Category: writing
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Writerly resolutions: November status
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…
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Writerly resolutions: October status
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…
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Beautiful Sentences: Tove Ditlevsen
Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. Tove Ditlevsen, Youth.
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A first draft of the novel is done
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…
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Writerly resolutions: September status
It’s been a pretty good month for writing. I managed to get a first draft of the last chapter of the novel finished and get started on the rewrite of that chapter. I expect to have the rewrite and revision done sometime before the five-year anniversary of starting the damn thing. The less resistant feeling story…
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1000 rejections
Today, I got my 1,000th fiction rejection.¹ It was a tiered rejection from Neon. Per my promise to myself, the journal responsible for the 1,000th rejection (or any acceptances while I was at 999²) gets a subscription³. Looking back over my records, the first rejection in my “modern” era of rejections was a form rejection…
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Writerly resolutions: August status
Chapter 26 is finally done, I’ve completed the first draft of Chapter 27 and I’m partway through the rewrite draft. The story continues to reveal heretofore unknown things about the characters, which is a plus (and some inconsequential happenings in the first draft have become a bit more consequential in the rewrite). I feel optimistic that…
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Writerly resolutions: July status
I finally finished the rewrite of Chapter 26 this month. I have two books covering the events that this chapter hangs on with numerous dog-eared pages indicating useful information that I need to go through and make sure that everything in the book is historically correct or includes some useful details to enrich the narrative, so…