Welcome to the Free Stuff: Workshops, Stories and Stuff That Comes to Mind

You don’t have to be a successful standup comedian to write convincing humor. In fact, you don’t even need a keen sense of humor. And you don’t have to worry about your sex scenes turning into pornography once you know the difference between romance, eroticism and pornography. 

Humor, sex, violence and foul language are elements of writing that can cause problems for writers. How much violence is too much, or too little? Where do you draw the line with profane language even when you have a character based on a real-life person whose foul language almost obscures everything they say? 

Four of the sessions in my Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop deal with these topics. This little ebook presents those sessions along with some exercises to help you tackle these problems in your writing. 

When you've finished the first draft of your novel, the fun is over. Now, it's time to get into the real work: re-writing. 

This is a multi-step process and the steps have a very distinct order. Break that order and you could be letting yourself in for a lot of heart ache. Re-writing is where the real writing begins. Everything up till now was getting an idea out where you can see it.

On the other hand, there are those writers who seem to get everything down on the first draft. I hate those people. Fortunately, they're rare. Rare enough that you're likely not one of them, so this ebook might just help you to get through the revision/re-writing process with your sanity relatively unscathed. 

Based on a workshop I gave at the 2011 Maritime Writers' Workshop, the information is dated in some parts and I'm sure some of the links are dead, but the basic concepts for finding a publisher or agent remain the same...some of them still want snail mail submissions. 

Go figure. 

Everyone is creative

This isn’t a mind-boggling, back-breaking treatise on creativity. Much has been written on the subject and there are hundreds of approaches to help you become creative. In this workshop I cover a handful of these...the things that have worked for me and for the folks who’ve taken my writing workshops over the last decade and a half.

Keep this in mind: Everyone has a creative wellspring. Many of us lose it for whatever reasons, but it’s still there and you can release it.

That’s what this workshop is all about.

Some folks say you're born with it, or not born with it. We're ALL born with it. 

We just tend towards losing it until we find our way back. 

OK, so this one pokes fun at writers, but it presents a view that many writers may recognize...and especially the people around them 

Don’t let the hard voices get to you. 

You’re a writer.

Yes, being a writer does have an upside. 

Sort of. 

This is a collection of stories mostly on the humour side and sometimes exploring some unknown region of writing that puzzles me. 

One man's struggle to accept the inevitable is everyone else's sob story.

What if you suddenly had super powers? How would you test them? How would you know exactly what they are? 

And what if they weren't exactly what you thought?

You don't kill coffee. Coffee kills you. Sweetly.

There's  nothing more haunting than not knowing and nothing more fatal knowing.

This is a story of a very disturbing obsession. 

Wrote this one over a ten year period. Wrote the the last six pages (minus the last page, which came almost five years later) in pencil while working at a bar and passing each finished page to three customers who kept telling me to write faster.