Just another writer
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2025 Tournament of Books: Headshot vs. The Book of Love
Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s. Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books.…
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2025 Tournament of Books: James vs. The Book Censor’s Library
The first “regular” match of the tournament also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Play-In Round
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at…
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Writerly resolutions: February status
So February started strong, which was nice but life can be a real jerk and between a bit of a slowdown mid-month combined with a minor disaster, I kind of stalled out. Minor disaster you say? These used to match: Why yes, I tripped and fell, landing hard on my hands, and, as it turned…
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Typography Tuesday: different kinds of dashes
The following is adapted from a reply I posted on the Writing Stack Exchange and since it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about, I figured this was a good opportunity to begin my typography Tuesday series. There are, in fact, four different dash-like characters in typographic usage: The hyphen (-) is used to join…
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Crazy bishops
My son is learning French, and being also chess-obsessed, wanted to learn the French words for various chess terms which he asked ChatGPT to provide. I don’t trust ChatGPT or any other generative AI to provide accurate answers. After all, it has provided such “delightful” knowledge as: so I made a point of looking over…
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Writerly resolutions: January status
So on the three goals I’ve set for myself, solid progress on the novel, although perhaps not as rapid as I might have hoped. Chapter two is finished, I’m working on the rewrite of chapter three and I updated chapters one and two after workshopping the first chapter. Still working on a new story (something…
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Writerly resolutions for 2025
I’m feeling pretty good about where things are with my writing at the moment. I’ve cleared off a lot of the decks of things lingering that needed more immediate attention. This year will be focused on getting a complete draft of the new novel finished (ideally well before year’s end, but we’ll see), workshopping those…
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2024 in rejections (and acceptances)
I almost forgot my last year-end post, my traditional year-end round up of rejections (and acceptances). In fiction, my acceptance rate was up to 3% from last year’s 1.4% and tiered rejections were at 24% up from 22%. The accepted stories were both excerpts from the novel I queried, one in Nebo and the other in Exterminating…