Usually, I post these when a story is available online or the issue can be ordered. But for whatever reason, the issue of Sandy River Review that contains this piece seems not to exist anywhere but contributor copies. If you’d like to read it, send me an email and I’ll send a PDF.
I can remember the moment in 
he shower when the idea for “The Namesake” came to me. It was one of those flashes of inspiration that come rarely, but I had nearly the whole story at once, it was just a matter of writing it down.
And editing it.
And editing it.
The accepted version of the story was draft 6. It was rejected 40 times , including a very encouraging note from Conjunctions indicating that they’d have taken it if it hewed closer to the theme of the current issue, before it was accepted. Twice.
It turns out that one of the publications I sent it to on the last round of submissions who I assumed were just not going to respond (they didn’t answer when I inquired about the story status after a longer than usual wait), were going to respond so a week after the initial acceptance. A few weeks later, I got the following rejection from The New Yorker.
Digging through my records on the story, this dates back far enough that it was among the stories that I workshopped on Critique Circle back in the day.
is returning to having a critique group. Trying to balance critique group responsibilities with my own writing has been a bit of a challenge and I need to do better with this. I did manage to complete chapter 23 and make some progress on chapter 24 in fits and starts, but I’m not writing at the pace that I’d like to be. I had a sense of what I wanted to do with chapter 24 last month, but I never bothered to write any of it down and now I only have a vague notion of where I was going with that.
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.