In today’s Journal
* The Uncle Harv Show
* The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
* Finished with the Website!
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The Uncle Harv Show
Actually it isn’t my show. Soon, maybe. But Vin Zandri has allowed me some air time this coming Friday to talk a little about Writing Better Fiction. Looking forward to it.
I only wish I could be live in his studio when it airs. The guy’s hangin’ out in Florence, Italy these days. (grin)
Once I get the time firmed up, I’ll let you know in case you wanna drop by. In the meantime, stop by VinZandri.com (I just heard him say “that’s VinZandri.com”) and pick up some great pulp-thriller reads.
Oh, and the paper edition of Writing Better Fiction will go out in the mail today.
The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
Rules of the Challenge
The challenge is to write at least one short story per week (or add to your novel), then submit the story title, word count, and genre to me each week for publication in the Journal on Monday.
You can join or rejoin the challenge at any time. There’s no cost. The whole point challenge is to have fun and grow as a writer.
During the past week, in addition to whatever other fiction they’re writing, the following writers reported their progress:
Short Fiction
- George Kordonis “Potential Perps” 2435 Suspense
- Adam Kozak “The Mysterious Disappearance of Elm Company, 51st Foot Guards” 1773 Fantasy Horror
- Christopher Ridge “The Plunge” 2400 Horror
- K.C. Riggs “Mind to Mind” 3031 Fantasy
Finished with the Website!
and Amazon gave me a stark reminder of why I’m putting direct buy links on StoneThread Publishing.
As I’m updating StoneThread, I’m also updating the metadata at sales venues like D2D and Amazon: especially pricing, and sometimes even revising my sales copy (blurbs) as I go, book by book.
I do that for Draft2Digital first because that always goes smoothly. But I also do it with Amazon. And for three different books Amazon’s machine got “stuck” on “Creating Your Preview.”
That happened twice. The first time I got impatient after an hour or so and closed the windows for all three books. The second time I let them run.
Finally, after FOUR HOURS, Amazon flashed a message: “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” Well, Duh.
So even a mega-giant like Amazon can crash. It’s comforting to know that when that finally happens, I’ll still have one extra sales venue (StoneThread Publishing) for my books that I didn’t have before.
My books are already available in over 400 sales venues and over 1200 libraries worldwide, but I see nothing wrong with having them available in one more. Even one sale from StoneThread puts that much more money in the bank account.
Yesterday I updated all the Wes Crowley Saga book pages, then all the Mysteries, then my 5- and 10-story short story collections. And I added a magic realism page to the site.
And I’m DONE! Woohoo! At least for awhile. But this process took me three very long days. And that didn’t include individually pricing my 230+ short stories.
See why I say you should do this from the start?
I’ll go back a little later and tweak here and there, but I’m finally finished with the hard stuff.
Drop by and take a look. You might find something you want to use on your own website. And if you find any glitches (missing covers, etc.) please let me know. My site is also fully responsive, so you should be able to look at it on any device.
My first reader got the Blackwell Ops Soleada Garcia subseries back to me last night, so I’ll go through that and get it published soon. But I’m gonna write first, and finish BO-21.
I’m surprised I didn’t have nightmares about nesting html last night. (grin)
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Nada.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 640
Writing of Blackwell Ops 21: Johnny Mercer
Day 1…… 4190 words. To date…… 4190
Day 2…… 2599 words. To date…… 6789
Day 3…… 3380 words. To date…… 10169
Day 4…… 2812 words. To date…… 12981
Day 5…… 1726 words. To date…… 14707
Day 6…… 1866 words. To date…… 16573
Day 7…… 4349 words. To date…… 20922
Fiction for March…………………….…. 14133
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 178725
Fiction since October 1………………… 481780
Nonfiction for March…………………… 13440
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 112630
2024 consumable words……………… 291355
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 4
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 86
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 239
Short story collections………………… 31
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.
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