D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 681.145 SWA The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage And The Quest To Build The First Computer

    We move from “manufacturing” to “manufacture for specific uses” which doesn’t sound too promising, but I managed to find this book about Babbage’s difference engine among the books in this decade and decided it looked like it might be interesting. Babbage’s difference engine is probably the most influential machine that was not finished. It inspired a…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 676.09 KUR Paper: Paging through History

    The 670s are “Manufacturing” and while I was initially nervous about what would be available at my local public library on the topic, I spotted this book about the history of paper and decided that this would be the book for me to read. From my life in typography, I’m reasonably conversant with the history of…

  • Writerly resolutions: January status

    2021 has gotten off to a decent enough start. I’ve worked on the novel daily without fail—the first part of the month was spent digesting comments on two excerpts that I workshopped with my writing group, then I returned to the chapter I’d left dangling in November, managed to finish a first draft, a rewrite and…

  • It looks like the Nelson Algren Literary Prize is endangered

    The first clue was when my submission to the 2020 version of the contest disappeared from  ubmittable without notice. The administrators of the prize tend to be not so great about closing out submissions on Submittable, so I didn’t pay much attention to it (in past years I’d had some marked “completed” a few “decline” and…

  • Writerly resolutions for 2021

    Last year, I wrote: 2019 was a disappointing year on many fronts, so I figure 2020 can’t help but be better. Ah, the naïveté of 2019. My goals for the year: Work on We, The Rescued daily until I’ve got it ready to pass on to other eyes to look at (which means finishing the first…

  • 2020 in rejections (and acceptances)

    Because of one of last year’s writerly resolutions, I didn’t send anything out this year, but there was still plenty of overhang from last year and early in the year I managed to get acceptances in both poetry and fiction (the latter even included a double acceptance). My publications for 2020 were my story, “The…

  • Writerly resolutions for 2020—the post mortem

    I set three goals for 2020: two related to finishing snd revising the novel and a third that largely involved doing nothing. I kind of failed at all three. I had bursts of productivity in the spring and the summer but continuing problems with my laptop knocked me out of commission for the last couple…

  • 2020 in reading

    2020 was, of course, a strange year. My reading habits were severely disrupted when I lost my 60–90 minutes a day of commute time on the “L” which had in previous years been a bastion of protected reading time. Like last year, I aimed to read 100 books and, like last year, I fell short,…

  • I’m deleting Twitter and Facebook in January

    In July, I started a countdown to January 20th on Facebook and Twitter. It was nominally to the end of the Trump presidency but about a month into it, I started to think that when I got to zero, I was going to delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I’ve been on both platforms for…