Saturday Working Through Stuff

Another day without much to talk about. I went to the convenience store twice. Nowhere else, though. I took one short nap. Why am I still so easily tired? Why is the still the same amount of discomfort? Small worries creep in.

Rejections:

8/7 

Thank you for submitting to Exposition Review Vol. XI: “PARA/SOCIAL.”  This year we received a record-breaking number of submissions, and we appreciate your patience while we gave each piece the time and attention it deserved.  We truly value your submission and consider it an honor to read your work. Unfortunately, “Agnes” is not a fit for this issue.  Since you indicated that you would like feedback on your submission, we will send comments from our editorial board along shortly.

We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors and hope you will submit again!

Take care,

Exposition Review

Submissions 

8/8

Cream City Review, Gordon Square Review, Southern Humanities Review: After Making Landfall 

Thriller Magazine Press - One Dead Blonde.

Readings

Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Indiana Authors Awards), a review (and one that has piqued my interest).

 While never rising to the comic heights of Vonnegut, and without his more overtly obvious moral lessons, these stories nonetheless have elements that will be recognizable to his fans, and the straight faced delivery of preposterous circumstances Moody presents will certainly be appreciated by those who enjoy Charlie Kaufman or even Terry Gilliam. Like Kaufman, Moody can verge on the allegorical and the surreal, and like Gilliam, the visuals are often of our reality but with the volume turned up on some of their more unsettling attributes.    

 Across all five pieces included in the collection, Moody’s writing is serviceable. He never quite swings for the fences when it comes to the prose, but that’s probably a good thing in that he is already stretching the imagination with the content he presents and doesn’t distract from the heart of his stories with cumbersome or showy sentences. Readers who need mimetic recreations of real life in order to find themselves drawn into a story might struggle here, but those who can set aside their nagging questions about how such things could be (or readers who prefer to!) will enjoy playing in the melancholy, symbol laden worlds of Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.  

The Lie the Character Believes: A Deeper Look at Consciousness and Character Arc (Helping Writers Become Authors ).

Being perverse, some of my characters do not transform positively.

But as I’ve come to recognize over the years, the Lie is not just a Lie. I’ve come to emphasize it specifically as a comparatively limited belief that exists in a continuum with a comparatively expansive Truth. Because here’s the thing: at the beginning of a story, the Lie starts out as the character’s Truth. To some degree, it was a Truth that worked for them up until the story begins. 

***

And so, I would posit that the Lie a character overcomes really isn’t so much a wrong belief they must correct (or at least not always and not at its deeper levels). Rather, it is a fissure in consciousness—a place where the conscious self is inhabiting an ego identity that has created separation between its surface-level understanding and the deeper Truth of our being. 

I have been more interested in people making choices based on incomplete or incorrect information and then having to live with those choices. Well, that has been the subject of some of my short stories.

 This may be why my stories keep getting rejected, and I should shift from wrong assumptions to lies.

First, we have the Lie as simply a mistaken belief or even an outright deception that must be seen through.

Second, we have the Lie as a point within a continuum from a comparatively limited perspective to a comparatively expanded perspective. Both “Lie” and “Truth” are qualified here; they are not black and white, good or bad. They are just reference points for where characters may find themselves along the continuum at any point.

And third, we have this deeper understanding of the Lie as an ego identity or a comparatively limited consciousness. It is ultimately a separation between the conscious self and the unconscious self. When we zoom back from the minutiae of any specific character arc to look at the movement of human growth, what we are really tracking is the larger expansion that becomes possible as we release the limitations of our ego identities, allowing us to embrace our capacity for deep alignment with the truths of life.

Or stick to my guns and live with characters who do not transform into better selves but live and die by their choices. After all, Ahab does not transform into anything apart from fish food.

Other lies addressed in the article: The Lie the Character Believes as Separation and The Lie the Character Believes as Social Reality. Some additional notes for me, if not for you.

Although I dearly love the idea of character arc as being about transformation, I think this expanded model reveals it might be more accurate to instead think of character arc as being about coming into alignment. It’s less about a change to the character’s fundamental self and more about the removal of the false self. It’s not the addition of a new perspective, but the stripping away of what isn’t true so the character may see more clearly.  

 ***

Ego identities are not simply personal. They are reinforced through collective social consensus. Society itself can be seen as an ego identity. In their seminal book, sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited that reality, as we think of it, is a social construction. Customs and traditions are dictated by varying societies. That America or Columbia or Italy are countries at all is a social convention. Indeed, the conventions of language are a social construction, with (mostly) agreed-upon rules.

Although we each, in our own small way, influence society, society bears a tremendous influence upon our own ego identities—not just in how we operate socially but also in how we understand ourselves internally. Arguably, the vast majority of our ego identities are inherited. We all entertain outer Lies (aka, limiting beliefs) about what we believe reality to be and inner Lies about what we believe our identities within that reality to be.

 I wonder what my father would have made of A Dying Art by John Semley. He was an embalmer, he held himself to a high standard, and I expect he would be appalled.

I spent somewhere around 2 hours writing a query letter and synopsis for One Dead Blonde. I do not have much hope for it.

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Once More Lagging Behind: Rejections, Ideas, Submissions

 8/6

I find myself tired and dealing with insomnia this week. It has gotten in the way of reporting my days.

Last Saturday was my most active day out of the apartment. Laundry, the farmer's market, a quick lunch at Popeye's, and the car returned was the morning. I got back here around 1 PM. Then I found out my friend DM was in town for DWNTN Muncie. He and I grabbed lunch at the Downtown Farmstand. He agrees they have great pizza. That took up about two hours. I arrived here a bit achy.

I have photos that will appear in a separate post. 

Sunday, I managed Liturgy but only Liturgy. A little weak doing all that standing, but also from the sitting and standing up.

I need to get out today. I seem to have lost my pants on Saturday. Confused by that.

I woke around one and went back to sleep around 5 AM and then back up around 10.  

Emails and Star Trek Discovery dealt with.

I started a new short story.

Onto other things. 

8/3

I went to the grocery, I think. Certainly to the convenience store. Watching Star Trek shows on YouTube.

8/4

I started this post.  

Stayed put, a convenience store walk. Working on the MS.  

Reminded last night of something unpleasant: Murder of Sylvia Likens. This I did not know about until my forties. One may smile and smile and be a villain indeed.

8/5

I meant to spend the day out. All I did was get to the writer's group and in the evening to Walmart.

 

 

 Readings:

‘I want to be ripped to shreds’: writers flock to MFAs - but does it breed elitist literature? (The Guardian) touches on a sore point for me: MFAs running the show and me not having one.

These days, the writerly lone wolf is more a myth than it is a reality. Most of today’s celebrated authors are trained in the profession and their qualification is the MFA (master of fine arts). Percival Everett received his from Brown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie studied at Johns Hopkins University, and Jhumpa Lahiri went to Boston. Great writers, now, are less rare animals discovered in the wild and more elite thoroughbreds, meticulously trained and set up for the race ahead.

 But is it a good thing?

While the idea that the workshop is de facto a magical, hermeneutic space where mediocre writing turns into something great is a lie, it can be a tool. For the most part my workshops were generous and generative spaces where people read plentifully and with grace. A writer who is forced to confront her work regularly through the eyes of others must think about what it is she wants to write and why, and this inevitably leads to writing that is more thoughtful and ambitious. Of course, learning who to listen to is a skill in itself. 

One rejection came with a critique and a recommendation to workshop my story. Okay, could it be that workshopping also offloads editorial work? 

What seems to be the consensus is that an MFA teaches you style as opposed to soul. A focus on craft, on how to write, creates automatons who can turn a good phrase, but whose writing is stripped of something essential. Pulitzer prize-winning Robert Olen Butler, interviewed by Edward J Delaney for the Atlantic, sums it up: “creative-writing students, who are typically trained almost exclusively in craft and technique […] don’t know the first thing about [being an artist].” Jo Ann Beard told me she could recognise an Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate anywhere. There was something honed, particular and controlled in the writing. Perhaps the imprint MFAs have had on fiction feels more forceful at a time when the gulf between literary and popular fiction has never been wider. Do MFAs guard the ivory tower of literary fiction while “untrained” writers produce popular fiction for the masses? Or more generously, do MFAs protect a dying art?

While it is true that spending hours in a classroom under the influence of certain teachers can create similarities in style among a cohort, in my classes students submitted widely: magical realism, noir, historical, auto-fiction. They had epic aspirations.

Yet there is a sense that contemporary fiction conforms to a similar style. Is this because MFAs encourage that? I’m not sure. Or is it rather the influence of narrow trends, which force certain books into the public eye at certain times. That many of the most popular authors today have MFAs, and that those novels might have a similar style or focus on a similar subject is a bit like saying fire engines cause fires.

But a shared education may implicate a shared philosophy. Or it could be a shared culture beyond the MFA program creates a shared world view, or just a shared set of cultural touchstones. What I write about seems to be slightly outside what MFA writers latch upon.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to say exactly how an MFA influences writing, and whether it is worth it. The truth is, an MFA isn’t a magic pill. It’s much harder to pastiche a style than you think; spending hours on anything takes stamina. Doing an MFA puts you in a rigorous environment for several years where, hopefully, you can learn how best you write. As Everett put it in Brown’s alumni magazine: “Brown allowed me to really just be who I am and just work.” 

Ideas:

The Greek Tragedy Behind Suddenly Last Summer - JSTOR Daily

Structurally, The Bacchae and Suddenly Last Summer are dominated by two key monologues, and, specifically, Violet’s and Catharine’s monologues turn Sebastian into the subject of a performed drama. “Sebastian himself, of course, exists only within the competing dramatic accounts of Catharine and Violet,” says Morra. “These expressions are themselves contained within a work that calls continuous attention to itself as drama, vehemently anti-realist and self-consciously subjective. The play refrains from staging or confirming the violence of Sebastian’s demise; even more so than The Bacchae, it contains its narrative at the level of language rather than action.”  

Frame-Breaking: When Stories Step Outside Themselves – The Hemlock Journal

 Description 

If writing descriptions intimidates you, consider breaking the concept down to just remaining mindful. Reflect on what the protagonist is thinking, feeling, and perceiving as they advance through a scene, whether or not you know the “perfect” language to describe that. Then, it will be up to you to decide which of these details are most relevant to convey the tone you’d like a scene to have. Including each of the five senses all at once is rarely necessary—in fact, doing so will work against you by reducing the impact that your words have—so be sure to prioritize what feels like it best fits the moment.

***

A complete lack of description, on the other hand, isolates the reader from the characters, environment, and plotline that they’re meant to bond with by leaving them in the figurative dark. If the reader is given no visuals, sounds, scents, or other details to ground them in a narrative, very little remains for them to connect with to envision our scenes as real. Dialogue and exposition alone, while both incredibly valuable skills for writers, cannot reach their full potential without the aid of description, and the same may be said vice versa.

***

With all of the above in mind, it’s also vital to remember not to rely solely and excessively on description to elevate our writing. Doing so is often referred to as writing purple prose, which many readers prefer to avoid, making it a distinctly unflattering label to have attributed to our narratives. Similarly, utilizing an abundance of repetitive descriptions may begin to fall into the territory of cliché. Because of this, it’s necessary to be mindful of how our descriptive writing works alongside other storytelling aspects like pacing and dialogue, as depending too heavily on descriptions may lead us to neglect equally necessary skills. 

Untranslatable Food Words (Vittles) there is something here, even if it is only a reminder of language's limits.

I really think Mike Bloomfield represents a story that needs telling and “It’s tragic the way he died. He made the blues accessible to a lot of guys like me.” Bob Dylan and Jorma Kaukonen on the 1960s guitar icon who led an electric blues revolution and died alone and unknown (GuitarPlayer) reinforce this idea.  

Rejections 

 8/1 for “The Unintended Consequences of Art”

 Thank you so much for your submission to the Submission Pit’s July ‘26 window.

I regret to inform you that your short story did not win this month but fear not! You’re more than happy to submit for August immediately.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the Submission Pit Substack below if you haven’t already.

Also if you have had a recently published short story elsewhere (or forthcoming) feel free to let us know about it and we'll give you a special shout out in next month's statistics post.

8/3:

Thank you for trusting us with "Agnes." After a close reading, we've decided that the story isn't the the right fit for us at this time.

Sincerely,

StoryBottle Co 

8/4:

Thank you for letting us consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 – 1984" for publication in the Missouri Review. We enjoyed reading your work, and though it doesn't quite fit our needs at this time, we wish you excellent luck with it and hope we will have the chance to read more of your writing in the future.

Sincerely,

The Editors
The Missouri Review 

Submissions 

8/4:

BoomerLitMag (Agnes 2026-06-26)

Thin Skin (Agnes 2026-06-26)

Passager Books (A Heart’s Judgment Judged)

The Fanatic (After Making Landfall)  

For Page & Screen (Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1836 -1990)

Planet Scumm (The Psychotic Ape)

8/5:

I was looking at a possible submission of One Dead Blonde. Only it required another 2,000 words. That took most of the day. 

EPOCH (After Making Landfall) 

Blue Mesa Review  (After Making Landfall)

MIAMI UNIVERSITY PRESS NOVELLA PRIZE (Plain Tales From The Flatlands)

The Iowa Review (After Making Landfall)

 

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Why Write

 Reason 1,235, but a good reminder.

Writing Needs Ego (and that’s okay)

Ego makes you write, because you are integral to creation. It literally comes out of you, specifically. The desire for it to be good, beloved, accepted, or the temptation to outsource the hard part in favor of sparing our emotional stability, is an act of pride. Both are intrinsically tied to the act of creation. Believing your work is important enough to dedicate time to is the first step. Continuing to do so in the face of countless pressures saying you can’t, shouldn’t, or won’t, is every step following.

Art is dismissed enough as it is. We can’t keep dismissing ourselves too.

sch 7/30 

  

Starting A New Week - Writing, Literary Stuff, Rejections, Bookers, Colson 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.

Should the Booker Prize Be Quirkier? (Thornfield Hall)

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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Reading Lists, Writing Examples, Making The Writing Work

 I got suckered a little by the following video, then I realized it's value.

 It gives us a list not compiled by some stody old fart. That's its value.

7 Habits of Highly Annoying Novels - by Cristin White - pay attention to his editing of one passage, if nothing else!

Why Multiple POVs Can Make Readers Love Your Characters More - Helping Writers Become Authors is important to me because this is what my “Dead and Dying” stories turned "Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory” has been trying to do. So far, no success. Whether that is because no one outisde of Indiana finds the stories interesting, or because I borrowed my presentation from The Spoon River Anthology, or both, occupies my mind. Maybe it will find a home for publication before I die.

 The Story Hook Writers Miss (Not the One You Think!) has something that I particularly like, support for my own ideas. It came from reading Bertolt Brecht wanting a theater that made people think. My response was that 's cool but how do you keep their behinds in theater seats? People have to feel some attraction to the characters, that's how we keep them in their seats. This is one thing that I am still working on; it seems with my latest revisions, I am getting closer. Now, do I have time to make it all work and write something worth reading?

Think about it. Hemingway does it. Toni Morrison does it, too. 

Talk about the ultimate wounded hero, the defiant underdog, the man risking loss, the man fighting for his ideals against the world: Done Quixote? Film archivists on quest to finish Orson Welles passion project (The Guardian). Do I mean Don Quixotic or Welles? Take your pick; take both.

Never Publish a Book Without Checking This (I’m an Editor) is way ahead of where I am, but for two things. I like BookFox and its advice. Second, it reassures me that I need to work on making sure the opening chapter establishes the book. (I need do some work on that!)

 

All of which leaves me feeling like this:

 sch 7/15

 

Thinking About Writing Novels

About all I can do is think. Today was another one of those days of fogginess. I do not know whether it is because of the hernias or not taking my meds as I should. I tried napping and never really fell asleep, only wasted time. I got up after 8 pm and decided to order a sandwich and work on this blog. I have not stepped out of the apartment building since this morning. Not that I feel anything lost, other than time.

Submissions made over the weekend:

 “After Making Landfall”

 Mulberry Literary 

New Orleans Review “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984”: Missouri Review.

Something from the other day: Jack White: Frozen Charlotte Album Review | Pitchfork 

Before the portions quoted below, there as a discussion about French grammar and I wonder if that does not make a difference between their novels and ours. English is far less formal than French. Think about it. 

Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp by Kathryn Scanlan (Paris Review)

A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.  

***

There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says, that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say, remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy, because Twenty Minutes of Silence is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that was her ambition. 

This is all for “Chasing Ashes”. I do not know what it will, only that it has to be different.

César Aira’s Art of Not Editing by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer (Paris Review) has this paragraph, it is what I want:

And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. 

Not that I this Aira's talent:

... Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.

I just feel like my own stuff is so constituated.

Although I am not put off by Dostoyevsky nowadays, I think that has more to do with having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is something true in Mark Nayler's Dostoevsky is a dreadful writer (The Spectator).

Given Dostoevsky’s reputation as one of the untouchables of literature, I was surprised at how bad his prose is. It lacks grace and balance. Instead of taught, stylish sentences, Dostoevsky works in messy, interminable paragraphs that erode the reader’s goodwill. I’m partly grateful, though, because his exhausting prose at least forced me to reflect on the complex relationship between reader and writer.   

And this is not how I would not want to be thought of:

My negative reaction to Dostoevsky, as I recently discovered, places me in distinguished company. Vladimir Nabokov once described him as “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” Ernest Hemingway had mixed reactions: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” he asked. For Henry James, Dostoevsky’s novels were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings.” James couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment. Reading it, he said, was “like having an illness.” 

We too often blame ourselves if we don’t like or “get” a classic work of literature, thus absolving the writer of all responsibility. But after battling my way through almost 1,500 pages of Dostoevsky, I’m in no mood to be generous. The fault is mainly his.  

Two rejections came in:

Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI.

Kind regards, The Editors

Visit AGNI Online, featuring selections from our print issues, as well as a trove of new Web-exclusive writing.

To stay connected, sign up for the AGNI newsletter! 

And this for a submission from last year:

Thank you for your submission to Press Pause Press. We did not find "Coming Home" a fit for Press Pause at this time, but we appreciated the chance to consider your work, and we wish you the best of luck finding it a home.

Sincerely,

The Press Pause Press Team

 

 

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Literary & Writing Stuff

 

7/1/2026 Submissions of “After Making Landfall”:

The Plentitudes

Toronto Journal

The Roost  

And of “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984”

Seven Story Publishing 

Today's rejections:

Thank you again for submitting 'The Unintended Consequences of Art' for consideration by The Future Fire. The editors have read this work and after some discussion we have decided not to take it for publication.

We'd like to thank you again for thinking of us with this piece, and wish you the very best with your writing in the future.

Djibril 

Press Blog: http://press.futurefire.net/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thefuturefire.bsky.social

 

***

 

Thank you for sending us "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984." Unfortunately, we do not have a place for it at this time. However, we appreciate the opportunity to read your writing and your interest in Peatsmoke.

We hope you find a good home for your work elsewhere, and wish you the best.

Cheers,

Wendy & Bess

-- 

Wendy Wallace and Bess Cooley

Editors, Peatsmoke: A Literary Journal

***

We are grateful that you trusted ANMLY with "After Making Landfill," however, our readers felt that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will be unable to publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors
http://www.anmly.org 

***

Thank you for submitting to Ploughshares. We have decided not to include your submission in an upcoming issue, but please be assured that "After Making Landfall" was carefully read.

Editorial decisions at Ploughshares are often informed by our vision for future issues, and as a result, we unfortunately must reject quality submissions more often than we'd like. Thank you again for the opportunity to consider your work.

For future submission opportunities, please note that our Emerging Writers' Contest is open each year from February 1-March 31 and our Regular Reading Period is open from June 1-November 15.

Sincerely,

The Ploughshares Editors

Good advice: Advice for older writers. Nathan Bransford has a newsletter, I think it is useful and educational about the publishing process.

 The Creative Resistance - by Joe Ponepinto ( Beyond Craft) pokes back at my AI bias. Having found much to my benefit from this Substack, I paid attention.

He noted, “Based on my experience teaching and lecturing across the world, the Creative Resistance is strongest in North America, much less dominant in India, and still less in China and Korea, with Europe somewhere in between. When I taught a class on AI and creativity in Seoul last summer, with students from across Asia as well as Latin America, they had a single concern: please teach us how to use these tools effectively. The only person calling for creative resistance was an American student who had strayed into the class.”

That seems pretty typical of American politics as well.

Maybe that’s the real debate. Many people in the US tend to look at social issues through the lens of politics, and since our politics is so divided, there is little to no middle ground, and no attempt to compromise. The Creative Resistance seems to mirror the us-against-them mentality that dominates our national discourse.

***

The above opinion of AI by people in other countries is closer to my own. I see it as a useful tool to enhance my work. It allows me to do research much faster4, and it occasionally offers input that augments my thinking, much like a human work partner. Its errors are annoying, but I believe I have the experience and judgment to weed them out of my work process.

I don’t use AI for writing. I don’t use it for planning or to brainstorm. I don’t use it to edit my work5. I am not tempted to use it for those purposes, partly because I have what I consider a very strong imagination, as well as decades of experience in creative writing and just don’t need it, and mostly because LLMs are tools that rely primarily on compilations of standard, mainstream literature, and I don’t want to write like that. They mimic writing styles, rather than attempt to create anything imaginative or original. They are useful as writing tools mostly for people who do not really know how to write.

I do not see it useful for my writing, and after too many years of doing my own research (and still regretting two errors), after letting one other person, someone I trusted at the time, I do not outsource my research.

Something a little different: On the Mark by Florence Hazrat review – a fascinating history of punctuation ( The Guardian ).

 Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire, putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.

Ivy Compton-Burnett's forgotten genius (Engelsberg ideas). A short piece about a writer I do not think I had heard of but the site turns up interesting items of all sorts. From what I read, complicated and distinctive, with the possibility of fomenting some ideas.

 Ivy Compton-Burnett’s literary method is quite unique, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the action. There is very little exposition, scene-setting or character drawing, and plot, as such, is perfunctory, often drawing on creaky devices from Victorian fiction. ‘As regards plot’, she wrote, ‘I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.’ Compton-Burnett’s dialogue is quite extraordinary – it has to be, as it has so much weight to carry. Her characters talk endlessly in long, formal, finely nuanced conversations which seethe with dark subtext, unspoken motives and fierce passions. These have to be read with close attention to discover – gradually or, often, explosively – what is really going on. It could be anything, up to and including murder. You have to be on your toes even to keep track of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people, sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequently do, in the course of uncovering what is really going on. They also have a habit of suddenly materialising from nowhere, like Jeeves.

***

It is unlikely that these novels will ever again have a wide appeal – they are too challenging, in too many ways, for a modern readership – but it would be a sad loss if they were forgotten. Ivy Compton-Burnett is a true one-off, and her novels are like nothing else in fiction: others, including Henry James and Ronald Firbank, have written novels in dialogue, but they are nothing like Ivy’s. She even, it seems, defeats AI’s mimetic abilities: I recently challenged a chatbot to produce a passage in Compton-Burnett style and the result was thoroughly unsatisfactory – whereas Firbank came out well. Ivy herself once said, ‘Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.’ It is well worth resisting the urge. 

And a cautionary story, the despicable treatment of a female writer: She Wanted to Be Seen as a Writer. The World Saw Her as a Sex Worker. (The Walrus )

Arcan’s untimely death forced a re-evaluation of her work and persona. Posthumously, she was transformed from a frivolous, middlebrow enfant terrible into a subject of serious erudite study. Critics have been perturbed that Arcan embraced conventional scripts of female beauty and sexuality. Feminist critics have had a difficult time figuring out what to make of her contradictory politics, her obsession with death, and her grim view of female subjectivity. For others—like the Tout le monde en parle panellists—her manicured, surgically enhanced good looks were evidence of hypocrisy, given the biting assault on beauty culture she levelled on the page. Their absolutist logic is unable to parse the messy reality that a person can be intellectually critical of the same norms in which they are psychically invested.  

sch 7/6 

 

 

Literary Stuff, Plotting, Rejections; A Bit of An Update

 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

swamp-pink.cofc.edu

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

*

Cagibi on Facebook:  facebook.com/cagibilit

Cagibi on Instagram: instagram.com/cagibilit

 

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Friday: Great American Novels, Writing Advice, William T. Vollam Interview; Napping

I did group and grocery shopping and survived the heat, took a nap, and worked through my email and wrote this post. 

May it you something to do, something to think, something to aspire to, and a reminder that the work may not find a perch to hand on. 

 Eight Great American Novels (The New Yorker) being behind a paywill I will give 

• “Miss Lonelyhearts,” by Nathanael West
• “Mating,” by Norman Rush
• “The Last Thing He Wanted,” by Joan Didion
• “Winter in the Blood,” by James Welch
• “Fun Home,” by Alison Bechdel
• “Barkskins,” by Annie Proulx 
• “American Wife” Curtis Sittenfeld 
• “A Thousand Acres,” by Jane Smiley

I know three of the writers and two of the novels, but have read none of them. 

10 Books That Might Be the Great American Novel (Collider). I just cannot agree with numbers 1 & 2.

(4) Kristen Weber (@kristenweber): “One of the biggest misconceptions about editing is that we're looking for mistakes. Most of the time, I'm asking a much bigger question: “What is this story trying to become?” Once I understand that, the direction of my edit letter reveals itself.” 

“We Always Leave Things Unfinished” - by Alexander Sorondo. William T. Vollman is touted as one of our greatest writers. He is dying.

An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day (Lapham’s Quarterly) inspired me to take a nap this afternoon after I returned home and opened this article. Novelists pat yourselves on your back.

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from “out of the blue,” to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from the Muses or the gods. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by reasoning seldom command. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps because their origin remains something of a mystery.

A devoted novel-reader since her teens, Christoff Hadjiilieva suspects that artists—who “live their thoughts”—may know more about the stream of consciousness than her fellow scientists do.

And a rejection for “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town”: 

Thank you for your submission to Sunspot Literary Journal. Although we must decline, please know that selecting works for publication can be guided by pieces we've already accepted for the current issue, a focus on specific issues, and other elements that change rapidly. The fact that we have declined your work should in no way discourage you from continuing on this path you've chosen for your life. We greatly appreciated the chance to consider your work.

Creatives like you can change the world. Your perspective is unique. Your efforts to generate something that makes an impact is difficult, and can feel heavy when you work so hard without recognition. Please keep going. The world needs to see things from your perspective. 

 Part of which may have been accepted for publication.

sch 

  

Writing Updates: Craft Articles & My Submissions

 I spent most of yesterday trying not to overheat and working on “After Making Landfall”. I did a couple of posts for publishign later in the week.

(3) The 53rd Try Was the Charm - by Marcia Yudkin persistence.

(3) There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel  explains why I have been having trouble with POV as an idea because I have been focusing on who has the information and how it is conveyed. Five seems like my experience.

Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.   

(3) The Writing Advice I’ll Never Give You - by Kristen Weber: Just read it.

(3) Lit Theory 101 | Voice, Consciousness & Distance 

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

This ties into the POV essay above. 

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

 ***

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

So much for headhopping, sort of. Shifting without attribution seems to be headhopping.

 

Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” (Literary Hub). If you have not read Walter Mosely, you might overlook this. You're mistake twice over - not reading Mosely is the first.

All the readers of Dorn have interpretations that come from their histories, their particular intellects, and desires, and yearnings they might not be aware of. That’s the beauty of fiction; it is a continually mutating protoplasm in the minds of readers. This colorless, almost invisible ever transforming blob of reactions is the party. It is not a machine. It is not good or evil, bad or boring—it is a cry in the dark, a hope looking for a harbor, something that pretends to make sense but, in actuality, is much deeper than that.

And let’s not forget the original definition of the term, the word novel; it means that you’re about to encounter something original, different, unique. And so, when the critic in your newspaper, your classroom, when the editor in your mind, or of your book, tells you that your novel would make a poor coffee percolator (or potboiler) you tell them, thank you, because the novel you created (and that is recreated by each and every one of your readers) is an ever-transforming document that grants the power to evolve in the minds of the many. From Conan the Barbarian to Othello the written word has the potential for transformation no one can predict.

 

 6/28-29 submissions

Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, Mudroom, The /tƐmz/ Review got “After Making Landfall”.

 Going out soon. Still no phone, and the heat advisory continues.

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