Category: writing

My goals for the year: Goals are nice, but remember that they don’t really matter. I’ll get done what I’ll get done, acceptances are out of my control. Get We, the Rescued through the rewrite and revision stage and then get some people to read the whole damned thing. I’ve got eight stories that have been…

I set ambitious goals for 2021 and I failed at them all. Perhaps I should set less ambitious goals? Or perhaps I should remember that the goals don’t matter in the end and that creativity doesn’t follow schedules and spreadsheets. I had two goals for the year: Work on We, The Rescued daily until I’ve got it…

2021 was a pretty good year for me publication-wise. I’ve not been that good about getting stuff out the door, but what I have submitted has been well-received. In fiction, I managed to have fewer responses this year than last despite the fact that in 2020 I didn’t actually submit anything¹ and this year I…

Today’s mail brought poetry rejections 999–1,001. It took a lot less time to hit 1,000 poetry rejections than fiction, not least of why being that poems are generally sent in packets of 3–5 and even an acceptance includes a handful of rejections. And then there’s the fact that I’m not that good of a poet…

I just got in the mail the latest issue of California Quarterly (Vol. 47, No. 3, which for some reason is not yet listed at their website) which includes my poem, Chicago Sonnet #19.  The poem details my vague memories of the Beverly House restaurant in Chicago’s Beverly Hills neighborhood on the South Side, an…

I had thought that I could read and take notes on 28 chapters of the novel in 28 days. That turned out to be optimistic. It turned out to be 47 days although I have a nice chart of all the characters in the novel and which chapters they appear in along with some notes on…

The big news this month was that I finished the first draft of the novel (finally). I then proceeded to print the whole thing out and get it ring-bound at the UPS store (I later realized that it would have been cheaper—if slower—to have that printing done by lulu.com instead). I continue working on the new…

A week shy of five years after I started writing, I have a complete first draft of the novel. It’s been a long journey and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but there’s a complete story now. Things I still have to fix include making sure characters don’t change names mid-novel as well…