Skip to main content

Patreon



As you might have heard, I've started a Patreon for short stories. You can watch the above video and check out the campaign here.

The reason I started this site in the first place more than ten years ago was to get myself into the habit of writing short stories on a regular basis. Since then, I've written more than a hundred short stories and almost a dozen novels. I've also picked up gigs writing for so many websites and magazines and placing short stories in anthologies, which means that the "writing short stories for fun" aspect of what this site used to be shifted into something else.

I'm trying to put myself in a position where I'm not doing any writing that I'm not getting paid for and this seemed to be the best way to blend how this site used to run and my new renewed desire to be a full-time writer.

And that's where you come in.

If you enjoy what I do on the blog and can support the Patreon even for $1 per short story, I would be forever grateful. It would help me produce more short stories, but also help subsidize the time I spend writing this blog and my livestream Q&As.

If you contribute at the $1 level or higher, you'll be able to participate in the polling that will determine the kinds of short stories I'm writing. If you kick in at $3 or higher, you'll get to see some of my rough work before it's been edited or sent to publishers, as well as essays about the short stories I'm writing. If my musings on this blog help you at all, I think the $3+ package on the Patreon would be of great interest to you.

I'm also working on creating a short story magazine on Patreon for Silence in the Library. We'll be producing a monthly short story magazine and the money will be used to pay the writers. I'll be curating much of that. If you're interested in having your short story considered for that project, contact me and I'll get you submission guidelines and talk to you about what I'm looking for.

Thank you for reading this and paying me for the time I put into helping educate readers of the blog and entertain readers of short fiction. Here's the link for my Patreon one more time.
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

50+ Rules and Tips About Writing I've Collected Over the Years

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…
Read more

Anatomy of a Scene - City Lights

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made. 
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it.
City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …
Read more

Anatomy of an Opening: The End of the Affair

Instead of breaking down a scene from a movie, this time we'll break down the opening of a book. (Previously, I've done scenes from City Lights, Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  I've also broken down the opening to Starship Troopers.) 

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is absolutely one of my favorite books. The writing is lyrical and story heart-wrenching and beautiful. Greene's style of writing is such that he always has me gripped, whether it's the beginning of the book or the end. And he shows you so much about the character in his opening lines.

So, here are the first two paragraphs from the book:
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but d…
Read more