Category: writing

  • Writerly resolutions for 2023—the post mortem

    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…

  • 2023 in rejections (and acceptances)

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions: November status

    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…

  • Writerly resolutions: October status

    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…

  • “The universe is broken”: The story behind the story

    “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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Writerly resolutions: July status

    Chaos continues as does progress on the novel, although the progress continues at a slower level than I would like while the chaos at a higher level. The annotation read is closing on completion with just a page and a half of notes to be pasted into the manuscript before revisions. No real progress on…

  • Where I get names

    Rebecca Makkai had a recent Substack post about naming which I enjoyed and I thought I’d share some of my own strategies for getting names. When I’m looking for names for characters in another country, one place I’ll look is at lists of World Cup players. One of the rules for the World Cup is…