Just another writer
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1000 rejections (poetry)
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…
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New poem in California Quarterly
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…
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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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Something interesting: Two sides of a story
Once again, after much delay, I’ve put another post on my mailing list. It’s about Joan Fontaine, Olivia de Havilland and Yoko Ono. There’s also a recommendation and a link to my latest story.
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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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The Big Countdown
My ife expectancy number has declined a lot this year. from 87 to 82. I can’t imagine that 2020 helped a whole lot with that. My writing life has improved with good progress on the novel and a few placements of stories and poems in the last year. I think the biggest thing I need to…
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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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Dewey Decimal Project 998 S South!
At long last, I’ve come to the end of the project, a bit more than seven years since I started. 999 in the Dewey Decimal system is “Extraterrestrial Worlds” but at my library, the end was in Antarctica instead. The last book, it turns out, has an incorrect call number labeled on its spine and…