Change Just Over The Horizon?

I have been trying not to be distracted by politics; almost an impossibility. Worse is being distracted by digestive problems. I collected the following since roughly last Friday up to today. I meant to write more, but I needed what energy I had for my fiction.

Even so, it appears that Trumpism and its incipient fascism has come up against the fact you can fool all the people only part of the time.

It may be that I will finally get confirmation that Indiana wants change, what it lacks is a focus and faith to initiate that change. 

 Republican cash advantage showing up with late spending in Indiana legislative races (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Rep. Ilhan Omar fires back after Trump accuses her of using an alias

“Whenever the news turns bad, this creep reaches for one name: mine,” Omar said in response to the president’s social media post. “So let’s make it crystal clear. My name has always been Ilhan Omar. Maybe you should focus on what your VP’s real name is,” Omar said on social media Friday.

“Any other implication is a flat-out lie,” Jackie Rogers, spokesperson for the congresswoman, told the Minnesota Star Tribune on Friday.

Blatant political attack showing the Trump people's inability to make a blatant political attack work.

Rep. Ilhan Omar clarifies full name after federal raid, alias allegation (FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul)

FOX 9 also found her junior-year school picture from Edison High School in Minneapolis. The yearbook listed the 17-year-old as "Ilhan Omar."  

Americans' income hits record, with wide gaps mirroring Indiana disparities (Axios Indianapolis)

Inflation under Trump is only about half the rate under Biden. Voters are still just as mad. But corruption is up. I have one quibble with the article. Counting from when, everything else I have read is that inflation is about the same as when Biden lost the election.

Speaking of corruption, read Taxation And Representation (Sheila Kennedy).

Holiness and Hedonism: On the Contradictory Duality of American Power (Literary Hub) a reminder of our good, ugly, and bad history.

 

 

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Vacating?

 Three days of gastritis dominating my days. No writing today, other than catching up on this blog. A run to the grocery. MNaybe get my voting done. It could be a full afternoon. The morning has been pretty empty: some reading, a trip to the convenience store, a lot of wishing the pain would subside. Insomnia again has left me listless.

Do I need a vacation?

 

Readings from yesterday:

The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch by Thure Erik Lund review – is this the greatest living Norwegian writer? (The Guardian): not sure if this could be done in America but damn what if it could?

 When will we see the movie version: Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated for our times?

How many people read Sherlock Holmes nowadays? Stephen Fry: ‘Sherlock Holmes altered the course of my whole life’   (The Guardian).

So, KFC is a sign of the apopoclypse? Why the Broiler Chicken Is the True Symbol of the Anthropocener ( Literary Hub)

Not sure I should follow broiler chickens with Warm front and 70s for Halloween: How rare is that in Indiana? but why not?

Monday:

It took all day to write 8 pages & 2293 words. I have got to leave the green curry alone as well as the red. Add to this laziness that has overtaken me these past few months.

All together 72 pages. Taking a break tomorrow. Too tired to work on it now and need to do some other things.

Mostly, I kept trying to catch up on the sleep I did not have the night before.  I went to the convenience store.

Sunday:

Liturgy followed by a day of unsettled digestion. A little writing done, some emails deleted, and not much else.  

 Saturday:

Some writing done, a trip to the Farmer's Market, a convenience store trip, passed on going further from home. 

“A Heart’s Judgment Judged” rejected 

Thank you for submitting your writing to Passager. We are sorry that your work was not selected for publication this year. This reading period we received thousands of pieces and we loved far more submissions than we are able to publish. 

The editors must agree on all acceptances unanimously. Sometimes our decisions are based on how the issue is coming together, or what we published most recently, and not a reflection on the quality of your work.

Best of luck with your writing—we always hope you keep us in mind.

Sincerely,

Rosanne Singer, Mary Azrael, Johnny Sweeney

Passager Editors

And another rejected:

At this time, the editors at Gordon Square Review have chosen not to publish "After Making Landfall" in the next available issue of Gordon Square Review. 

While "After Making Landfall" was not selected for publication, please know that the editors carefully considered your piece. 

With gratitude,

Katie Strine

Gordon Square Review 

Friday was the group class. I still need to write up my notes. Two rejections arrived. I binge-watched Lupin on Netflix. Great show, and it looks like there will be more. Omar Sy! And a rejection:

Thank you so much for submitting to the 2026 Boudin Novelette Chapbook Contest. We received an exciting and overwhelming amount of submissions. The finalists are currently under consideration with our final judge, Robert Olen Butler. We enjoyed Plain Tales From The Flatlands a great deal, but I'm sorry to report that it did not make it to our semi-final round.

We're honored that you chose to submit it to us. We have no doubt you'll find the perfect home for this piece, and hope you'll consider submitting other work to our bi-monthly online journal.  

Best,

Vallie Lynn Watson, Editor, Boudin 

Dusti RW Levy, Managing Editor, Boudin Chapbook Contest

Stephanie Smith, Managing Editor, Boudin Chapbook Contest

‘Fjord’ Review - by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark ). This will probably not come to Muncie, but I would make sure to see it if I could. The review had me thinking of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.

New study traces van Gogh's famed 'Starry Night' to an actual night sky from 1889

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It Is A Moral Issue - Our Morals

 We can say politicians are crooks. After all, they willsay what they think we want to hear to get elected. 

I have thought for most of my life that at bottom politics are about morals, or as KH might say ethics, how we the citizens aim to treat one another. 

Politicians are then only tools for realizing how we are live together.

It is not the personal behavior of the politicians that matters; it is not their ethics that should dictate how society functions; but it is our morals/ethical viewpoint that matters.

How can we not condemn what is going on in Ohio? 

Ramaswamy Takes Full Credit for Most 'Disgusting, Pathetic Ad Ever Created in the History of Political Ads' (Common Dreams)

 JD Vance slams Republicans for criticizing controversial Ramaswamy ad

 Trump doubles down on Amy Acton criticism as Ramaswamy ad controversy swirls

Meet the Corporations Funding Ramaswamy's Vicious Attack Ad on Acton (Common Dreams ) - why not boycott them?

Ramaswamy Takes Full Credit for Most 'Disgusting, Pathetic Ad Ever Created in the History of Political Ads' (Common Dreams)

 How can we approve their corruption - are we a nation of thieves? 

The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal (ProPublica)

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Indolence

 Thursday: eye doctor and more worries about galucoma, lunch with MW at The Dumpling House, and an indolent afternoon.

Clockwork's "The Devils" rerelease reignites NC-17 passion is about a movie I have heard of and never seen and likely not to come close to me.

Unreasonable demands on writers is not limited to the United States: The Canadian Blacklists - by Brad Cran 

Hype: How I helped to make Elon Musk’s flying car

The only reason I want to subscribe to Apple's streamer: “Slow Horses,” Apple TV’s Best Show, Retains Its Pungent Relevance (The New Yorker)

Once upon a time I identified with Heathcliff: Depression & Rage: “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Wuthering Heights” (Thornfield Hall ).

 

Submissions made today

Blue Earth Review, CRAFT, LIT, Pithead Chapel, Solstice, Southeast Review, Whiskey Tit, Permafrost Magazine, 

 “The First Day of Feeling Free” rejected yesterday: 

We're grateful to have had the chance to read your work, but it's not quite a fit for us this time.

Thanks so much for considering Variant Literature as a destination for your work, and for supporting the magazine. We hope for your success in finding a home for this work, and for all of your creative endeavors. 

Sincerely,

The Editors

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Dangers of Tech, Knowledge, Being Manly, The Dangers of Pete Heseth

I worry this describes me: The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies (Aeon Essays). The PO thinks I am barricaded in my apartment when I am trying to get my writing done, but all that work keeps me pinned in a chair.

 

We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.

Algorithms that regurgitate patterns and recommendations can release us from the effort of exploration and disrupt the play and curiosity from which preferences are formed and understood.

Thankfully, I have nothing to do with social media.

When Kant remembered a book by David Hume he’d read years earlier, he was woken from what he called his ‘dogmatic slumber’. Kant had believed that pure reasoning could teach us every absolute truth about the world, but Hume had asked a question that that stumped him: what reason do we actually have to believe that the future will resemble the past? We may have seen the Sun rise a thousand times, but how do we know it will rise tomorrow? The belief that the future will resemble the past is, Hume argued, merely a kind of habit. Kant couldn’t answer Hume’s challenge and was silenced for a decade. 

When Kant finally broke his silence with the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he offered a radical answer. We can know the world only as it appears to our minds, and that is where our science sits; the noumenal world – the Ding an sich (the ‘thing-in-itself’) – simply lies beyond our reach. Causation is not something we discover in the world, but something the mind supplies for experience to be coherent at all. When we watch a cat push a glass off a table, we don’t see a bare sequence of motions and then infer, by some metaphysical principle, that the push caused the fall. No: we see the push as causing the fall. The causal structure is not a hypothesis we add to the experience; it is part of how the experience comes to us in the first place. It is in our minds already.

So far, so good: Kant has met Hume’s challenge, and the workings of science are intelligible: we are structuring our experiences. But the work is not done, for there remains mathematics, the very language in which the sciences are framed. Hume was content that arithmetic and algebra are merely the unpacking of definitions; that proving a theorem is like unpacking a suitcase to find an outfit. Kant could not leave it there. If mathematics were only such unpacking, how could it underwrite the sciences? Either the sciences tell us nothing new about the world, or something has gone missing from the account.

I never got around to studying Kant. Let me confess to a distrust of German philosophy.

What Dummett took from Frege’s work on logic was that the problems of mathematics are, at heart, problems of language. Where things had gone wrong, he thought, was that Frege had grounded his account in a mind-independent notion of truth. ‘In this respect (and in this respect alone),’ Dummett wrote, ‘Frege’s new approach to logic was retrograde.’ For Frege, logic answered to truth: the rules were good because they preserved something already fixed. Dummett turned this around.

Following Wittgenstein’s later thinking, Dummett argued ‘a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding.’ And understanding, he insisted, must be manifestable: whatever a competent speaker knows in knowing what a sentence means must be something she can, in principle, display in her use of language. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), Dummett gave this account of language, logic and reality its most sustained form. Our linguistic practices – the ways in which we are prepared to assert, justify and infer – determine logic. Logic, in turn, determines what counts as a fact, what counts as truth, and ultimately what we are entitled to regard as real.

Consider how a child learns the word ‘red’. We do not begin by telling her about light of a certain wavelength, or the metaphysics of colour properties, or the conditions that would make ‘this is red’ true. We point at things. We correct her when she calls a ripe tomato green; we approve when she calls a fire engine red. Over time, she comes to use the word as we do – and at that point, she understands it. There is no further fact, hidden behind the practice, in which her understanding consists. The understanding is the practice, competently exercised.

I am not smart enough to understand how this does not justify the pragmatism of William James:

The constitution of our language is our current practice for public discourse. As it is extensible in this way, what we claim as ‘true’ is not a fixed structure with a ceiling we are forever failing to reach, but something that can change. Gödel’s verdict never applied to mathematics, but only to some edition of the constitution. Within the Sandqvist system, we can attend to the extension systematically. Hilbert’s words outlive his programme: Wir werden wissen. We shall know. Not because the answers are waiting at the end of a ladder, but because truth goes exactly as far as we have built the rungs. 

The politics of masculinity at the end of the Roman republic (Aeon Essays)

Cicero (and other Roman writers), influenced by Greek philosophical explorations of virtue, might sometimes attribute to women virtue of a more generalised kind. But the Latin term virtus never completely lost its association with masculinity. Noting the word’s derivation, Cicero observes in his treatise on the management of emotions, the Tusculan Disputations:

the proper virtue of a man is above all courage, whose particular functions are contempt for death and pain. We must exercise these qualities if we wish to be virtuous, indeed if we wish to be men.

Closely concerned with philosophical approaches to dealing with grief and the fear of death, this treatise is also about what it means to be a man and how manhood can be forged in – and by – challenging circumstances. ‘For surely virtue [virtus] gives sufficient to make us live bravely; if bravely, sufficient too to make us high-souled and in fact never appalled by any event and always undefeated,’ he asserts. Similar concerns surface in other works he wrote around this time: in On Ends, he stresses the importance of self-control – which he defines as avoiding behaviour that’s ‘unmanly’ – parum virile.

   Hegseth’s future as Pentagon chief at center of lame-duck defense battle - if anyone should Cicero it is Hegseth, but it is also too late for him to understand how unmanly he is. The sooner that loon goes, the safer the country.

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Writers and Writing!

leaning out the tabs and email after having a bad few days of being a little ill and working on a new novel. I hope these might be of help.

Anna North on the Genre You Didn’t Know You Needed: Bogcore (Literary Hub)

Do You Need to Be Surprised? (Reactor) raises an interesting issue.

I don’t think of myself as a person who has strong feelings about surprise in general. I don’t hate or love surprise parties; I try to be adaptable when a day goes not as planned and surprises me, for better or worse. The only kind of surprise I actively avoid is the jumpscare, but that’s because I hate being scared. I’ve never been a reader who focuses on seeking out the new, the “original,” the thing I’ve never seen before, though I’m always pleased when I stumble across it. I tried to think of the most surprising book I’ve ever read, but it was harder than expected. I just don’t think about books that way. Does that mean the twistiest? The most shocking? The book with the most gasp-inducing moments? (I can do that: That scene in Code Name Verity, or the moment in The Saint of Bright Doors where something is understood about the narrator. I gasped, and turned back, and read both those scenes at least twice.) 

I tend to think instead about whether a story showed me something cool, or looked at a familiar situation in a different way, or was structured intriguingly, or had characters that I wanted to understand. Did the writing sing? Did I want to crawl into the world and never come out? 

Is newness surprise? If a book shows you something new, is that inherently surprising? Am I splitting hairs? Possible. Merriam-Webster’s third definition of surprise is “the feeling caused by something unexpected or unusual.” Perhaps my sense that “new thing” and “surprising thing” are not necessarily the same thing is not borne out by the dictionary. 

But even more important since I think it can apply far beyond the practice of writing:

This is the thing about Davies’ remarks: I don’t think he’s really talking about fans. It’s too generous a word for people who have learned a detail from a leak and decided that they know how it’s all going to go and they can’t be wrong about it. I don’t prioritize surprise in the narratives I find interesting, but I do prioritize a capacity for surprise in myself. A capacity for surprise is a willingness to be wrong. A willingness to be wrong is, one one level, a willingness to find joy and delight and meaning where you didn’t expect it. On another level, it’s the only way I see to move through this world: to learn, and change, and keep doing both.

Yeah, think about that.

 And back to technical issues, have a look at How to format a book manuscript (Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing).

Literary agents and the various professionals you will work with throughout the process will absolutely view your manuscript as a proxy for your overall digital fluency. Being bad with computers is not necessarily a total dealbreaker, but there are more demands on authors than ever, and it could hurt your chances.

There isn’t an ironclad industry standard format for manuscripts that’s as exacting as, say, a Chicago Manual of Style. Instead, there are a mix of “must haves” and “some people do these things.”

What I’ll cover in this post:

• Why you shouldn’t mimic the formatting of a finished book
• Manuscript formatting must-haves
• Optional manuscript formatting
• A sample manuscript with proper formatting

Talent Isn’t Everything (Writing Forward)

Plenty of things can hold talented writers back from success:

• Some people only write when they feel like it.
• Some can’t accept criticism or stick it out through revisions and tedious or unpleasant phases of a project.
• Some refuse to learn new skills and practice the craft.
• Some give up too easily or drop projects to chase after newer ideas that seem more exciting.
• Some lack discipline, which encompasses just about everything else on this list.

Notice a theme? Discipline, not talent, is a more reliable path to success.

 On Seeking Validation...and Something More

During our session, Katie did something unexpected: she shared her screen with me and opened a spreadsheet she started 25 years ago to track her submissions. She scrolled through quickly to show me every line that says “Rejected.” She laughs that her relationship with literary rejections is one of her longest-standing relationships.

For every prestigious acceptance she’s earned over the years, there are countless rejections that came before those. She shared a story about how she and her fiction-writer husband used to keep a “Rejections Jar” in grad school where they put a one-dollar bill in for every rejection they received. When the jar filled up, they took themselves out to dinner.

The 5 Ingredients You Need to Write Subtext in Fiction (Helping Writers Become Authors )

Since the whole idea of story subtext is that you’re not supposed to look at it in the direct light of day, writers often get the feeling they’re supposed to tiptoe around their own stories’ subtext, never looking at it.

This is exactly what you shouldn’t do.

It’s true you’re not going to give your readers a direct look at your subtext, but you absolutely must be thoroughly familiar with it. The subtext must exist—the iceberg must be under the water—if the story on top is going to have any chance of floating.

Create your story’s subtext deliberately. This requires an absolute understanding of your characters’ backstories, motivations, and goals, as well as a firm grip on the world around your characters. This doesn’t mean you have t0 know all of this right away; it may be something you discover as you uncover the shape of the story for yourself.

 

Terms Publishing Assumes You Know (by Kristen Weber)

Practice makes some new content--Dey (FreedomFiction.com on Patreon)

Processing: How Adam Wilson Wrote Fail Sons (Counter Craft), an interview on writing process and ideas.

Yes - 

Point being, I’m a firm believer that people’s experiences of art—films, books, music, etc.—are as formative as any other experiences, and it’s precious and dishonest to pretend otherwise. In Fail Sons, specifically, Scott is a former magazine editor, and his midlife crisis is connected to his newfound feelings of obsolescence. It’s not just that he’s out of a career, but that he’s spent his adult life building a cultural knowledge base that seems to have been rendered worthless by things like recommendation algorithms. In the book, his constant cultural references tend to fall on indifferent ears, and I think that among many other things, Fail Sons contains a comic but earnest lament for a social language that’s quickly going extinct.  

A rejection that came in on 10/14:

Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "The Unintended Consequences of Art" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.

Sincerely,

Sequestrum

 

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Trouble in Mind

Yesterday, I had another of my days where I had no interest in going anywhere and I did not. Not to the grocery store or to Vespers. It carried over a bit to today, and I did not make make Matins.

The 10 Most Controversial Books of All Time, Ranked - agree with a couple and disagree with #1, but I also think the headline does not completely match the list. Any thoughts?

What I did accomplish was submissions: 

Short Story | Palisatrium | Substack,  The Temz Review, Press Pause Press,  - “The First Day of Feeling Free.”

Bourbon Penn, Short Story, Long, and APRICITY Magazine got a slightly edited version of “The First Day of Feeling Free.”

 I intend to do more this morning. I need to justify my existence somehow.

And a rejection: 

Thank you for trusting the novel/novella reading team at Split/Lip Press with your book! We have received your submission and look forward to reviewing it over the next few months. We intend to reply to all manuscripts no later than December 15, 2026—if you have not received a response by 12/15/26, please check your spam filters before querying on the status of your manuscript since Submittable responses are sometimes mistakenly flagged as spam (and we don't want that!).

Sincerely,

jonah wu

Novel/Novella Editor, Split/Lip Press

Oh, I did read this great short story:  “Dipshits” by Kirsti MacKenzie - Short Story, Long.

 I had a doctor's appointment and then time running CC around. Right now, very dissatisfied with my choices for breakfast, so off to Payless. Protein is needed.

 

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