D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Writerly resolutions for 2019—the post mortem

    I had two goals for the year and failed on them both. I aimed to finish the full draft of We, The Rescued.  This entailed writing some 50,000 words over the course of the year. I made steady progress (as the graph above shows), but not steady enough and I had more than a few…

  • 2019 in rejections (and acceptances)

    2019 was a grim year for me publishing-wise. I had only two acceptances, one each of fiction and poetry, the worst rejection rate since 2012 and for the first time since I sold my first story, I went a year without any income (not even a token sum) for any of my writing. As the…

  • 2019 in reading

    I had set a goal for 2019 of reading 100 books and nearly made it with 95 books. I’ll aim again this year. My favorite reads for the year, in alphabetical order, were: Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath The Best American Essays 2019 edited by Rebecca Solnit and Robert Atwan…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Ann Patchett

    There was no logic to the way any hospital was laid out—they grew like cancers, with new wings metastasizing unexpectedly at the end of long tunneled halls. Ann Patchett, The Dutch House.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li

    Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable. Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Jayson Greene

    I glance up at her, and her heartbreak is so acute it is like the sun—I can’t look at it. Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars. 

  • Writerly resolutions: November Status

    November started strong but life interfered to slow things down dramatically in the second half of the month. Chapter 17 of the novel came together reasonably quickly, but I had trouble getting into chapter 18 (it’s finally beginning to flow, at least). Meanwhile in short story land, I’ve been working on a new story which is…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li

    What if life could be saved by clichés? What if life must be lived by clichés? Somewhere tomorrow and somewhere yesterday—never somewhere today but cliché-land. Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End.

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 621.3092 COO The Truth About Tesla: The Myth of the Lone Genius in the History of Innovation

    Continuing through technology, we reach engineering. Spotting a book about Tesla, everyone’s favorite wizard of science, I decided I’d see what Cooper has to say, especially given his provocative title. Cooper is a lawyer and this reads in a lot of ways like a legal brief. Cooper writes the life of Tesla with an agenda, to…