Hi Folks, Many of you know I put a lot of stock in Dean Wesley Smith’s advice, but sometimes he tosses a blanket over a topic and beats it to death with assumptions and generalizations. When he’s talking about things he knows about, his advice can be golden. I’ve learned a great deal from him. However, he has his prejudices like anyone else. I suspect he was burned once by a bad freelance editor (or book … Read more
Hi Folks, Note: I originally wrote this back on May 9, 2015 for my Daily Journal. It’s valid information. I hope you will enjoy it and find it useful. More than once I’ve mentioned Heinlein’s Rules. You can actually get your free copy here. If you follow those rules, you will be a professional writer, period. Not only that, but others will consider you prolific, even if you’re not. As an aside, still others will consider … Read more
Hi Folks, There is a pervasive myth that writing “fast” is writing bad. The myth is based on the notion that if you write a novel in a period of days instead of at least several months, it must be badly written. That’s just not true. Productivity in writing boils down to two things: discipline (which is to say, a work ethic) and Heinlein’s Rules, especially Rule 3 in this case. Not too long ago one … Read more
Hey Folks, I encourage you to read this post. It revisits Cycling in the same way the previous post revisted Writing Off Into the Dark and continues it. Some have confused “cycling” with “rewriting.” One very good student of several of my own writing seminars recently wrote that she was about to perfom “cycling or rewriting or revising or redrafting or whatever other name you want to call it.” (Again, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the … Read more
Hey Folks, I encourage you to read this post even if you think you’ve heard it before. Especially if you don’t get it. I’m coming at it from a new direction. When I was a GED/college instructor, and later when I taught writing seminars, I soon found that not all students “got it” when I approached a topic from a certain perspective. So I soon learned to gauge student reactions, most notably their eyes or the … Read more
Hi Folks, The following is a guest post by my friend, professional fiction writer and ghost writer Dan Baldwin. Billy Ray Watkins stood in the doorway of the old shack where the unfortunate sharecropper was kept prisoner. Watkins, 300 pounds of angry bigotry and hate, pounded his fist, sneered and wiped the chewing tobacco spittle from his lips. He grinned and said, “You lacking-in-a-proper education, fatherless son of the African veldt, I’m going to smack the … Read more
Hi Folks, This post first was published in a slightly different version on October 10, 2016 over on the Daily Journal. I’m reposting it here because I felt it needed a broader audience and might help some of you. Got a great email from a respected writer friend recently (Thanks, JGV!) regarding my current WIP (back in October, 2015). He wrote What about doing away with the specific dimensions and leaving the images of the structures, … Read more
Hi Folks, A little rant this time, but a well-reasoned rant. It really is attrocious what Amazon does to authors regarding royalties. This problem came fully home to me awhile back when I uploaded the new version of The Wes Crowley Saga (10 full novels in one book) to Amazon and Smashwords. At Amazon, to get a 70% royalty, a book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. All other prices glean the author a 35% … Read more
Hi Folks, Happy St. Valentine’s Day. Today we have a guest post by professional fiction writer Dean Wesley Smith. Dean has made his living as a professional fiction writer for four decades. This post was originally published on his website on January 23, 2017. Here we go. Excuses… Last week I came to the sudden realization that most of us modern writers are lazy. While at the same time convincing ourselves we are not. We convince … Read more
Hi Folks, This is gonna sound WAY oversimplified, especially given the nineteen PAGES of comma rules in the HarBrace College Handbook. But it’s true. If you use these five rules, you can’t go wrong: 1. Never put a comma between a subject and its verb or between a verb and its object. Also you must realize that a subject may be compound, as in “John and Ray went to the store and bought a television and … Read more