Stephen L. Thompson's Blog, page 5

Writing Newsletter First Quarter 2024

 Probably the biggest writingnews for this first quarter of 2024, is that for the first time in years I’vesubmitted a story to a magazine.  I’mstill waiting to hear if they’ll accept it, but I hopefully will have good newson it for next quarter.#I’ve continued writing astory for my website each month, publishing “Scheming,” “Outstanding Merit,”and “Always a Catch.” I’ve also

Random Writing Tips – You need to write

 Your reaction to thetitle was probably along the lines of, “No shit.” So let me explain my point.A couple of years ago, Iwrote a previous Random Writing Tips about Schedules.  In that I talked about how if people knowevery third Tuesday there will be a new Random Writing Tips post on your blog, they’llbe more likely to check it out.  And Ifigured having schedules for posts on

Writing business cards

Recently, I wasdoing some cleaning and I came across some business cards I made years ago.I think, in someoffice supply store, I found a pack of blank business cards.  Each sheet had like ten cards you could separate,and the pack had four or five sheets.  Onthe pack there was a note about how it worked with some template in Word.  You filled out the template, then put the

Writing so bad … it’s good?

I watch a bunch ofYouTube movie reviewers. One topic that many of them discuss at some point aremovies so bad they’re good. As they explain, the difference between bad-badmovies and good-bad movies is intention. The word that often comes up whendiscussing bad-bad movies is “cynical,” while the word for good-bad movies isoften “inept.” Bad-bad movies are made by people saying, “X is popular,

Voter registration drive and book sale

I know a lot ofpeople are tired of being told that every election for the past decade WILLDETERMINE THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE NATION! But it’s true.  The fastest wayfor the anti-democratic forces to fully seize power is if We The People can’tbe bothered to vote.  And theanti-democratic forces already have too much power as it is.  To keep our democracy, we need to vote,

Random Writing Tips – Prewrite your bio

 I recently did somethingfor the first time in a couple of years: I submitted a story.  As of the posting of this, I’m still waitingto hear back.  But the submission processbrought back the scourge of many writers: the cover letter.  I don’t care for cover letters.  I prefer sites that just have a form you fillout with your name, story title, word count, etc. and they

Novels in a few sentences

I recently wentthrough some posts on an old blog of mine, and I came across this littlegem.  Years earlier, I had heard that agood exercise for creating pitches was to describe your novel in threesentences.  So I tried it with two of my ideas.  For my novel, Damocles, I came up withthe following:Most people gothrough their day-to-day lives worrying about “important” things:

To scheme, or to write?

I spent a decadeor so sloooowly building up a miniscule following on Twitter.  Now, Twitter had issues before Musk boughtit, but he didn’t fix the issues I had with it, and he made more.  So I left Twitter for Mastodon.  Is it better? Well, probably everyone I’ve interacted with on Mastodon Musk would claimis “woke,” so yeah.The main way Iused Twitter, is I had two

Free story idea – Star Jumping

I have a lot of ideas forstories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’sworth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting throughthem all.  I will admit that some of theideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could makesomething of them.  I’ll just never get achance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of

Random Writing Tips – Am I just writing gibberish?

 There is a project I’dlike to finish in the next few months.  Theidea of the project isn’t that difficult, it’s some essays on a subject I havea great interest in.  So I don’t have todeal with foreshadowing, or coming up with interesting characters, or any ofthe complexities of fiction writing.  Ijust have to coherently describe my thoughts on this subject.Of course,