Category: writing
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2025 in rejections (and acceptances)
My submission pace picked up a bit this year in both fiction and poetry. On the fiction front, it was a better than average year with my acceptance rate at 3.2% (up slightly from last year’s 3%) and a positive response rate (personal rejections plus acceptances) of 29% up significantly from last year’s 24%). In…
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Writerly resolutions: December status
So looking back on the year, I set three goals: Complete draft of the new novel Between indolence, deciding that the last novel could use another round of revision and ill-advisedly beginning a new large fiction project, this didn’t happen. I set an end-of-year goal at the beginning of November to get two new chapters…
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New poem: Corpse in the mirror
Whenever I write an 8-line poem, I find myself wondering if it can be turned into a pantoum, a poetic form which takes 8-lines of poetry and twists them into something else. As a sort of deterministic randomizer, this sort of thing felt like a good fit for the Dada issue of Exacting Clam and the…
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Writerly resolutions: November status
So I attempted to be a bit more focused in these last two months of the year, with minimal success: Read through We, the Rescued at least once and get my editorial notes in place: I’ve read 17 out of 29 chapters. I was hoping to have read the whole thing by now, but I think…
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Beautiful sentences: Roberto Bolaño
Veo el perfil de Neruda y el mío, pero en realidad me engaño, es sólo un árbol, veo un árbol, la silueta múltiple y monstruosa de la hojarasca, como un mar que se seca, un dibujo que sugiere dos perfiles y que en realidad es una tumba al aire libre partida por la espada de…
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Eternity
A week ago I saw a screening of the new movie, Eternity, which was a decent enough romantic comedy set in the afterlife.¹ I’m not going to write a review of the film itself, but instead there were two aspects of the afterlife as presented in the film that really captured my attention: First, the idea…
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A visit with my younger self: 23 February 1989
I think at this point I may have been either on my way back to Chicago after dropping out of college or already there. I was largely writing down story ideas at this point. Plot line: a young man is dating a girl who cheats on him because he doesn’t have sex with her. The…
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“The boy who loved music”: The story behind the story
My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a…
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Writerly resolutions: October status
This is a truly lousy month for writing progress. Even though I took a few days to take a mini-writing retreat at a hotel an hour away, I got very little writing done. My sole real accomplishment on the novel was doing some post-workshop revisions on chapter six (and workshopping chapter seven last night). My…