D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • An introvert at #AWP16—Day 1

    Showing Up I discovered that my hotel’s breakfast was far from adequate, but knowing downtown L.A., I knew that there was a Denny’s between the 7th/Metro subway stop and the convention center so I stopped there for breakfast and a chapter of the novel I’ve been reading before facing the crowds. I expected to be…

  • An introvert at AWP—Day 0

    So here I am, an exile returned to Los Angeles. While I’m Chicago born and raised, I’ve lived a big chunk of my adult life in L.A. and it’s very much home to me. Perhaps because my time in L.A. has been very much outside “industry” circles (which is not to deny that, like many…

  • 2015 in reading

    Continuing my goal of last year to diversify my reading, I’ve boosted the goals for reading women writers and non-white writers. My statistics improved in both categories, with women accounting for 51.4% of my reading (compared to 39.6% last year and a target of 50%) and non-white authors accounting for 14.8% of my writing (compared…

  • 2015 in rejections (and acceptances)

    My submissions in 2015 dipped somewhat as did the favorable-ish rate which dropped from 27% last year to 24% this year with just one acceptance which was a hangover from my 2014 submissions. I’m closing the year with 20 pending submissions with the oldest having gone out on 5 May. I also, per my goals…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 202.11 WAU God: The Biography

    It was the name on the spine that caught my attention. I discovered the writing of Waugh’s grandfather, Evelyn Waugh when I was in college after encountering a mention of him in Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape. The elder Waugh, like Greene, was notable as an author who had converted to Catholicism and who had…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 198.9 KIE Parables of Kierkegaard

    I first learned of the parables of Kierkegaard from a reading a short story a friend asked my to critique. I was intrigued enough that when I spotted this slender volume among the 190s, I picked it up to add to my project. The parables are drawn from throughout Kierkegaard’s writing. In context, they were…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 181.11 LAI An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy

    I went into this book knowing little more about Chinese philosophy than a handful of “old Confucious say…” jokes. Reading this book expanded my horizons a great deal although my lack of knowledge of Chinese history impeded me somewhat in my understanding.  Overall, one of the more enlightening things was the whole question of whether…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 174 SAN What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

    I’m not a strong believer in the absolute value of capitalism. It is a good generator of wealth, but that assumes that wealth is an end worth pursuing for its own sake. It also has the problem of not necessarily distributing the generated wealth in a fair or equitable way. In this book, Sandel offers…

  • And draft twelve is done

    Finally, I think I have the novel in a good enough state to start querying.  The chart above is one of those things that comes from obsessively tracking my writing. I can see my word count through each of the revisions. All the jagged lines that start from the bottom of the page are the…