Category: writing

As my life continues its daily chaos, I make slow progress with the novel. I’ve completed the highlighter read of the novel, but have a lot of work to do on the annotation read. I started with a dozen pages of research notes printed in double-column mode which I’ve been cutting into little rectangles and…

A bit more productive this month, but still behind where I hoped to be. On the novel, I moved from 55 pages into the highlighter read to 225 pages. Roughly 80 pages (six chapters) to go. I expect to get the highlighter read done in the next week and get most of the way through…

April, despite its soote shoures, is indeed the cruelest month. I began the month with Covid, finally succumbing despite still being careful three years into the pandemic. This pretty much knocked me out the first two weeks of the month, which came on top of recovering from the site hack and an associated email outage…

March saw me getting things done a bit more. I finished some new poems and revised old ones, which means that I’ve started a new round of poetry submissions, which has already yielded a bunch of rejections. I also got one of the workshopped stories revised and put into submissions as well. The character bios…

February was a pretty low-energy month for my writing life, it seemed. A handful of rejections came in (including communications from a couple magazines, Glass Poetry and LIT that I had thought had died). I got not much done beyond one and a half character bios out of the ten that I need to write. I’ll make…

How did January go? I’ve finished the research reading and the space on the floor where the research books had been stacked is now clear. I haven’t started on step two, the character bios, but I should begin that today. I’ve made a list of ten character bios to write, so that’s a start on…

Just like 2021, my submission pace has been slower, so my numbers are the lowest they’ve been since 2010. My acceptance and personal rejection rate are both down, but I think that’s as much a reflection of not submitting much as anything else. Poetry is also down in numbers but not as dramatically, even though…

The big goal for the year is to get the novel third draft done. For that, I’m thinking I have the following measurable goals: 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…

My resolutions for 2022 were a bit gentler and perhaps not so measurable. I had a bit of a mid-year pivot on the novel where I decided to focus on a research binge after I finished draft two in July. This did give a nice visual where I had stacks of books that shrunk (and…