I’m writing these posts in no particular order, just as the reasons come to me. And honestly, they’re everywhere. Because of last summer’s move, we reorganized our books. We are in a smaller space than we were in Oregon, so we got rid of a lot of our books—the ones we didn’t need for research or the ones we liked, but didn’t love. Now, we’re […]
Business Musings: Endings
For more than a decade, writers have asked me what they can do to sell their existing books. I always tell them to write the next book. Some writers don’t have time for promotion. Others don’t have the constitution for it. But all the ads in the world don’t work unless the writer has a lot of inventory. And when the reader is done with […]
Business Musings: Focus Again (A Process Blog)
I had two major challenges in 2021. The first was the stupid pandemic. I hadn’t realized how much of my brain it consumed. Even after I wrote the blog called “Focus,” I still wasn’t back 100%. At some point in early 2022, I clicked over to this: Covid will be ever with us, and I needed to put the fear and the hypervigilance in its […]
Business Musings: Dave (A Process Blog)
I’m writing this the week that Dave Wolverton died, a man most of you know as writer and teacher, Dave Farland. I first met Dave in 1987 and we’ve been friends ever since. As you’ll note, I’m having trouble with tenses, because to me, Dave is still around, even though he’s not. Another friend pointed out in a private conversation that Dean and I have […]
Business Musings: Focus (A Process Blog)
I read a lot of articles and essays during the worst of the pandemic about the way that the Covid crisis was having an impact on our concentration. Most of those looked at folks who had actually had Covid, and how they should try to rebuild or survive their still-lingering illness. Others, though, focused on what seemed to be a shared inability to concentrate. We […]
Business Musings: Deadlines (A Process Blog)
In the middle of our summer move, I was going slightly crazy. I had set up a lot of deadlines for the first time in years, and I was afraid I would blow all of them. I was truly out of practice at dealing with deadlines on the writing. I had been so burned out from traditional publishing and a rotating series of deadlines that, […]
Business Musings: Writing Wall
Heard from an old friend this morning, a hell of a writer, and one of the most together people I know. The email was a little sad, which makes sense as this damn pandemic continues, despite all our best efforts (or rather, some of us giving it our all). My friend mentioned, in passing, that they had hit a writing wall, and was working hard […]
Business Musings: Comparison is the Thief of Joy
I’m doing a lot of things here in Las Vegas that I only dreamed of doing when I lived in Oregon, especially small town Oregon. Sometimes I think I rolled myself into a little ball and cut out everything else. Some of that was health-related, some of it was the demanding job, but some of it was opportunity. Not that I took advantage of a […]
Business Musings: Fear And All Writers (Fear-Based Decision-Making Part 7)
Here’s the toughest post and the easiest post at the same time. Because we writers are a fearful bunch. Maybe it’s because we live in our heads all the time. We make things up for a living, so that habit bleeds into our lives. Most of us keep that part of ourselves under control. We manage to walk out the door every day, without encountering […]
Business Musings: FOMO And The Indie Writer (Fear-Based Decision-Making Part 6)
When I started these posts, I mentioned that the most fearful part of our industry is the movie/TV industry. With so many jobs and so much money at stake, only a handful of people seem capable of making decisions in that industry, and even they do so with great fear. The most courageous part of our industry is the indie (or self-published) writer. By jumping […]
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