We had crazy, wild weather here at WMG headquarters last week.
Days of heavy rainfall led to dangerous flooding and even landslides. The Coast Guard was called in to evacuate campers from campgrounds and deployed at least one rescue swimmer—inland!
Fortunately, WMG’s offices are on high ground. As are all of our employees’ homes, although I did have a new water feature in my back yard for a while…
And while I was watching this literal flooding, I was instead thinking of a deluge of a much happier kind. A flood of new releases over the past year by our own Dean Wesley Smith.
Only this massive event was no freak occurrence. It was the result of a lot of planning and hard work by Dean (with a little help from his friends…at WMG).
In 2020, as Dean was approaching his 70th birthday, he set a challenge for himself: To publish 70 major books between his 70th and 71st birthdays. For this challenge, a major book is a novel, a novella, a collection, or any major editing project with Dean’s name on the cover.
And he did it! Here is the jaw-dropping result of the 70@70 Challenge (a total of 1.3 million words).
You can find the entire list of 70@70 releases here.
And you can click here to follow along on Dean’s blog as he spends some time over the next few weeks talking about the segments of the challenge and his thinking on them.
And if you thought that producing 70 new books in one year was impressive, here’s a list of what else Dean was up to over the past year:
• Published 37 short stories standalone worldwide, and another four in other venues.
• Wrote, launched, and ran 6 major Kickstarters.
• Put together and ran 4 StoryBundles.
• Wrote 365 blogs of different types, one per day.
• Taught 84 six-week workshops.
• Recorded and taught 14 nine-week collections workshops.
• Created and recorded 21 Pop-Up writer’s classes.
• Moved two condos full of offices and books into a third.
• Ran a marathon and finished and also participated in 10 5K charity races.
Pretty awesome feat, huh? I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get tired just thinking about Dean’s day!
We have something special in mind to celebrate Dean’s achievement, but I’m not ready to announce it yet. So, stay tuned!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.