D. A. Hosek

Last year, I wrote:

2019 was a disappointing year on many fronts, so I figure 2020 can’t help but be better.

Ah, the naïveté of 2019.

My goals for the year:

1. Work on We, The Rescued daily until I’ve got it ready to pass on to other eyes to look at (which means finishing the first draft, doing the rewrite draft and then a revision draft after that).
2. Workshop a new piece of fiction monthly now that I’ve got a writing group to keep me motivated.

As with last year’s resolutions, I’ll check back in with status reports each month. Since 2021 has already started, I’d note that I’m on track with item 1, but behind with item 2.

I set three goals for 2020: two related to finishing snd revising the novel and a third that largely involved doing nothing. I kind of failed at all three.

I had bursts of productivity in the spring and the summer but continuing problems with my laptop knocked me out of commission for the last couple of months of the year (it’s back in for its third round of repairs right now). So I not only didn’t finish the first draft of the novel (I’m in them middle of chapter 24 of 28), but I clearly didn’t finish the rewrite and revision phase of the work either.

My third resolution was to cut way back on submissions. I did that. Nothing new went out this year. But I was going to wait until my submittable queue managed to drain to zero entries. Then 2020 came and there are still two submissions lingering (technically three, but the third is for a journal that’s folded and I haven’t withdrawn the submission out of sentimentality).

Here’s hoping 2021 will be better.

No graph this month for progress on the novel because there was no progress. I wrote not one word.

I had planned to finish some writing. Lots of writing. But during the first couple of weeks, I was trying to keep up with writing group obligations and put things off. Then, I decided that while I had the chance, I would take my MacBook Pro in to fix a problem with the touchbar (it was getting ghost touches which rendered the computer unusable unless I put the touchbar into spaces mode and didn’t actually use multiple spaces). I figured it would be a few days without the computer. They told me ten days. Not ideal, but OK. Then when I went to check on the computer on the day it was supposed to be returned the system showed that it was still at the Apple store. I called and after some transfers got my own customer service representative who’s been active through the process. Finally on 30 November, it showed as arriving at the repair facility and I got it back yesterday.

And the bad news, despite them replacing nearly every part of the computer, the touchbar problem is still there (I’m guessing they should have replaced the keyboard as well). I’m hoping that when my representative gets back in the office on Monday, we can work something out where I can get a working computer without being without my laptop for three weeks again.

In the draining the submittable queue news, I’m down to two from three with Whiskey Island officially revealed as defunct (via an e-mail from one of the faculty at the sponsoring institution). Another submission hit its first birthday this month. I’m guessing my no submissions until the submittable queue is empty resolution is going to default to no submissions in 2020. Probably for the best.

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. The PDF version is now available here. The website barely acknowledges the existence of the issue still.

I can remember the moment in the 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.

The biggest change in my writing life this month 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.

I did get some great feedback on a story that I’d sent out last year and had a number of near-misses without success. I now know exactly what was wrong with it—and it’s a simple matter of deleting a single section. It’s still a story that I can see generating form rejections when it goes out for a second round of submissions, but I feel confident that it will get accepted somewhere.

The submittable queue has drained a little bit more with a promised response arriving in the form of a rejection. I’m down to just three pending responses with the two youngest pending responses about to turn a year old in the next week.