Been Spending Too Much Time In 1850

 The research project has taken up my time - still.

There was the writer's group on WEdnesday, but otherwise I have not been anywhere but Walmart and the convenience store. Walking too far is just a painful experience.

I see the surgeon later this morning.

I forgot to add this rejection from Tuesday:

Thank you for allowing Twisted River Review to consider "Pieces About a Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976-1984". We have read and discussed your work carefully, but unfortunately must pass at this time. Your fiction was in the top 25% of submissions for this reading period. Our staff found much to admire in your work, and we hope that you will try us again soon.



We wish you the best in placing your work elsewhere, and we thank you for your support of Twisted River Review.



Sincerely,

Lindsey Paquette

Fiction Editor, Twisted River Review 

And this one from Wednesday for "Saved By Rock and Roll":

We have decided not to accept this submission. Perhaps the links below will help you find another venue for your work:

https://magazine.feedspot.com/flash_fiction_magazine/

http://www.newpages.com/magazines/literary-magazines

https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

https://www.pw.org/small_presses?genre=Fiction&subgenre=9660&perpage=100&booktype=All&format=All

Best wishes,
The BFF Team

Those who think it was better in the past have not spent much time there. 1850 was not that much fun - especially knowing you are seeing the Civil War start boiling.

I have three sections that are functionally done - basic research, text saying what I want.

I am trying to decide whether to take a break or not. It's been an off and on again project for over 30 years. Wearing myself to catch up all that time or taking a break and come back tomorrow is the option. There are other things needing done.

Just for the record CC has been incommunicado for almost two weeks. Her boyfriends stopped calling to see if she was here. Dead or holed up sick? I am not going out to seek answers. 1850 is more important.

 WPRB's Summer schedule!

 sch

 

Videos! Atwood - Vidal - Doctrow - Beloved - Iranians - Toot tooting Tudors - East of Eden

 Okay, bring out the tar and the feathers. I like Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy more than I do The Handmaiden's Tale.

 

Morrison's Beloved has too many reasons to read it, but if you have not then made this will clinch the deal.

Also related to Toni Morrison: Namwali Serpell and Dionne Custer Edwards on Toni Morrison’s Sula. I do not know if Sula gets the same attention as Beloved, and I have the sense that it does get anywhere near the attention of Song of Solomon, but it does have going for it the relationship between two women and their lives in a community. Understand that I have not read all of Morrison's novels, there may be a bad one but not in those I have read. Sula is one I have read. (The question of a bad novel is two-fold: is it a bad novel or is it a lesser work by Morrison? The first implies the lack of talent; the latter supposes less effort by Morriso in using her talent. I would give much to write what others might call a mediocre Morrison novel.) 

Gore Vidal in his grumpy glory:

 I have read only one of Deborah Levy's short stories, not any of her novels, and that I regret. The short story knocked me down.

 Reading Doctorow, like reading Gore Vidal, probably dates me. I will admit that the former is probably a better novelist than Vidal, with a reservation for Duluth. Popular, quality novelists who should not be allowed to just fade away. I will hold Doctorow's Ragtime against anything written by John Updike. Vidal's essays hold up in my mind better than his fiction.

 

 

Anne Lamott is someone I like listening to about writing:

 I have meant to read J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter; maybe I will have the time.

Yes, there are Iranian writers. They might even survive Trump's attack on Iranian civilization as well as the Revolutionary Guards..

 

 

Toot tooting Tudors:

I read Steinbeck's East of Eden before I read anything else of his. College, I think. My memory is it was a bit ramshackle in plot. That might have more to do with my having seen the movie version (which seems to have gone missing the past 30 years) and the TV version with the Bottoms brothers (which disappeared almost immediately). The following discussion puts the novel into order for me. I suppose I should read it again, but damn where do I find the time? 

I will close out with an article rather than a video: H.P. Lovecraft: Haunted by History. A good overview of the writer who scared me as a teenager.

 sch 5/29

Dealing With Advice

Welcome to the recesses of my twisted mind. I am not saying this is how to absorb advice. It is how I do it. Neuroses may vary.

10 Things I Need Every Writer to Know (Inside An Editor's Brain)

1. Readers, Agents, Editors and Publishers do not owe you anything. Your job is to give them a story they cannot put down.

2. Start the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited in…fast.

3. Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff.

4. Your first manuscript may simply be your apprenticeship. Sometimes Book One only exists to teach you how to write the book that finally changes everything.

5. Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting.

6. Readers only see the page. They do not know your intentions or the version in your head. Clarity matters.

7. Stop tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human.

8. Publishing is subjective, but craft still matters. You cannot control timing or trends, but you can keep becoming better on the page.

9. Protect your joy. The writers who survive this business are usually the ones who refuse to let publishing destroy their love of storytelling.

10. Do not decide your story has failed before you even try. People finish books every day. People get agents every day. People build writing careers every day. There is no reason you cannot become one of them.

I had “Scenes From A Small Indiana Factory Town” when I read this; I did some work on it today. These are the ones that jumped out at me.

Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff. 

Last night, I sent this to KH with the subject line “critiquing myself”.

 Reading https://eastoverpress.com/book/we-couldve-been-happy-here-by-keith-pilapil-lesmeister/ made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but there is little I see in some published stories that concern political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but there is the humanity, isn't it?

Yeah, I have been worrying over whether I have been investing enough emotion in the story. Some of the story (now a novella) involves business decisions that change the titular city. One family member decides to turn loose the family's control of the city because she has felt herself too long under the control of a husband and her brother. There is another involving an abortion driving a girl towards her girlfriend and the effect of pregnancy on a former lover. There is the girl who is likened to the princess of the prominent family who wants only to be free, to be herself, and is the catalyst for the deaths of two boys. There are the feelings of fathers for a son and sons for fathers. I know no other way but for the payoff to be low key, perhaps even elliptical. But is that enough? When the rejections come in, I will have to assume it was not enough.

Then there is:

Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting. 

Anyone reading my posts under the topic of “On Writing” knows that I keep doing this. Listening today to an old interview of E.L. Doctorow, he mentions a story that Thomas Hardy made revisions even after they were published. I made revisions this afternoon.

 This is a little trickier because so many of the stories in “Scenes” are about people screwing up, and even those where characters do not blatantly screw up, they are not saints.

Stop tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human. 

 So, trying, trying, trying.

Also, working on this one:

Start the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited in…fast. 

The odd thing with "Scenes" versus its earlier incarnations as a collection of short stories is that I added two sections starting long before the earlier incarnations. They also introduce two characters that will persist throughout the novella. I guess it really does kick in the story of the town's rise and the stakes posed to the people of the loss of its industrial base.

I like trying to write plays, even if it has not been something done lately.  Bertolt Brecht has ideas about making an audience think that I have gotten attached to, but with a caveat. If there are no emotional stakes, there is no attachment to the characters, and no one will pay attention to the ideas. 

Why then with my fiction do I get too caught up with the action rather than the characters?

sch 5/258 

 

 

 

 

State Constitutional Law (Indiana, Mostly): A Reading List (5/28-6/3/2026)

 I got the idea this morning to make a list of what I have been reading since I started on my latest research project. The hope is that it will give me time to get my eyes to focus.

State Constitutions (Indiana Historical Bureau)

Originalism and Natural Law by Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Beyond Standard Legal Positivism and "Aggressive" Natural Law: Some Thoughts on Judge O'Scannlain's "Third Way" by Michael Baur

Has the Indiana Constitution Found Its Epic by P Baude 

The Natural Law in the American Tradition  by Hon. Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

Matter of Lawrance 

Morrison v. Sadler 

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, vol. 1 [1753] 

SELF-DEFENSE, DEFENSE OF OTHERS, AND THE STATE, DARRELL A. H. MILLER

Wrigley v. Romanick 

INTERPRETATION AND AUTHORITY IN STATE CONSTITUTIONALISM , Paul W. Kahn

Interstate Dialogue in State Constitutional Law, Patrick L. Baude 

INDIANA'S CENTURY OLD CONSTITUTION by JOHN D. BARNHART and DONALD F. CARMONY

Kiste v. Red Cab, Inc., 106 NE 2d 395 

Matis v. Yelasich, 132 NE 2d 728 

MEDICAL LICENSING BD. v. Planned Parenthood, 211 NE 3d 957 

Meredith v. Pence, 984 NE 2d 1213 

Okla. Call for Reprod. Justice v. Drummond, 526 P. 3d 1123  

PEACHEY ET AL. v. BOSWELL, MAYOR, ET AL., 167 NE 2d 48 

John Pettit 

Price v. State, 622 NE 2d 954 

Pritchard v. State, 230 NE 2d 416 

Ratliff v. Cohn, 693 NE 2d 530 - 

Report of the Debates  

Richardson v. State, 717 NE 2d 32 

Schuchman v. State, 236 NE 2d 830 

Sidle v. Majors, 341 NE 2d 763 

Solomon v. State, 119 NE 3d 173 

Specht v. State, 163 NE 2d 581 

The Maturing Nature of State Constitution Jurisprudence Randall T. Shepard 

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Cover Letters & Query Letters

 

I admit I am lax about them. Probably because I think it will not help me get published; and that when I got business mail I wanted it to be concise so I could get to what lay underneath. A better way of doing them is here, Cover Letters: What they are and how to write one.  

While each differs a bit, they will all have a similar format. 

1. Editor’s name (if you can find it) and brief greeting 

2. Word count rounded to the nearest hundred 

3. Title of the short-form piece 

4. The genre 

5. Short description of the piece 

6. Your credentials, if applicable 

7. Whether it's a simultaneous submission 

Strange Horizons has some great cover letter examples on its website and tips for writing your own. 

There seemed to be a lot of query letter examples online, but I keep losing them. Soon, maybe sooner, I will need to be writing them. So, I am putting Everything You Need to Know About Query Letters here for safekeeping.

While every letter can differ depending on the author and their experience, you can expect it to have these elements. 

● Opening greeting: Personalize this to the agent you are sending it to if you can. If you don’t have a connection to the agent (maybe you were referred or met them at a conference), you can always fall back on the story. 

● Hook: Catch the reader’s interest fast with a line or a sentence about the book. If you can’t think of a hook, jump right into the “housekeeping.” 

● Housekeeping: Includes the title, genre, and word count (to the nearest thousandth). These three things are something every agent needs to know. 

● Book Synopsis: Typically around 150-300 words, the synopsis should provide a concise description of the plot, the characters, and the central questions and conflicts without spoiling the book. Think of it as the jacket copy (the copy you find on the dust jacket or the back of a book) for your future book. Make the stakes for the main character clear. 

● Comp Titles: You can compare your manuscript to these titles as proof of its market viability and potential readership. You’ll often see formats of introducing comp titles like “A meets B” or “for fans of…” Comp titles are often the most frustrating part of writing the query letter. Things to consider when choosing comp titles: 

    ● Don’t choose a classic book or any insanely successful book 

    ● Make sure it’s been published within the last five years (and that the author is alive) 

    ● Don’t choose a super obscure book/title 

● Your credentials: This is the opportunity to share relevant accomplishments or accolades about yourself. Everything you include in your bio should be pertinent to the agent. This includes (but is not limited to): publication credits, self-published work, your job (if relevant), writing credibility such as BFAs or MFAs, writing 

events/workshops/conferences, relevant research (if applicable), and awards and competitions. If you aren’t sure it’s relevant, err on the side of caution and don’t include it. Don’t just say you’ve been published in “various magazines/ and or journals”. If you can’t name them, don’t include them. But if you are unpublished, it’s implied you lack any credits if you don’t list anything, so don’t state it. 

● Professional Conclusion: Keep it short but simple. Thank the agent and sign off. No need to suggest how great the partnership would be or your availability. 

sch 5/28 

 

 

Swimming From Friday Through a Sea of Obsession To Tuesday Night

Obsession struck these past few days. I have been delving into Indiana history. I have not been doing much else than writing and researching; it left me a bit tired. I did the group thing on Friday, a little grocery shopping; Saturday, I hit the convenience store; Sunday was church; Monday, a visit to Walmart; and this morning was church, again.

I did work on a new section for the project after church, and I napped for around 4 hours. I tired some fried sardines in spaghetti sauce. Not bad, but I wish I had some peppers to balance the fish a little better.

Now, I am finishing up this post. 

I sent “After Making Landfall” to Ploughshares and to Ex-Puritan, and “Plain Tales from the Flatlands” (what I had been shopping around as “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”) went to Black Lawrence Press. “The Unintended Consequences of Art” was sent to NewMyths.

I read “A Sandwich for Lunch” by Penny Pepper (Litro) and was impressed by what Ms. Pepper did with a short story. She made me envious.

Marrow Magazine rejected “Saved by Rock and Roll” on 5/29.

Thank you so much for trusting us with your submission, Coming Home.

While your piece isn’t quite right for Marrow at this time, we wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere, and we hope you’ll keep writing.

Best,
The Editors

Same story was rejected on 6/1:

Thank you for submitting to Flash Frog and allowing us to read your work. Unfortunately, “Saved by Rock and Roll” is not a right fit for us. We wish you the best of luck in finding a good home for it and sincerely appreciate your interest and support.

 

With gratitude,

Flash Frog

www.flash-frog.com

Some videos from the past few days I want to pass along.

A Hoosier you've probably never heard of: John Hay. A very important man.

 Indiana is not all corn:

 A lecture on The Maltese Falcon:

 And one about Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I agree with one fellow that Tortilla Flats is better. That Steinbeck does not get respect may be because of books like this, but then why is Hemingway not excorciated about To Have and To Have Not?

 I am never sure who I enjoy reading more, Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My solution has been to keep rading both.

 

 Atwood on history:

The Prophet coems to Indiana:

 

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Quotation Marks

Maybe I never understood Cormac McCarthy's lack of quotation marks. For me, this made his novels to be read out loud, as I do with poetry.

Then came some critiques of my writing dialog, which I will summarize as being more about exposition than a conversation. All right, I have spent much time reading plays and trying to write a few.

All these thoughts came out as I read Larissa Pham's Thought, Speech: Dialogue Without Quotation Marks (Poets & Writers).

In my second semester of graduate school, I stopped setting my dialogue in quotation marks. At the time, I was working on a historical novel, set in Vietnam, and I was struggling with the voices of my characters—they felt too stagey, too dramatized. I suspected it was something about the quotation marks—the way they drew the eye immediately, throwing the dialogue up onto a slightly different plane from the rest of the text. It read like lines, not speech. 

And they are lines for me, just as if the story were a play. I have a sense that people act, so my characters were acting. Some of that acting was meant to be explicit.

I continue to work on “Love Stinks” in which I use two different time frames. Memory was meant to be a construct like a play. But then Ms. Pham blows that idea up.

Though I don’t replicate Moss’s technical trick in Discipline, I was interested in a narrator who filters experience for the reader, and who also withholds information—and even emotion—from other characters, as well as herself. Christine, the narrator of Discipline, is a writer, one who has turned a real-life relationship into a sensationalized novel. She’s an unreliable narrator precisely because she is a writer—she knows the power storytelling holds—and it was a pleasure to push that part of her character, applying pressure on what not only Christine but also the reader takes to be the truth. When we see quotation marks on a page, we assume what they contain is, in some way, true. We believe someone said that, for dialogue is faithful. In removing quotation marks, we ask the reader to read carefully, thoughtfully, and to trust our narrator to take them somewhere else, somewhere new.  

Do I want to rethink “Love Stinks”? I am always thinking and rethinking. The point trying to be made in that story (and several others) is to put the purported truth in one character's memory against the purported truth in another's memory. The truth would contain parts of both characters's memories. Of juxtapositions showing unreliabilty.

But what if instead of a contrast conveyed through competing marks, what about memory without quotation marks and current affairs denoted by marks?

Something to think about. It is also easier typing without quotation marks.

sch 5/27