A Valuable Lesson
In Today's Journal
* A New Short Story
* Bradbury Reminder
* The Writing
* A Valuable Lesson
* Yesterday, I Remembered Hemingway
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Note: If anyone else didn't receive Your Morning Serial for BO-42 Chapters 15-16 and 17-19 you can see them respectively at :
Thanks to Nan for the heads-up. I don't know why Substack is occasionally dropping emails. Sorry.
A New Short Story
"The Demise of Ramón Vargas and Raul Obregón" went live Friday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out. It's free.
If you enjoy the story, please click Like. Comments are welcome too. Both help with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else.
Bradbury Reminder
Today is SUNDAY. Just a reminder to get your Bradbury Challenge story info in to me before the Journal goes live on Monday.
The Writing
Thanks to a localized internet outage in southwest Texas, my first reader, Russ Jones, was a couple of days getting Blackwell Ops 43 back to me (instead of his usual few hours).
But for the first time ever, he also found more than the occasional wrong word or "ed" dropped from the end of a past-tense word.
I'd somehow managed to skip a LOT of necessary description, and of the description I did include, I got a lot of it out of sequence.
So see? Even I (I'm kind'a the description and dialogue king) occasionally fall flat on my face. (grin)
As a result of Russ' eagle eye and the fact that he's my Friend (read "trusts me enough to tell me the truth") I read over the opening again, trashed it, and wrote it again from scratch.
As a result, BO-43 is now 496 words and one chapter longer, and it's a TON more pleasing to read.
It will release everywhere live on June 7.
But if you've been enjoying Blackwell Ops 42: Sam Granger on my Your Morning Serial substack and you'd like to continue the story unabated, you can buy Blackwell Ops 43: Sam Granger | The Quiz Master at my online store right now for only $5.
What a deal, eh?
A Valuable Lesson
You should never stop re-learning this lesson: Take Your Time.
Take Your Time, especially during cycling. Make sure you convey everything the POV character gives you and that you convey it in the sequence with which it occurs or with which he observes it.
The reader's sole job is to be entertained. Leaving too much (or anything at all) to the reader's imagination will cost you readers. Don't risk it.
Yesterday, I Remembered Hemingway
At around 9 a.m. yesterday I realized I hadn't written a short story this week for my own Bradbury Challenge.
I haven't seen a story in the current novel yet and I didn't want to go backward and excerpt one from a previous novel. Also, no story ideas or characters or lines of dialogue were popping into my head like they so often do.
But I needed a story. What to do?
Then I remembered that Friday and Friday night I'd read a couple of stories from my copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition.
So I got up and went to the house to retrieve the book and bring it back to the Hovel. I opened the book to my bookmark, which marked the next story ("Under the Ridge") after the last story I'd read last night, and I read the first few paragraphs.
The opening sentence of the fifth paragraph in the story slapped me, and I closed the book and set it aside and put my fingers on the keyboard of my laptop.
I wrote the opening sentence of that fifth paragraph as the epigram for my new story, stole the first four words of that sentence to use as a title (and changed it when a better title surrendered itself to me near the end of the story), then wrote the story recorded in the Numbers below.
If anyone would like to read that story, email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. I'll send it to you free in PDF. It's a good, intense story.
The point is, I defy any fiction writer
to read any short story or novel by Ernest Hemingway and not encounter a phrase or sentence that will serve as an idea or title or epigram for your own short story or novel.
If you're a fiction writer and if you don't have a copy of the book yet, I strongly recommend The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition.
Writing Three Novels Ahead
Yesterday morning I got a note from Amazon saying Blackwell Ops 41: Leon Garras was "live" on Amazon.
That's when it hit me: I'm actually writing three novels ahead. I'd never thought of it that way before.
BO-41 went live today, BO-42 is still posting live every morning on Your Morning Serial, BO-43 is in the can and slated for release "wide" on June 7, and I'm writing BO-44. Weird.
Yet somehow I actually felt bad that I'd missed a day of writing on the novel on Friday. (grin) Go figure.
Of Interest
How to Create a Book Marketing Plan That Actually Works
Plotting Your Novel Writer's Digest Bundle I felt like I ought'a pass this along, but the bundle is rife with myths, BUT...
You can save a lot of money and buy Writing Better Fiction for only $13.99. Just sayin'.
Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week: “Mothers & Motherhood”
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 910
Writing of "A Kind of Cross"
Day 1…… 2519 words. To date…… 2519 done
Writing of Blackwell Ops 44: Sam Granger | Following the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 3613 words. To date…… 3613
Day 2…… 2893 words. To date…… 6506
Day 3…… 1824 words. To date…… 8330
Fiction for May………………………... 35334
Fiction for 2025………………………. 413747
Nonfiction for May………………........ 8700
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 109790
2025 consumable words…………….. 517027
Average Fiction WPD (May)……...... 3553
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 10
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 26
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 114
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 296
Short story collections……………………. 29
Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Hi Harvey, I continue to be amazed by how you can be so productive with your fiction efforts while also putting out a daily blog. My hands a full with just a weekly post--which, by the way, I thank you for recommending again this week.
Take my time with cycling... Difficult lesson to do. But I do it, at the very least I reread what I wrote in the previous session, and if something positively occurs to me, I make the changes. How little I can keep in mind! But fortunately, my crerative mind knows what he is doing.