Just another writer
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2024 Tournament of Books: Boys Weekend vs Blackouts
I’ve often wondered how the original seeding works in the Tournament of Books. Are they looking for unlikely matchups? Is it just random? However it goes, this is certainly an odd pairing. Blackouts is very much the embodiment of the Important Novel. It won the National Book Award and treats of a Serious subject, a…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Play-in round
For the first time, I’ve made the effort to try to read all the Tournament of Books entries before the tournament starts instead of relying on dumb luck to let me have read perhaps two or three. Having done this, I’ve decided to do my own parallel judging (I’ve been filling out my brackets as…
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Writerly resolutions: February status
At the end of last month, I ordered a spiral bound copy of the printed manuscript and once it arrived, I set out to read and annotate everything for editing. I managed to finish that read today and start editing draft4.docx on my Mac. Based on my own read, comments from other readers and some…
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Writerly resolutions: January status
January was a low-writing month. At some point last year, I managed to mess up my submissions spread sheet so that a lot of old submissions got attached to the wrong journals. Because I use past submission history as part of my determining where I’ll submit new things, this turns out to be something that…
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Writerly resolutions for 2024
I’m in that weird point in my writing practice where a major project is nearly out of my hands, and may or may not begin demanding my time depending on factors beyond my control. So, with that in mind, here are my goals for 2024: Get final draft of the novel finished Query query query…
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Writerly resolutions for 2023—the post mortem
So my goals for 2023 were: Finish the last of the research reading (only 6½ books right now). Character bios for major characters Do a highlighter read (per Matt Bell, pp. 128–133) Read and annotate the printed manuscript based on bios, research notes and fresh eyes. Weasel word check (Bell, p. 141–4) Draft three to…
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My favorite reads of 2023
2023 saw me returning to a more typical year of reading, with the vast majority of my reading being fiction again. I also ended up having a bit more reading time than usual so my total book count for the year was 124 books. The full list of books is available at GoodReads. My favorite…
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2023 in rejections (and acceptances)
My submission pace picked up a little in 2023 but acceptances have remained low. Acceptance and personal rejection rate are down even more than last year so apparently, I just suck. Poetry had a bigger uptick in submissions this year with a lot more acceptances. In fact, I had a long streak of poetry acceptances…
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Writerly resolutions: November status
It seems hardly worth it, being almost a half-month late in providing this status, but here it is. The third draft of the novel is finally finished. At this point I even have some reader comments back on the whole thing. The Matt Bell “weasel-word” check managed to yield nearly 4000 words of cuts. Not all of…