…………………………………. 101
I also went through my Annual Production spreadsheet for 2024 and found I had actually written 17 novels this year, so that number was correct originally.
I double-checked and found I’d written 2 novels each in January through April, July, October and November and one each in June, August and September. In May, I wrote only short fiction.
Sometime or other I’ll have to go back and update my IP Master Spreadsheet. It’s in more of a mess than I thought.
Sigh. Writing fiction is a lot more fun than keeping track of it.
Copyediting
In a recent post, I wrote about some questionable “Black Friday Deals.” Among those deals was one for a much-overpriced copyediting service.
Hence this segment, just to show you some people are still reasonable and living in the same world you’re living in.
In addition to being a prolific professional writer, I am a copyeditor.
Note that this is not a promo or advertisement. Because of my personal writing goals for this year, I am not actively seeking any new copyediting clients until sometime after the first of the year.
But if you think you will need a copyeditor when I reopen my copyediting service, I strongly recommend you Bookmark This Link. To copy the URL to your clipboard, right click the link and select Copy Link.
Then, when you’re ready, please read the page thoroughly and submit your story or novel.
Tell you what, if you’re a subscriber to TNDJ, mention that when you send me your manuscript. Whether or not I accept your manuscript for editing, if I haven’t done a copyedit for you before, I’ll do a free sample copyedit of a few pages and send it back to you.
If I accept your manuscript for editing, and if you hire me, unlike most others who offer copyediting services,
- I will not play on your fears and overcharge you. I want to help other writers, but I don’t want to fleece them.
- I charge a fair, per-word rate of between less than 1 cent per word up to 2 cents per word. The rate depends strictly on the quality of the writing.
- I’ve been copyediting and teaching writing, punctuation, and yes, even a little grammar and syntax for over three decades.
- To teach those things, I imbed comments directly in your manuscript that pertain directly to your own writing. This is what my Blackwell Ops guys would call ‘a real-time solution to a real-world problem.’
- I don’t do the myths. I will never suggest a rewrite or any other kind of conscious-mind intrusion into your characters’ story.
I’ve been writing and publishing this Journal specifically for fiction writers almost every day for around ten years.
Come to think of it, I wrote Quiet the Critical Voice to help get you started actually putting new words on the page.
And then I wrote Writing Better Fiction. If you read WBF and apply everything in it to your writing, chances are good you won’t even NEED a copyeditor. A good first reader will suffice.
Tomorrow I have a really nifty post for you about Writing Prompts.
Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1250
Writing of Blackwell Ops 32:
Day 1…… 3528 words. To date…… 3528
Fiction for November………………… 90789
Fiction for 2024………………………. 927921
Nonfiction for November…………….. 28150
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 362570
2024 consumable words…………….. 1,114,530
Average Fiction WPD (November)…. 3131
2024 Novels to Date…………………….. 17
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..… 101
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 268
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.