Just another writer
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store vs Open Throat
Open Throat is structurally similar to Dayswork in that it’s composed of short paragraph-long sections, but the resemblance ends there. The narrative is told from the perspective of a dispossessed mountain lion, inspired by the real-life P-22 (who’s mentioned in the acknowledgments). The story takes a bizarre twist where the mountain lion befriends a young woman…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Dayswork vs Cold People
Cold People starts as a possible romantic comedy: an American college student is vacationing with her family in Lisbon and accepts an invitation for a private boat tour with a local who feels they have a strange connection. And then. Aliens. The aliens serve largely as a huge plot device: All of humanity is given…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Boys Weekend vs Blackouts
I’ve often wondered how the original seeding works in the Tournament of Books. Are they looking for unlikely matchups? Is it just random? However it goes, this is certainly an odd pairing. Blackouts is very much the embodiment of the Important Novel. It won the National Book Award and treats of a Serious subject, a…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Play-in round
For the first time, I’ve made the effort to try to read all the Tournament of Books entries before the tournament starts instead of relying on dumb luck to let me have read perhaps two or three. Having done this, I’ve decided to do my own parallel judging (I’ve been filling out my brackets as…
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Writerly resolutions: February status
At the end of last month, I ordered a spiral bound copy of the printed manuscript and once it arrived, I set out to read and annotate everything for editing. I managed to finish that read today and start editing draft4.docx on my Mac. Based on my own read, comments from other readers and some…
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Writerly resolutions: January status
January was a low-writing month. At some point last year, I managed to mess up my submissions spread sheet so that a lot of old submissions got attached to the wrong journals. Because I use past submission history as part of my determining where I’ll submit new things, this turns out to be something that…
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Writerly resolutions for 2024
I’m in that weird point in my writing practice where a major project is nearly out of my hands, and may or may not begin demanding my time depending on factors beyond my control. So, with that in mind, here are my goals for 2024: Get final draft of the novel finished Query query query…
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Writerly resolutions for 2023—the post mortem
So my goals for 2023 were: Finish the last of the research reading (only 6½ books right now). Character bios for major characters Do a highlighter read (per Matt Bell, pp. 128–133) Read and annotate the printed manuscript based on bios, research notes and fresh eyes. Weasel word check (Bell, p. 141–4) Draft three to…
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My favorite reads of 2023
2023 saw me returning to a more typical year of reading, with the vast majority of my reading being fiction again. I also ended up having a bit more reading time than usual so my total book count for the year was 124 books. The full list of books is available at GoodReads. My favorite…