Starting A New Week - Writing, Literary Stuff, Rejections, Bookers, Colosn Whitehead, Otters.

Lollygagging around the apartment this morning. I have gotten caught up with Orphan Black. Now, that is an excellent thriller. I went down to the convenience store. Not sure if I want to go out again.

Yesterday's trip to Walmart was partially successful. I had to leave some items there because I ran out of time to catch the bus. 

Working on the blog last night and today are the closest I came to any writing.

Bad insomnia last night. Discomfort continues from the surgery. I really want to take it easy, to do this recovery right.

Items related to writing follow.

 How To Write the Perfect Cover Letter Even Tho Nobody Cares (+ formatting and submission methods)

 (3) The Do’s and Don’ts of Cover Letters

 Writing Queernormative Worlds: World Building Workshop - C. M. Rosens

‘It Was A Matter Of Lust’ and other poems - Literary Yard

The Booker Prize 2026 not likely to read them any more than I get any other books read.

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man should be a laugh for Musk and the racist trolls who were so worried about a feminist Odyssey because Nolan used Wilson's translation. 

ROFLMAO: Nolan's 'The Odyssey' ruined a poem I never bothered to read

 What I Learned from a Close Read of All of Colson Whitehead’s Work (Literary Hub) an overview of one of America's best writers.

Oops, I thought I had withdrawn this one:

Thank you for submitting "Going For The Kid" to Tome and Space. Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept it for our publication.

We appreciate the time and effort taken to share it with us.

Sincerely,

The Tome and Space Editors

And a rejection for “After Making Landfall”, but for an older version:

Thank you for sending a submission for the upcoming issue of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Although we feel your work has many positives, after much deliberation, we decided it was not a good fit for us at this time. 

We receive many incredible stories, poems, non-fiction, and images, and we are forced to select only a handful of pieces. Know that though your work will not be in this next issue, our staff welcomes your submissions and truly hopes to continue receiving material from you. Should you wish to send us another submission, please wait until the next submission period opens.

We do accept—and encourage—simultaneous submissions. You can find listings for where to send submissions at the following:

http://newpages.com/

https://www.chillsubs.com/lists

http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/.

Http://www.duotrope.com is perhaps the best source but charges a fee. There is a free trial, however.

If you have any questions regarding your submission or any other publishing matter, please feel free to contact the editor via our website.

Thank you for your support of literary and art publications in general and especially of SBLAAM.

And completely off topic: Bay Area wildlife mystery leaves researchers 'somewhat horrified'.

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Looking Out At The World From Muncie

 It doesn't look so good sometimes. It feels like my thinking is divorced from the main currents out there. Frankly, I like my thinking better. When I was getting sucked down into nihilism by my depression, I could not understand why thinking diverged from what everyone told me about reality. I thought I was crazy. Not so sure about not being crazy, but it is my life, and I am happier living with what I think is right. I just stay amused about it all.

Proof that Indianapolis is multi-cultural and how much that recognition is in danger: Indy’s Global Village Museum facing funding troubles.

The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids (The New Republic) leaves me wondering why certain ideas do not die. Are our egos so frail? Is our empathy illusory?

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

 The Media (Sheila Kennedy)

Then Krugman gets to what he calls the shaping of the information space, the promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy with “zombie” ideas that experience should have debunked. (Tax cuts for the rich have never stimulated economic growth. Climate science is not a hoax.) The takeover of the legacy media is one way of promoting those “zombie ideas” 

The Ellison family has already acquired CBS and installed Bari Weiss to corrupt it. Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner will effectively destroy CNN as we now know it. (Krugman says “It will almost turn into Fox News. Now, that won’t be a profitable venture. There’s already a Fox News, and so creating another one is not going to actually produce a lot of profits, if any, but that’s not the objective. This is buying influence.”) Look what happened to Twitter when Musk took it over.

Krugman says this takeover of the general information environment by a handful of billionaires will continue, and the only “fix” is to bring the concentration of wealth at the top down

 A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie (Thornfield Hall) why Musk failed to stop The Odyssey: he has no art in his bones.

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Indiana Writing Resources 2026 - Proof 2026!

 I have noted some of these before, I think. Like Bookmark Indy – Where Pen Meets Place and Indiana Humanities. Not that they are not worth repeating!

But some new stuff is here, too:

Indiana Authors Awards - the nominees are here.

Line Break: The Power of Practicing Craft - which new, but also for poets.

Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - I went last year, intend to go this year; I think it is a grand festival.

There's Only One Sin in Hollywood - Indiana Authors Awards - reviews a new book from an Indiana writer.

In conjuring the magic of a great movie capable of making one believe anything is possible for our heroes, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood will similarly imbue readers with hope on every page that the main characters can best the forces working against them. Readers will watch Aaron torn between institution and authenticity, and as the stakes mount and the consequences compound, Aaron must answer a question that I invite readers to consider themselves: If there is only one sin in Hollywood, but that sin promises freedom, is it worth the risk of damnation?   

Not Indiana related but still might be of interest: What Editors Want: The Ultimate Guide for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines 

sch 7/26 

Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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Post Surgery Politics

  Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. 

Capitalism’s ‘Metabolic Rift’  Los Angeles Review of Books 

 

(3) Undoing Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption

sch 7/23

Writing, story, film stuff

Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth.

The Art of Opposition by Courttia Newland review – piercing essays on culture and creativity  The Guardian

The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong review – profound exploration of Ireland’s deep time  The Guardian

This vivid lyricism calls to mind other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, echo Baume’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Looking farther afield, the reading experience resembles that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns are set against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we are not up in the heavens, but down in the dirt. Just as with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth might bemoan the lack of dialogue or explicit plot. There are no big epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; new losses are accrued; mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, comes to realise, such is life: “things happen, one after the other, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints … uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, such uncertainty, so exquisitely rendered, is more than enough to sustain us to the end.

Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’ | Fairytales | The Guardian

In the tradition of Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Emma Donoghue and Helen Oyeyemi, Blackie wants to reclaim these stories from the Disneyfication of the past century. Many of the heroines in her books would rather throw a frog at a wall than kiss one, and are “very much more likely to rescue than be rescued”. The heroine’s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.

Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the “wise old woman” to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – “raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men” – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. “I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,” she says. “Why does nobody know about them?”

Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach (“old woman” or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. “A very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,” she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller’s daughter, whose father cut off her hands and must regrow them, are rich metaphors for her own story and for female narratives in general. Rebirth, transformation and renewal – the message of Blackie’s books is clear: be ready for “the Call”, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.

‘Barn Cat Proliferation’ by Caitlin Woodford – The Hemlock Journal - lovely story.

Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence by Ed Simon 

 The Enduring Power of Bro Language 

But "dude," "man," and "bro" are a specific type of vocative known as "familiarizers." Familiarizers mark a relationship as casual and provide social nuance beyond their attention-getting function. Their true power lies in how they help perform interactional work like signaling closeness or commiseration, expressing or softening disagreement, and managing conversational turns. Consider the different relational messages being delivered by the "bro" used in "Bro, you ate my pizza!" versus the one in "I love you too, bro." 

David Thomson On Cinema And America - by Andrew Sullivan (podcast) 

sch 7/23 

 

Surgery and Recuperating

 Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. 

Started this on Monday with: 

Submissions

Merion West: Agnes, The First Day of Feeling Free, After Making Landfall

The William Faulkner Literary Contest:  The First Day of Feeling Free

 

 7/20: A rejection for "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984"

Thank you for submitting your work to us. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in Joyland Magazine, and wish you all the best with your writing. 

Joyland Magazine

7/21: surgery - sister came and brought me back from the hospital. Oh, my sides hurt. CC came after my sister left. I had fixed pork shoulder ala CC for her. It turned out well. Insomnia is the big problem.  Thankful for Netflix to keep my attention. I added some to my research project - the insomnia was that sharp.

Rejections for "After Making Landfall" 

7/22:

Thank you for submitting “After Making Landfall” to our editorial team. Although we found value in reading your work, we have decided not to publish it. 

May the publishing gods find this piece its perfect home. 

Pinch

Subscribe at www.pinchjournal.com

The main in the sides - two holes whose purpose is not understood by me. CC called to check on me. I sleep, wake, watch Netflix, sleep, and repeat. 

  

A headache and I realize it is not a good idea to go cold turkey from caffeine while recuperating. I order from Domino's.

 

7/23

Thank you again for your interest in our journal and for taking the time to send us your writing. 

Though we have decided to pass on this story, we want you to know that it received several positive reviews. 

We hope this is taken as encouragement and that TGLR will remain on your radar when you seek publication opportunities in the future. 

Best wishes for a prosperous summer.

Sincerely,

Shyla, Lea, Amy, Toni, & The Good Life Review Short Fiction Team

I walked my furtherest today - to the street where I catch the bus down to the convenience store for more caffeine. I rode the bus back. It was as much as I could do. More sleep, more Netflix.

I thought I could do The Odyssey. No way.

This is taking a chunk of energy and I want to be very, very lazy.

 

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