Category: writing
-
Beautiful Sentences: Tove Ditlevsen
Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. Tove Ditlevsen, Youth.
-
A first draft of the novel is done
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…
-
Writerly resolutions: September status
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…
-
1000 rejections
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…
-
Writerly resolutions: August status
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…
-
Writerly resolutions: July status
I finally finished the rewrite of Chapter 26 this month. I have two books covering the events that this chapter hangs on with numerous dog-eared pages indicating useful information that I need to go through and make sure that everything in the book is historically correct or includes some useful details to enrich the narrative, so…
-
“The Norton Anthology of Self-Destructive Behavior”: The story behind the story
This story was one that unfolded itself gradually over time. It started with the title which came to me one day during a residency for my MFA. I wrote down the title and even got so far as writing down a list of self-destructive behaviors, but put it aside for a while after that. I picked…
-
Writerly resolutions: June status
Progress has slowed but not stalled on the novel. Rewriting chapter 26 is a challenge since I’ve also been reading multiple books about the Exodus 1947 which is at the center of the chapter which has often revealed details that required rewriting scenes as well as occasional direct contradictions between one source and the next. Rewriting the…
-
Writerly resolutions: May status
I continue to make progress on the novel, with the first draft of chapter 26 done. It’s a big chapter—28 pages—so reading what I have in preparation for the second draft rewrite is taking a while and I keep making changes as I do my research (this is probably the best-documented historical event in the…