Category: Literary Matters

This Year Can’t End Soon Enough

This past Wednesday I received my COVID booster shot at a local pharmacy and, like with the first and second shots in April, I felt an immediate sense of relief which was welcome but not altogether pleasant. It was something like a hangover, a post-stress reaction to getting a thing which is desired but not wanted, if you follow me. Since it was necessary, I was glad to get it, but I would much rather that it was not necessary. But this is the world in which we now live.

I just found out that an old friend has entered hospice, which, coming after another friend passed a couple of weeks ago, and two others in late winter and early summer of this year (none from COVID), really took the energy out of me. And all this in addition to Mom dying back at the beginning of September. Yeah, 2021 can go straight to hell, which at this point is kind of redundant.

On a more positive note, this was a most excellent week for the library at Winkelman Abbey, with many books and magazines arriving in this, the first full week of December.

First up is The Tempered Steel of Antiquity Grey by Shawn Speakman, newly arrived from a successful Kickstarter. This is another of the Kickstarters which was significantly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated fallout and supply chain disruption. I suspect this will not be the last Kickstarter reward which will suffer from the events of the past couple of years, and at this point it is probably fair to say that this will be the normal state of affairs for the foreseeable future. As Hofstadter’s Law states, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Next up is the latest issue of The Paris Review. I recently cancelled my subscription, or rather the automatic renewal of my subscription, as I have not read any of the previous six issues. However, the thought of no longer receiving The Paris Review causes me a sense of unease, so that cancellation may soon, well, be cancelled.

Next up are two(!) books from my subscription to the catalog of And Other Stories — Paulo Scott’s Phenotypes, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and Mona Arshi’s Somebody Loves You.

Next is issue 44 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a small magazine of great words published by Small Beer Press.

Next is Terminal Uprising by Jim Hines. This is my second copy of this book. Hines signed the first one at ConFusion 2020, and I gave it to some friends who live on the east side of the state. This copy, however, is MINE, and I hope to get it signed at ConFusion 2022, which is scheduled for the third weekend in January.

And finally, the boxed set of the Interdependency series (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox) by John Scalzi, of which much to my surprise I did not own copies. This is also a purchase specifically meant for receiving one or more signatures, as Mr. Scalzi is a regular attendee at ConFusion.

As Zyra and I were leaving to pick up dinner last night I noticed a box tucked in a sheltered corner of our porch. When I opened it I found my copy of the single-volume edition of Harrison’s Complete Poems, which I was not expecting to arrive for several more weeks. This book is gorgeous; nearly 950 pages long, and it contains, as it says on the cover, all of Harrison’s poetry. This edition includes a beautiful introduction penned by Terry Tempest Williams, and cover art, as with so many of Harrison’s other books, by the late Russell Chatham.

Wednesday night after Tai Chi class, I watched the book launch event for Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems, hosted by his publisher Copper Canyon Press. It included stories about Harrison, as well as his friends reading some of his poems. I have been a fan of Jim Harrison since the early 1990s when, at the suggestion of one of my professors, I picked up Wolf. One book led to another, and I have never looked back nor regretted a single minute spent reading his words.

The event was recorded and is available for viewing here on YouTube.

In reading news, I am (still) working my way through the stories in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as well as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I am enjoying both immensely, but times being what they are I don’t have a lot of energy or focus, and these books each deserve both. So I am reading slowly and in small chunks.

In writing news I am noodling around with a short story and a few poems, trying to work up the energy to dive back into my partially-completed NaNoWriMo manuscript. I would have made better progress, but 2021 keeps finding way to kick my legs out from under me, metaphorically speaking. So maybe I will hit my writing goals for the year. All I can say about that is, this year was a hell of a lot better than last year, writerly-speaking, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good.

2021-12-12
December Again? Already?

It really does seem that the past year has gone by in a haze where the differences between days are mostly in the length of time between sunrise and sunset, if such things even matter any more in a world where an entire year of a television series can be binge-watched in a single day.

This week was light on new reading material, with the only new words to arrive contained with the new issue of Poetry.

In reading news, I am still working my way through David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which is endlessly informative, enlightening, and infuriating. Given that I am reading it a few pages a time, in bed before I fall asleep, I expect I will need to go back and re-read Debt in order to get everything out of it that it offers.

I have just begin reading The Eternal Husband, and Other Stories, a collection of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s short stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I read The Brothers Karamazov at the beginning of the year, and it seemed fitting to have Dostoevsky-shaped bookends for this, one of the strangest and most stressful years I can remember. I had an idea that I would do an annual “Dostoevsky December.” We will see how that plays out in the years to come.

In writing news, I took a few days off from prose writing and worked on a couple of poems and some journaling, of which I did very little during NaNoWriMo. I have a short story I would like to complete and polish up for a December 31 submission deadline, but even if I miss the deadline I think the story is good enough that it would make the cut in another venue.

2021-12-05
NaNoWriMo 2021 Wrap-Up Post

So here it is, a few days after the wrap-up of National Novel Writing Month for 2021. Somehow I found the time and focus to write my 50,000+ words, crossing the finish line in the early evening of November 25. Our Thanksgiving plans were upended so I took advantage of the extra time to push through to the end.

2021 was, in the parlance of our times, a hell of a year. Between the new reality of life in the middle of a multi-year pandemic, unexpected expenses, and the loss of three friends and my mother, I didn’t think I would have the energy, time, and focus to start a new project, much less see it through to completion.

But complete it I did, or at least complete the 50,000 words needed to win NaNoWriMo. I attribute this to several factors in my life here in the COVID years.

First, my wonderful partner, who herself is a writer and so understands the need to have time and space to work on creative projects.

Next, our cats Poe and Pepper, who insist that I am out of bed every morning at 5:00 to feed them. I am a morning person anyway, so this is not a big deal, though before the cats arrived I would get out of bed between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. I put that extra time to good use, getting in a solid couple of hours of writing at least five mornings a week, even though the amount of words I produced in that time varied wildly, depending on my energy level.

Third, I tried something new this year for the structure of my writing: Instead of going chapter by chapter, as I have done with past projects, I created 30 blank documents in Google Drive, one for each day of the month, and on each day I wrote exclusively in that document. If I ended the day in the middle of a previous chapter, the rest of that chapter would go in the new document.

I don’t know where I got the idea for this approach, other than that I have kept a daily (-ish) journal since sometime in 1991. The point there isn’t to write a set amount, but to write every day. There is no pressure to complete something. To borrow a phrase, the journey is the destination.

And this approach worked! I kept a running tally of my word count in a separate spreadsheet, and I appended the word count of each document to the title at the end of the day, so I could see at a glance where I was with respect to my goals. At no point during November did I drop below the minimum daily average of 1,667 words. And I didn’t miss a single day of writing before I hit 50,000 words.

I can’t say that this approach will work for everyone. And I don’t think it will work for those years where I write a collection of short stories instead of a single novel. But having November broken out as a series of quasi-journal entries made it easy for me to write every day, even if some days I only wrote a couple of hundred words. The days where I wrote 5,000 or more easily made up for the slow days.

As for the quality and content of what I wrote, I think it was improved by removing the pressure to complete “a chapter” by the end of the day. Certainly the words came more easily and I found myself getting into the flow of the story more easily. And in my experience the draft is just better when the writing is easy.

That is not to say that the editing part will be easy. No matter my frame of mind, I wrote 50,000 words, only sketchily-planned, in a month. This draft, when complete, will be not yet even be the first draft. That will come after the round of edits which I use to e.g. make sure the characters have the same names from one day to the next, and that a character who was killed on day 2 doesn’t suddenly reappear on day 20, unless that was the plan all along.

So I would call my NaNoWriMo 2021 experience an unexpected and unqualified success.

2021-12-03
IWSG, December 2021

Welcome to the Insecure writer’s Support Group post for December 2021.

Well here we are, the day after the end of NaNoWriMo 2021, and I am actually feeling…good? Hyped? Pumped? I reached 50,000 words on Thanksgiving Day, which was fortunate because the rest of the holiday weekend was fraught and full of family drama.

But I won NaNoWriMo 2021, in one of the most stressful years of my life. It provided for me a distraction and an escape from all the [gestures at everything], and I made good progress on the sequel to the book I didn’t finish last year, which means I am now in a good place to go back and finish my book from 2020.

This month’s IWSG question is the following:

In your writing, what stresses you the most? What delights you?

The stresses in my writing life vary over time, depending on many outside factors. But the stress factor which pops up most consistently is when the words just…don’t…work. I don’t mean writer’s block, or any kind of general malaise which prevents me from getting my head in the proper space to put words to paper. I mean the disconnect between the thing I am trying to say and what ends up on the surface in front of me. I have a great idea for a poem or a story, and I sit down to get it out of my head and onto the screen, and the words just kind of…sit there. Whatever energy went into transcribing the multidimensional multimedia images from my imagination down onto the page is now gone. The words are stagnant, uninteresting, completely lost in translation.

Riffing on Michelangelo’s quote about finding the piece of art inside the stone, this particular stone, if I hacked away at it, would only contain a slightly smaller stone. This is the state of mind where I can easily slip into the impostor syndrome mindset, which is difficult to overcome, as it provides its own sort of self-sustaining energy.

In contrast, what delights me the most is when I get some words written and they are exactly what I was trying to convey, and instead of sitting there like a lump of rock, they glow in all their myriad facets of wonder. And even if (to abuse the metaphor) they sit there like a lump of rock, this time they are the rock which contains within it a sculpture of sublime beauty and detail. These are the drafts within which you can already see the story in its final, perfect form, and all you need to do is remove the extraneous and polish the remaining.

The process of writing which results in such a feeling tends to provide its own sustaining energy; the groove or flow or zone where time seems to disappear and I feel like I am writing in an eternal now, though in the mundane world that eternity may only last for a few minutes.

I couldn’t say which I feel more often while writing – stress or delight – but since I am still writing, thirty-plus years after I first started, I would say that a single moment of writing success makes up for almost any amount of writing stress.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

2021-12-01
Complete but Not Finished

Another brief post, because life is busy right now.

Four new books arrived at the house in the past week. The first three are from an order I placed with Books and Mortar. The last is from a recently-fulfilled Kickstarter.

First up is Out of the Ruins, an anthology of apocalyptic stories edited by Preston Grassman. Since I like writing stories in the “salvage punk” subgenre, it seemed appropriate to read stories about events which would lead to the state of needing to salvage to survive.

Next is Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, the sequel to the most excellent Gideon the Ninth, which I read last year.

Next is Shadowboxing by Joseph Rios. I picked this one up based on a single poem of his which was featured in the Poem a Day newsletter distributed by Poets.org. This is the first book of poetry I picked up in many months.

Last is the Volume 19 of the Girl Genius comic created by Kaja and Phil Foglio, titled Sparks and Monsters. This one was a long time coming, thanks to *gestures at everything* happening during the course of production. But it is finally here, and it is wonderful as usual.

In reading news, I spent a couple of hours at a laundromat this week, which gave me time to read four of the five stories in Jean Davis’ collection Dreams of Stars and Lies, which I picked up, oh, some time ago. I read the fifth story on Friday, making the book the only one I read to completion in the month of November.

I also made a little headway in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I will probably finish by the end of the year. Maybe.

In writing news, on Thanksgiving Day I passed 50,000 words in my story, Racing the Flood Down to the Sea. That puts me at about 75 to 80% done with this the pre-first-draft version of the book. If I complete it, and if it seems to have potential, then at some point in the future I will edit it to get a proper first draft. Then the real work will begin.

2021-11-28
A Cautious Anticipation of Success

As of today I am past 40,000 words in National Novel Writing Month. This is not as much as I had hoped, but, well, I am 52 and don’t have the burning energy and contempt for sleep and other healthy lifestyle choices that I had in my 40s.

Four new books arrived at the house in the past week.

The first three are purchases from Books and Mortar bookstore here in Grand Rapids.

First up is Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a collection of the central texts of CRT, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and several others. With all of the white supremacists squealing and crying about how their children are being taught to be ashamed of being white, I thought that becoming well-informed on the subject was a necessity. And frankly, white supremacists should be ashamed of themselves.

Next up is Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I picked up A Thousand Plateaus a couple of year ago, and it has been slowly warping my brain. I look forward to diving into this one, probably sometime this spring.

Third is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. I only recently became aware of this book, in a thread somewhere on Metafilter. It came up again, in another thread, and since I was heading to Books and Mortar to pick up the previous two books in this post anyway, I grabbed it from one of their tables.

Books and Mortar is just the best!

And last is Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, from a recently completed Kickstarter run by PM Press.

In reading news I am still working my way through David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had thought to be done by the end of the month, but I have had almost no time at all to do anything besides write, thanks to several unexpected time sinks popping up this month.

In writing news, as stated above I am just past 40,000 words into my text, and should hit 50,000 by mid-week. After that, we will see. I have a short story I would like to complete, as well as the story to which the current effort is a sequel. But as long as I keep writing, it’s all good.

2021-11-21
Writing, Writing, Writing

Here I am, almost halfway into NaNoWriMo and well past the halfway point in my word count. I haven’t done this well in NaNoWriMo since, I think, 2019. Today I reached 30,000 words, and with due application of virtual ink and elbow grease I could possibly hit 50,000 by end of day of Friday. That would leave me eleven days to finish up the book and maybe work on a couple of other writing projects. That’s the real goal, after all – finish this draft of the book.

Three volumes arrived here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey in the past week.

First up is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, which has the honor of being the first book I purchased from Books and Mortar after they re-opened the store in their new, improved, and much larger new space.

Next is the latest issue of Peninsula Poets, the biannual magazine of the Poetry Society of Michigan, of which I am a member when I remember to pay my dues.

Next up is Michigan Roots, the once-every-five-years anthology of the poetry of the members of the Poetry Society of Michigan. This is of particular significance to me, because it contains one of my poems! “Afternoon Traffic”, which was originally published by Portage Magazine in the 2020 edition of their online magazine, is reprinted here thanks to the efforts of editor Jennifer Clark, who reached out to me this past spring to see if they could include my poem in their anthology.

In reading news, there is nothing new to report, because I’m spending all of my spare moments writing. 30,000 down, 20,000 to go, and 16 days in which to do it. I feel cautiously optimistic.

2021-11-14
Back Into the Writing Life

I have written more in the past two weeks than in the entire previous year. I wouldn’t say I have recovered from anything; more that I have grown accustomed, finally, to the way things are now. The new abnormal, if you will, which could also be a newbie-friendly version of the New Weird genre. Like, Annihilation for junior high.

But whatever needed to click, clicked, and now I can write freely again, if not well. I am a little out of practice.

Four new readable things arrived this past week at the Library of Winkelman Abbey.

First up is The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig, the most recent delivery from my subscription to Two Lines Press.

Next is the new issue of the ever-excellent Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, to which I will, one day, submit some writing.

Next is the latest issue of Jacobin. I have cancelled my subscription to this one as, though I like the magazine and appreciate what they do, I have a stack of over two years of mostly-unread issues sitting in my office.

Next is the latest issue of Salvage, subtitled “The Disorder of the Future.” I will continue my subscription to Salvage for as long as they continue to publish. Though their topics are grounded in the present their viewpoint seems to be about five years ahead of the consensus reality, and I find that invaluable as I think about the events of the past few years.

In reading news, not much has happened because I have been too busy…

WRITING! NaNoWriMo started on November 1, and as of this post I have completed 17,000 words, or just over one third of the 50,000-word minimum to be a NaNoWrimo Winner. One third in one week is a comfortable buffer and I think I have it in me to get to 50,000 by the end of the month, though I have looked that particular gift horse in the mouth enough times to know that I shouldn’t take my time/energy/motivation/health for granted.

2021-11-07
IWSG, November 2021

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group post for the month of November, 2021.

Hmm. What am I feeling insecure about this month? What could it be. Could it be…

SATAN*?!?!

No! Not Satan. Just NaNoWriMo. It’s always NaNoWriMo.

My confidence took a big hit last year when I failed to complete my 50,000 words worse than in any previous NaNo. I blame burnout, family stress, COVID stress, and attempting to continue a partially-completed work, rather than starting something new. For me, NaNoWriMo works best when whatever I work on is completely contained within the month. This is why I do so well with short stories at this time of year.

So for 2021 I am trying a different approach. I plan to write a book, so nothing new there, but instead of writing in chapters, I have created 30 documents in Google Docs, one for each day of the month. Whatever I write on a given day, no matter what it is, where it starts or where it ends, goes in the doc for the day. I’ll take notes about where chapters should start and end, but rather than worry about chapter (or short story) length, this year will be all about the writing. Just get it down and get it done. The editing will happen in December. Or January. Or never. Anywhere but in November.

Therefore I am cautiously optimistic that this month I will be able to get the 50,000. And so far, two days in, I have averaged about 5,000 words a day. So it may actually happen.

If you are participating in NaNoWriMo, here is my profile page at nanowrimo.org. Hit me up with a buddy request!

Anyway.

This month’s IWSG question is the following:

What’s harder to do, coming up with your book title or writing the blurb?

That’s an easy one: The title. I say this simply because I have not yet had to come up with a blurb for a book, because I have not yet worked a book the point where it requires a blurb. Maybe this year. Or maybe next.

I suppose that makes it another thing to feel insecure about.

*If you didn’t get the Satan reference, do a google search for “SNL Church Lady”.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

2021-11-03
Another October, Put to Rest

Yesterday was the last outdoor session of the year for the tai chi and kung fu classes. We were extremely lucky with the weather. Since late March we were only rained out twice, and had to cancel one class due to extreme heat. Three classes in eight months. We could probably tough it out on Saturdays for a couple of more weeks, but since all of us are vaccinated and okay with masks, we are moving classes to From the Heart Yoga for the winter. With a little luck our original practice space at the downtown YWCA will open after the beginning of the year, but we are prepared to move locations for the long term, if necessary.

No new reading material arrived at the house in the past week. This is becoming a regular occurrence.

In reading news, I am slowly working my way through David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which has put me in a state of information overload. I think it is brilliant, but a more nuanced opinion will need to wait until I compete the book.

In writing news, I wrote most of the first draft of a short story which has been bouncing around in my head for a few months. I would have completed the draft but a migraine laid me low for a couple of days in the middle of the week. Still, this is the first creative prose writing I have worked on this calendar year, and it was a good practice run for NaNoWriMo which starts tomorrow.

And tomorrow starts in about six hours.

2021-10-31