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
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
*
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