It seems the past week has been an up and down one.
Insomnia and then oversleeping. It has hit me again.
Christmas in the church under the Julian calendar.
Going nowhere but church, grocery, and the group session because I have been working on “Chasing Ashes”.
However, I did draft a post for my daily report; only I would find myself too tired to work on it. This is what I have collected this past week.
Another writer that prison gave me time to read was Iain M. Banks. Not heard of him? He was Scottish, didn't write YA dystopias, and none of his books were adapted into film, and so has probably escaped your attention. If you want to write science fiction, then he needs to be read - he creates a future civilization that does not feel like a retread of our current models.
For a second opinion: Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks is still a master (New Scientist).
But there is also so much to think about, from the nature of life in a utopia where there are no challenges left, to what it means to be a human in a universe where vast Minds take charge of everything. And that’s not to mention the joys of the plot – I was almost shouting at the page when Gurgeh was tempted into cheating at the game of Stricken by Mawhrin-Skel, and I was utterly swept up in the Azad games. This was a real win for me, and I’m going to go back and reread lots of other Iain M. Banks as a post-Christmas treat.
An inside look at college in Indiana Women’s Prison
I never saw many of Bardot's films when young, and when I came of age she had retired. I never understood the mystique. For me, the French actress that meant something to me is Catherine Deneuve. Even after reading, Brigitte Bardot was a zeitgeist-force and France’s most sensational export (The Guardian), I still do not understand what was the fuss.
Wednesday's rejection for “Coming Home”:
Essay | 41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction by Caleb Klaces - The London MagazineThank you for entering the 46th "On The Premises" short story contest. We received 507 qualified entries. Of those entries, 10 made it to the final round of judging. We're sorry to have to inform you that "Coming Home" was not among them.
If you are interested in getting a critique of your entry, please go to https://onthepremises.com/
getting-critiqued/ for instructions. Critiques cost $15 in US dollars. Issue #46 will be published in February 2026 Our next contest, a mini-contest, will begin at the same time and will be announced in the February newsletter. Look for it, and keep reading and writing!
Sincerely,
The "On The Premises" editorial staff
The pious John Milton, noting that virtue cannot be known without knowledge of its opposite, argued against censorship: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”Cloistered virtue, indeed! How can we know what’s virtuous, gentle and good, without reading, acknowledging, and parsing its opposite? And how can we stand up to corrosive and inhumane forces without naming them? It is an ignorant and unreasoned stance to argue that reading the adversary of virtue will set an example, trigger, or otherwise amplify bad behavior. To admit what hurts, agitates, and offends us in fact illuminates what is complicated and good in us. Catullus openly mocked not only his rivals, but also leaders, generals, and their allies. He hated Caesar’s friend Mamurra, a wealthy, corrupt engineer whose bourgeois degeneracy made him a tempting mark.
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Catullus’s vast capacity for love and sweetness is made all the more visible by his unflinching view of humankind; we get to measure the distance between what he hates and what he loves. Sometimes, as in 85, “Odi et Amo,” “I hate and love,” they are one and the same. And this is true of all of us. Poem 5 contains thousands upon thousands of kisses for his Lesbia; 51 has her laughter bringing him near death, his first sight of her rendering him voiceless with love.
Book banning is a movement against being or feeling alive, seeing with clarity what is already good and what can be made better. It is truth banning, and while it particularly silences vulnerable people, it also closes possibilities and voices for all of us, narrowing the narrative of our society and obstructing our views of what is essential to see.
Literary Hub » The Publishing Industry is Capricious… Gamble on Yourself
Not that the publishing industry can’t or shouldn’t address the more general problem Kuznetsova highlights, which applies to this dictum, too. And I do think there is a fairly simple formula more conducive to giving the best literary art the best chance at commercial success: hire a diverse array of editors, pay them a living wage, and let them buy the books they like best. It would be great if someone tried this! But regardless, the only recourse for serious novelists is to stand by their work irrespective of market response, rejoicing in any commercial success for the sheer good luck that it is.
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If the contemporary institutions we might expect to reliably support high-quality work only do so haphazardly, I think there is another to which we might turn. A hypothetical institution, admittedly, but one that unfailingly supports the mindset I find most conducive to artistic productivity: your own house, turned into a museum after you die.
I am not being glib. Fixing your sights on a post-mortem house museum simultaneously incentivizes you to embrace the models, work ethic, timeframe, and material surroundings most conducive to creating the highest caliber art of which you are capable.
#50: Five for Them, One for Me, with Lori Rader-Day
5. WRECK YOUR HEART feels like a love letter to Chicago. You’re an Indiana native, but you’ve lived in Chicago for some years now, and Dahlia’s (and your own) love for the city feels palpable throughout. There’s an unexpected but very real sense of community in the book. Talk about how you wanted to portray the city in WRECK YOUR HEART, and what you wanted to spotlight.
Back to the story of how this book was written. I started it in 2020 as a writing challenge, I put it away never expecting to see it again, published my book Death at Greenway. Meanwhile, I got started on something else and sold that book on 50 pages. But almost immediately I realized I didn’t know if I could finish that book, at least right that moment. There was a tone to it I didn’t know if I could sustain—a fun, buoyant tone. I had I had just started treatment for aggressive breast cancer. So I poured my feelings about that into a different book, written quickly, and sold that instead. That was The Death of Us, a book I am very proud of but also realize is the darkest of all my books. Well, yeah. To recap: the pandemic, hardest book of my life (Greenway), then cancer.
All this to say, when I was facing cancer, writing and my writing community were the largest part of what kept me sane. Writing reminded me who I was, even when my brain was literally losing some cells and I couldn’t think straight. The mystery community was so generous and loving.
Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules! | Creative writing | The Guardian
Literary Hub » Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing
My Adventures as "Rosamond Smith"
Sara Paretsky - Bestselling Author and Creator of Private Eye V.I. Warshawski
Literary YardAndrey Platonov, The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution, Tora Lane
Literary criticism can suggest other avenues of inquiry, and Lane concludes on an intriguing perspective of Platonov’s place in today’s world as an author of relevance. Read together, her introduction and afterword endeavors to explain that relevance by posing the question—“Is it possible to reach an understanding of Communism in literature that is not communist literature?” Given the endless resurrection of socialism and its abject failure time and again as a viable form of social organization, it is hard to make a case for Platonov’s idealistic notions of a literary revolution ever evolving out of a decidedly aliterate culture.
In the end, Lane answers her own the question—”To the extent that the modern world in general and the realization of Communism in particular prefer the illuminated world of outer appearance, the nocturnal experience of shared existence in the Inner is also diminished or even extinguished. . . The problem with the myth of the Communist utopia, as Platonov tells it, is not the myth itself, but what happens when the myth purports to be real.”
Subjectivity Is A Thing In Publishing (Babbles from Scott Eagan )
Yes, we are very much trying our best to be rational and looking that things objectively and whether or not a book is marketable, but let's be honest, we are all still human. We all have our own likes and dislikes. There are simply times when we read a proposal and something just doesn't click with us. It is that simple. Does it mean the book is not marketable? No. Does it mean the book is poorly written? No. It just means, it isn't right for us.
This is part of the reason why I am always pushing for you as authors to take the time to truly research those editors and agents. Find out their likes and dislikes. Don't just see if they acquire your genre, check to see what it is about that genre that they like and hate.
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You can even see this by looking at sites such as Publishers Marketplace and seeing who editors and agents are signing. You will see a pattern really fast and figure it out.
My verdict – and votes – on the seven finalists for Europe’s Car of the Year (Irish Times)
An Askēsis of Epiphany Revisiting “Worship in a Secular Age”: Part One (Public Orthodoxy)
As prescient as Schmemann’s remarks may appear to us today, they were (and remain) inconvenient to those who would attempt to construct from them a programmatic response to secularism. Indeed, contemporary “anti-secularists” often fail to grasp the spirit and subtlety of Schmemann’s critique and miss that it is, in fact, a penetrating self-critique of Christianity: defended solely as an institution of moral order; confined to the formal rites of the Church; wielded as a world-denying (yet deceivingly worldly) ideology. Above all, Schmemann urged Christians to treat secularism as a self-imposed and self-perpetuated tragedy: a scandalous, intergenerational failure to transmit the life-giving and life-affirming message that “the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Only this paradox and the Person it points to can provide the basis of an Orthodox Christian response to secularism—one that renounces every easy lapse into antagonistic ways of thinking and being and embraces instead the evangelical and incarnational work of witness.
Trump’s anti-globalism looks like old-school Yankee imperialism (Washington Post)
In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said he didn’t see himself bound by international law. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he told the paper. He also explained that ownership of Greenland was “very important” from his perspective, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” He said he could be willing to sacrifice the NATO alliance for the sake of his expansionist desires
Why Scotland lost its tongue (Englesberg Ideas)
There were two rejections that I have not yet put in here.
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