Writing at not-nearly-pulp speed

Dean Wesley Smith has made a name for himself by producing interesting new content at a fast pace, often in huge chunks. He's taken that idea into the concept of Pulp Speed levels, not unlike Warp Speed levels in Star Trek. Pulp Speed Level One is 1,000,000 words a year or about 83,000 a month.

Starting on the 9th, he plans to start work on his next non-fiction work, Living at Pulp Speed Five, where he will chronicle his quest to write ten novels and that non-fiction book over the course of 100 days, for a grand total of about half a million words in less than four months. It's a lofty goal, but Smith has produced crazy large amounts of work on a monthly basis for years, so if anyone can do it, is certainly him. He helps himself along by including the count for every blog post he writes as well, several of which will then be the content of the book.

I look at that challenge and have to say it intrigues the hell out of me. Now, I know that with a full time job and a family, I'm not getting close to his 150,000 words a month. But my current output is somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 words in a good month by the same standards. I want to push that to 30,000 in September, 40,000 in October and 50,000 (of course) in time for that regular goal for NaNoWriMo in November. If I can succeed I'll have written the equivalent of about two full length books.

Can I do it? Heck if I know. But we don't grow if we don't challenge ourselves. So wish me luck as I start down the path of increased content creation. I'll keep updates coming every couple weeks right here on the site, much as I have always done with my WIP Wednesday updates. I'll also talk a bit more about my plans and goals over at the Patreon. So stay tuned as the writing gets crazy as I look to go above and beyond anything I've done in the last few years. First up: a whole heck of a lot of Lightweight!

How I suddenly realized I'm really dang deep in this self publishing game

A couple weeks back I was invited to sit down and talk self-publishing with a group of writers at a local venue for that sort of thing, The Cottage. It's a superb little venue ran by a writing friend of some years, Robyn Groth. She and I have talked writing quite a bit over the years, albeit it in a general sense. My interests turn to superheroes and self-publishing, while she's on a far more literary track than yours truly. But with her regular writing groups, she frequently received tons of questions about self-publishing, ones she couldn't answer. That's where I came in. Turns out that over the last seven or eight years I've picked up a bunch of knowledge on publishing with my delve into the Quadrant Universe and Metahuman Press over nearly a decade now.

The Cottage looks absolutely nothing like this, but I needed a good comic
house to feature here. DC Comics' House of Mystery by Bernie Wrightson.

You can read the entire notes on the event at the Cottage's website.

I realized after the invite and even more so in the experience that all the time I spent teaching myself design, enough to call myself talented enough. I've mastered the art of the self-proofread, an important tool even with the help of hired proofreaders or editors. I can format a document like the best of them and my knowledge of my far out of date Adobe suite is pretty solid.

I maybe won't ever be the best writer in my field or the greatest editor or the greatest publisher or any of those things. But I damn well have the knowledge to talk about these things.

And on the hardest days I have, it feels good to know that I will always have at least that.