D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful Sentences: Tom McAllister

    I’m not sure what obituaries are for. You can tell people’s stories, but nothing you do is complete or accurate. It’s just a list of people they used to know and jobs they used to do. We spend so much time trying to be effective mourners, but we have no idea how to do it.…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Lydia Kiesling

    Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss. Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State.  

  • Writerly resolutions: June status

    The novel gained a net of nearly 10,000 words this month, which is a vast improvement over previous months. Doing the 1,000 words of summer thing helped a fair amount even if, during the two weeks of that challenge, I only hit the 1,000 word target a few times. Not much progress on the new story,…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Tom McAllister

    Shell-shocked acquaintances will say without irony that he had so much to live for, ignorant of the fact that the prospect of having to live like this for another fifty years was not the solution to but rather the cause of his hopelessness. Tom McAllister, How to Be Safe.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Bennet Sims

    What if he is her paramour from the past tense, cuckolding me from her unconscious, such that her body will break up with me in undeath, leaving our apartment for him? Bennett Sims, A Questionable Shape.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Genevieve Valentine

    Of course, like most unkind advice, it was correct, eventually, somehow. Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Sigrid Nunez

    In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”). Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Tommy Orange

    She presses the Home button and for a second, just for a small moment, thinks she should open her other Facebook feed. On that other Facebook, she’d find the information and media she’d always been looking for. On that other Facebook feed, she’d find true connection. That is where she’d always wanted to be. Is…

  • Writerly resolutions, May status

    I made significant progress on the novel (the graph at the right shows the progression of my word count over the month). A first draft of chapter 11 is done and I’m nearly finished with the rewrite of the chapter. I think that this might be a chapter that can stand on its own as a…