Week 24 of 2019 – 3 June to 9 June 2019

Goals

Reading

• Goal – 103 / day, or 721 / week
• Achieved – 747/707 – Success!

Writing – I Remember

• Goal – 7 / week
• Achieved – 0/7 – Failure!

Writing – Small Projects (Fragments, short stories, etc)

• Goal – 28 minutes / week
• Achieved – 30 minutes/28 minutes – Success!

Writing – Large Projects

• Goal – 49 minutes / week
• Achieved – 27 minutes/49 minutes – Failure!

Getting myself out there

• Short story reviews – Zero (Seven total for the year)
• Submissions – Zero (Twelve total for the year)
• Rejections – One (Six total for the year)
• Acceptances – Zero (Zero total for the year)

Commentary

Ah, another rejection.  This time from Hi Vis Press’ Low Light magazine, so that is a shame.  Nose to the grindstone and all that.  I’ve received a lot of rejections lately because I have been submitting a lot!  So it doesn’t bother me too much, though more than, of course, an acceptance.

Writing was ok this week, though not as good as the previous couple of weeks.  I was unwell, and that basically meant I spent two days off working playing Hollow Knight, and then when I was back at work, I went to bed very early and just recovered. That also meant I read a good chunk of Murakami because it goes down super easy, even if I don’t exactly admire his subject matter or writing style.  But I do like to read him when I miss Japan, which is often.

Still, I started work on a new short story, this one set in Minsk and concerning two friends who start an importing company under watchful Soviet eyes, and which was initially inspired by Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Far From Here, which was in one of the Dalkey Archive Press’ Best European Fiction collections.  I have about 700 words so far, and it’s at a point where I could finalise it as flash or keep it going to hit the sweet spot of 2,000 – 3,000 words.  I may just submit it around as a flash piece while continuing to work on it.  I am reasonably happy with where it is going, though I admit I need to avoid my strange tendency to fall into mawkish sentimentality.  I suppose because it is easy to write (and horrible to read)?

The novel continues apace.  It’s a 5,465 words now, so there was a modest increase from last week’s 4,865, but much of the (admittedly short) time spent working on it this week was tinkering around the edges.

I have added a front page now with a working title and an area for two questions which I need to keep in mind at all times:

What is the through-line?

What are the themes?

Themes are self-explanatory, and I believe that they will begin to reveal themselves as the piece continues.  Already I can see a focus toward art and the relationship of a father to his daughter (surprise – I write about that more now that I have a daughter!).  But a more thorough reread (and further words on a the page!) will help elucidate the themes and allow me to focus and cut away items which don’t swirl around those.

The through-line is more tenuous but more important, I think.  It’s an aspect of a novel I think about a lot when reading, and even more while writing.  Let’s take Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which is 800 or so pages of – everything!  And yet, the through-line is, to me, the search for the writer Archimboldi and the problem of the murder of women in Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.  Everything read in that book revolves in some way around those primary conceits, or near enough.  One can indulge a touch with 800 pages.  Anyway, I need to find my own through-line/s and then use that lens to view anything I write – does it align with what I’m trying to achieve?  Is it relevant in some way?  Am I progressing or commenting upon the major aspects of the novel?

I don’t know what it is, yes, which means I am fumbling around a bit.  But when I find it that will allow me to go back to what I’ve written and, also considering the themes, really hone in on what I would like to achieve.

I continue to fail writing I Remember, which means more of the mundane nothingness of my life disappears.  I started that project with the explicit intention of avoiding losing the small parts of my life, but that hasn’t worked as well as I would like.  Alas.

Reading was fine.  Nothing spectacular.  Of primary note is S. A. Chakraborty‘s City of Brass, which I picked up a while ago based on an article I’d read about up and coming fantasy writers who were taking fantasy in different and interesting directions.  And, look, if the Arabian skin had been removed from this novel it would be a mediocre fantasy novel, so that’s a real shame.  There’s not much to it and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you really want to read the word ‘Cairo’ in a fantasy novel.  I am not in a very great hurry to read the other two in the trilogy, and perhaps never will.

I’m on track to read 50 novels by the end of June, which is, I think, about right and what I should expect with a young child.  100 novels for the year would please me.

And that was my week of failure.

Each week I aim to provide an update on the Journal of Failure.  These reports are intended to provide an impetus for me to achieve as much as I should/more than I do, and also to provide a further ongoing record of my life, as it is.