In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Audio Courses
* Of Interest
Quote of the Day
In Saudi Arabia, “The religious police’s official Arabic name dates back hundreds of years, but still sounds Orwellian in English: the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.” from an article in The Atlantic on the Saudi crown prince (Nothing to do with writing, but a really cool quote anyway.)
Audio Courses
Yesterday, to my delight, a young woman named Monica Arac de Nyeko ordered several of my audio courses.
I’m naturally curious, so I keyed Monica’s name into a search engine. I learned she was born in Uganda but now lives in Nairobi. And she is a successful poet, essayist, and short story writer in her own right.
In fact, she’s been writing for awhile. In 2009, her story “Jambula Tree” won “the 8th Annual Caine Prize—Africa’s most prestigious literary accolade for a short story published in English.”
Impressive. Not only does she write stories in English, a language so difficult that most English speakers don’t even understand it, but she does so well enough to win a prestigious prize. And perhaps most impressive, she apparently is still hungry to learn more about her craft.
But for me it was time for reflection. Anytime anyone orders one or more of my audio lectures and thereby draws my attention to them, I question the usefulness of the lectures themselves. After all, I wrote most of them before I’d even written a novel.
So are they still relevant? Are they too basic, too elemental? Certainly they engage the conscious, critical mind vs. the creative subconscious, and that can’t be good, can it?
That’s when I take a deep breath and shut down the inner critic. Yes, some of the lectures (to me, at least) are elemental, but they are all certainly still relevant. They all still contain valid information for writers of fiction and poetry.
And yes, of course they engage the conscious, critical mind. But that’s how we learn new techniques and bits of techniques: with the conscious mind. Then as we write from the creative subconscious, what we learned seeps out as necessary.
So I’m leaving them up for the foreseeable future. Just in case you’re interested, you can view the Audio Courses at https://stonethreadpublishing.com/audio-lecture-series/.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “A Marketing Revamp for your Older Book Title” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-marketing-revamp-for-your-older-book-title/.
Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.