Category: writing

  • Writerly resolutions: February status

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions: January status

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions for 2024

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions for 2023—the post mortem

    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…

  • 2023 in rejections (and acceptances)

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions: November status

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions: October status

    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 universe is broken”: The story behind the story

    “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…