In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* The Bradbury Challenge Report
* Other Challenges?
* A Nod to the Important Stuff
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
Need aliens? Researchers find caterpillars hear with their hair. from 1440 Daily Digest
The Bradbury Challenge Report
The requirement for the Bradbury Challenge is to write at least one short story or short-short story per week. During the past week, the following writers wrote these new stories:
- Erin Donoho “A Morning in April” 1900 YA contemporary
- Vanessa V. Kilmer “Road Rage” 3113
SyFy - Christopher Ridge “Mama Prayed” 2692 crime/ noir
- KC Riggs “Water Polo” 1245 Humor
- Dave Taylor “A View of Home” 2,206 Science Fiction
Special thanks to Vanessa. If she hadn’t sent her report yesterday morning I might have forgotten to post results from the Challenge this week. (grin)
Other Challenges?
Participating in any challenge is a great way to have fun and grow as a writer. Reporting results on your challenge to someone is a great way to hold your own feet to the fire.
If any of you would like to start your own challenge and use TNDJ as a place to report your weekly progress, feel free to email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. Others might be interested in pursuing your challenge too.
A Nod to the Important Stuff
This post is another blast from the past. It first went live in TNDJ on March 1, 2015.
A fiction writer is a person who writes, who puts new words on the page. It’s a person who loves to tell stories in written communication.
There’s nothing elevated about it, nothing special except that you get to spend your life making up stuff for a living. If that definition fits you, or if you want that definition to fit you, here are a few guidelines that might help.
Your conscious critical mind (CCM) exists to protect you.
Like the benevolent android in Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands,” the sole function of the CCM is to keep you from being harmed… even by rejection.
That’s why it’s so much easier to spend all your time rewriting and polishing instead of moving forward and writing the next story. There’s no risk of rejection as long as you’re rewriting or polishing.
Your subconscious creative mind is the source
of all your inspiration, all of your story ideas, and all of your stories. If you get out of your own way and trust your subconscious, you will write in your own original voice.
Then your only challenge is to NOT go back and rewrite and polish until you’ve erased your voice and made your story sound like everything else in the slush pile.
Of course, your authorial voice sounds boring to you. That’s because it’s with you 24/7/365. But to readers, your voice is unique unless you polish all the uniqueness off of it.
Everything in life is a matter of priorities.
My critical mind often will use priorities to attempt to “save me” from writing. When I’m about to write, suddenly doing something else (anything else) becomes a priority.
When that happens I shake my index finger at my critical mind. No! BAD critical mind! Get back in your corner and leave me alone! My creative mind has stories to write! I wanna run and play with my fictional friends now. You get the idea.
Productivity matters.
The more work I put out there, the more I practice my writing, the better my craft becomes. Also the more books and stories I have to feed off of each other and the more income I receive from my writing.
This is the same reason every time I get five new stories I slap them into a collection in both ebook and paper. When I get ten, I put them into another collection. That gives me three streams of passive revenue from every story I write. Can you say Ka-ching?
Productivity can be reduced to mathematics,
and math is a concrete, finite thing.
Here’s the equation: P = PW/H(H). Or Productivity equals publishable words you can write per hour times the number of hours you spend in the chair putting new words on the page.
If you want to increase your productivity, you have to increase one of those two factors.
Words per hour (production) matter.
Truly, this is a biggie. I write about 1000 publishable words per hour. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But if you’re writing 1000 words per hour, that’s only 17 words per minute. Think about that.
Writing 1000 words per hour gives you a LOT of time for staring off into space. If you’re getting less than 700 or 800 words per hour, you might want to check in with yourself and figure out what you’re doing during that hour.
You can safely bet whatever you’re doing is linked to your critical mind. Seriously. Don’t tell me or anyone else about it if you don’t want to—it’s nobody’s business but your own anyway—but if you’re serious about being a professional writer, Fix It.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Hidden Cost of Spam… Just kind’a interesting.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 830
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 830
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for January………………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.…………………… 1530
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 21120
2026 consumable words………………… 21120
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29