Just another writer
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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Dewey Decimal Project: 664 LYN Seeds of science : How we got it so wrong on GMOs
I continue working through the “Technology” class of the Dewey Decimal System, with 660–669.9 being “Chemical Engineering.” It’s easy to forget this while I’m browsing the stacks and I wouldn’t have guessed that’s where I was when I saw this book about GMOs. There are a handful of areas where my liberalism becomes a bit
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Writerly resolutions: November status
No graph this month for progress on the novel because there was no progress. I wrote not one word. I had planned to finish some writing. Lots of writing. But during the first couple of weeks, I was trying to keep up with writing group obligations and put things off. Then, I decided that while
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“The Namesake”: The Story Behind the Story
Usually, I post these when a story is available online or the issue can be ordered. But for whatever reason, the issue of Sandy River Review that contains this piece seems not to exist anywhere but contributor copies. If you’d like to read it, send me an email and I’ll send a PDF. The PDF version
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Writerly resolutions: October status
The biggest change in my writing life this month is returning to having a critique group. Trying to balance critique group responsibilities with my own writing has been a bit of a challenge and I need to do better with this. I did manage to complete chapter 23 and make some progress on chapter 24 in
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The Big Countdown
My life expectancy number has declined slightly this year from 88 to 87. I imagine the last year hasn’t helped with this, between the pandemic shutting out interpersonal interaction and trump generating daily stresses and then yet another first-degree relative getting cancer, it’s not been my favorite year. My writing life has been fair. I