The Journal: Half-Price WMG Workshop Sale

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Dean Is Doing It One More Time
* Yesterday
* Clarification
* Today
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quotes of the Day

“One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.” Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.” Robert A. Heinlein (via his character, Lazarus Long)

“Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.” Robert A. Heinlein (via his character, Lazarus Long)

Dean Is Doing It One More Time

“For the next five days, until 5 pm on Friday [Pacific time] Every WMG Publishing Workshop, Lecture, Pop-Up, Class, or Subscription on Teachable will be HALF PRICE!

“Yes, you can buy more than one, but you just have to do it one at a time because Teachable has no shopping cart. And you can use Paypal or any credit card.”

There’s a code involved. For details, see the first item in “Of Interest.”

Yesterday was a pretty good day (see Day 12 below), but I have some big plans coming up.

Some of those plans are dependent on me kicking this novel into high gear. That starts tomorrow morning. As a result, the Journal will probably be short for the foreseeable future. I’ll still include “Of Interest” links, though frankly, I hope by now you’re visiting Dean’s and Kris’s sites and The Passive Voice and PWW regularly and have signed up for newsletters from Atlas Obscura and whatever else interests you.

The smallest of my big plans is to lose the cigars. I recently learned that nicotine is a vaso-constrictor. My feet and ankles have been swelling a lot recently even with increased meds from the doc. So I have to assume I’m doing it to myself. So I’m kicking cigars to the door sometime this week.

Please, no lectures pro or con. I will miss my quiet time with a good cigar; it was important to me. But that’s what old age is: giving up bits and pieces of yourself and certain small pleasures. It’s all a trade-off, I suppose, in an effort to keep the pump beating and the air-exchange working correctly. So it’s all good.

I’m not ready to announce the other plans just yet, but I will before too long.

Clarification

One PWW writer took umbrage at my comment yesterday that ‘only’ Dean Wesley Smith and I “preach Heinlein’s Rules” (and writing into the dark).

I did not mean to imply that NO other writers practice or talk-about HR or WITD. Almost all major long-term writers practice it, and a few others talk about it, but none that I know of talk about it day by day. If they did, I suspect they would save a lot of new writers years of disappointment spinning the hamster wheel driven by the myths of writing.

I was also thinking of Dean’s admonition to me years ago to NOT tell anyone about my writing process. And of my stupid decision to ignore that advice. (He was right, of course, as he is roughly 99% of the time, and if I had it to do over again blah blah blah.)

And in that frame of mind, I was thinking of King, Child, and all the myriad other major writers out there who practice WITD all-but religiously but don’t talk about it very often or mention it only in snippets here and there, if at all.

And just to be clear: what bothers me is NOT how others choose to write. I really REALLY don’t care how anyone else writes. Why would I?

What bothers me is anyone who uses the dishonesty of innuendo to spread half-truths and lies about a process they know absolutely nothing about.

Why? Because other writers who don’t know any better read that crap and believe it. And as a result, their own possibilities are limited without them even realizing it. I’ve spent much of my life cleaning up the messes left by bad “instructors,” from explaining what comma splices and run-on sentences actually are to teaching writers it really is all right to trust themselves.

Today, I begin ramping up the novel, which really only means spending more time in the chair actually writing. I’ve lived with this one for only 13 days so far, but (without going back to count days) I’ve lived with the overall storyline for a couple of months, and that’s a very long time for me.

So I want to reach the end of this one and move on to something new. And since I don’t force my will on my characters (it’s their story, not mine), the only way to do that is spend more hours in the chair writing. So my new daily word-count goal is 5,000 words per day. At worst, I’ll fail to success.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “Summer Learning Workshop Sale” at https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/summer-learning-workshop-sale/.

See “4 Newbie Writer Mistakes that can Derail a Great Book Idea” at https://annerallen.com/2020/05/newbie-writer-mistakes-derail-book-idea/.

See “Theme for Unruly Writers” at http://prowriterswriting.com/theme-for-unruly-writers.

See “Book Awards for Self-Published Authors” at https://www.thebookdesigner.com/book-awards/.

The Numbers

Fiction words yesterday…………………… 4361
Nonfiction words today…………… 830 (Journal)

Writing of The Good of the Galaxy 2 (novel)

Day 9…… 3258 words. Total words to date…… 34842
Day 10… 4682 words. Total words to date…… 39524
Day 11… 3881 words. Total words to date…… 43405
Day 12… 4361 words. Total words to date…… 47766

Total fiction words for the month……… 12924
Total fiction words for the year………… 292518
Total nonfiction words for the month… 3250
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 106360
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 398878

Calendar Year 2020 Novels to Date…………………… 4
Calendar Year 2020 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2020 Short Stories to Date… 12
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 49
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 208
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31