Category: Magical Words

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 1/16/2012 and 3/26/2012

Erin Penn

Ambition and Tenacity

Half of the year gone and not having half the goals met. Is that because the goals were too ambitious or my inner drive not tenacious enough?

What ambitions did you start the year with and what have you reached? Do you need a new set or to retool the old? Or just turbo charge that old tenacity?

When thinking about your goals, you might want to read the Magical Words – “On Writing: The Value of Ambition” by David B. Coe. It can be found here:

He mentions three ambitions:

  1. Material Ambitions – For me, this would be publication credits and sales numbers. Things I have no control over other than production.
  2. Output Ambitions – Which leads to Word Count, Complete Stories, and Anthology Submissions. To get #1, I have to meet #2.
  3. Creative Ambitions – How do I want to push myself as a writer?

In 2019, I started my patreon page at the beginning of the year (https://www.patreon.com/ErinPenn) and an Editing Rant Vlog (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4qqZ3dYm_OlXfecgzWRi1g) at the end of the year. One related to my material ambitions and the other related to my creative ambitions of exploring the video and sound field. In 2020, my goals include completing a novel and 500 words per day every day – both output ambitions.

I think I am ambitious enough, but am I tenacious enough for my ambitions?

Mr Coe covered that in “The Writing Life: The Value of Tenacity”:

The tenancies covered include:

  1. Day-to-Day Tenacity – That 500 words per day, or one hour, or every weekend or whatever it takes.
  2. Project Tenacity – Finishing that thing.
  3. Market Tenacity – Selling that finished thing somewhere.
  4. Career Tenacity – Finishing the next thing, and the next, and sell, and sell. Repeat.

For me, I think Project Tenacity is my major downfall. Between fighting the Oo-shiny syndrome and my mixed-up schedule forcing me to take a break a week at a time sometimes (or four months during tax season), once the “right now” issue settles and I reach to pick up an ongoing project, I rarely reach for exactly what I was working on before.

The dreaded “meeting week” being the worst offender. The second week of the each month I have a meeting Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night. I get NOTHING done this week other than meeting prep and meeting cleanup.  I collapse over the weekend (if it isn’t filled with a convention or other obligation) and try to restart the fires of ambition as soon as I can. I need to work faster so everything is completed in three weeks or figure out how to integrate the Meeting Week into an ebb-and-flow.

WRITING EXERCISE: Review this year’s goals. What have you been able to do and why? What has been a barrier? Should the goals be changed?

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 6/2/2010

Erin Penn

Dragoncon 2019

Conventions are to writing as Facebook meal shots are to food. You don’t think that dozens to thousands of people on top of each other has anything to do with writing, but they do. Networking, career advice, and squealing when you realize, yes – that is EXACTLY who you think it is!!!! are just a few of the reasons to attend. Newbie writers to season pros, enthusiastic readers wanting to become beta reads to editor-publishers, fanfic artists to cover artists. Everyone has a place at the registration table and a reason to be rubbing elbows.

Faith Hunter provides lists of what a person should aim to get out of a con – as an unpublished writer, as a published writer, and as a reader – in the Magical Words 6/2/2010 “More on Cons” –

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 7/6/2009

Erin Penn

Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Point of view is what binds character development to plot development; it’s what allows a story and its main character to grow and change and resolve together.  When that bond is broken, even briefly, character and narrative both suffer.  The storytelling becomes confused; the reader’s identification with your lead character is compromised. 

quoted from David B. Coe, 7/6/2009, Magical Words

Remember Vernor’s Law: Every scene should do at least one, preferably two of three things: Develop character, advance plot, and/or fill in necessary background. Character-Plot-Worldbuilding walk together through every aspect of writing. The above quote struck me hard, making me understand why POV choice is so important to a manuscript. If the Character and Narrative are not handcuffed together, the manuscript will not blossom.

See the whole blog past on Biding Character and Narrative (thru) Point of View here:

B is for BIC

Erin Penn 1 Comment

B is BIC – Butt in Chair

The most important thing about being a writer is writing. To do that you need to … write!

Sit on that hiney in a chair and put words on paper or hands on keyboard.

So many things throw this off, anything that completely changes your life: a new baby, holidays, starting or ending a job, or a global pandemic. The process changes and now you got to figure out a new one. But at the end of the day, the process boils down to the simplest form – Butt in Chair.

Catie Murphy explains her take on this in a Magical Words post from 12/015/2011. You can see the original here: It’s all about the timing. As always read the comments.

Another good source John Hartness vlog – Writing while the world burns.

This month I am working an the A to Z challenge, the NaNoWritMo camp, the end of tax season, and three book edits (I’m an editor for Falstaff Books) due before the end of tax season. Why do the first two when I got the last two to deal with? Because BIC needed an extra nudge.

Good luck to everyone visiting for the A to Z blogging challenge – may your BIC be fun and productive this month.

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words – Length

Erin Penn

Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash

Length Matters

Length matters when writing. To be marketable a story needs to be long enough, but not too long – fitting the genre and publisher requirements. Small presses make decisions on printing costs and book sizes allowed by print-on-demand companies. Novel or novella? Series, serial, or stand-alone? How much is the editing cost (usually by word count)?

How long can an anthology be and still break even? How many stories are needed to pull in a broad enough audience? How long can each short story be? Should flashes be allowed? How about a drabble?

Drabbles are exactly 100 words. Flashes fall under 2,000, usually hovering between 500 and 1,000. Short stories for anthologies start about 2,500 with 5,000 to 7,000 usually the sweet spot for little known writers and 10,000 to 15,000 for the anchor writers whose names appear on the front cover. Novellas, you are looking at 30,000 to 40,000, plus or minus 5,000 for the extreme ends. Novels are 70,000 for short and sweet genres like urban fantasy, romance, and mysteries; and 100,000 for the heavy worldbuilding speculative fics of science fiction and fantasy. Add 20% to these if a well-known author where a publishing house is willing to risk more editing costs.

The challenge is writing for a length, especially when your natural length is writing more or less than what is required. My natural length is short, really short. I’m naturally a poet – and not Norse Skald epics. I like tanka, a Japanese form of 31 syllables. I think in phrases, partial sentences. I don’t need to string together three to five sentences for a paragraph. My goal is nine to twenty phrases.

Flashes are beautiful.

And not marketable.

I’ve got to write longer. My natural length of 500 to 1,000 words, which means a short story is 10 flashes that need to hang together. A novella is 60 flashes and a novel 100 flashes.

Magical Words have had several episodes on writing to length. Here are some and their take-aways. Most focus on short stories since novel is the “assumed” length:

Coe, David B. “On Writing: A Novelist Takes on Short Stories”. 10/3/2011 –

On Writing: A Novelist – Writing a short story has different challenges than a novel: length, narrative aim, description (level) and method of writing. Mr. Coe states that to him, writing a short story is like writing a chapter in a novel. An internal arc, character growth, the driving of a reader forward, all remain the same. But the Method of writing is much slower. The articles does a good breakdown on the structural differences one finds in short stories.

Coe, David B. “On Writing: Short Fiction and Worldbuilding”. 4/1/2013 –

On Writing: Short Fiction – Sometimes, writing short stories of your characters can help flesh out ideas from your novels. These worldbuilding exercises (while necessary) don’t fit into the novel, as they are usually side stories or back stories, but, after the novel is done, they can be sold to anthologies as a marketing tool to point readers to your novel. They also can be used as special clues given to fans which follow you on patreon or your blog. (If you are one who normally writes large and want to scale down for short stories, David is you guy. His natural length is somewhere around 150,000 words. He approaches the problem of length from the opposite end as me. This is one of the great examples of each person’s writing style is different and what works for one person might not work for another.)

Jaffe, Stuart. “Publishing – Short Story Contracts”. 9/24/2010 – 

Jaffe, Stuart. “Writing – Scope”. 7/16/2010 – http://www.magicalwords.net/really-i-mean-it/writing-scope/

Writing Scope – Is the story the right size for a short story? Does it have changing viewpoints, and are there subplots? The list goes on about red flags to look for when figuring if a tale which wants telling is a short story or a novel.

Martin, Gail Z. “10 Reason to Consider Writing for Anthologies”. 3/9/2016 –

10 Reasons – Focuses on why to market to anthologies. “#4. New Sandbox. A book is a commitment. A Short Story is a vacation.” and “#6. Test-driving publishers”, anthologies set up an environment where writers and publishers can see if they are compatible. “#9. Reusable content” – when the anthology rights revert (and be sure to have a time limit built in, industry acceptance is one year), the writer can publish a collection of short stories they had in various anthologies. The list goes on.

Massey, Misty. “Inviting A Crowd to the Party”. 11/5/2015 – http://www.magicalwords.net/misty-massey/inviting-a-crowd-to-the-party/

Inviting a Crowd – Limit the number of characters in a short story. A short story is a love affair; you don’t have to introduce them to the whole family.