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Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. Tove Ditlevsen, Youth.

My  ife expectancy number has declined a lot this year. from 87 to 82. I can’t imagine that 2020 helped a whole lot with that. My writing life has improved with good progress on the novel and a few placements of stories and poems in the last year. I think the biggest thing I need to […]

A week shy of five years after I started writing, I have a complete first draft of the novel. It’s been a long journey and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but there’s a complete story now. Things I still have to fix include making sure characters don’t change names mid-novel as well […]

At long last, I’ve come to the end of the project, a bit more than seven years since I started. 999 in the Dewey Decimal system is “Extraterrestrial Worlds” but at my library, the end was in Antarctica instead. The last book, it turns out, has an incorrect call number labeled on its spine and […]

It’s been a pretty good month for writing. I managed to get a first draft of the last chapter of the novel finished and get started on the rewrite of that chapter. I expect to have the rewrite and revision done sometime before the five-year anniversary of starting the damn thing. The less resistant feeling story […]

Today, I got my 1,000th fiction rejection.¹ It was a tiered rejection from Neon. Per my promise to myself, the journal responsible for the 1,000th rejection (or any acceptances while I was at 999²) gets a subscription³.   Looking back over my records, the first rejection in my “modern” era of rejections was a form rejection […]

I’m drawing to a close on this project and for the 980s—South America—I saw this book which one of the back cover blurbs describes as “taking vital parts out of everything that has been written on the discovery and settlement of America … arranging them in a kind of verbal collage … something that defies […]

Chapter 26 is finally done, I’ve completed the first draft of Chapter 27 and I’m partway through the rewrite draft. The story continues to reveal heretofore unknown things about the characters, which is a plus (and some inconsequential happenings in the first draft have become a bit more consequential in the rewrite). I feel optimistic that […]

For the last two decades, I’ve heard many people waxing rhapsodic about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so when I got to the 970s—History of North America—I decided that this was my chance to finally read it. What I found was not the life-changing book that many people consider it to be. […]