29th Street — Friday Pages

A playful session of the South Metro Writers Collective:

• 6:00 pm — arrivals
• 6:30 pm — timer boundary: 90 minutes of sacred writing time
• 8:00 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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I admire the heck out of the writers who stick with it, even when it's hard… Readers want more books. Once they finish one, they want another. When you only have two, readers move on to other writers. With fourteen, you're going to keep them occupied for a while.

-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.

29th Street 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.