Week of: 5/2/26

Woot!

Do you see this, universe? Two weeks in a row -- yer boy is serious!

Another only somewhat productive week of writing, but I'll take it. Every step forward is a step forward. I've had more rejections, too! Well, one. One rejection. It will take some time to get things cranked back to the point where I'm getting them regularly, but I'm excited for that.

I'm not even being facetious. I love getting rejections! Mostly! Certainly I love getting acceptances more, but I've at least trained myself to understand that each rejection is a stone on the path towards eventual success. (The chocolates my writing group Wordos handed out for rejections helped somewhat in that regard, I'd imagine. Thanks, Wordos!)

Now, you might be asking whether I'm just going to come on here each time and talk about getting rejections... and I'm wondering that, too! But for now, it's just about putting in the time, building the habits that I want to have, so please bear with me: an imperfect man on an imperfect journey.

In other news, I finished Christopher Moore's Fool. It was enjoyable, for sure. Not too deep... and not trying to be, and that's a-okay. I plan on following up with the sequel through audiobook. (Do audiobooks count as "reading"?)

If you're reading this, I just want to wish you a fantastic day/week/life.

Till next time! 😄

Week of: 4/25/26

Gods, what a bland title. But 1) titles have always been a difficulty for me and 2) if I have to come up with something unique every time I post here, well...

I probably would post just as irregularly as ever, but that would be one more thing to discourage my efforts. So here I am, making effort!

The irony of it is, of course, that any time I take "writing about writing" is less time I have for writing itself, but I could say that about almost anything, I suppose. I have to find a way to make all of these things I'd like to do -- all of the things I'd like to be my life -- to work together, somehow. Blogging and various social media have never been my scene, but I further recognize that it is part of what I'm trying to do in the world right now.

So.

I'd said I wasn't going to use this as a reading journal, and yet if you're here, reading this, then like me you care about books. Literature. Stories. That's why we're all here, is it not? Attend, then, my friend: I've just finished reading Duma Key by Stephen King and I've started in on Fool by Christopher Moore.

That's my (primary) reading. As for my writing, I continue to put in time just about every day. I've been sending things out as well -- and I already have the rejections flowing in, on schedule. 😀

I'm sure we'll have more opportunity to talk about rejection.

Till next time!

It's been a while...

And here we are again. (Again!)

With my daughter officially in her rebellious teenage era, I think it's finally time that I let myself play a little bit. I don't want to overcommit, and lord knows my days are still quite full, but at the moment I have hope for the future. I don't just want to "have written"; I actually do want to write.

While I'm here, and though I don't just want to use this as a reading journal, I may as well share that currently I'm reading My Antonia and The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, along with some other odds and ends. These early days will probably be rather lean on writing info as I battle the dreaded blank page, though I have finished a few things over the last couple of months, including some flash fiction and poetry. Just starting to send one or two things in for consideration now (though the poetry will wait).

Happy to be back.

Another Recommendation: tick, tick... BOOM!

Film on Netflix by Lin-Manuel Miranda about Jonathan Larson, the writer/composer of Rent. Brilliant.

Things I Love + A Recommendation

We spend a lot of time on hate. What about love? I'd love more love.

Right now I'm listening to Queen (their first eponymous album) and eating home-roasted pumpkin seeds. These are things I love. Also, tonight we finished watching Midnight Mass (on Netflix) which was flipping fantastic. Highest recommends.

Maybe, depending on how things go, this space can be used as a bit of a clearinghouse for the things I love most in the world. If no one is listening anyways, it's not like I have to be super strict with myself. May as well stretch out, put my feet up.

With respect to my reading list, I'm already cheating my own system. I haven't finished 1Q84 -- I've relegated it to the Finnegans Wake seat of honor (aka porcelain throne) to ensure, erhm, daily progress. In the meanwhile, I've read The Hunger Games and started Johnny Got His Gun. It's not totally tidy, but it's something. And something is so much better than nothing.

Reading for 2022 Update #1

 Finished SPQR today (and posted a review of sorts, here); picking 19Q4 back up tomorrow...

Reading for 2022

I like books.

Or, I used to. I've always defined myself as a "reader," but actual reading has been in short supply for a while. Initially the transition to writing made it (perhaps ironically) harder to read fiction -- I think because I was reading things from this new, highly-critical perspective, and it prevented me from being absorbed by the fiction. For a while I was afraid that I'd lost the magic permanently.

Then my child was growing, and what little time I might have had for reading was spent either writing, or participating in workshops, or with my family in other pursuits, etc. And then, when I would read, I often got sucked into some non-fiction, for one reason or another. For the last couple of years, I've been homeschooling my child, and that's led me to read a number of works of history and etc., to help remind myself of the things I ought to know, to pass them along. And no mistake, I love it. I love history.

But it isn't fiction.

So here I am, ready to read once more. And because I cannot have a slice of cake, but must stuff the whole thing in my mouth, I have a plan to read... 54 books next year. (Which represents 52 books I've never read before, and 2 more that I have.)

Here they are:

It being October, I was initially inspired to attempt something like this when I stumbled over several "favorite horror books" lists. I started writing down suggestions, which eventually became... this. So a ton of horror to kick this thing off.

1. The Ruins by Scott Smith
2. Ghost Story by Peter Straub
3. Blindness by Jose Saramago
4. The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
5. The Books of Blood by Clive Barker
6. Funland by Richard Laymon

I've never read anything by Clive Barker, yet, which seems a bit of an oversight. (...a theme that shall develop throughout this list.) And Ghost Story I've meant to read forever, given that Stephen King has namedropped it in the past.

Speaking of Mr. King, it's a life ambition of mine to read his corpus (or corpses, as the case may be), so a couple of his earlier works that I've somehow missed:

7. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
8. Cujo by Stephen King

And I've never yet read anything by his kid

9. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Filling in a few more gaps in my literacy with

10. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
11. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

And a return to the author of Hyperion, which I enjoyed long ago. I've heard he's a great horror writer, too

12. Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

One of the subgenres I've read about in these lists, which will be reflected above, presently, and later, is "extreme horror," by which I take to mean lots of unpleasantness. Frankly, I don't expect to enjoy it, but I've always set the most stock in my own, direct experience. I mean, I've subjected myself to Finnegans Wake; I can stomach anything.

With that hubris in mind

13. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
14. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
15. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
16. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
17. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk
18. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
19. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Lest this sound too stuffy or sanitized, some works that I think veer a little further from mainstream respectability...

20. The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
21. The Bighead by Edward Lee
22. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
23. The Ressurectionist by Wrath James White
24. The Troop by Nick Cutter

I plan on regretting a few of these decisions, I'm sure, and maybe not the ones I most expect. But if I'm not taking chances, what am I doing? Besides, I plan on learning from the bad at least as much as from the good -- or so I shall tell myself.

Now a little SF/Fantasy to lighten the mood, which I've roughly divided into "classic" and "modern" (but don't hold me to that, or anything).

25. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
26. Ringworld by Larry Niven
27. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
29. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
30. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

All classics, so far as I'm aware, and I've never read a single one of 'em. So I figure I can either sit here embarrassed or do something about it. These then must be the "moderns" (mostly so I could split 'em, six and six -- I'm sure they're equally "classic" in their own right, or will be):

31. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
32. Redshirts by John Scalzi
33. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
34. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
35. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
36. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

In searching for titles to add, I came upon a video talking about peoples' favorite books. There's nothing particular in this, but it's as good a starting point as anything, and so

37. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
38. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
39. Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
40. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
41. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
42. One-Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
44. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
45. A Secret History by Donna Tartt
46. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

And two taken from there that I've already read, but years ago, such that I think could stand revisiting:

47. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Finally, to round this out

49.  The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
52. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
53. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
54. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

And now that I see this all written out, it looks like... a lot. It is likely, at the very least, that I shall have to call an audible or two along the way. But let's see what happens! If nothing else, the daunting prospect of climbing a mountain like this excites me -- and maybe that alone is worth the challenge, whatever else results.

Anyways, I'll start off by letting myself cheat. If I can wrap up my current projects (SPQR by Mary Beard and 19Q4 another novel by list author Haruki Murakami, which I've been reading off-and-on for a very long time), I'll let myself get a small head start. I suspect I shall need it.

Otherwise, I'll report back soon on what happens. Or maybe in another five years. We shall see!