Category: writing

  • Writerly resolutions: June status

    Back on track this month with the novel. I missed writing a few days and had a few days of very low word counts, but for the last week and a half, I’ve made a point of advancing at least two pages a day through the printed first draft manuscript in the revision process which…

  • Writerly resolutions: May status

    No good reason for this month’s poor progress on the novel other than life intervening. In theory, I can finish this rewrite still by the end of June, but I suspect it will be July when it happens. Once that’s done, I end up diving into some heavy-duty research to make sure that I can…

  • “Place de Stalingrad”: The story behind the story

    In both Paris and Brussels, there are metro stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening…

  • Writerly resolutions: April status

    Another interesting graph month. This time the odd shapes are because I added a new chapter to the book (and life intervened a bit more than usual). I got a bit stuck on the new chapter since I wanted it to be about more than the chapter title and historical event that I was relating…

  • Sonnet 18 after much machine translation

    Do I cut your summer?You are very beautiful and very sweet.Can change by a strong wind.And put the summer in a short time.It’s hot in the eyes of the sky,It’s a gold weight.The best time of this time is correctActivity or changeBut all the summer never passes.To lose damage;His garden not dead when the timeIf…

  • Writerly resolutions: March status

    Sometimes a graph doesn’t tell the whole story. My graph looks like for about a third of the month I didn’t make much progress but in fact, even though my word count didn’t move around much (and even dropped a bit), that was a result of wrestling with a troublesome passage in the first draft and…

  • Writerly resolutions: February status

    Even though there was one less day and I missed a day of writing, I managed to get more words rewritten for the novel this month than last. I’ve also been in a bit of a research binge of late with even more books added to my list and more books read. Israel Joseph Singer’s¹ novel…

  • Writerly resolutions: January Status

    I succeeded in getting at least a little bit of writing done on the novel every day this month. At the current pace I’ll have draft two finished in mid-July. Of course there are always bits of research digressions which can throw me off (like I wanted to know what the name of the railroad tracks…

  • Three poems in new anthology

    I had three poems come out this week in the anthology, Rising Voices: Poems Toward a Social Justice Revolution. These are all part of my Chicago Sonnets series. Chicago Sonnet #4 has its origins in a research paper I wrote in high school where, somewhat enamored of my role on the school paper, I decided to focus…