The Story Behind the Story: My First Publication of 2026 is...

 "I Educate Myself, Therefore I Act:" My Top 7 Heritage Month Reads in 2025! Published in Books Are Our Superpower. 

Getting this published was important to me, because my Heritage Month reading last year ended up being...ah, well, a little profound, is probably too highfalutin' a way of thinking of it. It was meaningful. I read some good stuff. I read a couple of authors I'd heard of but never read, and they were terrific. I read some authors I'd never heard of, and they were terrific, too. I read a genre I didn't foresee myself reading for this project, and it was terrific, too. I got to read a few books I'd had on my TBR shelf/iPad for a while, and that was was...you guessed it...terrific.

It was also eye-opening. I'm saying "eye-opening," but I could say "humbling." I saw myself as advocating for groups who are not part of mainstream white Anglo-saxon Protestant America by reading these authors from nonmainstream white Anglo-saxon Protestant America and writing about them. But these authors didn't need Gail advocating for them. They were already well-regarded, well-read, even award-winning writers. Who did I think I was?

At least, I ended up being a reader who enjoyed their work and told other readers they could enjoy it, too. A good use of time, and a great reading year.

What Am I Reading This Year?

I was also happy to get this essay published, because it wrapped up last year's reading. It was a conclusion, before getting started on something new.

The something new I'm getting started on is reading history. This year's reading project is, indeed, called Reading History. In fact, on this blizzardy Sunday afternoon, I'm going to go move my history books to a lower shelf so I can get to them easily and spend some time on the first history book I've been reading this year. 

More to come. 

Friday Done List January 23

I believe it's been a while since I've posted food pictures here. This one's  appropriate, because it illustrates what I was doing this afternoon instead of writing. Yup, I was making two kinds of soup and a stuffed gluten free bread with which to sustain life in case we lose power this weekend. While I was putting the second soup into the Instant Pot, I saw a Facebook post from our town indicating that this storm isn't expected to cause widespread power outages here in Connecticut. So I guess I will gain some writing time next week when I don't have to cook what I cooked today.

In better news, I got my first publication of the year today. I will write about that in another post. Maybe on Sunday during the storm, if I do, indeed, have power.

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

• Made 3 submissions. I've already met my objective for making 2 submissions this month.
• Have resubmitted one of the last two pieces that were rejected in 2025. 
• Updated my short-form marketing research spreadsheet, meaning I've done a little more lit journal reading.  
• Signed up for a writing workshop 
• Worked on the yogurt essay. This involved a little research in old cookbooks in my basement. 
• I had some problems with the submission of a  final Heritage Month essay to submit to Books Are Our Superpower. I think there's some kind of technical problem. And there was! I resubmitted with a new title, and voila!
• Updated my info on NetGalley and requested a book coming out in April that I'd like to use for The History Reader Project.
• My NetGalley request was approved! I have the egalley! 

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

• Did a couple of blog posts that weren't related to this Friday Done List.
• Promoted those blogs.
• Updated my 2026 Goodreads reading challenge. I've read two books!
• I set up a second flat file in my upstairs office. This will make an enormous difference in my life, won't it?

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Barely. But I have a spot for notes in that extra flat file!

My First 2026 Encounter with History

Today is the birthday of Ethan Allen, the most profane and hardest drinking noise to come out of pre-Revolutionary Connecticut. A legend in his own time, but not in ours.

Yet sometime in the 1990s while researching a book, I went into the late Briggs Carriage Bookstore in Brandon, Vermont, when it was in its first, smaller location, and said, "Do you have The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen?"  Jeezum Crow! They did! The bookseller went right to the shelf and put his hand on it as if he sold copies of it every day.

This past Saturday I was in Dakin Farm in Ferrisburg, Vermont, a store known primarily for ham, cheese, and pancake mixes, not books. What do I see in its little Vermont book area? You guessed it! The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen! Since I already have a copy, I didn't buy it, though I did get a book there on the nineteenth century prohibition era in Vermont. As well as a bottle of my favorite Vermont wine. 

Allen's book is what is known as a captivity narrative, which were popular in his time. They usually involved Europeans being held captive by Native Americans. The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen is about an "American" of European decent being held captive by Europeans. (He was a prisoner of war for around two years during the Revolution.) It's supposed to have been a bestseller when it was published in 1779.

Published in 1779 and still on shelves. Well done, Colonel Allen.

My The Hero of Ticonderoga was originally called The Narrative of Therese LeClerc, but the marketing people at G. P. Putnam's Sons thought that sounded like a nun's diary. Middle grade readers don't like nuns' diaries?

I plan to focus on reading history this year, so I'm delighted to have had this encounter with a historical narrative without even trying. 

I Don't Think the Retreat Week Bliss Will Be Lasting Much Longer

My yard today. Nice, eh?

Today was my first day back at work after returning from my annual reading and frolicking in the snow retreat. I also worked on trying to create a meditation practice and took a terrific meditation class last Thursday. Coincidentally, Thursday was the day I began to feel chill.

I made a submission today and tried to contact a Medium publication that rejected something I sent them before I left town because it has not responded in any way to a resubmission I made. What's going on there, guys?

The big thing I did today was file my claim as part of the Anthropic case. It was pretty simple for me, less so for a family member filing for a late relative who was a textbook author. Books classified as "education" require a lot more thinking for their claims.

I did some additional reading on the Anthropic case and realized that the court didn't rule against Anthropic on anything. The first part of the case it clearly felt that stealing books to train AI is fair use. The second part of the case involved Anthropic downloading books from pirate sites to use for training AI. I thought the court had ruled against them on that, but I was wrong. Anthropic continued to deny it had done anything wrong and merely settled out of court. All this talk about this settlement being the largest of its kind sounds good, but it diverts attention from the fact that the court case doesn't change much and authors still have no protection from AI companies going forth.

And on a Personal Note 

I have to start cooking again and sometime in the next couple of hours plan meals and make a grocery list so I can go out and restock this house tomorrow. On top of that, we had snow yesterday and last night, and it's four-thirty in the afternoon here and my plow service hasn't shown up yet. Not all is lost. They didn't come until four o'clock after the last storm. 

Still, there's a real possibility that I'll have to spend part of tomorrow cleaning the driveway as well as dealing with groceries. Glad I got some work done today. Though, you may have noticed, it was work that didn't involve new writing. 

I'm still feeling kind of laid back, but I'm not stupid. That can't last much longer.

Friday Done List January 9

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

• Added a new publication to the marketing spreadsheet. This one I'll consider for a submission later this month.
• Worked on an eating essay. Some baking and picture taking and some actual writing. 
• Finished the last essay I believe I'll be doing on my Heritage Month Project. 
• Submitted the above essay. It was rejected, because I used external links to support my points, and they only accept links to other articles from their publication. My first thought was, How unprofessional! My second thought was, This is how they control publishing essays with links to freak sites. I understand. I removed the links and resubmitted.
• Listened to Hillery Stone's Ted-ish talk on writing essays. She said a number of things about personal essays I already believe, so, of course, I liked the talk. I'd been looking forward to listening to it for a while, and it was well-worth my time. Relatively short, too. 
• Published a link to Mountain Lake Resorts on BlueSky, because it's getting to be that time of year. I'll be taking off soon for my reading and woods walking retreat, and MLR is a humor piece related to that experience.
• Attended a terrific OCWW workshop run by author Joseph Scapellato. A number of takeaways including...do multiple submissions for literary journals! Of course, this means having multiple literary journal markets appropriate to submit to. So, I'll be doing some lit journal reading on my reading and woods walking retreat.

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

• Wrote an unplanned blog post on marketing. This was one of those I'm-blown-away-by-what-I-just-read-and-have-to-write-about-it-things that doesn't happen as often as it used to.

Oh, My Gosh! Do I Even Recognize Social Media Marketing?

According to Watch for These 2026 Social Media Trends by Lacy Phillips at Jane Friedman big things happened in social media while I was working in the kitchen or meditating, doing a little yoga, or going for a walk. It's kind of unrecognizable.

I am of the writing group that needed to be careful about social media use. We're those people who aren't big enough to hire professionals to handle our social media for us, so we have to be careful about how much time we give to it because we're actually working at something else. 

Give this some thought: comic Leanne Morgan is supposed to have got her big break, because she hired some guys to do some social media marketing for her, not because she did it herself. She was writing material and performing.

For the average, more or less, writer, whatever we're doing for social media is never enough. Or, at least, it doesn't stay enough for long. We started with blogs in the '90s, then went on to Facebook, then went on to Twitter then side stepped to BlueSky. By that point, it was obvious that whatever you did wasn't going to be that useful for long, so you needed to think long and hard about what you did next because you knew you couldn't expect much.

I went on to Pinterest instead of Instagram, because I wanted something I could use for archived images and material from Original Content. Instagram appeared to be only for new material. That probably was a mistake. I don't think Pinterest has been that useful for me (though I did do it to collect images of clothes for characters I was writing about), but it's probably too late for Instagram. 

I was able to wrap my head around a few of the things Phillips wrote about in her Friedman article.

What I Might Be Able to Use from Phillips' Friedman Article:

• Write about yourself, not just your work, across platforms. I find this to be a crap shoot. Maybe you have to post about cooking without wheat a lot to get some attention? On the other hand, it's true that on Facebook my hundreds of friends are usually unmoved when I post about a new publication, but a core group comes out for travel and cooking pictures. Also, I posted an apron question on Facebook yesterday and got some good responses. Posted the same question on BlueSky where aprons evidently don't exist and no one understood what I was talking about. I'm not sure how much time I should be spending on writing about myself across platforms, even though I don't have that many platforms.
• Use keywords instead of hashtags. Aren't keywords hashtags without the hashtag?
• Pinterest is supposed to be coming back somehow. As I said earlier, I'm already on Pinterest, so I added an objective about working with that to my 2026 branding goal. I had been thinking for a while that I should do something there about my Medium publications, anyway. I should at least watch this movie on the subject. It lasts a whole hour!

Time Management Tuesday: Goals and Objectives for 2026

I very much enjoy thinking about what I'm going to do. I like it a lot more than actually doing what I thought about.

First A Word About Using Goals and Objectives with Done Lists

Usually, I introduce my goals and objectives post with a few sentences about the difference between a goal and an objective, a goal being what you're going to do, an objective being a task you do toward completing your goal. Oh, look. I did it again.

What I want to do instead/additionally, is say a bit about the significance of done lists. Done lists are often considered jokes, but they aren't. You aren't creating some kind of scam by writing down what you did to make yourself look good. You are keeping track of what you've done so you can decide what you need to do.

If you keep regular done lists, connecting them to your goals and objectives, you can also ensure that what you are doing has value because you are working on objectives and thus goals.  But it all starts with having goals and objectives in the first place.

Here are my goals and objectives for 2026. 

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

This was the main focus of my time last year, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

Objectives:

• Work on the starts made during December.
• Also, continue revising the chapter in my adult scifi book into a short story.
• Make two submissions a month. Anything. Anywhere.
• Resubmit the last two pieces that were rejected in 2025. I have places in mind
• Limit my reading of publications on the Medium platform to those I have followed and actually like. I waste a lot of time looking at articles directed to me by Medium that for the most part aren't of interest to me and aren't well written. This will be a timesaver, at the very least.
• Continue adding to the short-form marketing research spreadsheet that I may or may not have written about here before. You know, just because I haven't blogged about something, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 
• Take workshops on short-form writing. 
• Work on the yogurt essay, which involves baking. And eating. I like to write about eating.
• Work on one final Heritage Month essay to submit to Books Are Our Superpower.
• Begin The History Reader Project. This will involve reading history, promoting it here, and perhaps revising blog posts for submissions, just as I did with last year's The Heritage Month Project.

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

I'm turning this one down a bit, since it didn't do me a lot of good last year.

Objectives:

• Keep the short-form publications features on website updated.
• Attend virtual events for writers.
• Attend local events for local writers.
• Continue supporting local writers on Facebook by sharing their local public events.
• More writing for Original Content that can become the first drafts of submittable work.
• Dip into Original Content archive to update some topics that are still of interest to me.
• Look into whether I should be paying attention to Pinterest again, especially in relation to my publishing about food and children on Medium. I haven't touched my Pinterest account in years.
• There is a one-hour video for me to watch about Pinterest. Yikes.

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

Not much activity with this one, either.

Objectives:

• I have two leads on agent submissions for early in the year. They are somewhere on my desk.
• Use info I found in a Medium article to research Manuscript Wish List for agents. 
• In the event I find anyone through MSWL, submit 

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

Objectives:

• One of the main chachters in a nineteenth century botanist. Get serious about research in that area in order to define him.
• Get the characters seriously defined.
• Stop collecting research and start reading the research I've already collected.
• Read more historical fiction.

I Have Fewer Goals These Days

I noticed how few goals I've had the last couple of years. Certainly, I have fewer than I did when I first started creating formal goals and objectives thirteen years ago. In part this is due to cutting back on book-length writing and submitting. In part it's probably due to the recapitulation posts. Those make clear that many goals spread me too thin. I get more done when I plan to do less.

Friday Done List January 2

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

• Two rejections at the end of the year! On the upside, I believe that closes the book on 2025, everything I had submitted has either been published or rejected. On the other upside, I have a place in mind to submit both those manuscripts. On still another upside, I was rejected by what I would describe as better places. On the downside, of course, there was the part about being rejected.
• Got started on this year's goals and objectives, which you'll be seeing next Tuesday.
• I'm in the very initial stages of writing a piece on eating. I'm doing the baking I'll be writing about. As a result, I've totally changed the course of what this essay will be.
• Registered for a workshop being held next Thursday.
• I'm trying to line up my work plans for later this month, after I get back from Retreat Week.

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

• Did two blog posts this week, one of which I promoted.
• I've got a number of blog posts started, if you call a couple of sentences starting. There may be a little more activity here in the immediate future.