2026: 10 Year Anniversary and Beyond

by benmweilertNo Comments
In 2016, I started my websites as a place to store my thoughts, ideas, and experiences for photography and writing. Since then, the writing is the only thing that has continued to stick. Sure, I still write reviews over on BMW the Critic (and will continue to do so this year)—but that's mostly to catalog my thoughts about books, movies, and video games. The true creative space that I keep coming back to is here with the stories I produce each year. I've occasionally gone back and looked at my long-term plans for my writing. Some predictions came true, while others were pushed out further in favor of ideas that came fully formed to the front of my mind that screamed to be let out. While 2026 will be lighter than some of my busier years, I'm also looking out into the future and making near-term plans that will influence what I work on this year. If anything, these aren't...
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Barely Alive After 2025

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If there's one tweak to a famous quote I love it's, "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy." If this doesn't describe this year's creative efforts, then I hope I don't give myself nearly as much to do next year. I figured I was due a break after a few years of recording and publishing audiobooks for The Fluxion Trilogy. Instead, a project I thought would take a month ended up sucking me in for several. The emotional burden of many things this year forced myself to give my creativity some grace to let a few things drop from the plan I set forth in January. Still, I managed to be quite productive on the few things that mattered most. Here's the summary... 2025 YEAR IN REVIEW The $1,300 Alphabet While I started The $1,300 Alphabet last year, there was plenty of activity with my illustrator, Nancy Anderson, to get this alphabet book containing...
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Striving for 2025-ing

by benmweilert1 Comment
Now that 2024 is over, I'm glad to see my creative calendar lighten up significantly. Last year, I had something to work on for every single month. While many of the tasks were easy and only took a couple days to complete, others expanded and took more time than I expected. Having sat down and worked through what I want to accomplish this year, I'm glad to see it's slower than usual. Of course, there's a lot of moving parts in multiple projects, so here are the broad strokes of what I want to accomplish in 2025. The $1,300 Alphabet With last year's release of Bountiful Bunnies, I'm on a bit of a children's picture book kick as I continue to work with artist Nancy Anderson to illustrate this year's release, The $1,300 Alphabet. I am convinced that if kids can memorize the Latin names of dinosaurs, then they can also learn "$50 words" like "Akimbo" or "Defenestrate." This book has been...
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2024’s Checklist

by benmweilertNo Comments
I love the quote, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." This year, I had an ambitious goal to accomplish something every month. I was wrapping up a few years of 10th Anniversary projects and wanted to get a head start on the next few years of projects. Some of these tasks were easier than others and some took a lot more work than I had expected. Ultimately, I'm proud of what I accomplished this year, so here's how my initial January plan stacked up... JANUARY/FEBRUARY: Releasing the complete, definitive edition of The Fluxion Trilogy wasn't too difficult for the hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions. However, all the experience I gained from producing the first three audiobooks came to a head when I realized I needed to re-record a lot of what I had previously done the last few years. This set me back a bit as I had originally only expected that I needed to record the Appendix...
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More in 2024

More in 2024

by benmweilert1 Comment
For the last few years, I've been more productive than I had to be. Since 2018, my singular goal has been to publish a single new book wholly written by myself each year. This means that being in an anthology doesn't count, as the entire project must be something I wrote. However, it also means that compilations of things I've written (like blog posts or short stories) can count as my annual release. There also isn't a length requirement, which is why I count children's picture books and cookbooks as meeting the intent of my goal. Having published not only a 10th Anniversary edition of The Fluxion Trilogy for the last few years (including audiobook versions of these books), but a new book as well, I decided it was time to refocus my efforts for the next few years before I have to put out a 10th Anniversary edition of Fourteener Father in 2028. The plan for 2024 still has some...
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Systems Simplify

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How long does it take you to write 100 words? I'm sure most of us have never sat down and figured this out, even if we've done it many times. Still, if I asked you to write 100 words in 100 minutes, you'd likely say you can easily do that. 10 minutes? Probably more of a challenge, but not impossible. 1 minute? Unlikely—unless you really work at achieving it. As with most things in our lives, we develop an innate understanding of how long something takes the more we do it. We feel frustrated if it takes too long but accomplished if we can do it faster than normal. The routine becomes subconscious. A tenet of writerly advice is usually "develop a daily writing habit." Why is this? First, it's practicing something that then becomes easier with each iteration. Whether it's a set number of minutes or words each day, the more times you practice this routine, the better you'll get at...
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Write what you like

by benmweilertNo Comments
There are tons of pithy sayings writers usually hear when they're starting out. "Kill your darlings." "Show, don't tell." "Write what you know." Most who are starting out don't really know what these idiomatic pieces of advice actually mean. Even experienced writers have trouble cracking the code on some of these sayings. Ultimately, you can't really distill sound advice down to a 3-word phrase. Sometimes, it's better to rephrase this advice. For instance, when I tell people to write what they know, what I'm really saying is to "write what you like." Passion makes it easy. "If you could speak on something for an hour without prepared notes, what would it be?" is an icebreaker question that uncovers your interests and hobbies. It also answers my "write what you like" motto. Have you ever picked up an interest that suddenly sucked an entire weekend away as you dove down the rabbit holes that uncovered the depth of this hobby? Did you spend...
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Using real places in your writing

by benmweilertNo Comments
The setting is a key foundation of any story. Without it, your characters are engaging with a plot in an amorphous location. Sometimes, ignoring the setting can lead to dialogue-heavy writing (or “talking head” syndrome). A simple way to ground your story in reality is to use actual places in your writing. I’ve talked about how traveling to these locations helps add the needed realism to stories based on the real world. However, I also understand that not everyone has the time and money to go to a specific spot in a big city that they don’t live in. It’s certainly easy to use locations close to where you live, but not every story you write will likely be set in an easily accessible spot. Thoroughly researching these places you haven’t been to with Google Maps and travel guides is a simple way to overcome this limitation. Convey the sensation of “being there” Ideally, though, visiting the location you want to use in...
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Be a Voracious Consumer of Stories

by benmweilertNo Comments
Being an author takes a lot of time and commitment. Depending on how fast an author can craft clean copy determines how much time they must dedicate to the various steps of finishing a manuscript. Perhaps an author is a fast writer, which might require them to spend more time editing. On the flip side, maybe an author agonizes over each word as they write, which might take longer to get through a draft but requires less time editing. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of writing and editing, there is one activity you should also dedicate some of your time to. What's nice about this activity is that it can often be relaxing. I refer, of course, to consuming stories. Read universal stories with wide appeal. While we encourage writers to pursue the stories they want to tell, if these stories only focus on wish fulfillment or other narcissistic tales, their audiences are likely to be limited to themselves. Reading other...
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Logic and the Suspension of Disbelief

by benmweilertNo Comments
Fiction writers have the most freedom to write whatever they want. After all, fiction is—by definition—not true. Thus, without the constraints of truth holding them down, fiction writers can write about things that don’t make any sense. This is how the more fantastical genres of science fiction and fantasy can get away with having aliens, dragons, and any other number of crazy things the author can think up. While fiction doesn’t have to hold to the tenets of truth, there is one fundamental foundation needed for this—or any other—writing. That foundation is logic. Even if readers can accept a world that has faster-than-light travel or a ring that can make its wearer invisible, if there isn’t a logic supporting these claims, the reader will begin to doubt the world the writer has created. The second that doubt creeps in, disbelief isn’t far behind. A hole in logic is a hole in the plot. Because there’s no need to write factual things in fiction,...
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