Just another writer
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Writerly resolutions: February status
February was a pretty low-energy month for my writing life, it seemed. A handful of rejections came in (including communications from a couple magazines, Glass Poetry and LIT that I had thought had died). I got not much done beyond one and a half character bios out of the ten that I need to write. I’ll make…
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Writerly resolutions: January status
How did January go? I’ve finished the research reading and the space on the floor where the research books had been stacked is now clear. I haven’t started on step two, the character bios, but I should begin that today. I’ve made a list of ten character bios to write, so that’s a start on…
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Non-book things that delighted me in 2022
I thought I had a collection of stuff that delighted me this year that would make this post a quick effort, but apparently not so much. So here are the things that delighted me last year that weren’t books. Spider-Man: No Way Home. With the post-credit scene in Far From Home I was really curious to see…
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2022 in rejections (and acceptances)
Just like 2021, my submission pace has been slower, so my numbers are the lowest they’ve been since 2010. My acceptance and personal rejection rate are both down, but I think that’s as much a reflection of not submitting much as anything else. Poetry is also down in numbers but not as dramatically, even though…
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Writerly resolutions for 2023
The big goal for the year is to get the novel third draft done. For that, I’m thinking I have the following measurable goals: 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…
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Writerly resolutions for 2022—the post mortem
My resolutions for 2022 were a bit gentler and perhaps not so measurable. I had a bit of a mid-year pivot on the novel where I decided to focus on a research binge after I finished draft two in July. This did give a nice visual where I had stacks of books that shrunk (and…
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My favorite reads of 2022 (now with charts and graphs!)
2022 was an atypical year for reading for me largely because it turned out that 67% of the 103¹ books I’ve read this year were research for the novel, which, among other things, meant that my numbers got skewed in interesting ways, like the fact that only 29.5% of the books were fiction (compared to…
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Listless
I was feeling listless yesterday, and I started wondering about the origin of the word. My guess was that it was related to how a boat lists, meaning leaning off to the side, and I was thinking that it was connected to how a sailboat will lean to the side when under heavy wind and…
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Writerly resolutions: November status
Continuing the research this month. My trip to the USHMM was productive and the stacks of books are dwindling, although research has generated some new books to read so the stacks have gotten a little shorter. I had hoped to get them down to nothing by the end of the year, but it looks like…