My life expectancy number has declined slightly this year from 88 to 87. I imagine the last year hasn’t helped with this, between the pandemic shutting out interpersonal interaction and trump generating daily stresses and then yet another first-degree relative getting cancer, it’s not been my favorite year.
My writing life has been fair. I had a long slow difficult summer with my writing but things have finally picked up and as an added bonus, I’ve found a new writing group so maybe things will be better in the next year, especially once I have the first draft of the novel completed.
month for progress on the novel. I finished a first draft of chapter 23 and have done most of the rewrite draft although I’ve slowed down as I need to get into the weeds on some questions of Jewish theology to write a conversation that takes place. Even better, I have a decent sense of where things will be going in chapter 24 which has often not been the case in the past.
I sure would. So when I faced the bleak wasteland of 650–659.999, Management and Public Relations, I decided that one of the time management books would be the most appealing option.
that the best option for writing about this book is to provide a copy of the letter that I wrote to accompany the copy that I gifted to my nephew after I read it (roughly a year ago, in pre-Covid times when he had just started his freshman year of college.
managed to finish chapter 22 and get a good start on chapter 23 without too much dithering about what’s happening in the novel. It’s still a challenge to get myself to re-read the pages when it’s time to rewrite/revise, but I’m spending less time procrastinating about it than has been the case before.
in reference to the robe-like garb that some Islamic men wear. My editor, doing due diligence found spellings of “galabeya” and “jalabiya.” 
first from the movie Adaptation and when I finally saw Susan Orlean in person and she didn’t look especially like Meryl Streep, I was somewhat disappointed.
I’m not necessarily having the progress I’d ideally like, but I’m doing much better at getting the words onto the page. Still a lot of flat stretches in the graph, but the vertical bits are more vertical than they’ve been for months.
mediocre month, although I did at least finish a draft of chapter 21. Now the only problem is getting myself willing to do a critical read of that chapter and start rewriting.
on the right? Looks pretty good at least for the end of the month, eh? Until you look at the vertical scale and see that I wrote less than 700 words the whole month. But at least things are starting to pick up and maybe June will be better.