Friday Done List February 27

So, we had a blizzard last weekend. Lost power for 90 minutes. That led to a heat problem for a little while. I had to shovel snow a couple of times. Had a decent workweek in spite of all that.

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

• New essay, The Reading History Project: The "Our" in "Our Shared History" was published at Books Are Our Superpower.
• Worked a bit on revising a chapter into a short story.
• Cleaned some files while the power was out and determined that I had some work that was not going anywhere and threw it away. This is a good thing.

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

• Promoted The "Our" in "Our Shared History" on Facebook and BlueSky
• Wrote a Story Behind the Story post for the above essay and published it here on Original Content.
• Wrote a new Reading History Project post.
• Wrote still another blog post. 
• Promoted all the blog posts. 
• Continued taking part in BlueSky's 30-Day Women Writer Challenge in which you post a book you've read by a woman writer, no particular order, no commentary. I did one of these soon after I joined BlueSky. It was fun and gathered me a few followers. This has led to me breaking 400 followers on BlueSky. In case you're wondering, I've been on BlueSky for something like 15 months and just broke 400 followers, which is maybe a third or less of what I had on Twitter. 
• Signed up to attend a Zoom author presentation next week. The author involved is Dana Stabenow, who I've never heard of. But she's promoting a mystery set in the nineteenth century, and I can watch her without changing my clothes or leaving my house, so I'm in.

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

• Yesterday the Manuscript Wish List people ran an event on BlueSky that involved agents posting material they're looking for. I have the names of three agents I'll be submitting to next week.

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

• Worked thirty minutes on this.

Using My Blog as a Writing Journal is Probably Not a Good Idea

Winter forest bathing?

Yesterday I threw out an idea here about starting to use this blog as a writers' journal, a place to work on preliminary writing and drafts.

"...if you go back to the early days of lit blogging," I said, "writers sometimes did use blogs as journals. Even writing journals for experimenting with writing." 

It seemed like an artie bloggie thing to do, to say nothing of being time and energy efficient.

"It would be a multiplier," I said, "one action that meets two goals."

I've Thought Better of That 

Then I remembered that many literary journals consider material used in blogs as "published" and will not consider it for publication themselves. The Medium platform accepts previously published work. In fact, it appears that some people there publish the same things on Medium publications and their private Substacks.

So, there's no issue with me starting something here, revising it, and submitting it to a Medium publication. I could even just submit this post you're reading right now as is. (UPDATE: 3/10/26. This appears to be the case at Medium overall. Individual publications may have different guidelines, however. And they may change their guidelines, as is the case here, if you scroll down far enough. Another version is a best bet.) 

But most of the other places I submit to, no. I am not confident that even just working on something here and refining it elsewhere would be acceptable in those cases.

Why, Yes, I Am Obsessing About This

Nonetheless, I won't be working here on the winter forest bathing essay idea I came up with after posting about the subject on Facebook yesterday. Posting on Facebook is also considered publishing by some publications, by the way. 

This situation inspired a writing idea, but I won't say anything about it. I've got to go write it down in my private writer's journal, the one you don't see.

The Story Behind the Story: A Second Version That Refines a Concept

The Reading History Project: The "Our" in "Our Shared History" was published at Books Are Our Superpower on Monday. This was a combination and revision of two of my Original Content Reading History Project posts--"Thinking About History" by Sarah Maza and What I'll Be Reading in 2026. I wanted this essay to be an introduction to The Reading History Project and to cover Thinking About History, as well as a couple of other books while I was at it.

I did this type of rewrite regularly last year. I started with a blog post about a book I'd read for The Heritage Month Project and then did a second draft to create a newish essay to submit to BAOS. What I found was that the second draft often ended up being at least somewhat different and sometimes having a much different focus.

A Different Focus Tightens Up My Reading Plan for the Year

That was definitely the case with The Reading History Project: The "Our" in "Our Shared History."  While I do raise the question of "who is the "our" in "our shared history" in the blog post, I don't focus on exploring the "our" in "our shared history" with my reading until I get to the revision. That will most definitely change my thinking about what I read this year and how I write about it. 

In the original blog posts, I also write about reading as "activism." But in the revised essay, I write about advocacy, instead. Activism, to me, seems sort of vague. But advocating for the groups I read about is much more specific and will have an impact on my thinking and writing.

So What's Happening Here?

Using the same material or research in different ways is a traditional method of working for writers. You do a fictional treatment, you do an essay, you do an adult book, you do a children's book, all with the same basic idea or research. 

For my material to evolve the way it does between blog and essays means someone can read both versions and come away with something different. I'm good with that.

On the other hand, I feel as if I'm using the blog to publish first drafts. When I first realized this was happening last year, I was somewhat uncomfortable because, as I said, I felt as if I was publishing first drafts. 

However, if you go back to the early days of lit blogging, writers sometimes did use blogs as journals. Even writing journals for experimenting with writing. 

Now I'm wondering if I can do even more of that here. It would provide me with original content for the blog, but also material that could be used elsewhere. It would be a multiplier, one action that meets two goals. 

I will play with that idea.

The Reading History Project: "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard

 I am writing today about Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard even though I haven't read it. What I did do was watch Death by Lightening the Netflix limited series based upon it. The series is marvelous.

Both book and series deal with the assassination of President James Garfield, who is just a name to most of us, because he was shot a few months after his inauguration, lingering on for a while thereafter. In Death by Lightening Garfield is portrayed as an incredibly decent man. Charles Guiteau, his killer, is tragically unbalanced. Chester A. Arthur turns up, which was a surprise because I didn't know he was Garfield's vice-president. Here he is shown as realizing he's a pretty lousy character, but a lousy character with a shred of human decency.

Death by Lightening was well-reviewed when it was released.  I don't know how well it did as far as attracting viewers is concerned. The fact that we know how the story ends could have discouraged some people. I must admit I've never seen Titanic, because, well, everyone knows the ship sinks.

This story, as good as it is, might be just that, a good historical story. But the TV series does link its ending to something bigger than a tragic tale. Garfield has an interest in dealing with the patronage system used in his day but dies long before he can do so. After Chester A. Arthur becomes president, he does do something about it. 

Destiny of the Republic is also very well-reviewed. I've read it may cover more about Chester A. Arthur, with whom I am now a bit obsessed, and it may include more of the political repercussions of Garfield's death.

I suspect reading it is somewhere in my future.

Friday Done List February 20

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

• Finished an essay on the Reading History Project.
• Submitted the essay on the Reading History Project. 
• Did a very little work on a scifi short story.
• Took what was one of the two worst Zoom writing workshops I've ever encountered. The last writing prompt for it gave me an idea I'm liking though.

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

• Taking part in BlueSky's 30-Day Women Writer Challenge in which you post a book you've read by a woman writer, no particular order, no commentary. I did one of these soon after I joined BlueSky. It was fun and gathered me a few followers.
• Started updating a section of my website.
• Am now considering just redoing the entire website.
• Renewed my SCBWI membership even though I do no children's writing now. I do still have some children's book manuscript, one of which I submitted to an agent last month.

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

• Did some scene work. 

Friday Done List February 13

I am trying a new daily organizational plan to deal with my body falling apart, as bodies do, and it's worked great these first few days. I feel as if I've worked more, though not much new writing, and my desk is the cleanest it's been in ... maybe a year? Also ended up unexpectedly organizing a shelf. 

No, of course, this isn't going to last.

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

• I Was an '80s Tradwife was published last weekend.
• Submitted the yogurt essay.
• How Much Would My Spiritual Ancestors Have Spent to Save Some Yogurt (the yogurt essay) was published at Tastyble. I spent some time editing this piece, because Tastyble does real editing of their submissions, unlike almost any publication I've dealt with on Medium. One editor, in particular, is very impressive, and I greatly appreciate her work.  
• Finished a The History Reader post and published it here at Original Content.
• Began revising the first two History Reader posts to create an essay to submit.

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

• Promoted I Was an '80s Tradwife on Facebook and BlueSky
• Promoted How Much Would My Spiritual Ancestors Have Spent to Save Some Yogurt on Facebook and Bluesky
• Promoted The History Reader post on BlueSky. Skipped Facebook, because I've been promoting a lot of work there recently and getting little response. I don't get much response on BlueSky, either, but I don't know those people. 
• Updated the Goodreads blog with a post from Original Content.

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

• Submitted The Mummy Hunters to an agent I heard about through SCBWI.

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

• Well, no writing. But I did organize some notes.

The Reading History Project: "Thinking About History" by Sarah Maza

I wanted to start my reading history project with some reading about history, which is exactly what Thinking About History by Sarah Maza is. In my history journal (something I will write about here at some point) I describe the book as being about how historians do history, how it has been done in the past, and how the doing of history has changed. (What can we expect from a journal entry?) Maza also covers different types of historians, something that is a relatively recent development. 

I think I may be referring to this book off-and-on this year in relation to other books I read, but for now I'll touch on some of what Maza says about the "history of history," because I think it could help make sense of some of the present-day controversy over how we view history and what we consider to be appropriate history.

Saying Good-bye to the Good Old Days of Nineteenth Century History

I like the nineteenth century, myself. I see it as a period when a great deal was happening in various fields and a period when knowledge was appreciated. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was a period when the world was getting ready to transition into the twentieth century. Things were going to change!

Or maybe not.

According to Maza, in the nineteenth century practitioners of many fields of study were interested in professionalizing, and history was no different. Historians wanted their work to be considered scientific like the other academic fields. Maza says, "...scholars assumed that a scientifically examined source could yield only one meaning..."  That kind of uniformity is easy to understand because from the end of the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century history departments "were extremely homogeneous workplaces peopled by white male Protestant scholars from upper-class backgrounds." They tended to value the same kind of history--political and military, for instance, and focused on great men who, coincidently, were frequently white, Protestant males like them.  

But in the second half of the twentieth century, the academic world opened up as women entered colleges in greater numbers and the GI Bill brought nearly 8 million men from different backgrounds to campuses in its first twelve years. Some of these new people became historians who were interested in a broader range of topics: labor history, women's history, gay and lesbian history, and environmental history, for instance. You name the subject, it has a past that can be studied. 

In this period, "the history of things" also became important. Food ... clothing ... the natural environment... I am particularly interested in "things," and will direct your attention to Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser, which I liked. (Social history. That's another whole subject Maza addresses.) 

As long as we're on the subject of the history of things, I'll also mention The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage. 

These two examples illustrate that we are no longer talking "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities," which is how Maza says nineteenth and even early twentieth century historians thought of their field. 

You Can't Go Back to the Past, Folks

But "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities" may be how some people in the present do want to think of history. Over the last couple of years, we've been hearing talk of manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, concepts from the nineteenth century. There's also been talk of the present administration turning to eighteenth and nineteenth century laws to support its actions. Last year's Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History raised the question of just what truth and sanity American history should be restored to. Should we be turning to the nineteenth century for that, also, and looking, again, for the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities?

Oh, please, no.

While there are concerns right now about groups who had been lost to history being lost again if  present-day lawmakers are able to impose restrictions on public historical sites and schools, I think there's a limit to how far they'll be able to get with that. The reason? History without those groups is boring.

That's right, "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities" is boring. All the time I was studying history in college, I was hearing about how boring it was from people who didn't care for it. "Memorizing dates" was how it was viewed. To some extent the boring argument is true. What makes it boring is not the dates but that there's a limit to how much interest anyone can maintain in the leaders and political elites who had little to do with our ancestors' lives. We only care about the history of royal figures if there's sex and weird stuff involved. Would anyone care about Queen Victoria if she wasn't portrayed as having a love interest with whom she had a great many children? I think not.

Over the last half century, the past has become far more about how everyone lived than what a few people did. There's a circular aspect to history now, in my humble opinion. We see history now as the impact of individuals on events and the impact of events on individuals. All individuals. Many of these individuals are unknown to most of us because of their ethnicity, employment, gender, religion, and more, and thus they are very, very not boring.

History is a pandora's box and the lid has been opened. It's going to be very difficult for anyone to shut it again. Especially if we all keep reading.

  

The Story Behind the Story: Tradwife Lifestyle Parody

Odile on Unsplash

My first humor publication of 2026 is I Was an '80s Tradwife. Thank you to Muddy-um for the  acceptance. 

I started submitting this piece last October. Putting aside the whole humor-is-subjective business, I think there are a few reasons why it took a while for this piece to find a home.

• It may seem essay-like, and some humor sites don't publish essays. Even though I didn't submit it to any publications that openly state they don't publish essays, that still could have been a factor.
• Tradwives may be a timely subject that is no longer timely. I read a couple of articles late last year (after I'd written I Was an '80s Tradwife) indicating that some readers find the tradwife lifestyle unsustainable. Others associate it with a level of affluence not available to all. Editors may not be interested in this subject anymore.
• I Was an '80s Tradwife could be perceived as housewife or domestic humor, which may be of limited interest to some editors. Only Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck managed any level of success with that kind of humor, and it's been a minute since they've been writing. 

This was a piece I enjoyed working on and am glad to see it published.

Friday Done List February 6

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

• Finished writing the first Reading History post
• Finished reading first book for Reading History project
• Received two rejections, one of which was, well, painful. But the most important writing skill is sucking it up and moving on. So I sucked it up and moved on.
• Resubmitted one of the rejections.
• Finished the yogurt essay.
• Spent time on the yogurt essay images. It is very, very close to submission ready.
• I really wanted to take another writing workshop this week, but I had to accept that I just didn't have time.

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

• Published the first Reading History post.
• Promoted the above post.

 

The Reading History Project: What I'll Be Reading in 2026

Reading history is an interest of mine. It probably got started before I was reading much, when I was watching TV Westerns with my father and then gladiator movies that played late in the afternoon on one of the three TV stations we had access to in rural Vermont. Actual reading history started as a teenager, when I read my fair share of historical romance but also these enormous tomes on royal figures from centuries back and family stories that covered generations. 

A pivotal moment in reading history for me came in my freshman year of college when my History of Western Civilization professor told us why his license plate said "Bodo."  All his students were expected to know this. Bodo was a ninth century peasant living in St.-Germain-des-Prés. (That is all I know about St.-Germain-des-Prés. Bodo lived there.) He gets an entire chapter in Medieval People by Eileen Power, which I still own.

Gauthiers: Like Bodo but different

Bodo is all I remember from that class. What I got from the professor's license plate story was that history is not just about the great and mighty of this world. It is also about people who might have been my ancestors. People who were not at all great or mighty. Not even close.  

America's 250th Anniversary and Executive Order 14253

The United States is approaching its 250th anniversary, a good reason to focus on reading history this year. But another good reason might be the little historical brouhaha that came up last year after President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Please read it yourself, but some highlights:

"It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."

That paragraph ends with "Museums in our Nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history."  

"Ideological indoctrination" is a very loaded expression, and after reading the whole executive order, one might wonder who is trying to ideologically indoctrinate whom and with what ideology. Also, who is the "our" in "our shared history?"

Last year there were concerns about the present administration whitewashing history or reshaping it. The concerns continue, though they now have to compete with all the other concerns that have turned up since last March when Trump signed 14253.

Keep in mind that whatever is going on historically as far as the U.S. government is concerned, this particular order 14253 deals only with Federal sites. (History in schools is impacted by another, earlier executive order.) For now, at least, publishers, booksellers, and private museums are not touched.

That puts those of us who read history in a position, maybe not of power, but of advocacy. We can still read any work of history that we want to. We can support any type of historian we want to support, either by buying their books or spreading word of them. 

By reading as much history as we can, we create the possibility that we, and other history readers like us, will retain it no matter what else happens to it. By educating ourselves, we act. 

The Reading History Project

My reading history this year:

• Will be somewhat random. I want to enjoy this, and I have a lot of different histories on my TBR iPad.
• Will probably lean toward the nineteenth century, since that's a favorite period for me right now. Sorry Revolutionary Era!
• Will probably lean toward groups who were not in positions of great power. Remember my Bodo story. I have what is known as a cognitive bias. I tend to read things that play to my interests. I don't believe I've read a great dead white man bio since Fawn M. Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, originally published in 1974. It was controversial at the time, because it was the first popular biography of Jefferson to address his relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned. DNA would later prove Brodie right. 

Some upcoming books:

Thinking About History by Sarah Maza. I'm nearly done with this. An unusual book in that it is exactly what I was looking for.

Speaking of whitewashing, as we were recently, I've just started reading Black AF History: The Un-whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. 

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson will be published in April. I have a galley from NetGalley,  will be reading it this spring, and writing about it closer to publication.

That's the plan, folks. And don't I love a plan!