Author: D. A. Hosek
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Writerly resolutions for 2023—the post mortem
So my goals for 2023 were: Finish the last of the research reading (only 6½ books right now). Character bios for major characters Do a highlighter read (per Matt Bell, pp. 128–133) Read and annotate the printed manuscript based on bios, research notes and fresh eyes. Weasel word check (Bell, p. 141–4) Draft three to…
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My favorite reads of 2023
2023 saw me returning to a more typical year of reading, with the vast majority of my reading being fiction again. I also ended up having a bit more reading time than usual so my total book count for the year was 124 books. The full list of books is available at GoodReads. My favorite…
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2023 in rejections (and acceptances)
My submission pace picked up a little in 2023 but acceptances have remained low. Acceptance and personal rejection rate are down even more than last year so apparently, I just suck. Poetry had a bigger uptick in submissions this year with a lot more acceptances. In fact, I had a long streak of poetry acceptances…
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Writerly resolutions: November status
It seems hardly worth it, being almost a half-month late in providing this status, but here it is. The third draft of the novel is finally finished. At this point I even have some reader comments back on the whole thing. The Matt Bell “weasel-word” check managed to yield nearly 4000 words of cuts. Not all of…
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Writerly resolutions: October status
Finally got out of the first chapter and began moving more quickly through the manuscript. I only have two chapters left before I do the weasel-word check and then send the whole damn thing off to some people to read it end to end. I got another post-workshop story out into submission along with a…
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The big countdown
I’m still at 88 years this year, which is I guess what I should expect. Not exactly the happiest year of my life this past year, but I guess things can only get better from here. As of tomorrow, I will have outlived the following (in no particular order): Christopher Columbus (genocidist and lousy navigator)…
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“The universe is broken”: The story behind the story
Electric Literature does a weird thing where they give a different title to the webpages that have their stories than the story actually has and use that in their promotion for the story. A couple years ago, they did this with Elizabeth Campbell’s story, “The Big Bang” giving an alternate title of “A busted family in…
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Writerly resolutions: September status
A bit more work on the first chapter, but it’s still a bit of a slog. I think this chapter is going to be the biggest chunk of revision work on this draft. The key thing I did was tearing out a big chunk of the past tense work in the chapter and rewriting and…
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Writerly resolutions: August status
The status is showing up a bit early this month since I’m going on vacation and won’t be doing any active writing work while I’m gone.¹ Got one of my workshopped stories revised and out into submissions as well as wrote a new short-short and workshopped it (I think this needs another round of revision…