In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Echoes of Chandler Contest
* Pacing Again
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“The subjective opinions of a certain group of people at a certain moment in time say nothing about the value of your work.” JA Konrath, talking about critique input
Echoes of Chandler Contest
More entries are coming in. Today’s the end of July, so only three days left. I won’t accept entries that arrive after I start work on August 3.
I’ll be reading contest entries most of today, but I wanted to get this out to you first.
Pacing Again
Yesterday, Big Philly Smith over at Vigilante Magazine posted ‘Dumber’ Books Are Better Reads.
Phil makes some good, valid points. I only wish he’d mentioned paragraphing and/or pacing. The two go hand in hand with lean prose.
Like convoluted, syntactically difficult sentences, long paragraphs bog readers down. If you want to speed up the pacing of your story or even just keep the reader interested, hit the return key a little more often.
I’ve written a lot about this. For more, see
There’s also a lot more on the Journal website. Just click the link, then key “paragraphing” into the search box in the sidebar.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
13 Years… Every Night… Without Missing Quite an accomplishment.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 230
Writing of Blackwell Ops 47: Sam Granger | Special Duty
Day 1…… 3250 words. To date…… 3250
Fiction for July..………………………. 5840
Fiction for 2025………………………. 526647
Nonfiction for July…………………….. 16770
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 168400
2025 consumable words…………….. 687433
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 13
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 117
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 301
Short story collections……………………. 29