Stephen L. Thompson's Blog

Back when Twitter wasstill a thing, I had two accounts.  Onewas my personal account for everything, and one was just for writing.  After a couple years of trial, I ended upwith a way to promote my books.  For eachof my books, I worked up fifteen or so tweets with the title and link.  Most were nearly identical, with me justrearranging the order of hashtags.  Oneday,

A couple yearsago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just thatit was terrible.  I think it took a fewmonths for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories”were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a firstdraft and edited it into a real story.  (Likeall

 The basic reason I writethese Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out onthe internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that Iexist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fractionof the money I make from my hated day job. I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellowcreatives.&

I think for the pastdecade, every Fourth of July I’ve had a sale for some of my ebooks.  Which ones vary over the years, but PoliticalPies, my collection of forty short stories of a political nature, is alwaysincluded.  The sale is usually just tomark the Fourth of July, but this year – with an ever-quickening slide intoauthoritarianism – I’m making it a Save America Sale.How

 This quarter I continuedwriting a story each month on my website, publishing, “On Your Sleeve,” “Mountain out of a Molehill,” and “Black Sheep.” My Ko-fi post for this quarter was repostingthe poem “For the Public Health.” On one of my blogs, I posted the stories “Someday”and “A Sealed Fate.” I also reposted my poem “Loss” on my Mastodon profile.#If I counted correctly,this quarter

In the past yearor so, I’ve gotten into “First Time Watching” videos on YouTube.  Basically, some 20-something will filmthemselves watching The Terminator, or Iron Man, or whatever and posta half-hour long video of their biggest gasps or reactions.  What I find appealing about these, is theywill be watching a favorite movie of mine, but one I haven’t seen for a decade,and it’s like

 I’ve easily read over athousand short stories.  I have numerousshort story collections, and I used to subscribe to a couple magazines thatpublished 10-12 stories each issue and I read all of them.  Now I am terrible with titles or names ofauthors, but if you had me describe the plot of a story, I probably remember …fifty or so.  But if you handed me astory I read a

I have an interestin history.  There’s the standard WWIIand ancient Rome, but also the history of spaceflight, technology, and anythingdealing with the hundred or so other minor interests I have.  As such, I follow I don’t know how manyYouTube history channels.  But for thispost, I want to talk about one in particular: Cambrian Chronicles, the “numberone Welsh history channel

 Ten or fifteen years ago,I came across a site where you would post a blog/story/whatever, and for everyview it got you would get a penny.  So Istarted posting whatever I could thing of to get some money.  In the following few years, I found a dozenor so such sites.  Some I actually didget money from, but others would have like a $5 payout minimum, and I’d be at$4.50 and

Many years ago, Iread some famous author saying that to make a living as a writer, you needed totreat writing like a job.  You punch in,do the work, day in and day out.  A fewyears ago, I was trying to think of some way to boost my writing, so I decidedto try making it a job.  The first thingI needed to figure out was how many hours a week I wanted to write.  I quickly