Friday, March 15, 2024

Friday Done List March 15

Today I made three lasagnas today and three batches of cookie dough, one of which I baked and...Wait. We're supposed to talk about work here.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

  • Finished a draft of an essay!
  • Submitted the essay.
  • The essay was accepted and published
  • Very small amount of work on a short story.
  • Considered joining a Medium Zoom event. Need to sign up for a OCWW workshop next week.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road To Agents 

  • Did minimal research on agents for this.

Goal 3. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

  • Four blog posts
  • Marketing of blog posts 
  • Marketing of essay

Thursday, March 14, 2024

I've Written A Doughnut Essay

My second publication of the year, Confessions Of A Doughnut Eater, is what I call an eating essay. My eating essays tend to be memoirish. We could call it a doughnut memoir, inspired by my children who were both burning up our family text one weekend with news about their doughnut excursions. They inspired some of my earliest work and continue to do so. 

Interested in literature? This piece has a couple of references for you. There's one to Jane Eyre, and the title is a shoutout to Thomas de Quincey's 1821 classic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Everyone loves Thomas de Quincey, right?

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

March Is Francophonie Month

I first heard of Francophonie Month four years ago, when I celebrated it here at OC for a week. Oh, look! I did a round-up of my 2020 Francophonie posts

After 2020 I missed Francophonie Month for the next three years. Obviously, I need to put this in my bullet journal. That thing's getting kind of full.

Photo by Andrea Piarquadio on Pexels
Francophonie Month gives me a good opportunity/excuse to mention Useful French Phrases For Madame Keith's World Languages Class. There. I mentioned it.

I only realized today that we're in the midst of Francophonie Month, and I am grasping for how I can observe it personally. I have a couple of episodes of Monsieur Spade left to watch. I love that show, because it stars a British actor playing an American who speaks French with an American accent. I am an American who barely speaks French with an American accent! You can see the attraction. I still haven't seen the new season of Lupin, because I decided to rewatch the first seasons. I could spend the rest of the month catching up on all that, which should do something for my French, non?

But some French reading? I have French books around here I've never finished.

Lectures Pour La Jeunesse by W.F.H. Whitmarsh. It was published in 1946. I'm guessing I found it in my in-laws' house. It's a tough read for me, and it's hard to get excited about going back to it. I just found two twenty dollar bills in it. They're not old, so I must have put them there. No idea what I was thinking about with that.

French Stories, A Dual-Language Book. Edited by Wallace Fowlie. I have some hope of getting through a couple of these stories. Well, one, anyway. They include English translations.

Lire 12 Extraits de Romans de la Rentree. No idea where this came from or even what it is.

At any rate, I have the means to observe Francophonie Month. I just have to do it.


Friday, March 08, 2024

Friday Done List March 8

I missed nearly two days of work this week in order to go to a museum and hiking. On the other hand, I saw some great stuff

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, And Humor

  • Started a new eating essay. Did I finish it? No, I did not.
  • Worked on the longer and longer short story. Did I finish it? No, I did not.
  • Did listen to an hour program about short stories.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road To Agents.

  • Watched a workshop presentation on agents that indicates that I'm doing everything right with submissions.
  • And, yet, I received three rejections this week. What does it all mean?
Goal 3. Community building/General Marketing/Branding
  • Four blog posts counting this one. 

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Some Annotated Reading March 8

I probably found Julija Sukys' (I apologize for my inability to deal with accent marks here) site through a Facebook essay group. I'd saved a link to her on my iPad, so I really don't know for sure. She says on the page I linked to that one of the writing forms that interests her is "life-writing (letters, diaries, and all kinds of archival materials)." I had never seen or heard the expression "life-writing" before, but I love it now. There is so much I could be exploring at her website. 

Someone on X was talking about My Last Duchess by Robert Browning this week, which led me to reread it. There's a little more subtle part I'd had trouble with years ago that worked for me this time. I thought this might be a narrative poem, but I've seen it called a dramatic monologue on-line.

Reading My Last Duchess reminded me that I meant to read writing by all the United States' poet laureates this year and never got past the first one. I can still do it! But not this week.

What I did read this week was some flash fiction. Candied Lemon by Grace Kennedy at Fractured Lit grabbed me with all the food mentioned in the beginning. I am not quite sure about the ending. 

New Yorker humor you probably can't read without a subscription:

  • Scenes From My Open-ish Marriage by John Kenney. It's probably just as well if you can't read this, because while I thought it was very funny this used to be a blog for childlit people and Scenes From My Open-ish Marriage is not childlit-ish.
  • I liked that John Kenney New Yorker piece so much that I found this article about him and read it. This is why it took me four years to write my last book and not eighteen months like it took him to write his first one. You can bet any amount of money that John Kenney's not spending any time looking up and reading articles about me.
  • What Blurbs Really Mean by Dana Maier and Gila Pfeffer. I've said many times here at OC that as a reader I distrust and dislike book blurbs. So, yeah, I ate this thing up. They did not go anywhere near far enough.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

There's Still Good Stuff On The Radio

Keeping it Brief: A Celebration of Short Stories on Connecticut Public Radio's Colin McEnroe Show aired yesterday afternoon but is available on-line now. I loved that it was broken into individual interviews instead of an hour-long panel or free-for-all discussion. I'm not ashamed to admit that I don't have a 60-minute attention span.

Some high points for Gail:

With Rebecca Makkai, Colin (here in Connecticut he's known as Colin) talked about why people may choose not to read short stories and why they should. Here are a couple of my own thoughts on why short stories may not go over with some readers.

  • It takes as much energy for readers to invest in characters and acclimate to a world for a short story as it does for a book. And then the short story is over. You get more for your effort if you're reading a book. To be truthful, I got this theory from my cousin.
  • Epiphanies--characters experiencing some kind of realization that changes them somehow--are a big deal in short stories. This particular reader finds that epiphanies are often so interior to the character that I don't understand them, which undermines my enjoyment of the story. 

With Amy Bloom the talk veered more to technique. She said how a short story begins is important. You only have about two paragraphs to hook the reader. 1. This seems hugely helpful. 2. I should have kown this.

The last section of the program was a discussion of a New Yorker short story, How I Became A Vet by Rivka Galchen. This was fascinating for me, because, though I have had a digital subscription to The New Yorker since last year, I never read the short stories. I don't even read that much of the humor. I like wading through years of articles. To get the whole Keeping it Brief experience, I dropped everything this afternoon and read How I Became A Vet. It's an absolutely lovely story, though I found the ending a bit epiphany-ish and didn't understand it. I think it has broken me into reading New Yorker short stories, though.

So I had an excellent radio experience that was work-related enough that I don't feel very guilty about not really working.

Monday, March 04, 2024

I Don't Mind Rejection. It's Submitting That's The Problem.

So I've been spending the first two months of the year submitting an adult manuscript to literary agents. This gives me an excellent excuse (or at least an excuse) to mention The Trick To Writing Stellar Book Submission Letters published less than a year ago at Greener Pastures Magazine

Today's agent research experience also sent me off a few minutes ago to start another humor piece about literary agents. That sounds terrific, except what I meant to write about today was doughnuts.


Friday, March 01, 2024

Friday Done List March 1

 

Well, I'm feeling some improvement this week.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, And Humor

  • Far away from finishing a draft of a short piece this week. But I have started work on the short story! I had some serious thoughts about it recently that made it possible to get started again.
  • I'll be "watching" the workshop I signed up for tomorrow, because I couldn't take it live yesterday. That's the beauty of the Off Campus Writers Workshop. They send you a recording of the workshop that you can use for one week. So you can sign up for workshops you know you can't attend. Which is what I did.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to Agents

  • Two submissions.
Goal 3. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding
  • Finally finished updating the short-form writing links on my website. That took a long time to get to.
  • Three Original Content posts, including this one. 
  • Do some blog promoting this weekend. I'm doing so much this weekend.


Thursday, February 29, 2024

Some Annotated Reading February 29

I managed to finish another book this week, On Earth as It is On Television by Emily Jane. Terrific book, and I now have a thought about humor in fiction. Which I may have had before, but, if so, this book really illustrates it. Humor must support story. Perhaps it is another element of fiction.

Flora Mancuniensis: The study of botany in 19th-century Manchester by Julie Ramwell is a terrific piece of historical writing. It appears at a publication on the Medium platform called Special Collections from The University of Manchester in England. This is an example of the neat things that can be done at Medium

I did some reading of time travel short stories:

  • The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester in Fantasy & Science Fiction, October, 1958 pg. 118. I heard this would be funny, and it probably would have been much funnier if I had more of a science background. This was clever, though, with good narrative drive and some clever time travel stuff.
  • The Clock That Went Backwards by Edward Page Mitchell.  Scroll down. Yeah, not an exciting read. This is believed to be the first instance of a device being used for time travel. So now I can say I've read that.
  • The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree Jr. in Clarkesworld. This is both a time travel and post-apocalypse story, two sub-genres that I'm not fond of. But for some reason I found this pretty riveting, and it leads me to want to learn more about the author, a woman writing under a man's name.
  • And I did! The Most Prescient Science Fiction Author You Aren't Reading by Kay Steiger in Vox.

New Yorker humor you won't be able to read: Why People Who E-mailed You Aren't E-mailing You Back, By Week  by Hallie Cantor