Arg! No color, accept for that righteously horrible green.
*sigh*
The andro-coupling must have jimmied out from underneath the Barklavian fish-tank that caused the resonating…
Oh right, hi! That’s me…sort of.
I obviously need more time to hacksaw this configuration into shape.
And I am waaaaaay out here in…well, we’ll get to that later.
While I strain all my ample abilities into shaping up some sort of coherent transmission relay, please let me send you to some truly fine places to start!!
(…and that hopefully have a color variation a little more pleasant than the awkward side of gross.)
If you like it, you can get a lot more on the Bryant Street Kickstarter, coming real soon. There will be more stories and other fun rewards. If you like THE TWILIGHT ZONE and TWIN PEAKS, then this will surely entertain you.
This week Allyson, the
wonderful publisher of WMG Publishing, turned her blog over to me to write a
little about a really fun project I am doing. So let me start from the very
beginning.
A couple years back
Kickstarter started a promotion to get people to make one hundred of a certain
object and have a limited to one-hundred copies award of the object. When I first
heard that, I figured I could make 100 short story paperbacks, all never-before
published short stories.
That’s right, the stories
would be out in electronic form, but also in small, very short paperbacks. I
have done a number of these before and the length runs from 24 pages to about
50 pages. Too thin for writing on the spine, so they sort of feel like
chapbooks, only with real glossy paperback covers on them.
Everyone who holds one thinks
they are really nifty.
Last two years I didn’t have
time to even try this challenge, but this year, when Kickstarter offered the
promotion again, I figured why not? I would do almost all the work. I would, of
course, write the short stories. I would lay them out for print, create the
covers myself, and even load them up.
Allyson and the wonderful
crew at WMG Publishing convinced me that they could load them to the stores
like Amazon (I would just mess up the works is what they were saying,
basically) and that they would do all 100 short stories in 3 limited (and very
large) collections.
So I went for it and started
a Kickstarter campaign. You can get different forms of my stories or the three
final collections. (If you support the campaign at all you get the three
collections of all 100 stories in electronic form.)
Also, since I teach a lot of workshops for WMG Publishing, we decided to include discounts to all our writing and publishing workshops. So you can support the Make 100 Paperbacks Kickstarter Campaign by getting a discount on a workshop you’d like to take. Nifty, huh?
So I do hope you will take a
look at this really crazy idea. I am going to have a great time doing this and
I hope you would have a great time reading all the stories as well.
Allyson Longueira, the publisher of WMG Publishing, asked me to tell everyone about the new online workshop. So here I go.
Starting in September, WMG Publishing workshops will offer a new online workshop called Speed.
It’s not about running or driving or flying faster. Nope, this workshop will help writers write faster and at the same time with better quality.
For those of you who didn’t know, WMG Publishing Inc. not only does a series of books for writers, but also online lectures and online workshops to help writers with craft and business.
The Speed online workshop will be the newest one on the list, and it’s going to do more to help writers than most other workshops WMG Publishing sponsors. The workshop might only help a writer get a hundred words per hour faster. Or it might help the writer get three hundred or more words per hour faster.
Any extra words can really add up over time into more novels that readers want to read, especially if the writing maintains a higher quality.
USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch and I will put this together, but I will be the one doing the talking on the videos and answering questions. The workshop will be six weeks long, with five to seven videos to watch at your own pace each week. Also, there is an assignment each week to help you work on some of the topics being talked about.
Most writers find they spend about three hours per week on the workshop, so lots of time for your writing and regular job.
WMG Publishing already has a workshop called Productivity, to help writers get to the computer more often to write. But this Speed workshop will focus only on the actual writing part of things.
So if you are interested in signing up for the new Speed workshop, or want to look at any of the other online workshops and lectures available for writers, stop by www.wmgpublishingworkshops.com.
And if you have any questions about the workshops, feel free to write me directly through my web site at www.deanwesleysmith.com.
Many people know WMG Publishing for its fantastic Fiction River anthology series with more than eighty different authors, or the great Kris Nelscott mystery novels, or the Kristine Kathryn Rusch groundbreaking Retrieval Artist novels, or my strange and fun Smith’s Monthly project.
WMG Publishing also does a series of nonfiction books on the business of being a freelance artist in our world, including the massive must-read industry bible, The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.
But WMG Publishing also has a side to it that many writers know about, but not many readers or fans have heard of. That side is the online workshops and lectures.
At the moment, WMG Publishing has twenty-two different video lectures on the business and craft of fiction writing, and seventeen online six-week video workshops.
The video lectures are available any time you would like and you can return to the lecture over and over as you need. And new lectures are being posted most every month.
The six-week online workshops cycle through ten different workshops each month. WMG limits each workshop to twelve writers and each member of the workshop gets personal feedback from me on five different assignments over the six weeks.
Sounds like a lot of time to commit to a workshop, but writers will spend only four hours per week at most.
The October workshops that are taking sign-ups now are:
Class #21… Oct 6th … How to Write a Thriller
Class #22… Oct 6th … How to Write Series Novels
Class #23… Oct 6th … Genre Structure
Class #24… Oct 6th … Character Voice/Setting
Class #25… Oct 7th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #26… Oct 7th … Depth in Writing
Class #27… Oct 7th … How to Write Science Fiction
Class #28… Oct 8th … Pacing Your Novel
Class #29… Oct 8th … Cliffhangers
Class #30… Oct 8th … Productivity
For full workshop descriptions and more information as well as upcoming workshops in November and December, please go to wmgpublishingworkshops.com
This month is the second-year anniversary of starting the online workshops, and everyone at WMG Publishing is proud of the knowledge that writers get from the various workshops and lectures. We hope to add in more workshops as time goes by to keep them fresh and informative to those trying to learn the craft and the business of fiction writing.
There is one more very special thing going on with the online workshops in October.
Since WMG Publishing is doing a subscription drive for Fiction River through Kickstarter (you can get the details at ), everyone at WMG Publishing thought it would be fun to combine the workshops and the subscription drive.
So, if you sign up for an October online workshop, you get your choice of three electronic volumes of published Fiction River anthologies or a three-volume electronic subscription as part of the deal.
You can also give the workshop as a gift to a writer friend, or the subscription as a gift to a favorite reader friend.
So now the news about the WMG Publishing online workshops and lectures is out there. After two successful years of doing the workshops and lectures, we figured it was time to let people know that WMG Publishing had yet another side to it.
A wonderful side dedicated to helping improve the craft and business of fiction writers from all over the world.
