Literary & Writing Stuff

 

7/1/2026 Submissions of “After Making Landfall”:

The Plentitudes

Toronto Journal

The Roost  

And of “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984”

Seven Story Publishing 

Today's rejections:

Thank you again for submitting 'The Unintended Consequences of Art' for consideration by The Future Fire. The editors have read this work and after some discussion we have decided not to take it for publication.

We'd like to thank you again for thinking of us with this piece, and wish you the very best with your writing in the future.

Djibril 

Press Blog: http://press.futurefire.net/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thefuturefire.bsky.social

 

***

 

Thank you for sending us "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984." Unfortunately, we do not have a place for it at this time. However, we appreciate the opportunity to read your writing and your interest in Peatsmoke.

We hope you find a good home for your work elsewhere, and wish you the best.

Cheers,

Wendy & Bess

-- 

Wendy Wallace and Bess Cooley

Editors, Peatsmoke: A Literary Journal

***

We are grateful that you trusted ANMLY with "After Making Landfill," however, our readers felt that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will be unable to publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors
http://www.anmly.org 

***

Thank you for submitting to Ploughshares. We have decided not to include your submission in an upcoming issue, but please be assured that "After Making Landfall" was carefully read.

Editorial decisions at Ploughshares are often informed by our vision for future issues, and as a result, we unfortunately must reject quality submissions more often than we'd like. Thank you again for the opportunity to consider your work.

For future submission opportunities, please note that our Emerging Writers' Contest is open each year from February 1-March 31 and our Regular Reading Period is open from June 1-November 15.

Sincerely,

The Ploughshares Editors

Good advice: Advice for older writers. Nathan Bransford has a newsletter, I think it is useful and educational about the publishing process.

 The Creative Resistance - by Joe Ponepinto ( Beyond Craft) pokes back at my AI bias. Having found much to my benefit from this Substack, I paid attention.

He noted, “Based on my experience teaching and lecturing across the world, the Creative Resistance is strongest in North America, much less dominant in India, and still less in China and Korea, with Europe somewhere in between. When I taught a class on AI and creativity in Seoul last summer, with students from across Asia as well as Latin America, they had a single concern: please teach us how to use these tools effectively. The only person calling for creative resistance was an American student who had strayed into the class.”

That seems pretty typical of American politics as well.

Maybe that’s the real debate. Many people in the US tend to look at social issues through the lens of politics, and since our politics is so divided, there is little to no middle ground, and no attempt to compromise. The Creative Resistance seems to mirror the us-against-them mentality that dominates our national discourse.

***

The above opinion of AI by people in other countries is closer to my own. I see it as a useful tool to enhance my work. It allows me to do research much faster4, and it occasionally offers input that augments my thinking, much like a human work partner. Its errors are annoying, but I believe I have the experience and judgment to weed them out of my work process.

I don’t use AI for writing. I don’t use it for planning or to brainstorm. I don’t use it to edit my work5. I am not tempted to use it for those purposes, partly because I have what I consider a very strong imagination, as well as decades of experience in creative writing and just don’t need it, and mostly because LLMs are tools that rely primarily on compilations of standard, mainstream literature, and I don’t want to write like that. They mimic writing styles, rather than attempt to create anything imaginative or original. They are useful as writing tools mostly for people who do not really know how to write.

I do not see it useful for my writing, and after too many years of doing my own research (and still regretting two errors), after letting one other person, someone I trusted at the time, I do not outsource my research.

Something a little different: On the Mark by Florence Hazrat review – a fascinating history of punctuation ( The Guardian ).

 Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire, putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.

Ivy Compton-Burnett's forgotten genius (Engelsberg ideas). A short piece about a writer I do not think I had heard of but the site turns up interesting items of all sorts. From what I read, complicated and distinctive, with the possibility of fomenting some ideas.

 Ivy Compton-Burnett’s literary method is quite unique, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the action. There is very little exposition, scene-setting or character drawing, and plot, as such, is perfunctory, often drawing on creaky devices from Victorian fiction. ‘As regards plot’, she wrote, ‘I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.’ Compton-Burnett’s dialogue is quite extraordinary – it has to be, as it has so much weight to carry. Her characters talk endlessly in long, formal, finely nuanced conversations which seethe with dark subtext, unspoken motives and fierce passions. These have to be read with close attention to discover – gradually or, often, explosively – what is really going on. It could be anything, up to and including murder. You have to be on your toes even to keep track of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people, sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequently do, in the course of uncovering what is really going on. They also have a habit of suddenly materialising from nowhere, like Jeeves.

***

It is unlikely that these novels will ever again have a wide appeal – they are too challenging, in too many ways, for a modern readership – but it would be a sad loss if they were forgotten. Ivy Compton-Burnett is a true one-off, and her novels are like nothing else in fiction: others, including Henry James and Ronald Firbank, have written novels in dialogue, but they are nothing like Ivy’s. She even, it seems, defeats AI’s mimetic abilities: I recently challenged a chatbot to produce a passage in Compton-Burnett style and the result was thoroughly unsatisfactory – whereas Firbank came out well. Ivy herself once said, ‘Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.’ It is well worth resisting the urge. 

And a cautionary story, the despicable treatment of a female writer: She Wanted to Be Seen as a Writer. The World Saw Her as a Sex Worker. (The Walrus )

Arcan’s untimely death forced a re-evaluation of her work and persona. Posthumously, she was transformed from a frivolous, middlebrow enfant terrible into a subject of serious erudite study. Critics have been perturbed that Arcan embraced conventional scripts of female beauty and sexuality. Feminist critics have had a difficult time figuring out what to make of her contradictory politics, her obsession with death, and her grim view of female subjectivity. For others—like the Tout le monde en parle panellists—her manicured, surgically enhanced good looks were evidence of hypocrisy, given the biting assault on beauty culture she levelled on the page. Their absolutist logic is unable to parse the messy reality that a person can be intellectually critical of the same norms in which they are psychically invested.  

sch 7/6 

 

 

History Lessons: Lincoln, Napoleon III, The Arab Bureau , The Meaning of the Fourth, Freeing Religion

 A new perspective on Lincoln that illuminates: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker review by Richard Carwardine (Literary Review). Maybe I just did not know that much about Lincoln as the party man before his election. It does not explain Lincoln, nothing ever will. It just shines a light on a spot.

I have not read as much about Napoleon III and had to wonder why a new biography was needed, but the review The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross (Literary Review) makes a good case for not spitting at his name.

Though behind a paywall, Edward N. Luttwak's review of The Arab Bureau by Eamonn Gearon (Times Literary Supplement) makes a great case for why history is important, even more than the hard sciences:

 The question arises: whence did all this modernity come? Even today, one does not associate Oxbridge – where almost all Arab Bureau staff were educated – with the ultra-modern, but it is a paradoxical truth that there was something exceedingly modern at the core of pre-1914 classical studies: the new, hyper-systematic Roman historiography invented in German universities under the leadership of Theodor Mommsen. (German became a required language to study the classics because of it.) Its purpose was to replace reliance on the narrative historians, with their limited fields of vision, time-limited coverage and personal biases, so similar to the inherent limitations of agent reports (even the great Tacitus unfairly condemned Domitian’s sensible withdrawal from unproductive Scotland, newly conquered by his son-in-law Agricola, with his perdomita Britannia et statim omissa), with the systematic collection of Roman inscriptions throughout the empire by successive generations of student volunteers. Equally systematically, these were collated to allow the extraction of “hard data”, from which the actual dates of wars and other events, and the politically revealing career paths of Roman officers and officials, could be extracted, turning Roman historiography into a scientific endeavour centred on epigraphy. The Roman history almost everyone in the Bureau had necessarily learned at some stage of their education was thus an excellent preparation for their intelligence work.

The first chapter of this book, which explains why the Arab Bureau’s masters were ultimately able to use its intelligence to drive out the Ottoman power and expand the British Empire, has startlingly modern implications. It recalls the Ottoman reaction to the first expressions of Arab nationalism: the public execution in Damascus, on May 6, 1916, of seven prominent Arab intellectuals and public figures, accompanied the same morning by the execution of fourteen poets, journalists and political activists in Beirut. The condemned were forced to walk to the gallows wearing placards specifying their supposed crimes. In both cities, the Turks failed to obtain the desired reaction – the crowds were horrified by their cruelty. Now that there is a Turkish president who relies on the Ottoman nostalgia of Turkish TV serials in offering his leadership to the Levant, he is discovering that very different memories persist.

With the Fourth of July past, Donald J. Trump's best efforts to turn the day into an image of his jaundiced, misanthropic self, I have been leery of adding to the disgust. I would rather not cater to those who want to indulge in their masturbatory fantasies, regardless of their actual politics. We have not attained the goals sets out in the Declaration of Independence. I doubt it will ever be possible. There will always be those denied their equal part in American liberty, life, and pursuit of happiness.

“The American Revolution Was Hardly an Anti-Colonial Movement”: UCLA Historian Robin D. G. Kelley (Democracy Now! )

And for a lot of Black people, both enslaved and free Black people during the American Revolution, they saw the declaration as doing multiple things. It wasn’t about American nationalism. It wasn’t about American independence. What it was about was a referendum on the definition of the human. It was also a justification for rebellion, right? And then, the third thing is that they saw it as a kind of lever to argue against the conceits of liberty — that is to say, that the claims that, you know, all people have a right to liberty, no matter who it was intended for, they could use that language against their slave owners, against those who ruled the colonies, and against those who ruled the new republic. And so, in some ways, they were making a case that their claims of freedom were far more universal than the provincial claims of the colonists fighting for freedom against British colonial rule, you know.

And ultimately, the American Revolution was hardly an anti-colonial movement, because in many ways it was a struggle to take control of this empire, this expanding West. I think one of the most important parts of the — or, the argument for independence was a resistance to the British Proclamation of 1763 that said that colonists cannot move beyond the Appalachian Mountains. And in the end, they were pushing against British limitations on expansion. In other words, they wanted more empire for themselves. And in the end, what we get is a nation that is pro-slavery, ultimately, or divided on the question of slavery, in which the proceeds and benefits of American capitalism would generate or flow to the — to those who are settler colonial — settler colonists, as opposed to Britain or the crown. 

Happy Fucking Birthday, by Christopher Hooks (Harper's)

But the bicentennial took place at a time when the moment of maximum danger for the republic seemed to have passed. Today, that moment may not have yet arrived: the prospects for the next few years, and the years after those, look pretty bleak. But reading about the bicentennial, I nonetheless wondered whether the amnesia button might be pressed once again—whether we could expect another explosion of warm and fuzzy feelings—and what it might mean for the nation. Privately I wondered whether I, too, would be susceptible, and whether I could connect with any remnant of the old faith that I had first picked up from children’s books, my parents, and the honorable masters of the Austin Independent School District, or if it would all feel, well, childish. 

The Expert as Tourist: Beverly Gage takes a road trip through historic sites from 1776 to today, discovering optimism for our political future along the way. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Gage’s trips around the US left her hopeful. “I came away from my travels,” she writes, “heartened about the state of our country.” Even in the places that recall the most painful parts of the past, she suggests, “there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.” At the very least, she writes, traveling the country and learning about history “makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever.” “For better or worse, public interest in history tends to peak at moments like ours, full of political debate, anxiety, and division,” Gage writes early on in the book—and there’s a sense that this book is a response to that interest, as well as a corrective to the current politically divisive climate. Her closing discussion of Connecticut, specifically New Haven (a city close to my own heart), implicitly reminds readers to look around them for the historical past, as her introduction reminded us that we are all historical subjects, made by history. Gage notes that she was surprised by how “intensely local” the history that she found was—that the great conflicts of a nation are played out on a local scale—and she praises the many citizen initiatives she saw. 

Making Sense of the Fourth of July (Jul 97,Vol:48 Issue:4) (American Heritage) provides a history of the Declaration of Independence.

Five years later, in senate debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Indiana’s John Pettit pronounced his widely quoted statement that the supposed “self-evident truth” of man’s equal creation was in fact “a self-evident lie.” Ohio’s senator Benjamin Franklin Wade, an outspoken opponent of slavery known for his vituperative style and intense patriotism, rose to reply. Perhaps Wade’s first and middle names gave him a special bond with the Declaration and its creators. The “great declaration cost our forefathers too dear,” he said, to be so “lightly thrown away by their children.” Without its inspiring principles the Americans could not have won their independence; for the revolutionary generation the “great truths” in that “immortal instrument,” the Declaration of Independence, were “worth the sacrifice of all else on earth, even life itself.” How, then, were men equal? Not, surely, in physical power or intellect. The “good old Declaration” said “that all men are equal, and have inalienable rights; that is, [they are] equal in point of right; that no man has a right to trample on another.” Where those rights were wrested from men through force or fraud, justice demanded that they be “restored without delay.”

Abraham Lincoln, a little-known forty-four-year-old lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who had served one term in Congress before being turned our of office, read these debates, was aroused as by nothing before, and began to pick up the dropped threads of his political career. Like Wade, Lincoln idealized the men of the American Revolution, who were for him “a forest of giant oaks,” “a fortress of strength,” “iron men.” He also shared the deep concern of his contemporaries as the “silent artillery of time” removed them and the “ living history ” they embodied from this world.

Before the 1850s, however, Lincoln seems to have had relatively little interest in the Declaration of Independence. Then, suddenly, that document and its assertion that all men were created equal became his “ancient faith,” the “father of all moral principles,” an “axiom” of free society. He was provoked by the attacks of men such as Pettit and Calhoun. And he made the arguments of those who defended the Declaration his own, much as Jefferson had done with Mason’s text, reworking the ideas from speech to speech, pushing their logic, and eventually, at Gettysburg in 1863, arriving at a simple statement of pro-found eloquence. In time his understanding of the Declaration of Independence would become that of the nation.

Jefferson and the Declaration (Winter 2020, Volume 64, Issue 1)  (American Heritage)

The national idea is timeless and transcendent, an ongoing collaboration across the generations. The historian’s role is to protect us against facile appropriations of the past to serve present purposes, to challenge the assumption that the founders’ “original intentions” — whether they are supposed to be “liberal” or “conservative” — can be fully known and should be authoritative guides to future action.

***

The libertarian assumption of a never-ending struggle between the individual, with his “natural” (property) rights, and society, exercising its voracious (property-consuming) power through the state, was alien to Jefferson. Jefferson instead saw the progressive development of society as the necessary precondition for the emergence of the modern individual in full enjoyment of his rights; by eliminating the despotic rule of privileged classes, a republican government would secure national unity and facilitate individual “pursuits of happiness” that in turn would promote the community’s prosperity and well-being.  

 

From Augustine to Jefferson, the idea of separating church and state has deep religious and secular roots (The Conversation).

In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities, one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the purity of the church.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.

Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”

No government can be Christian. The Papal States ruined the Roman Catholic Church. Let government into the pulpit and it is religion that suffers.

 

sch 7/6 

Literary Stuff, Plotting, Rejections; A Bit of An Update

 Has it been 3, 4 days since I gave the last update for myself?

Thursday was one of those drowsy days. Friday I made it to group, talked to KH, and had a day of discomfort and weariness. Then I got a bit of research done by not being to sleep; I did my dishes about 3 AM today. I do not know if I got dehydrated but I got light-headed and slightly nauseous and decided I am not going to bed feeling like this.

I went nowhere today but the convenience store. I went through Google Scholar looking for articles for my research project while running Netflix alongside. That worked for three movies. Well most of three. The Northman was too weird for that kind of treatment.  

I went to sleep very early and just woke up again to work on the blog posts.  

7 Books That Blur the Boundary Between Fact and Fiction (Electric Literature ) - a series of books I have not heard of, one that I did, and nothing that I have read. from the mini-reviews, I think I have missed out.

Ten Postwar American Novels 

 Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation (Counter Craft). Lincoln Michel always makes me think about what I am writing, so you might want to subscribe to his Substack. I am waiting to see what happens to “After Making Landfall”. It may be the most ambitious thing I have written in a formal sense. I wanted to combine a quest and an Eastern staying put/Ursula K. Le Guin carrier bag theme; I used second-person, third-person, and first person points of view. The second-person was mostly rising action and the third person was mostly oscillation. It keeps getting rejected.

A second objection I’ve seen might be summed up as “Who cares if the plot is interesting? Maybe what matters is other elements of the story, like the voice or the character’s memories or the setting.” In both entries, I went out of my way to stress that I admire the infinite forms of fiction and that includes many “plotless” novels.5 Still, I think the question to ask yourself is why are you including a plot if you don’t find it interesting and/or don’t care to make it interesting on the page? If your story revolves around a mystery plot where a detective figure finds clues to try to solve a case, but you don’t care to make the mystery or its solving compelling… well, why is it there?

There might be a good reason! I’ve enjoyed some novels that deconstruct and subvert detective fiction. I love Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, where the detective seems ever further from solving the case as the confusing clues mass. Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company was my favorite TV show last year and it revolves around a character obsessing over solving a ridiculous “crime” and finding ever more ridiculous clues and conspiracies. Several Thomas Pynchon books could be added here. I would suggest that these authors still make their plots interesting, even if in absurd ways, and also that they undermine traditional detective stories for specific thematic, comedic, or narrative reasons. If your plot is thoughtlessly tacked on for no real reason except you think you need to cram one into your manuscript to sell it to publishers, well, readers will probably be as unenthused as you are about the plot.

When I read articles like this, there are paragraphs where the brain snags on the idea and asks if I am doing this.

There’s an old writing saw that goes “an ending should feel both inevitable and surprising.” You can apply this to every plot beat. A clever plot consistently feels both inevitable (or at least logical) and surprising (or at least fresh). We want to see the ideas tweaked and concepts twisted—but not so much that it feels disjointed and not so little that it feels repetitive. The reader wants to be both surprised and not so surprised. Yes, this is hard to do. Who said plotting was easy? 

In “After Making Landfall”, the first-person section feels more like a coda. The protagonist writer has decided the only way to fight impostor syndrome is to keep writing. Seeing the stymied passion between her boyfriend and an old girlfriend of his inspires her to not give up writing. But is that a surprise and inevitable? I am not so sure about the surprise, besides the reason she makes her decision. Too neurotic? It happens when I am not really writing.

Keeping reading, I hit another snag:

Part of why Variation is so important in any genre is that it provides the reader with another reason to turn the page. They aren’t just reading to find out what happens next. They are also reading to see how you can delight them with the unexpected.8

My protagonist overcame the derision and lack of belief on the part of friends and family about being a writer; her culture in a way. She finds a boyfriend, the need to make a living, as a block in her career; the boyfriend leaves her, the job gives her a wider experience, she meets a new lover who encourages her writing. She gets published, only to find herself as the final obstacle. She has fulfilled her quest to get published; she needs to find out where she goes next. I like to think that is sufficient variation.

 But then what about “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”? Driving KH nuts these past two years on how I keep altering my “Dead and Dying Stories” and too lazy to start over at the beginning, this is just a crazy experiment that only works with people from Indiana. So far, anyway.  Right now, the form is a novella with one long arc from the rise of a factory town (like an overture or a prologue) setting the importance of the factory to the town and the importance of its founder to the factory. Then there is the arc where the family sells out, the town thinks it will be a boon, while the kids pay the costs of the changes (abortions, broken hearts, lost ideals). There is an arc about a bisexual girl getting pregnant and the boys in her life; There is an arc about the conflict between the brother representing the old idea of the town's preeminent family and the sister who wants nothing of it. There is the failure of the new owners and the final collapse of the factory, with the different ways that people cope with the failures imposed from the outside. There are longer arcs between art and commerce; between the homegrown efforts to remake what was, between those who want to build upon what they have and those who want only what was to return. Marriages falter, suicides are attempted or succeed; there is persistence in the face of reality. There is the loss of heroic leaders only to find success in the face of democratic cooperation. Whether I have pulled all this off is far from clear. Success is escape until those left can only succeed by following a madman.

Continuing with with Lincoln Michel: Principles of Plotting Part IV: Intersection and Redirection.

One of the worst sins a plot-forward story can commit is to drop plot lines. It is far easier to generate interesting story ideas or mysterious elements than it is to finish them. So, there is often a temptation to pull a Lost and cut the plot lines you can’t finish and then walk away whistling, hoping the reader doesn’t notice. This is a mistake both for ongoing storylines and for elements that are signaled as significant to the reader. (This is the real meaning of “Chekhov’s Gun,” aka that a gun shown in the first act must go off in the third. That’s not because a play needs a murder—although it rarely hurts—but because a gun placed prominently on a stage is something a viewer will notice and expect to see have a payoff.4)  

Okay, I think I am good here with “After Making Landfall”  and not so sure about “Scenes”. The first really has only plotline. But the latter is a really a series of interconnected stories with interconnected characters. The same worry persists after reading this:

Still, completing storylines is only step one. The more powerful and difficult thing to achieve is to bring the storylines together in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. This normally means that the storyline trajectories intersect—thus Intersection—and affect each other. The arcs and plots weave together to form a complete pattern or picture. The ideal is that each part feels necessary. If you removed one, it would untangle the whole thing.

There are parts that might be pulled and the plot, the action, might be able to continue. But the themes might take a hit. The distance between what was thought to be ideal and the reality of how those ideals are either no longer applicable or were always toxic is an important theme. It is meant to contrast with the craziness of originality, of creativity, that might just solve the problem of the town's future. This has me thinking, have I done enough to get these themse properly displayed? Display implicating plot for me.

While writing the previous paragraph, my mind went to the final scenes, I have a ghost tying up his story of ambition and failure and a love gone astray; I have a son justifying his faith in his father's art; but do I have the routing of the Bridges family? Then I went back to the essay, wondering what else I might find to help or to torment myself with.

There is a unique challenge presented to stories with several main storylines and different POVs. In such works, you might still want to have the character and plot arc of each character cross but you also need to have the various storylines collide. Potentially, this could be merely thematic but normally it is going to be more literal: your POV characters will appear in the same place and/or act in ways that affect the other storylines causing some level of chaos, closure, comedy, or tragedy.

Yep, I need to look at the ending again. Especially with this paragraph in mind:

Redirection might take the shape of shifting the story to a new plane that reorients everything that comes before. The blunt version of this is the twist ending. But there are subtle ways of twisting, such as how John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and other means of redirecting to a new plane. You might shift focus, zooming in to highlight the most important element or else telescoping out to place the story in a wider view. Or you might do both at the same time, such as when Donald Barthelme’s “The School” shifts from a catalog of things that have died at the school over the course of a year to a philosophical debate about the meaning of death during one class.  

In “Scenes”, my redirection was one character's failure and another's revival after attempting suicide. I am not feeling that was clear enough. “After Making Landfall”, it is a defiance of impostor's syndrome. I feel good about that.

Why “Scenes” came forward is that I am looking at a possible submission; only I need to add about 10 pages. Reading Michel's articles leaves me convinced I have excluded important parts. Well, useful ones. 

I am so far from having anything worth the sending out of a query letter and Nathan Bransford's How to nail the last line of the plot description in a query letter is mostly a reminder of what I have still to do.

 

Rejections

7/8/2026 - “Agnes”

Thank you for submitting your work.  While we're not able to accept this piece for publication, we appreciated the opportunity to read your fiction and hope you'll try us again in the future.

Many thanks,

The Eds.

swamp pink

swamp-pink.cofc.edu

7/11/2026 - the April revision, so not a great disappointment.

Thank you for sending us "After Making Landfall." We're grateful to have had the chance to read and spend time with this piece, but unfortunately it was not selected for publication in Cagibi. We wish you all the best of luck placing it elsewhere and hope you will submit to us again.

Best wishes, 

Cagibi Editors

*

Cagibi on Facebook:  facebook.com/cagibilit

Cagibi on Instagram: instagram.com/cagibilit

 

sc h

Looking Forward to Nolan's Odyssey

 Some things I have been reading because I just cannot get my head around the wankers's hate of this version.

The Guardian view on Homer: The Odyssey is more modern than we might like to think (The Guardian)

Christopher Nolan Says ‘Odyssey’ Backlash Over Casting and More Is ‘Irrelevant’ and He’s Learned Not to Worry: ‘Remember, I Spent 10 Years Dealing With Batman’ 

Odyssey fever (Mary Beard)

sch 

Proust!

I find that knowing something about the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Proust is not a writer I thought I would either enjoy or learn anything from. Both prejudices demonstrate my foolishness.  

Great Novels - Best Civil War Novels - Alan Massie's 2025 List

Is Moby-Dick the Greatest American Novel? (Literary Hub)

Paradoxically, though, the book’s emergence as “the Great American Novel” may have inhibited its enjoyment by ordinary men and women, left them daunted by its reputation. Yet Moby-Dick should be read, not just revered or studied in school. This Folio edition, sumptuously produced, beautifully illustrated, allows you to experience this masterpiece directly, unencumbered by critical apparatus. Someday, you may want to seek out the innumerable scholarly commentaries or the several Melville biographies. But only later. For now, shipmates, turn instead to that immortal opening and begin the voyage: “Call me Ishmael.”  

 For scale, for breadth (even though it is set on a whaling ship!), for verve, it is hard to beat Moby Dick. It may be crazy but that is what makes it American.

 I read something over the weekend, now I forget what, that got me thinking about a list of Civil War books. I cannot say I am all that impressed, but about that later.

Best American Civil War Novels (Ranker)

The Civil War in Historical Fiction — a staff-created list from Sno-Isle Libraries (BiblioCommons)

 8 of the Best Novels About the Civil War ( Book Riot)

 10 Civil War Fiction Must-Reads (Blue and Gray Education Society)

Favorite Civil War and Reconstruction Era Historical Fiction (She Reads )

HF - Recommended Civil War-Era Historical Fiction from the ALA's "Booklist" Magazine | Civil War Books, Stories, & Media (American Civil War Forums ) (the most ecletic)

I can go with Cold Mountain, and The Red Badge of Courage (which I have read), and I liked seeing The Good Lord Bird, March, by Geraldine Brooks, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, by Allan Gurganus, although I have not read them.

What I find missing is Raintree County. Yes, it has been in and out of print. Yes, it is long, but no longer than Gone With The Wind (which does show up on one list.) It is better written than 99% of the books appearing on these lists. Also missing was William Faulkner's Sartoris. Probably the simplest Faulkner novel to read, and not so sentimental as Gone With The Wind.  

Some non-fiction Civil War books from UI Press | University of Illinois.

Some lists that I think I did not use before:

The best books of 2025: Allan Massie names his top ten  (The Scotsman) 

10 Poverty Books That Change How You See Inequality ( BookAuthority)

Great American Novels you should read 

 

 sch 7/6

 

Starting The Day Off With Politics

 I was wobbly yesterday. I missed the writer's group. Nothing much accomplished. A bit of research done, but nothing worth talking about.

This morning I started off thinning the email and going to the convenience store.

I will get back here with something of more substance, but I want to get the rancidity of our politics off my mind.

NATO reaffirms ‘ironclad’ joint defense in Ankara declaration (Daily Sabah) fails to mention anything useful said or done by Donald J. Trump. Too polite to mention his ranting about Greenland, or his general dislike of our friends. Why should a man without friends see the value of allies?

How Ukraine's drone strikes are wreaking havoc in Russia (CNBC) destroys Trump in one paragraph:

Ukraine is holding all the cards, she said, adding that they have “drones and counter-drone systems, and indeed data on how to fight the Russians.”

It is clear now how a man could bankrupt a casino. He has no idea what cards are needed for a win. 

Trump is promising Patriot missile defense to Ukraine. Let us hope it is not another hot flash in his brain. 

The Bourbon trap: military prowess is not a grand strategy (Engelsberg ideas ) arrived before Trump decided to give up the ceasefire with the Iranians. It does not make any less pertinent - or scary:

At the outset of Trump’s second term, I worried that his political instincts might make sense for peacetime grand strategy, but not for wartime strategy. As I wrote in these pages: ‘Trump’s preference for transactionalism and uncertainty, along with his ongoing effort to eviscerate the national security bureaucracy, will make it more difficult to implement strategies with a better chance of success. Because Trump’s approach to grand strategy increases the odds of another strategic quagmire, history may remember his second term as a grim irony.’ While it is too soon to make definitive judgments, the recent war in Iran seems to point in that direction. The president seems to have believed that a rapid bombing campaign would topple the regime, leaving in place a new government willing to bend to US pressure. But the bombing did not lead to regime change; it bolstered hardliners in Tehran. According to some observers, the net result has bolstered other great powers at America’s expense, and given them new opportunities to erode US advantages. Trump’s predilections cut against the logic of his administration’s stated grand strategy, creating uncertainty about American national security policy, and working against coherent strategy in war. 

 ***

Two other lessons stand out. The first is that battlefield excellence is not a substitute for strategy, and lethality is not the same as security. President Trump revels in military operations that seem to resolve longstanding problems with little cost or risk – witness his victory lap after US bombers targeted Iran’s nuclear programme in June 2025, and when US special forces captured Venezuela’s president in January 2026. Meanwhile, the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has chosen a back-to-basics focus on improving tactical performance. This is understandable, given the resurgence of conventional war alongside continuing counterterrorist operations. Yet Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality is misguided, because it suggests that the key metric for wartime success is killing power. The ability to destroy is not the same as the ability to translate military force into political results. Increasing the enemy’s body count is not the same as compelling the enemy to stand down – and to accept the idea of losing. Sometimes it has exactly the opposite effect. Lethality run amok is likely to generate lasting antipathy and mistrust among those on the wrong end of the spear, meaning that battlefield victories will, at best, produce only temporary gains. Excessive killing in war will complicate grand strategy in the aftermath. 

U.S., Iran trade more strikes after Trump says ceasefire is "over" (CBS) 

 What truly interest TRump is not the nation but what he can put in his pocket from the nation: The Corruption Is Unprecedented (Sheila Kennedy).

sch