Category: writing

  • Audience photo from the I-70 Review reading in Kansas City

  • Upcoming readings

    For the first time since my MFA, I’m part of a couple of public readings of my work. On Saturday, 17 September at 1p PST, I’ll be part of a Zoom reading to celebrate the release of the latest issue of Invisible City in which I have a senryū entitled, “宝石の十字架” (don’t worry, only the…

  • Writerly resolutions: August status

    No fancy graph this month as it’s all-research time for the novel. I’ve managed to get eight of the books from my leftover research stack finished as well as going through ten survivor testimonies from the Yad Vashem website that had transcripts (there’s no way I would be able to follow spoken Hebrew with my…

  • Writerly resolutions: July status

    Draft two is DONE! I managed to trim about 5,000 words in the process, despite adding a new chapter in the middle, so that’s a good sign. I will need to print this puppy up to be able to read and edit for the revision stage and I’m planning on doing some significant research reading before…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Isabel Allende

    En algos momentos tengo la sensación de que esto ya lo he vivido y que he escrito estas mismas palabras, pero comprendo que no soy yo, sino otra mujer, que anotó en sus cuadernos para que yo me sirviera de ellos. Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

  • Writerly resolutions: June status

    Back on track this month with the novel. I missed writing a few days and had a few days of very low word counts, but for the last week and a half, I’ve made a point of advancing at least two pages a day through the printed first draft manuscript in the revision process which…

  • Writerly resolutions: May status

    No good reason for this month’s poor progress on the novel other than life intervening. In theory, I can finish this rewrite still by the end of June, but I suspect it will be July when it happens. Once that’s done, I end up diving into some heavy-duty research to make sure that I can…

  • “Place de Stalingrad”: The story behind the story

    In both Paris and Brussels, there are metro stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening…

  • Writerly resolutions: April status

    Another interesting graph month. This time the odd shapes are because I added a new chapter to the book (and life intervened a bit more than usual). I got a bit stuck on the new chapter since I wanted it to be about more than the chapter title and historical event that I was relating…