The 29 Club — New Year Pages

A playful session of the South Metro Writers Collective:

• 3:00 pm — arrivals
• 3:30 pm — timer boundary: 90 minutes of sacred writing time
• 5:00 pm — share weekly iteration counts (how many 90-minute blocks this week?)

• The coffee shop is open until 9:00 pm.*

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If you really and truly want to have a lifelong career as a professional writer, you must figure out the ways around your own mind games.

You can.

I mean, after all, who wouldn't want to play every day, making things up for a living?

-Kristine Kathryn Rusch, How Writers Fail : Analysis and Solutions (2023). Rusch has so far written over 200 novels and 1,000 short stories; another source suggests she has written nearly 400 books — so far.
"""

Creating novels relies on playfulness. Bring your current project.

The Alliance of Independent Authors' (ALLi's) Big Data Dump 2023 reveals indie authors hit their financial stride around novel twenty-nine. By then, you're writing so well readers are pre-buying getaway tickets to your world-building and demanding to know when your next book drops.

• Top-earning indie authors invest 20 hours a week writing
• Thirteen 90-minute iterations = 19.5 hours of writing time!

John Cleese recommends 90-minute creativity periods in Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (2020). Dean Wesley Smith and Stephen King in their writing guides urge using a dedicated writing tool and location, and both ardently maintain an author has written ; a writer is writing. Be both.

The 29 Club sessions are for storytellers making the deep investment — developing craft, building backlist, and treating storytelling as a career measured in decades, not by a handful of books. Instead of a book or a trilogy, we're thinking in sets of 29 novels!

I will arrive before 6:00 pm to pull tables together in the big room.

I will display a sign at the tables for "SMWC".

* Please be prepared to make a small purchase to thank the establishment for use of their space. If you like your hot chocolate hot, you have to smile and ask when you order.