Over the weekend, I managed to get myself into a very strange position.
I have been doing this thing of working until I was tired and then sleeping. The sleep was not necessarily all that long, but it was intense. But insomnia started creeping into my life: tired but could not sleep. Even though my eyes were still blurry, and I worried about becoming incoherent, I kept writing.
Saturday morning, I work up around 2:30, decided since I didn't feel like going back to bed, I would knock off some writing. I had finished a Gore Vidal novel and thought I would put my views. I did, and I did, and I did for about 4 hours.
That was published on here as Having Finished Gore Vidal's The Golden Age. So far, and for all the work I put into it, and with me thinking I did a damned good job, there is no sign anyone has read it.
My fiction keeps getting rejected, but I persist without denting my vanity. Another rejection/loss came in on Saturday; this time for the first page of "Love Stinks":
Thank you once again, so much, for submitting your work to the 2025 Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize. (And sorry about the wrong link; thanks to those who alerted me!)
While I did not select your entry as one of the winners, I feel honored to have had the sincere privilege of considering your work—thank you so much for sharing it with me.
As you know, I judged this competition "blind," which means I did not know the identities of any of the submitters until I made my final selections. Click here if you wish to review the judging process.
The 2025 competition had a record 969 entries in a wide variety of genres, and a large number of those were notably good, making my task a significant (and enjoyable) challenge over the past nine weeks of steady reading; it's inspiring to me that so many worthy writers are crafting such compelling novels.
I hope you'll join me in congratulating the winners.
The winner is D. Shay Gable from Evansville, so an Indiana writer.
But the best stuff on here going unread bothers me more. I know when a story has been rejected, it has also been read.
Blog posts and "Theresa Pressley" were the focus of my Saturday. Revising "Theresa Pressley" using the text-to-voice app with LibreOffice, came up with so many words that are just wrong, so many words that are missing, paragraphs with the lead buried that I feel incompetent. Much of the text had been in fuller stories, so they should have edited before now. The paragraphs' flow had been picked over for years, but now I find them muddled, dull, stupid. KH has had faith in my writing, but I wonder if he is not just being kind. Incompetent at proofreading makes me look incompetent as a writer. Effing amateur hour.
This morning, Monday morning, I got the newsletter from The Walrus, and read Miriam Toews's piece “Why Do I Write?” You Might Not Like My Answer (Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from A Truce That Is Not Peace). I have always thought of my taking up writing at the suggestion of KH was not connected to my having tried to kill myself. Yes, there was the journalling of what had gotten me to the idea of suicide, and the idea that I should do something to balance all the damage and ugliness that had led me to being self-destructive, Ms. Toews has me seeing a different perspective on my why I am writing.
After the madness, the divorce, the sickness, my sister’s silence, the dread, here we go again: the only thing I can control is the writing. Or, the only other thing I can control, the only alternative to doing away with myself, as they (who?) say.
I will go there with you. I will go right to the very edge of the rail where you can smell the creosote, feel the limestone shale give way under your feet—or is it ballast?—a small earth quaking.
The immense altering of silence, of writing. It is the same. We are sisters. We are thieves. We steal ourselves, and others, and we alter them, Frankenstein them, ourselves, into something that tracks, that scans, that makes sense, that remains. Something not corporeal, this strange non-thing.
But being alive is worth something.
Damn great piece of writing, it distracted me from everything else since I opened it this morning. When I looked back on my life and saw that whenever I made a major decision that I had chosen wrong, I decided to go back, to uncover the shit I had buried myself under because like Jagger /Richards said, "Sometimes you've just got to scrape the shit off your shoes", and take up the rejected choices. Being creative instead of destructive leads that list. Ms. Toews reinforces the rightness of that choice.
And I kind of needed that this morning.
Unlike Saturday night where I turned and tossed, and my brain kept jumping around with memories and images and arguments, I decided to read. A little Rex Stout helped me to sleep. I have been awake now for 3 hours. During that time, I have read a little and eaten a little breakfast, and I started updating this post.
I write because now I cannot stop writing. Looking back, after deciding that could not be a writer in my early twenties was a mistake for my mental health. I write now to keep regressing back into depression, and also because it feels an obligation to be creative in the face of a destructive age.
At the last minute, I called off church on Sunday. About 6 am, I was finally yawning, and the body was shutting down. Too stubborn to give up trying to sleep by getting up and writing more, or reading a book, because I felt myself too tired to put words together, and my eyes too tired to read. When I woke around noon, I went back to going through my email. Sometime after 3 pm, I started on "Theresa Pressley".
Disgusted still by all the errors I found, I kept at it until around 7 pm. Then I was finished with the work, and worn out. My eyes were blurry, and my brain felt like cotton candy. I think I have had done more close editing on this than anything else I have written. What I have learned is I need to rethink my writing process if I am to do anything longer.
I made only one major change to the story by changing the last paragraph.
An even greater sign of my madness: I had missed the deadline for the publisher which I was doing all these revisions. It does not matter. There will be other places to send it.
More worrisome to me - and this came to me last night and my brain reeled from re-reading it - is whether the current format works as a true story. I have some people reading it now, I will let them tell me what they think before I go over it with an eye on the story itself.
I want to go fishing.
So says the guy how has not left his apartment for the past two days except to go down to the convenience store. When I go broke this week, those visits will stop altogether. I did my grocery shopping on Friday, after the group thing. Saturday there was a concert and a political meeting that I slept through - I did not want to walk back from Ball State. Today, I do need to get out and do some running. What I will not do is go to a political meeting tonight. When I scheduled it, I thought I would still be working and would get a taxi home. I do not feel like walking across half of Muncie. Yesterday, I did not feel like doing anything more after I finished working on "Theresa Pressley" - not the dishes, not fixing dinner, not eating, not talking to anyone on the phone. I need to do all those things today.
I started shopping for fly rods last night. YouTube has several videos with advice on buying tackle.
Has this staying at home working been any help with the writing? Yes. Keeping better track of deadlines seems a very good idea today. Several things have been started. I need to look more at publishers who will pay. They won't save me right now, but money can't hurt while I work on the longer stuff.
Coming up will be another post about John Banville, videos mostly, interviews. He is not anyone I have read widely, but boy I like to hear him talk. Not pretentious about his art while being an artist. Maybe it is he is Irish. At the same time, I could not write as he does - too much fine sanding of the text - because I started too late to get back to writing. I should take his advice, this latest round of revising "Theresa Pressley" proves me as a sloppy writer
This video is now running in the background, and I think it hits on the worst aspect of the current Democratic Party - and always with Indiana's Democrats - being they need to stand for something:
Unlike the Bush years, I do not find politics depressing. I wish I could get more angry than just appalled. It is good being the majority now - since the country is finding Trump more and more despicable.
. Back to Banville, he refuses to say he is writing about Ireland or for Ireland, that he is not putting his politics into his novels. I do not know that I can do this. Too much of our politics are cultural, even history has become an issue of partisan politics. However, Banville serves to remind me that politics cannot be the main emphasis in my fiction. Find his books, look up my posts here on him.
I saw this Friday: Anderson man convicted of fatally shooting wife. Divorce is cheaper. I might be reverting to my old life when I say lawyers need to eat, too.
Another writer I have listening about on YouTube is Thomas Mann. I read Buddenbrooks before I read The Magic Mountain; they different from one another in so many ways, but both are worth reading. If I were young, I would try telling the story of a business family. Dreiser is the last writer we had of the business world - well, the last I can think of. Maybe it is impossible today, with the likes of Musk being too well known to the world and not part of any dynasty. Maybe capitalism has become too large for families. Could be Americans cannot face up to the devouring nature of capitalism. Anyway, this is the video I found about Buddenbrooks. I hope it encourages you to read it, to read Mann.
Friday night, I also indulged in playing some videos about film.
I learned of pre-Code movies before the turn of the century, and I think we should think hard on them. First, we need to think about the effect of the Production Code not on movies, but on us and our culture. The conservatives have railed throughout my life about the welfare state, but the phrase that sticks out is "nanny state". However, they have no problem of censorship. Books bans are again ramping up in width and ferocity against subjects that offend conservative mindsets. Are Americans willing to do such things because the Production Code bred generations of Americans with the morals of Catholic priests and Victorian spinsters? Foreign films have never had problems dealing with adult themes for adults. American moves have declined from Deliverance to Avengers: Endgame; from pictures about real people we can understand to superheroes we cannot do anything else with other than to bow down to. Spectacle and size were the chief aspects of fascist art. As the video about film noir points out, Americans did make such films - before the country got swallowed up in the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Both being conservative movements. We had Rocky Horror Picture Show; what do they have now? Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show review – the campfest that became a cultural colossus.
Lost might be a little hyped, but noir can be neglected:
Samurai movies influencing Westerns - I can quibble with some of the influence, or its direction, or that it much more muddled, but still some fun and serious:
British thrillers - I have seen The Long Good Friday only once and have never forgotten it. That movie was why I will always watch an English crime movie.
While there were people there to support, there were some who weren’t. The president of the Ball State college Republicans, Charles Mandziara attended to speak out against the group. His thoughts on the protest are that as a group, they are "antithetical" to American values, the Ball brothers and Ball State itself.
He calls the group a “radical marxist communist group,” and says they have no place on campus. Mandziara also believes that they are using issues to push a radical left-wing agenda.
Mr. Madziara, I would think being a student, knows what is Marxism, and that peaceful protests by citizens against governmental abuses are neither radical nor necessarily left-wing.
He also raises some questions for me:
- When did police abuse become an American value?
- So, the Ball brothers were for abusive police and an authoritarian state?
- Since when has Ball State stood for abusive police and an authoritarian state?
- When did the First Amendment stop being an American value?
- The Ball brothers were against the First Amendment?
- Since when has Ball State been against the First Amendment?
- Do you have any original ideas, or can only ape the same empty slogans of adults?
Did Trump save Intel? Not really
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is injecting nearly $9 billion into Intel(INTC.O)
, opens new tab in exchange for a 9.9% equity stake. But the money - which the struggling chipmaker was slated to receive anyway under a federal funding act - will not be enough for its contract-chipmaking business to flourish, analysts said.
What Intel needs is external customers for its so-called cutting-edge 14A manufacturing process - a tough ask, at least in the short term
The headline assumes salvation, not control, was the object.
Sunday:
10 Ukrainian Books That Show the Many Sides of a Nation
In these ten books, Ukraine is feminist, magical realist, realist, and postmodernist. To Artem Chapeye, Ukraine is an empty bus station in Cherkasy. To Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Ukraine is the wail of alpine horns reverberating through the mountains. To Vsevolod Nestayko, Ukraine is a pair of village children stranded in a cornfield and laughing. Oksana Zabuzkho struggles to reconcile her love for her homeland with its patriarchal nature. Serhiy Zhadan says that he loves Ukraine even without cocaine—a sentiment that, conveniently, rhymes in Ukrainian and English.
There is only one trait that unifies Ukraine to all of its writers: Ukraine is home.
Found a new band, Blackberry Smoke. Although, they so not sound that new.
This thing has gotten too long, and I have not yet got to the main topic for today's screed. Time has also run out. Therefore, will end here.
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