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.

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.