7 May 2008
I’ve decided this blog needs to be better. It needs a schedule and a purpose. Well, several purposes. Because I’m that kind of guy. With several purposes. So. My goal is to post every Tuesday.
Why Tuesday?
Why not Tuesday?
Because it’s there.
What will be the several purposes?
Talk about Who Dares Wins as I rewrite the book and do workshops and presentations.
Talk about Bob-Land which consists of writing, speaking, on the road, and various inane observations including comments on Crusie-Land.
Rant about books and movies because I’m a writer and I look at things from a different perspective.
And run blog sale specials for my on-line store that will only be up for the week the blog is up, then will be removed.
Who Dares Wins:
A tenet of WDW is that our greatest defenses are built around our greatest weakness. More on that in a future post. A corollary to that is that what we think is our greatest character trait is often our greatest defense. Therein lies the rub. While we think we are doing something positive, in reality we are defending ourselves.
So it behooves us to look at what we think is ‘noble’ and ‘good’ about us and try to see how we are using something to actually hide a defect of character that subverts that good trait.
For example: you take responsibility for others and take care of them. All fine and good, but perhaps you’re doing that so you don’t have to look at yourself and take care of yourself? And if you can’t take care of yourself, you really can’t take care of other people.
Bob Land: I started to feel like The Fourth Horeseman of the Apocalypse this last week. I flew in to Denver, en route to a conference, and they had a snowstorm there that kept us on the ground in the plane for two and a half hours. Then when I got Oklahoma City, they had a fierce hailstorm. The conference went well, nonetheless. Although I couldn’t get the projector to work right during my last talk. All the slides were elongated so people could only see the middle of the slides, not the sides. I’m sure they missed nothing important.
Except the ‘secret’ handshake of publishing.
Books & Movies: No Country for Old Men. Sorry. Didn’t get it. It struck me as a literary film. Where they got way too cute. Especially deciding to skip over the climactic scene and sort of have you figure out what the hell happened on your own. And what exactly did Tommy Lee Jones accomplish? Nada. Nothing.
Next week: Viggo Mortenson redeems himself. Which he couldn’t do in A History of Violence.
Blog Special:
A hardcover of The Novel Writers Toolkit: A Guide to Writing Great Fiction and Getting it Published. Retail: $22.99 On this week’s blog special for only $10 plus S&H:
Back from my long Jeep trip. It was interesting and both conferences were well worth attending.
One thing that happened was meeting people I’d worked with years ago. Either via Writer’s Digest or my own writing courses. A woman in Las Vegas showed me her published book that she was very happy with. I just got an email from a member of Orange County RWA about some information for the workshops I’m giving the weekend after this and she mentioned that a book I had given her a little help on had sold to Berkley for a 2009 publication (www.deannacameron.com) I’ve had a couple of other people this past year that I worked with tell me they got published.
I’m not saying it was my teaching or help that got them published. They did that on their own. But it’s nice to know that the assistance actually helps because teaching writing is often very frustrating. In Who Dares Wins I talk about the Five Percent rule and I think it’s true in teaching writing: about five percent of the people I’ve worked with really apply the material and change what they are doing. But those who do get so much better it’s amazing. So it’s really about them and there own initiative.
I’ll be in OK City this weekend for the Oklahoma Federation of Writers Conference. Then LA next weekend for the Orange County Romance Writers monthly workshop. Then back here for my Advanced Writers Workshop for which there are two slots still available, but it will close soon as I have to get the material disseminated early in May.
Then no trips for a while. Well three weeks which is a long time for me. I have to get Jefferson turned in to my agent after rewriting based on feedback.
Nothing but good times ahead.