Friday Done List

 Well, I haven't been blogging this week. Have I done anything at all?  

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

• I worked on some of the pieces I started during December.
• I made two submissions.
• Received a rejection.
• Resubmitted the rejected piece.
• It was rejected within a couple of hours. If you have been following things here, yes, it has been a rough few months.
• I worked on revising my last annotated reading post, since I've published a couple of those at Medium, directly myself, not to a publication.
• Instead of publishing the most recent Random Reader article to Medium on Monday (I've read that's a good day to publish), I queried a publication to see if it would be interested in that type of work. I received a reply that the editor had added me to the pub's writer list, meaning I could submit.
• I did some more work on revising it, making it appropriate for a publication and submitted it. A few hours later, I received a response telling me it wasn't appropriate for the publication. I would have thought he would have said that when I queried him, saving us both some effort. I'm guessing he doesn't read queries, adds everyone who contacts him, or has some kind of automated response set up that, again, accepts everyone as a writer. Doesn't that mean inappropriate stuff is submitted that he then has to read and not use? We're about managing time here, folks! That doesn't seem like a good use of it.   
• I have also been wading through essays and short stories that I've bookmarked.
• God help me, I was thinking of starting a Substack project. The little bit of research I've done suggests that that place is far more complex than Medium, and I found the learning curve there a little steep.
• To end this on a positive note, I have an objective this year of making 2 submissions a month. I've made 7 this month, with one resulting in publication. Not an acceptance to submission ratio I'm crazy about, but it's there, nonetheless.

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

• Followed a few new people on BlueSky and Medium and got a few new followers in each place, as well. Not necessarily the same people I followed.
• Got the side bar of this blog updated with BlueSky link. And, what's more, I believe I can do that myself now, and I have some things I want to do there.
• Got started on some reading for Black History Month and did some research on other books I want to read this year to support heritage months.
• Got started on an updating the website with work I've had published the last few months.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• Took part in my first BlueSky pitch. While no agents or editors noticed (I don't know if many are there), I did get more shares than I used to get on X. So that is both gratifying and helps build connections with people on BlueSky.
• Submitted 143 Canterbury Road to an agent.

Goal 4. Play With 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Name Now, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• Did a little outlining. Named a couple of secondary characters. Continue to read a history book dealing with my setting and characters. Think maybe religion should become involved, because everyone likes to read about that.

Does It Seem To You As If It's Been A Long Time Since I've Published Something? Because It Seems That Way To Me. A Story Behind The Story.

Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels

 Today my first humor piece of the year, Trad Parents: Learn How to Go Back to a Simpler, Happier Time  with This Sample of Titles From my Blog was published at Frazzled. 

As I mentioned just yesterday, I am freaked out by trad wives. Being old as mud, I recall the total woman period. So, I believe trad wives will go the same way total women did. We shall see. 

I don't recall the total woman thing being as rooted in nostalgia as trad wives are believed to be. I have a great distrust for nostalgia, perhaps because of my interest in history. Nostalgia became my jump off point for this humor piece.

If trad wives could be nostalgic, why couldn't other groups? The first one I thought of was trad parents. What would turning to, and embracing the past, mean for them? Giving up birth control, maybe? This parody raises the question of what the trad parents here are really nostalgic for...a past they never knew or a past with birth control?

Notice that I mention birth control three times in Trad Parents. That's the rule of three. It's used in many kinds of writing, humor writing being just one of them. 

Some Annotated Reading January 23

This annotated reading thing...it's becoming a reading journal. Only I am now reading so much short-form writing I can't possibly write it all up here.

Books

I am just full of thoughts about The Guest List by Lucy Foley. First off, I must say that as a reader I am not a fan of alternating points of view, especially when there are several of them and every point of view sounds like the others. In fact, I recognized the first couple of chapters of The Guest List, because I'd started to read it before and gave up on it. Probably because of the p.o.v. switches. This time I stuck with it and ended up staying up until 2:15 AM a few nights later to finish reading it. Didn't have to fight sleep for even a minute. This thing has a number of surprises that are of the best kind...surprises that you realize make all the sense in the world because they are so intricately set up. Additionally, I had nearly finished the book when I realized it has a structure that I have been thinking of using if I end up writing another novel. And, finally, rich kids are freaking sociopaths, aren't they? And they're only marginally better when they grow up.

Short-Form Writing

And She Had Been So Reasonable by Rachel Bolton in Apex Magazine. This story definitely grabbed me, I think because the narrator is speaking directly to readers and there is a feeling of reality until the end.

Small Rebellions: Prose Poems by Bruce Holland Rogers in Flash Fiction Online. I have written exactly one prose poem, which is why I was drawn to this essay about prose poems.

I liked Do You Speak Indian? by RealStories in Ellemeno very much. It's the kind of story that opens a person's mind to other cultures.

I don't recall how I came upon Benjamin Woodard's writing, but what I've read of it is terrific. I haven't been able to read everything but some things I've enjoyed:

• Intimacy at Gooseberry Lit Magazine.
• Everyday Miracles in Bull. 
• Bump in the Night in The ASP Bulletin

I'm trying to read more traditional length short stories this year, and Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM by Rebecca Roanhouse at Apex Magazine is a stand-out.

Yes, trad wives do freak me out. Trad Wives Are Thriving in the Post-Dobbs Era by Morgan Jerkins in Mother Jones. Personally, I take a "this, too, shall pass" attitude toward them, but, yeah, I may be wrong.

I did some reading at Bending Genres, because I'd submitted a piece of creative nonfiction there. Bending Genres published me in the past, though it has had no interest since then. My most recent submission came to nothing, too, though I didn't know that when I read the following:

• A Fallibility of Hoopoes by Patricia Newberry
• Snakeskin Road by Douglas Cole
• Deciding by Marie Hoy-Kenny

Humor

Conditions That Must Be Met Before I Can Do My To-Do List by Viktoria Shulevich in Slackjaw. I know this feeling.

Don't Have Time For Small Talk--Why Do You Hate Your Mom by Kelly Matheis in Frazzled. Fortunately, I don’t get out much, because I’ll never be able to hear questions like she’s talking about without bursting out laughing. Matheis also has a fun piece on how much she hates Connecticut. Don’t hate it here, but the place is full of itself. For no good reason. 

Looks as if I went on a little Emily Kling reading binge:

• The Wedding Vows of Someone Marrying Their "Best Friend" by Emily Kling in McSweeney's. I love this. Both the concept and the structure.
• A Member Of The Donner Party Responds To It Being Called A "Party" by Emily Kling in Slackjaw. Incongruity humor, folks.
• What I Said To My Boyfriend On Saturday During A Fight Vs. What I Said One Hour Before His Weekly Therapy Session On Friday by Emily Kling in Slackjaw. Notice the build-up in this one.

How Gail Came to Leave X. Because Everyone Wants to Know That, Right?

We're finally putting up my BlueSky info both on my website (done) and here at the blog (not sure when that will be happening) this week, so it seems like a good time to officially tell people I left X two months ago. And, yes, I'm on BlueSky.

For A Long Time, I Didn't Have a Big Problem with X

X goes up in flames. Pixabay at Pexels

I often heard people talk of ugly stuff going on on X, some of those complaints coming from people
who had never been near it. I didn't see a lot of attacks on others in most of my time there. I had to go look for that kind of thing, it didn't usually turn up on my feed. For example, I only know who catturd is because he(?) was trending once, and, of course, I'm going to go see why someone who calls themselves catturd is trending. (Can't recall now.) But just on my feed, I didn't see a lot of unpleasantness.

That was probably because of the way I'd curated my experience there. By the time I left, I was following around 1,500 people and had about 1,200 people following me. They were primarily children's writers, other types of writers, history people, litbloggers, librarians, literary agents, book people. Most of them were there, like myself, to promote their work. Evidently, they were not the type of people who engaged in name calling on social media. What I saw from them were announcements of new publications or reviews or that an agent or a journal was opening for submissions. I saw newsy type things about problems in publishing companies and literary agencies. This, for me, was legit water cooler stuff.

Additionally, over the last year or two, no other viable alternative to X was presenting itself. I'd see people talking on Facebook about joining this platform or that platform to get away from X, but they came to nothing and soon people were moving on to something else. I just couldn't spend time going from place to place. 

So I stayed at X where I could get info and promote my short-form writing.

A Big Change Came the Morning After the Election

The morning of November 6 an enormous change came to my X feed. It was like watching an on-line street riot. People were incensed, crazed over the outcome of the election. The two standouts for me were:

1. A woman who filmed herself shouting into a camera as if she were railing at Trump supporters, telling them what was going to happen to them because they voted for Trump. She wasn't threatening them. She was yelling that they had doomed themselves. Then she posted her rant on X. No, I don't know what she thought she was going to gain with that. The Trump people had won. What could they possibly care about what a random naysayer had to naysay?
2. A guy who announced that he'd just called his Trump-loving mother and told her that when her Social Security was cut because Trump was president, he was not going to lift a finger to help her. Maybe he got a lot of support for that. I don't know. I didn't stick around to look.

Was this politics? I wondered. What is politics, anyway? I looked the word up. It's either the workings of government or other institutions or discussion of ideology related to same. I guess telling the world that you've just bitched out your mother because of whom she voted for might fall into one of those categories, but, if so, it certainly lowers the level of political discourse.

Things calmed down some after 48 hours, but the place was not the same. I was seeing less professional discussion and more the-sky-is-falling kinds of things that were not necessarily well informed or offering any thoughts on how to move forward. I wasn't the only one who saw the change. I kept seeing tweets saying things like "Where are all the writers?" "Where are the writers?" "Did everyone leave?" "Is anyone left?" 

Writers, the people I wanted to see, were abandoning the place. I held on, though, because I wanted my publishing news and, in the past at least, my work had received some attention there.

AI Raises Its Ugly Head

Towards the end of the election period, we started hearing that X was going to allow AI to train on anything posted there. That sounded a little bit like urban legend to me. I'm big on looking things up and found that, no, it was not urban legend. I do take issue with companies helping themselves to the creative output of others in order to train a computer system to pump out its own bland and pretty much unnecessary "work." I have, for instance, stopped submitting to a Medium publication that uses an AI editor. (In addition to being AI, it's a pain in the ass to work with.).

Then, while taking a writing workshop, I learned that artificial intelligence uses tremendous amounts of energy, which I had totally missed. That was the straw that broke the X camel's back for me. I am not a major environmentalist. We're talking here someone who has a three-section compost bin and a pollinator garden, not someone who lives off the grid. But I don't see how artificial intelligence is doing anything at this point to justify that kind of environmental impact.

Maybe someday AI will be responsible for doing something in the area of science that will enhance human life. But for now, it is primarily generating mind-numbing music for YouTube to broadcast with those creepy fake pictures and allowing search engines to steal info from websites in order to form shallow answers to user questions. It allows poor writers to quickly generate more poor writing and flood the Internet with it. 

In Conclusion

Between my personal X echo chamber being shattered and X becoming part of the AI invasion, I just couldn't justify staying there or, yes, spending valuable time there. Also, leaving was easier, because what appeared to be a workable alternative had finally turned up. BlueSky.

So, I'm over there now, and at some point, I hope to do a post here about my experience skeeting. 

Friday Done List

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

• Since my last Done List, I finished the Advent project on December 25. I didn't go through the whole month, because it was an Advent projection, so it ended on the 25th. Actually, shouldn't an Advent project end on the 24th?
• Worked on three humor pieces from my December starts.
• Received a number of rejections at the end of the year. 
• Had one last publication just after Christmas. 
• Made my first submission of the year. So half-way to my objective of making 2 submissions a month!
• Got my first rejection of the year. Do I have an objective for rejections? Let me look. No, I do not.
• Read a number of pieces of flash fiction and humor. 

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

• Did six blog posts, counting this one.
• Promoted some of the blog posts in two places.
• Worked on two blog posts to post the week after Retreat Week. (Which is next week.)
• Worked on increasing followers on both Medium and BlueSky.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• I could have made a submission this week, but it would have been a struggle, what with getting ready for Retreat Week. I don't feel I'm being down on this experience to say that the chances of an agent being interested are not so great as to make it worth struggling. I'll do it when I get back when I don't have to struggle. 

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

• I watched a couple of videos produced by the Rutland Historical Society. One of them, related to French Canadians in the area in the nineteenth century, has fired me up some more for joining Ancestry.com again. Who has time for that? 
• I'm reading a nineteenth century historical mystery.

Why, Yes, I AM Grateful For All The End Of The Year Rejection, Which Has Continued Into This Month

My retreat reading spot

I work on gratitude with some of the younger members of the family. It used to be that gratitude was admired because lack of gratitude was perceived as ugly. Selfish and greedy. It turns out, though, that gratitude is an important part of spirituality. It's an important part of happiness. I think it's part of the Buddhist thing about unhappiness being caused by desire. Lack of gratitude, always wanting more, is not a very happy state. Finding something to be grateful for, like the headache you had yesterday went away on its own or the gluten free blueberry pancakes you made Monday turned out great, is significant.

So, yes, I AM grateful for the seven rejections I received in December and the two I received yesterday within fourteen minutes. I'm also grateful that the two pieces published in December didn't do well.

And Why? 

We have had many, many years...so many...when family members have died in December. Or they've been dying in December. Or they've been waiting for medical tests to see if they're dying or facing a hellish year to avoid dying. Except for a seven-year-old who spent the evening in a pediatric ED waiting to see if he had appendicitis, we had none of that this year. And that boy discovered Captain Underpants while watching a CU movie while waiting for his test results, so he probably feels he got some gain from the experience.

So, if me taking a number of rejection bullets for the family meant I was able to change our end of the year experience, I am happy to have done it. And, damn it, don't anybody try to tell me that life is random, and all that rejection was meaningless, like life, and that I didn't make a meaningful sacrifice, because I did, I tell you. I am grateful. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Retreat Week Is Next Week!

I am definitely looking forward to retreat week, though. A retreat week in which all I'm escaping is rejection and can get over that with reading and walking or snowshoeing and more reading and meditation and more reading. Ommidy omm ommm. 

I spent some time this morning revising one of my December writing starts, I've written this blog post, and I'm going to be spending most of the rest of the day prepping for retreat. Because, man, getting ready for retreat week is a lot of work.

For which I am grateful.

Time Management Tuesday: Goals and Objectives for 2025

I have a number of Facebook friends who each choose a word to guide them for the new year. That just isn't enough for me. I don't need guidance. I need to be told exactly what I'm going to do. That is what goals and objectives do for you. That's why they're significant for time management. Goals and objectives are how we plan to use our time.

Once again, goals are what we plan to do. Objectives are the individual steps
we are going to take in order to meet the goals. I'm doing something a little different with the goal statements this year. I'm using some verbs instead of just phrasing them as topics. I've always used verbs in the objectives, but I think they should be in the goals, as well.

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

This will be the main focus of my 2025 work.

Objectives:

• Work on the starts made during December.
• Make two submissions a month. Anything. Anywhere.
• 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.
• Focus on short-form reading during Retreat Week, which is coming up soon.
• Expand my reading of publications on the Medium platform, looking for new sites to submit to.
• Take workshops on short-form writing.
• Spend more time with essay Facebook group. Really. 
• Revise a chapter in my scifi adult book as a short story.
• Submit that scifi story, of course. It should go without saying, but these are objectives, so I'm saying it.

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

I'm making this a more important goal this year. The point being to broaden readership and create an identity as a short-form writer.

Objectives:

• Keep the short-form publications features on website updated.
• Continue with the Annotated Reading posts on Original Content, which support other writers.
• Continue promoting the Annotated Reading posts on BlueSky, which both supports other writers and connects with them.
• 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.
• Attend virtual events for writers.
• Attend local events for local writers.
• Continue supporting local writers on Facebook by sharing their local public events.
• Update website and blog to feature BlueSky instead of Twitter.
• 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.

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

This is way down in my goal list this year. I have the manuscripts done, so I'm not going to forget about them. But they're no longer my big focus.

Objectives:

• Submit to an agent if one catches my attention.
• Submit this month to an agent who has already caught my eye.
• Follow agents on BlueSky. I have not done this since moving to BlueSky. That's how iffy I feel about pursuing this goal.
• Take part in BlueSky pitches. I'll be missing the first one next week while on retreat.
• Pay attention to agents featured in SCBWI's monthly publication.

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.
• Continue using the organizational system of the fun stuff research that I managed to create the end of last year. 
• Focus on creating characters.
• Focus on more plot points.
• Maybe write some bits and pieces.
• Read more historical fiction.

I See a Change

Back when I first started doing this, I had many more goals. Was I doing more back then? I don't think so. I just didn't do some of those goals. I read somewhere recently that it is much better to do less and do it well. I would not say that I do things "well" when I concentrate on fewer goals, but I am sure I do things better when I concentrate on fewer of them. 

Some Annotated Reading January 2

My first Annotated Reading of the new year. Though, of course, this is all December reading. I'm working on increasing my short-form reading. Relax. I'm not going to be posting about all of it.

Books

The List by Yomi Adegoke is one of those books I can't remember hearing about, but I ordered it through Libby, it turned up after a while, and I read it! An enjoyable read with some depth to it. Ola Olajide and Michael Koranteng, a well-known and admired couple on social media in London, are weeks away from getting married, an expensive event with relatives coming in from foreign countries. Then Michael's name turns up on a list of abusive men posted anonymously on-line. Michael can't prove he's innocent of the charges without revealing some other negative things about himself. The guy is not pure as the driven snow. Ola is in a particularly difficult situation, because she's a journalist who would normally be all over a story like this, supporting the anonymous women behind The List. Both characters are torn apart by the claims. Now, there is a reveal here that blew me away, as I'm sure it was supposed to. I don't want to spoil your reading experience, so you will hear nothing more about it from me. 

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin is described as a "modern day Mulim Pride and Prejudice," which is what drew me to it. There are enough P&P connections to make it an enjoyable read for people who like that sort of thing. (I do.) I've also seen it described as a Mulim romcom. As I've said many times before, I'm not that fond of contemporary romance, because I need more than someone-meets-someone-and-they-fall-in-love-after-a-lot-of-contrived-roadblocks. I need a historical novel or, better yet, a historical novel with dead bodies and a murderer to find. Ayesha at Last, though, did provide me with more, though not the more I usually look for. A romance set in another culture definitely has something more to offer. Also, these Muslims live in Canada. I'm no authority on Canada, but I have been in a Tim Horton's and loved these guys heading over to one regularly. Also, Algonquin Park is mentioned and, guess what? I've been there! Once! So, yes, this was a good read for me. 

Short-Form Writing

I was struck when I read about The Tiffany Problem, described at the Dictionary of Medieval Names frim European Sources, because the Georgette Heyer novel, set in the early nineteenth century, that I read recently had a character named Tiffany. Yes, it was a little off putting. But evidently realistic. By the way, author Jo Walton named The Tiffany Problem. She also coined the expression Suck Fairy.   

Dead dogs are a thing in children's literature. A cliche even. You see a dog on the cover of a kids' book, and it's probably going to die, if it isn't dead already. So I was struck by My Dog Died and It Was Super Awkward by Andrew Knott in Grief Book Club, because it was a dead dog story from an adult viewpoint. The kids were not there to learn some important life lesson, as so often happens in children's dead dog stories. 

Only six years late reading V.E. Schwab's "In Search of Doors" Tolkien lecture. I loved the whole door thing. Also loved her standing up to the guy about reading Tolkien.

Why I Quit Teaching at the Villain Academy by Tina S. Zhu in  Flash Fiction On-line. A flash story in the form of a numbered list.

Absence by Mike Fox  in Fictive Dream. Not sure why what happened happened, but I was expecting it.

Wired Declares 47% of Medium Content as AI Slop by Susie Kearley in Never Stop Writing. I wonder if the rate of AI is really that high or if AI sounds like a lot of on-line writing and whatever they used to test can't tell the difference. Little detail, no distinct voice, usage errors, and spelling mistakes. 

Why 'Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel' Still Charms All Ages by Janice Harayda in Lit Life. I have an interest in Mike Mulligan. It only came about recently.

According to my Goodreads account, I read Joan Aikens' Wolves of Willoughby Chase last year and gave it a four-star rating but no review. I didn't mention it here, which suggests I wasn't blown over by it. I read One of the most beloved writers of all time: the genius of Joan Aiken at 100 by Amanda Craig in The Guardian because I read her historical romances as a teenager. Yeah, I read a lot of that back in the day.

Humor

I noticed some humor pieces recently that were very much recalled life experience with a humorous twist. It wasn't working for me. The following did.

I'm the Random Five-Year-Old at the Playground Who's Going To Follow You and Your Toddler Around All Day, So Get Used to It by Nick Gregory in Frazzled. In my humble opinion, good child humor (but for adults) needs to have a voice and not be too close to reality. This does both those things.

Best Dad in the World Power Rankings by Aaron Crown  in Frazzled. Again, I like some attitude. I like brevity, too.

Terrifying Two-Sentence Parenting Stories by Jen Dee also in Frazzled. This one won me with the title.

Common Hangover Cures That Won't Work Because You're Over Thirty by Richie Zaborowske in Jane Austen's Wastebasket. Again, voice. And I like the short bits created with subtitles.

I Am Deeply Committed to This Work Unless I Can Quit by Justin Courter in Jane Austen's Wastebasket. I need to find something funny immediately, and I do here. Additionally, this is fantastic incongruity humor.