Just another writer
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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…
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Writerly resolutions for 2024: the post-mortem
I had modest goals for 2024: Get final draft of the novel finished Query query query Get six new stories workshopped and into submissions Maybe start a new novel? Of these, I completed 1, 2 and 4, and partially finished 3: I only got three new stories into submissions, but I did also get two…
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Year in review at my mailing list
My last mailing list post of the year, mostly links to stuff here.
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Non-book things that delighted me in 2024
The top of the list has to be dorky Snoop Dogg. The rapper has apparently decided that he’s old enough to not care about being cool and is willing to be dorky as an Olympics correspondent for NBC this past summer, most notably, his use of Martha Stewart for comfort while covering equestrian events because…
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My favorite reads of 2024
Somehow, this year, I managed to blow past my previous records for numbers of books read and end the year with 154 books read. As usual, a full accounting of the books is at Goodreads. My favorite books of the year, in no particular order. The Wedding People by Alison Espach. This starts out seeming…