Category: writing
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Writerly resolutions: April status
Another disappointing month for progress. I’ve been a bit more attentive to my mental state though and I’ve noticed a few things: With the fixed-goal approach, I ended up being reluctant to get started when the daily amount of writing I had to do crossed a certain threshold and I ended up doing nothing instead,…
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Of monsters and malaprops
I recently encountered a delightful malapropism in an article I read online: Greene’s final text of his so-called Catholic teratology Given that DiCamillo lists four books after this, I’m pretty sure the word he was reaching for was “tetralogy” and his spellchecker did him wrong giving him instead a word that means: 1 Medicine Biology…
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New poem in Hanging Loose: “Ekphrasis on a City Sidewalk”
This poem began life as the alt text on a picture I posted to Twitter back before Twitter turned evil. After I wrote the alt text, I realized that the alt text applied to itself and not just the picture and with a bit of editing turned into the poem that was published in Hanging Loose. …
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Writerly resolutions: March status
Yet another disappointing month of little progress. A nasty flu at the beginning of the month and a new job haven’t helped. but mostly it’s indolence and procrastination to blame. New Novel. Ideally I’d have at least finished a chapter to be on pace this month. Not so much. I wrote 2037 words over the…
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Writerly resolutions: February status
Well, I’ve at least gotten better at Terraforming Mars, although there is some better progress on the resolutions: New Novel Get two chapters finished. The revisions on the first of the two chapters was finished, but I only have 596 words of a second chapter written. Goal for March–April: Finish this chapter plus one more. We,…
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Writerly resolutions: January status
As I try my new bi-monthly system of resolutions, I find myself falling short of my goals. I wish I could attribute it to circumstances beyond my control but largely it’s a consequence of having gotten addicted to Terraforming Mars on Board Game Arena. I really need to exercise some self control, especially since I…
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2025 in rejections (and acceptances)
My submission pace picked up a bit this year in both fiction and poetry. On the fiction front, it was a better than average year with my acceptance rate at 3.2% (up slightly from last year’s 3%) and a positive response rate (personal rejections plus acceptances) of 29% up significantly from last year’s 24%). In…
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Writerly resolutions: December status
So looking back on the year, I set three goals: Complete draft of the new novel Between indolence, deciding that the last novel could use another round of revision and ill-advisedly beginning a new large fiction project, this didn’t happen. I set an end-of-year goal at the beginning of November to get two new chapters…
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New poem: Corpse in the mirror
Whenever I write an 8-line poem, I find myself wondering if it can be turned into a pantoum, a poetic form which takes 8-lines of poetry and twists them into something else. As a sort of deterministic randomizer, this sort of thing felt like a good fit for the Dada issue of Exacting Clam and the…