Time Management Tuesday: Recapitulation 2025

Don't you just love assessing yourself? I do, which suggests that I am very easy on myself.

I've been doing a recapitulation post related to my work (yeah, I'm not touching my personal life) since 2012. You can read about the Yoga Journal article that inspired my annual recapitulation. 

What recapitulation involves, for my purposes, is going over the work goals and objectives I created back in January and assessing how I did with them. Among other things, it helps set me up for creating work goals and objectives for the next years. 

The Heritage Month Project became a very big part of my reading, blogging, and writing this year. In fact, two of my Medium essays on Heritage Month reading were boosted by the platform, which drew a lot of readers to one of them. The Heritage Month Project was not a goal for 2025. I must have thought of it in January.

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

My plan was for this to be my main focus for 2025. And it was.

Objectives:

• Work on the starts made during December. Yes! I worked on 7 of these starts, submitted them, and had 3 accepted for publication.
• Make two submissions a month. Anything. Anywhere. I made 53 submissions this year, so I nailed this objective. Though I wasn't formal about getting 2 out a month, I must have done more than that. For those 53 submissions I got 19 publications, including 1 to a college literary magazine, which was gratifying. Yes, good to recall that, since not 5 minutes ago I got a rejection from an on-line litjournal.
• Read short-form work every day, using my new reading system that I will someday do a blog post about. Both to enhance my mind, of course, but to look for new publications to submit to. Try to read both a short story and an essay from that system I just mentioned. I have no recollection of that reading system was. I did use Lent as a temporal landmark to manage reading short-form work every day during that period. It was not a good experience.
• Focus on short-form reading during Retreat Week, which is coming up soon. I think I did that. The thing I really recall from last year's Retreat Week was watching videos from a local historical society. Those were great.
• Expand my reading of publications on the Medium platform, looking for new sites to submit to. Yes.
• Take workshops on short-form writing. Took 7 workshops! Also, at the beginning of the year, I started going through notes from earlier workshops, which was helpful, but I didn't finish.
• Spend more time with essay Facebook group. Really. Maybe I should just give up this objective.
• Revise a chapter in my scifi adult book as a short story. I started it!
• Submit that scifi story, of course. It should go without saying, but these are objectives, so I'm saying it. I didn't finish the short story, so I didn't get to this point.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

I made this a more important goal last year. The point was to broaden readership and create an identity as a short-form writer.

Objectives:

• Keep the short-form publications features on website updated. I have trouble doing this. I'm behind. 
• Continue with the Annotated Reading posts on Original Content, which support other writers. I gave up on this when I got started on the Heritage Month Project.
• Continue promoting the Annotated Reading posts on BlueSky, which both supports other writers and connects with them. Continued until I stopped doing the Annotated Reading posts.
• Continue republishing the Annotated Reading posts as Random Reading articles on Medium. This both supports other writers and fills any gaps in my publishing history there. The bulk of the work is already done, so we're not taking a labor-intensive task. Stopped that when I stopped doing the Annotated Reading posts here. Those received no attention on Medium.
• Attend virtual events for writers. I can't recall any of these. There may be far fewer of them now.
• Attend local events for local writers. I went to a fantastic book walk featuring local writers.
• Continue supporting local writers on Facebook by sharing their local public events. Yes. I did quite a bit of this.
• Update website and blog to feature BlueSky instead of Twitter. Done.
• Work on increasing followers on both Medium and BlueSky. Even though many of the people who follow me at those places do not seem to be people who would be at all interested in my writing. Perhaps you have read that engagement on Blue Sky is low? I find that to be very true. Expanding followers there is very difficult. Part of this may be because on Twitter I was still part of a children's lit world and that was a big part of my Twitter world. On BlueSky I concentrate on other types of writers and publications, and it's always difficult to break into a new network.

Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

This was way down in my goal list this year. I have the manuscripts done, so I haven't forgotten about them. But they're no longer my big focus.

Objectives:

• Submit to an agent if one catches my attention. It appears that I submitted to 5 agents this year.
• Submit this month to an agent who has already caught my eye. Three of the 5 submissions were in January, so presumably the agent I was referring to here was one of them.
• Follow agents on BlueSky. I have not done this since moving to BlueSky. That's how iffy I feel about pursuing this goal. Not many.
• Take part in BlueSky pitches. I'll be missing the first one next week while on retreat. I found very few of these.
• Pay attention to agents featured in SCBWI's monthly publication. Yes,

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

Objectives:

 

• Continue researching fun stuff. Yes.
• Continue using the organizational system of the fun stuff research that I managed to create the end of last year. Not that great an organizational system.
• Focus on creating characters. Yes. And came up with a few more. Because you can never have too many characters, right?
• Focus on more plot points. I actually did well on this.
• Maybe write some bits and pieces. Started a couple scenes during the Advent Project.
• Read more historical fiction. I definitely did this.

Thoughts Regarding 2025

Finding time to work was a struggle this year, yet I managed 53 submissions and 19 publications. I would have liked broader readership for those published works but having them published is part way there. Also, not all of those submissions were for new work, but finding submission opportunities for older work is time well-spent, too.

As usually happens, creating this recapitulation post has provided me with some ideas for next week's goals and objectives for 2026. Stay tuned.

Friday Done List December 26

Christmas Eve yoga spot

We got through Christmas without death, dying, or general illness! Hurray! I forgot to take pictures of 

our dessert bar or my sister. But I did get an hour of yin yoga on the Solstice and a half hour Christmas Eve. How chill was that? 

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I completed my Advent Project. One of my most successful Advent Projects as far as making me feel that I was both working and living through Christmas preparations without undue suffering. It remains to be seen if any of these beginning essays/humor pieces/book chapters will ever be published.
• Had my last essay of the year published at Books Are Our Superpower. A Native American Writer Opened My Mind to Literary Horror is a rewrite of an Original Content blog post.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Wrote and published a Time Management Tuesday post.
• Promoted the Literary Horror publication to Facebook and BlueSky.

Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• I spent last night with a 5-year-old houseguest who didn't want to sleep by herself. So sometime in the night or this morning (I actually woke up before she did) I was in bed with this kid who was sleeping while I wasn't. So, instead, I was reading (on my iPad) an article on Medium about how to use Manuscript Wishlist to find agents. Using methods I haven't been using. I thought, well, maybe I should consider doing one of these nonAI things next year and sending out some more submissions. Except I didn't save the link (I think someone else in the bed woke up), and I don't know where the link was, and now I have to spend some time looking for it. Hey, that's thinking about a goal, and I'm claiming it. UPDATE: I found it! It didn't take long, either.

Time Management Tuesday: Looking Forward to the End of the Holidays Doesn't Mean You Hate Them. It Means You Love Temporal Landmarks.

Last week I got an email from the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio with a link to its spring Zoom writers' workshops. I went through that thing like a gardener sucking up a seed catalog in January. I am excited about putting the holidays behind me so I can take workshops, get back to a more regular writing schedule, take on a new reading project to replace this year's Heritage Project, increase my market research, start new submissions, and....everything! I am psyched for everything! 

My sister, a serious rubber stamper and card maker, looks forward to Christmas being over so she can deal with a "to be answered" box filled with letters, a craft room that is a wreck, and a table that is piled high. I do not know what table she is talking about or what it could possibly be piled high with.

I don't believe that what we're feeling is any kind of intense dislike for Christmas and the labor and distraction leading up to it. Instead, I think we are feeling the impact of the temporal landmarks, calendar events that provide opportunities for fresh starts, that surround us right now.

A number of cultures celebrate holidays at the end of the year, each with a lead-in season beforehand involving ritual, food, and, well, shopping. The beginning of all those holiday seasons is a temporal landmark, marking the start of something. The holiday comes, and now you've got another temporal landmark, the beginning of "after the holidays." 

Then, of course, it being December we have the end of one year and the beginning of the new one, a very big temporal landmark that has a big impact psychologically.

All those temporal landmarks coming together provide some significant power, drawing us, at least my sister and me, into the excitement of what's coming up. 

Being excited for what's coming up in life doesn't mean you can't enjoy what's happening now, your holiday. And enjoying your holiday doesn't mean you can't look forward to what you're going to be doing in the coming new period. We're not talking a binary, either/or situation. Instead, this is a classic example of being able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time.

Enjoy whatever holiday you observe and best wishes for whatever you're excited about doing in the next few months.

Friday Done List December 19

I wish I'd taken pictures of all the small batch cakes I made this past week. But I didn't, so here's a picture of a Christmas tree instead. No, we have not finished decorating it. Yes, the tree has been up since last Sunday.

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Seven new beginnings for the Advent Project. 
• Have nearly completed an essay using material from my post on literary horror and Native American Heritage Month. I may get that submitted this weekend.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Promoted my literary horror and Native American Heritage Month post.
• Updated my Goodreads reading challenge for this year. 
• Have come up with a couple of ideas for Time Management Tuesday posts next month.

Friday Done List December 12

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• New humor piece published.
  
• Seven new beginnings for the Advent Project. A couple of these were extensions of beginnings from other years' Advent Projects. 
• Wrote up my Native American Heritage Month reading for my Heritage Month Project.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Did a couple of promotional posts for the new humor piece.
• Wrote a Story Behind the story post for the new humor piece and promoted it on BlueSky.
• Took part in the annual OCWW Holiday Book Mart, which went hybrid for the first time this year. Promoted that on Facebook.
• Have not yet promoted my Native American Heritage Month reading at Facebook and BlueSky. Sunday!

The Heritage Month Project: Literary Horror by Stephen Graham Jones

I thought I had reached the end of my Heritage Month Reading related to the Heritage Months the U.S. used to recognize (that's archived material I just linked to) but dropped earlier this year. (Black History Month is all that's left. I can't tell you why, 'cause I don't know.) But last year's Native American Heritage Month inspired the Heritage Month Project for me. So, of course, I was going to observe it in November with some reading even though, according to my research at the Department of State's website, which used to post info about heritage months, it was never observed by the U.S.

Well, folks, I was cruising around the Internet last month when what do I find? Not only did the U.S. recognize November as National Native American Heritage Month in the past, it continues to do so! We just don't do it through the Department of State. We do it through the Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

What does this mean? 

• The Department of the Interior treats Native Americans differently than the Department of State treats absolutely everyone else?
• One hand in Washington doesn't know what the other hand is doing, and the people who went after the other Heritage Months were unaware that National Native American Heritage Month is living at the Department of the Interior?
• The Secretary of State was using "we were here first" as an argument to nix all the other Heritage Months and decided that that wouldn't work with Native American Heritage Month?

I don't care! I just think Native American Heritage Month managing to stay on its feet during the white washing is subversive as hell. I mean that in the most positive way.

So Let's Talk Some Native American Literary Horror. My Search for Something Different

Whatever possessed you to read horror, Gail? Well, truthfully, it's not something I read a lot of, unless you include Shirley Jackson and the occasionally zombie book. After last month's reading, I think horror may have specific genre requirements that I don't understand, so are Jackson and zombies horror? Perhaps someday I will know.

But to be specific about this fall's horror reading: I was looking for Native American fiction writers to read and came upon Stephen Graham Jones. I see that he writes horror. Literary horror. And I think, Well, that would be something different for me to read this year. Then I see that he wrote a book called I Was A Teenage Slasher , and I was all in. I was aware Jones has written quite a few books, so once I started this one, I thought, Gail, why don't you read another of his books, as if you were making a study of him? That would be different, too.

I Was A Teenage Slasher 

The Native American connection in I Was A Teenage Slasher involves a secondary character who is very important, but readers won't get a feeling of being steeped in Native American culture. Unless there was something going on here that I wasn't knowledgeable enough to get. 

What I did feel steeped in was slasher culture, if such a thing exists. The basic premise here is that this is the first-person account of poor adolescent Tolly who finds himself unwillingly pulled into a classic slasher story, as the slasher. I was about to say as the main character, but are slashers the main character in slasher stories? He realizes that he is in a slasher story with specific tropes he can't control or avoid, because his Native American best friend/nearly girlfriend is a fan of the genre and recognizes what's happening. 

This is kind of a heart-breaking story, folks, something I didn't expect from a slasher tale.

Having been a childlit person in the past, I've read a YA book or two. Whenever I read an adult book with a YA main character, I have to wonder, Why is this adult and not YA? It's an easy question to answer here. Tolly is now an adult recalling his teenage slasher experience, making him, in reality, an adult character able to assess events from an adult perspective. YA books take place in the moment as it's being lived. All their responses are, or should be, YA responses.

I Was A Teenage Slasher was an Alex Award winner this year, an award given to ten adult books with appeal for young adults. It may be my favorite book award.

The Only Good Indians

The second Jones book I read was actually one of his earlier ones, The Only Good Indians. This has been widely reviewed and has won an award or three, which were pretty well deserved I'd say. 

This book is horror within a Native American culture. Four youngish Native American men go hunting in an area where they were not supposed to be hunting. They kill quite a number of elk, including a pregnant female who does not experience a quick and easy death. 

Ten years later they, and some of the people around them, pay a price for what they did.

What I'm going to say now is going to seem to come out of left field, but there is a lot of basketball in this book. For those of us who consider basketball to be another one of those run-back-and-forth with a ball sports, this could seem...odd. Mystery solved. Basketball is part of Native American culture.

There's some moving around in points of view here, so expect to do a little work while reading this, which just enhances the whole experience.

The Horror Genre

Here is what I've learned from reading these two books:

• Horror may deal with specific themes around guilt and revenge. Who is most at fault? Those who have done something for which they feel, or should feel, guilt or those the guilty wronged?
• The final girl. This is a quite marvelous literary figure in horror, one I'd never heard of until reading I Was A Teenage Slasher, in which she is explained. She also appears in The Only Good Indians. I will not spoil either of those books by explaining her, but I love her.

I can't claim that my latest exposure to horror has made me a fan of the genre. However, I expect I'll be reading more of Stephen Graham Jones in the future.

A Story Behind the Story: Christmas Lists

Isaac Martin on Unsplash

Yesterday, Frazzled published my most recent humor piece, In Case You Don't Know What I Want for Christmas, Here is My List. I began this before Thanksgiving, planning to write a profound essay about how my immediate family members share wish lists for Christmas and birthdays and how these are this meaningful way to keep in touch about our lives and interests when we don't see each other regularly. (I, personally, curate my list all year round.)

Within 24 hours my original idea shifted into a child's Christmas list, and I never looked back.

I felt bad about tinkering with it over Thanksgiving weekend, when I'd planned to commit to holiday time with my husband. But then the piece was accepted for publication, and I felt better.

Writing Humor and In Case You Don't Know What I Want for Christmas

I started out just making a list of random things a child might want, which is a legitimate starting point. But with humor as humor, you need two things. Which I mention because I didn't know that when I started writing this kind of humor a few years ago.

• You need escalation, rising action.
• You need something like a climax, for those of us who started out writing traditional fiction. You need a kicker of an ending. I feel there is a term for this I don't recall.

Randomness does not help provide either of those two things.

I came up with the idea for children believing Santa will bring them something big, which, of course, he will not since he doesn't exist, putting parents on the spot. But I still needed something else.

I needed Minecraft. I needed Minecraft. Minecraft is a unifying element in this piece and helped me tremendously in terms of generating material and escalating what was going on.

I chose Minecraft because we have a family member seriously into it now, and thus I could write what I knew. Or what I know about what he knows. But it didn't have to be Minecraft, of course. It could have been K-pop Demon Hunters. It could be anything. Except for Pokemon. We've moved past that.

Is There Something Profound Here After All?

I feel that this piece is about obsession and relentless marketing to children. But, as a family member often tells me, "You think too much."

I, too, obsess.

Friday Done List December 5

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Had a humor piece accepted for publication.
• Did three beginnings for the Advent Project.
• Took a Zoom workshop, Character-driven Plots, that was stimulating. Lots of ideas for things to read, a few ideas for new short-form work, and some generative writing.
• I tried to sign up for a Zoom workshop on essay writing, but the organization was no longer accepting registrations. Seriously? They ran out of room on Zoom? Is that possible? Well, that was a gift of three hours I'd have spent Zooming next week, to say nothing of the money I would have spent. Hurray?

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Did an Advent Project post for Original Content.
• Got started on another post for OG that I want up this month.

Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• As a result of taking the workshop mentioned above, I looked up a writer who linked to her agent who I believe I'll be submitting a manuscript to. But not until next year.

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• Two of my beginnings for the Advent Project went toward beginning scenes for this project. This brings me up to five beginnings, right on target.
• The generative work during the Character-driven Plots went toward this project.

Time Management Tuesday: The Advent Project. Or The Holiday Hell Project. Whichever You Prefer.

Since 2021 I've been spending my Decembers on what I call either the Advent Project or the Holiday Hell Project, a way of writing while dealing with the hell of preparing for a holiday that is a bizarre combination of materialism, media-induced spirituality, nostalgia, and some other stuff. In addition, we are one of those families that routinely has relatives terminally ill or actually dying in December or, if we're lucky, we're waiting for medical test results. Or, if we're really lucky, someone is just run-of-the-mill sick at the peak holiday time. 

Our history is bad enough that as December approaches I often feel undirected, low-level fear. This year we have ducked health crises so far, or gotten them out of the way early, but we have two different family groups going on extensive trips, involving flying out of the country. And back. Why? Why? No, I am not filled with the freakin' joy of the season. 

Or maybe I am. This is the joy of the season here. 

Which brings us to the Advent Project.

The Advent Project 

My Advent Project, which I believe I've also called my December Project as well as the aforementioned Holiday Hell Project, leans on the concept of temporal landmarks, calendar dates/events that mark a difference of some sort. Temporal landmarks make people feel they can begin something new.

If there's anything I love, it's beginning again.

And that's what I do during the Advent Project. I accept that this is a rough time of year to get anything done and just focus on beginnings. I try to begin a new writing project each day. I get something down in Word, file it, and then walk away and do whatever else I need to do for December. 

Where do these beginnings come from?

• My writer's journal.
• Beginnings from earlier years that I didn't do anything with and add some more to that earlier work. Yeah, begin again. I'm not a purist about this. I want to generate material.
• I'd like to take a peek at very old projects in the filing cabinet and either start something with them or throw them away.

Last year, I did, indeed, make 25 beginnings. You only need 25, because Advent ends on Christmas Day! Maybe Christmas Eve. I don't know. But my point is, I didn't have to slog it out to the end of the month.

• 7 of those beginnings were moved to working files in 2025
• 7 of those beginnings that made it to working files in 2025 were submitted
• 3 of those beginnings were published

Not big numbers, but, remember, all those beginnings are still available for me to do something with in the future. I may tinker with some of them this month. Beginning is hard.

Also, other years' beginnings ended up worked on, submitted, and sometimes published.

Get this, I was pleased with today's beginning until I looked at last year's beginnings and realized I'd begun it then, too. So now I've put those two beginnings together, and I have a lot of material to work with in January. Don't think I'm not excited about that.

That's one of the positives of the Advent Project. When it's working, I feel excitement about going to work after it's over.

I've done today's beginning as well as this blog post (and received an acceptance on a humor piece I wrote over the long weekend), and now I can walk away to maybe do a little Christmas work and try to deal with the disorder that's somehow accumulated around me. As it does in December.

Happy Advent Project!

Friday Done List November 28

Thanksgiving Week Edition: Well, I made cranberry sauce from scratch this week, which was fantastic. Also, the gluten free salted chocolate chip cookie sandwiches I made for the first time were so good, they may become my holiday dessert.

But for work:

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

Started a totally new humor piece that was not in my bullet journal for this week.

Checked out a lit journal and added it to my spreadsheet. May submit to it next week.

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

Okay, this is a strange one. I was with an eight-year-old family member who was working on his movie script. I asked him if he knew about making story boards. I got a confusing answer. But while he was working on his project, I drew a few little sketches of scenes for the 19th century novel for mine. Maybe I should be thinking about doing something with this.

Friday Done List November 19

 Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• The essay version of Where Are the ADHD Characters in Adult Fiction was published at Books Are Our Superpower. 
• Registered for an Off Campus Writers' Workshop workshop.
• Spent a little time on a short story revision. I was pleased with the work and frustrated because I couldn't do more.
• Got another rejection a few hours ago. All these rejections suggests I'm working a lot harder than I think I am. At least on making submissions.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Promoted the above essay on Facebook and BlueSky
• Registered to take part in an Off Campus Writers' Workshop on-line sale for members. Of which I am one. This involves Saving the Planet & Stuff and is the first thing I've done for that book in quite some time. I don't expect to make any sales, but I'd enjoy having a little more of an identity with OCWW.
• One new Original Content post that is not a Friday Done List.

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• I came up with a reason for the crime involved and a murderer! A new character. This happened while I was on the treadmill.
• Joined a Facebook group that deals with history related to this book.

A Story Behind the Story with My Search for Adult ADHD Characters

Heber Galindo @ Unsplash

 As writers often do, I repurposed some material. My two blog posts on the lack of ADHD characters in adult fiction became one essay on the subject, which was published today at Books Are Our Superpower. 

What I find fascinating about the three pieces I've published on adult ADHD characters in fiction...and promoted here and there...is that no one has responded with "Why, Gail, you are so very wrong about this. There are so many adult books with adult ADHD characters. Read this and this and this."

I would actually enjoy being told I was wrong and be referred to the kinds of books I've been looking for. But so far, nope. Nothing.

Friday Done List November 14

Here is the big, big news from this week: I have an eight-year-old family member who attends a movie club after school one day a week. After his day of third grade. As a result, he now knows what Freytag's Pyramid is. You know, the pyramid that describes plot structure? Movie club covered that.

This is a writing thing

He had a chart he'd drawn himself, which was better than this one I made, because it had more labels. I can't recall if he used the terms "rising action" and "resolution," but he sure knew what they were.

Just to be sure you're clear on what I'm talking about, he is eight-years-old and in third grade. I didn't learn about Freytag's Pyramid in college, even though I took at least four writing classes. Don't try to tell me it didn't exist when I was in college. Gustav Freytag was a nineteenth century writer. Of course, it existed when I was in college.

I didn't learn about Freytag's Pyramid until after I'd had at least a couple of books published by a traditional publisher. 

Now, there is a positive way to look at this and a negative way to look at this. 

• The positive way is that children are getting a really good education these days, aren't they? At least in movie club. 
• The negative way is that I had a really lame-ass writing education, and it is a freaking miracle that I got as far as I did.

And now on to the rest of my writing week.

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Finished reworking the ADHD reading posts into an essay.
• Submitted the ADHD essay.
• I've been working on revising a humor piece into a short story. I kicked that up a notch this week, hoping to have it done for a themed submission.
• Received a rejection on a humor piece. That piece is somewhat essay-like, which means it can't be submitted to just any humor site. Some of them won't accept anything they perceive as an essay. Decided to send that to the lit journal that's made a call for humor pieces, instead of the one I mentioned before. Yes, I am making thinking and decision-making part of my done list.
• Submitted that rejected humor piece just this morning.
• Oh, yeah. I received another rejection. Gotta file that somewhere. 

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Attended an Author's Guild zoom talk on copyright. Not sure that that is an objective toward this particular goal, but I want credit, so I've got to put it somewhere.
• Came up with a new blog post idea. I haven't written it. Hope I don't forget it.

Friday Done List November 7

Yes, I am a day late with this. But it was a week of family visits, appointments, and I had to buy a snow blower, okay? And I still don't have the thing! Oh, also, I had to renew my library card.

It was not a highly productive week, but the point is to produce something toward your work goals. Done Lists reflect that.

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Got the short story market research spreadsheet functioning. 
• Read for short story market research.
• Did a lot of work on the revision of my two ADHD posts into an essay, which I will then submit to a Medium publication.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Finished reading a book for a Native American Heritage Month post I'm planning to write for this blog.
• Got my library card renewed so I could get another book for Native American Heritage Month. So, yeah, getting that library card renewed was professional work. Damn straight.

Friday Done List October 31

This week involved mornings lost to a doctor's appointment, buying and taking care of groceries (which I try to do only twice a month in my desperate attempt to save time), and a telephone call appointment, which, of course, involved preparing for the call and post-call activity. All this came out of work time. 

I mention my loss of work time to my fascinating personal life, because it points out, once again, the value of a Done List. I hustled this afternoon to make a submission and get an essay started so I could put both items on my Done List. My week would have been far less productive without having knocked those tasks off.

Sadly, the letters I wrote to friends and relatives to include with Halloween cards do not count toward writing. Wait. Unless I can use something in one of those letters in an upcoming piece. Gasp! Also, I've started keeping a nature journal! I wrote a little bit in that last night. Could that turn into something some day? 

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Received two rejections. Huzzah! That means I'm working!
• Resubmitted one of the rejected pieces.
• Found a publication I can submit a short story to if it is rejected by the publication that is considering it now. That is not negative thinking. That is planning.
• Tried to save and start using the short-form marketing spreadsheet Computer Guy made for me. Yeah, we need to do some work on that.
• Started an essay revision of my two ADHD adult character blog posts. By which I mean I have copied the blog posts into a Word document. Important first step before the cutting begins.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Wrote two blog posts on ADHD adult characters for ADHD Awareness Month. This took quite a bit of my available writing time this week, but I was very interested in the subject so there you go.
• Promoted both posts on Facebook and BlueSky. ADHD Awareness Month doesn't seem to have received much attention at either place.
• Spent a little time looking for short story writers on BlueSky.
• Did a Facebook post promoting some local book events coming up next month. That got more attention than ADHD Awareness Month.

ADHD Awareness Month: Still Looking for Adult ADHD Characters in Adult Books

With adult fiction dealing with ADHD characters there are two issues to consider: 1. Characters who are not intentionally created as being ADHD, readers see it in them. 2. Characters who are intentionally created as being ADHD. In my limited experience, there may be more of the first than the second.

Unintentional ADHD Characters

This is a matter of readers perceiving a character as ADHD whether or not the character is clearly identified as ADHD or whether or not the author intended to be writing an ADHD character. 

This Book Riot article, for instance, argues that Jane in Dread Nation and Ayoola in My Sister, the Serial Killer both have ADHD characteristics. I've read both books but before I became what I might call ADHD sensitive. Thus, I can neither support nor refute their characters' ADHDness. Certainly, these books were written in a time period when ADHD is recognized as ADHD and authors could be interested in creating ADHD-like characters, even if it wasn't discussed as such in the story.

But I've also found articles about characters in books from periods when the disorder must have existed and was even recognized within the medical world. But how much the general public and reading public knew about it is another thing. Were the authors modeling characters on people they knew with what we'd now recognize as ADHD characteristics? Were they intentionally creating ADHD characters, though they wouldn't have known that designation? 

Characters from older books who are sometimes believed to be ADHD-like include Sherlock Holmes and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables. But the character from an older book that I frequently saw listed as having ADHD qualities is Emma from Jane Austen's Emma. 

Unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories and Anne of Green Gables, I don't believe I've ever read Emma. I made an attempt this past month, but the characters in that thing talk a lot. They talk about the neighbors, primarily. I used to have to finish reading a book once I'd started it, but not anymore.  

However, I did get through, I believe, 18 chapters and found some of the material sited by readers who find Emma to be an ADHD character. 

• She has been meaning to read more since she was 12, has made lists, but another character says he has given up expecting her to do any reading. 
• When her mother died, a character says, Emma lost the only person who could cope with her.
• Emma describes having been interested in painting portraits a few years before but had given it up in disgust and not one painting had been completed.
• At one point, Emma herself describes how little she's able to maintain attention.

I find Emma to be incredibly elitist and overall unpleasant, which has nothing to do with these ADHD type characteristics. I'm not at all sure what Austen was going for here.

Authors With ADHD: More Unintentional ADHD Characters?

Adult authors with ADHD include Rebecca Makkai and Mary Robinette Kowal, both of whom were diagnosed as adults, after they were established in their careers. Kowal has a marvelous short video on ADHD and writing.  In a conversation with Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species) Kowal says "I think I'm writing all of my characters as ADHD characters, but if I were trying to write a character who is explicitly ADHD, I wouldn't actually know how, because that's just the way my brain works all the time."

Now I had read the first of Kowal's Lady Astronaut books a few years ago, before ADHD was something I was what you might say sensitive to. I have no recollection of seeing anything ADHD-like in it. But for this ADHD Awareness Month project I read her book Ghost Talkers.

Kowal writes alternative history, and Ghost Talkers involves an alternative World War I-era world in which the British government employes mediums to work with recently deceased soldiers who are trained to report back to them immediately after being killed in order to pass on information about what is actually happening during battles. On the very first page the main character describes having to try to struggle to maintain control during a work session.  "She tried to hold the awareness at bay, along with the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army." "...if she weren't careful that would pull her back into her body." There are references throughout the book to her being in danger of coming unmoored, in danger of losing her grip, and dealing with thousands of memories at once. At another point, one of the ghosts has to struggle to focus.

Was Kowal using ADHD characteristics to create characters and even plot? Is this something other ADHD authors may do? Or is this just a reader finding what she's looking for in a text? 

Intentional ADHD Characters in Romance

I've read, more than once, that romance writers have embraced ADHD characters. In fact, you can find ADHD romance lists. I found Portrait of a Scotsman, a historical romance by Evie Dunmore, on a couple of ADHD romance lists. 

Right away in the first chapter the main (wealthy, of course) character is concerned that she has gone to the wrong address. "Or perhaps she had done it again...She squinted at the address, then back at the house number with full attention." She struggles with impulse control in a gallery. "...she shouldn't touch it. She really should not." When caught touching something she shouldn't have, she says, "I had not meant to touch it." She later describes how she had failed to get her mail that morning and thus didn't know about a cancellation. In a discussion with the male lead, she says, "...there's the matter of my attention...It is either scattered or directed with an unnatural focus. I lose track of time when I paint, for example."

She, and her family, are aware of her ADHD, even if they don't have a word for it.

She is also clearly dyslexic, however. The two conditions do sometimes occur together. Having seen  doctors about her inability to write without spelling errors or keep numbers in the correct order, her family is finally told that it's not her eyes causing the problem, but a sort of "word blindness." This leads her father to fear there is something wrong with her brain. Her brain is considered odd within the family, though the male lead in the story recognizes early on her superior visual memory.

We don't see a great deal about her conditions over the course of the story, but I think what we do see is mainly related to dyslexia. Dyslexia is like the autism I wrote about earlier. Neurotypical readers feel they know what it is and can recognize it. That would make it easier to show in fiction than ADHD.

My short study of ADHD adult fiction has been as interesting as it's been disappointing. I'll definitely be looking for ADHD in my adult fiction reading in the future.

ADHD Awareness Month: Where Are the ADHD Characters in Adult Fiction?

I have reached the end of my reading for the Heritage Months that were recognized by the U.S. government prior to 2025.  The State Department only recognizes Black History month now. The former history months can be found at an archived web page.  

That left me free this month to read for ADHD Awareness Month. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting how the brain works. People with the condition sometimes identify as neurodivergent, because they think differently than what is considered typical or neurotypical. (Remember that. I'm going to use the terms  later and needed to squeeze them in early, sort of like foreshadowing but different.) ADHD has become an interest for me, because we have a family member with the condition. Thus, I have a dog in this race, so to speak.

These days, adult books are also an interest for me. This month I was interested in finding adult fiction relating to ADHD. I came up really short on that. 

In children's fiction, there have been ADHD characters for years. Since back in the day when it was called just ADD, in fact, if not earlier. Why can't I find much in the way of adult fiction dealing with them?

You've probably guessed I have a theory.

Theory Part 1. Children's Gatekeepers Love a Fictional Problem

Problem books are a definite thing in children's fiction. This may be connected to the belief that children's books should be instructive, something that goes back to the nineteenth century, anyway. If a problem is addressed in a book, child readers can learn about it. Huzzah!

I also used to see a theory that problem books are easier to teach than, say, anything else, meaning problem books would have a good chance in the educational market. And then the school library market. And the parent and grandparent market. All the markets that buy children's books so kids can learn something.

Now there are excellent reasons for including ADHD characters in children's books, whether or not the book is specifically a problem book. Representation for ADHD readers is one of them. Opportunities for readers without ADHD to gain more understanding of the condition is another. I am going to argue that ADHD characters can also have something unique and interesting to add to a work of fiction, something new I haven't seen over and over again because I've been reading so very, very long.

But those reasons for including ADHD characters also exist for adult fiction. So why have I found it so difficult to find ADHD characters in adult works of fiction?

Theory Part 2. Adults Are Our Own Gatekeepers 

We adults have a great deal more flexibility in choosing our own free reading than children do. No one is assigning us meaningful books to read or insisting we read from an approved list of improving titles. Fiction around conditions as conditions doesn't appeal to us that much. If we have a condition or disorder we want to learn more about, our first thought isn't a novel, but nonfiction written by a professional of some sort. 

There is a great deal of ADHD nonfiction for adults.  A great deal. So many nonfiction lists.

But the lack of representation in fiction is fascinating. Perhaps if adult readers wanted to see ADHD characters, they would appear?  A market would be born! But my guess is that after having spent their youths seeing treatment of ADHD in children's literature as a problem to cope with, neither those with ADHD or those without it are wildly enthusiastic about having to read more.  

Theory Part 2, Subsection A. Writers Don't Know How to Write ADHD.

But why aren't there characters with ADHD in books that are not specifically about ADHD? After all, other neurodivergent characters, and I'm thinking autistic ones here, appear in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and The Maid. (Both mysteries for what that's worth.) I've recently finished watching the wonderful French TV series Astrid et Raphaelle, a clever, even witty, buddy cop story in which one of the cops is autistic. So neurodivergent characters can be successful in fictional worlds.

I'm going to do some speculating here and throw out a guess that neurotypical audiences and gatekeepers believe they know the common characteristics of some types of autism--lack of eye contact and stimming, for instance, and sensitivity to sound. These happen to be characteristics that are relatively easy to show. 

Though knowledge of ADHD behaviors goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century, it became far more known among the neurotypical public around the 1980s. At that time, it was generally thought of as involving struggles to pay attention in school and impulsive behavior. Those general issues are harder to quickly use in a piece of fiction for adults than the issues general readers and writers associate with autism. In an adult book the results of having had trouble in school, something that happened in the past, or the results of being impulsive would probably be easier to work into a story than the real time school problems and impulsive behavior.

ADHD was also associated with children at that point in the late twentieth century. It appears to have taken the literary world a while to recognize that ADHD children grow up to become ADHD adults.

Or that ADHD can go undiagnosed until adulthood.

Perception of ADHD in the Twenty-first Century

These days a great deal more is known about what ADHD involves, things we so called neurotypicals had never heard of a few decades ago. In addition to the famous difficulty focusing attention and impulsive behavior we now know about:

• Hyperfocus--The ability to stay fixated on a subject or project for lengthy periods of time, which, yes, seems unexpected since superficially ADHD is seen as the inability to maintain attention. I've witnessed this.
• Sensory processing issues--This can involve any of the senses, including taste and smell. Connected to the eating problems in some people with ADHD? I've witnessed this, too. Though there are other reasons ADHD can be accompanied by eating problems.  
• ADHD paralysis--Sensory overload or overload from having too many options or tasks to complete, so the individual just shuts down. Maybe collapses on the couch. Yes, I've witnessed this.
• Anxiety--Anxiety is common in people with ADHD. I have witnessed this, too.
• Hypersensitivity to rejection/criticism--Or maybe even perceived rejection/criticism? Yes, yes, you've guessed it. I've witnessed this.

Those are just aspects of ADHD that my shallow knowledge of the subject has turned up. They could definitely be used to create unique, well-rounded characters.

In another post I'll cover some books I read in my attempt to find ADHD adult fiction, including older books ADHD readers look to to find themselves, a genre that is supposed to be taking the lead in including ADHD characters, and a little bit about some ADHD writers.  

Friday Done List October 23

I missed two days of work today to attend a family event--a pleasant one, not a funeral. I still have some cleaning up for that, because I don't travel lightly. And I have a lot of life things to do that I didn't do while I wasn't here.

What I'm getting at is that this is the kind of week when a Done List is really important. You can reassure yourself that you did something, no matter how small. Also, as the day for the Done List draws closer, you'll find yourself hustling to get a few more things done to add to it. An example? For goal one I resubmitted a story I might have wait until next week for but I wanted to look good on my Done List.

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Submitted the humor piece I talked about for three weeks. Now four, because I'm talking about it now.
• Received rejection on that humor piece.
• Resubmitted that rejected humor piece to another site, one that I have never submitted to before.
• Believe I worked a bit on the book chapter being revised into a short story.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Did some promotion for an essay published the end of last week.
• Did quite a bit of work on a blog post I hope to publish soon.
• Came up with another blog post idea! One that can become an essay to submit!
• Came up with still another blog post idea!

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Am considering a new agent to submit one of my books to. This came about within hours of me telling my cousin I wasn't doing that anymore, unless a name dropped into my lap. And that's sort of what happened.

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• Made some notes on this.