D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Writerly resolutions: October status

    Finally got out of the first chapter and began moving more quickly through the manuscript. I only have two chapters left before I do the weasel-word check and then send the whole damn thing off to some people to read it end to end. I got another post-workshop story out into submission along with a…

  • The big countdown

    I’m still at 88 years this year, which is I guess what I should expect. Not exactly the happiest year of my life this past year, but I guess things can only get better from here. As of tomorrow, I will have outlived the following (in no particular order): Christopher Columbus (genocidist and lousy navigator)…

  • “The universe is broken”: The story behind the story

    Electric Literature does a weird thing where they give a different title to the webpages that have their stories than the story actually has and use that in their promotion for the story. A couple years ago, they did this with Elizabeth Campbell’s story, “The Big Bang” giving an alternate title of “A busted family in…

  • Writerly resolutions: September status

    A bit more work on the first chapter, but it’s still a bit of a slog. I think this chapter is going to be the biggest chunk of revision work on this draft. The key thing I did was tearing out a big chunk of the past tense work in the chapter and rewriting and…

  • Writerly resolutions: August status

    The status is showing up a bit early this month since I’m going on vacation and won’t be doing any active writing work while I’m gone.¹ Got one of my workshopped stories revised and out into submissions as well as wrote a new short-short and workshopped it (I think this needs another round of revision…

  • Writerly resolutions: July status

    Chaos continues as does progress on the novel, although the progress continues at a slower level than I would like while the chaos at a higher level. The annotation read is closing on completion with just a page and a half of notes to be pasted into the manuscript before revisions. No real progress on…

  • Where I get names

    Rebecca Makkai had a recent Substack post about naming which I enjoyed and I thought I’d share some of my own strategies for getting names. When I’m looking for names for characters in another country, one place I’ll look is at lists of World Cup players. One of the rules for the World Cup is…

  • Writerly resolutions: June status

    As my life continues its daily chaos, I make slow progress with the novel. I’ve completed the highlighter read of the novel, but have a lot of work to do on the annotation read. I started with a dozen pages of research notes printed in double-column mode which I’ve been cutting into little rectangles and…

  • Writerly resolutions: May status

    A bit more productive this month, but still behind where I hoped to be. On the novel, I moved from 55 pages into the highlighter read to 225 pages. Roughly 80 pages (six chapters) to go. I expect to get the highlighter read done in the next week and get most of the way through…

  • Writerly resolutions: April status

    April, despite its soote shoures, is indeed the cruelest month. I began the month with Covid, finally succumbing despite still being careful three years into the pandemic. This pretty much knocked me out the first two weeks of the month, which came on top of recovering from the site hack and an associated email outage…