Just another writer
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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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Dewey Decimal Project: 980 GAL Vol. 1 Memory of Fire: Genesis
I’m drawing to a close on this project and for the 980s—South America—I saw this book which one of the back cover blurbs describes as “taking vital parts out of everything that has been written on the discovery and settlement of America … arranging them in a kind of verbal collage … something that defies…
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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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Dewey Decimal Project: 973 ZIN A people’s history of the United States
For the last two decades, I’ve heard many people waxing rhapsodic about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so when I got to the 970s—History of North America—I decided that this was my chance to finally read it. What I found was not the life-changing book that many people consider it to be.…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 960.3 WES Divide and rule: the partition of Africa, 1880–1914
The 960s bring me to Africa. Another part of the world that I know very little of the history of. The selection of options was somewhat uninspiring, and I decided to take a look at this book. I knew very little about colonialism in Africa. I was most familiar with the history of colonialism in…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 954 DAN A brief history of India
At some point in the late ’90s I decided that I wanted to read a history of India. I think it might have been a result of reading the themed issue of Granta on the country. Whatever my motivation, it never went beyond putting “some history of India” on the long list of books that I…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 940.5318 LEB Memories, miracles & meaning: insights of a Holocaust survivor
The 940s are the history of Europe and I decided to pick up something that might be useful for the novel. One of the things that I’ve learned in the course of researching the novel is that women’s accounts of the Holocaust have been largely marginalized. There is an explicitly stated claim that to treat…
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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…