D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • 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 […]

  • Ceci n’est pas Graham Greene

    I somewhat randomly found myself at the website for the Harry Ransom Center and remembering that they had some (most? all?) of Graham Greene’s archive there, I thought I’d see what they had and found this picture, labelled “Gabriel García Márquez and Graham Greene”: My first thought was, whoa, is that a picture of Greene […]

  • “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 […]

  • Song of the Month: Feelin’ Love by Paula Cole from This Fire

    This song was never a single from Paula Cole’s second album, but it really should have been. In his song, Cole manages to convey in music and lyrics the feeling of sex perfectly. Some of it is in the doubles-entrendes lyrics, but it also comes from the music itself. Cole’s breathy singing conveys a sense […]

  • Sonnet 18 after much machine translation

    Do I cut your summer?You are very beautiful and very sweet.Can change by a strong wind.And put the summer in a short time.It’s hot in the eyes of the sky,It’s a gold weight.The best time of this time is correctActivity or changeBut all the summer never passes.To lose damage;His garden not dead when the timeIf […]

  • Writerly resolutions: March status

    Sometimes a graph doesn’t tell the whole story. My graph looks like for about a third of the month I didn’t make much progress but in fact, even though my word count didn’t move around much (and even dropped a bit), that was a result of wrestling with a troublesome passage in the first draft and […]