This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“To be sane in an insane world is to feel insane every day.”
Source: “Oklahoma” in The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
I’m told that fall is the time when literary magazines and publishers open their submission windows more widely. That may be true, but throughout the year I am able to find opportunities, so I guess fall is just more of the same for me.
I have a half dozen completed short stories and a couple of completed novels that I’ve been shopping around. I’ve been doing this for years, but I’ve decided that I need to get more diligent about it. I need to get my stuff in greater circulation to increase the chances of acceptance and publication. In the past month I have made 15 submissions to publications and publishers. Overall, I currently have 31 pending submission out in the world. (The longest has been out there 259 days, and I think it’s about time to give up on it. UPDATE: I just tried to change the status of that submission in the tracker, and it wouldn’t let me, saying I should wait 365 days. This publication is notoriously slow in responding, so I guess I’ll leave it as Pending.) Of that 31 number, nine are for novels. The remainder are short stories, and a handful of those are already-published pieces that I’ve sent to places that take reprints.
It’s not unrealistic to think that I could submit at least one work each day. That would require me to find enuf likely markets to send them to, and I always imagine I’ve exhausted the opportunities, but then I come upon a new one, or a submission window finally opens, and I send something.
Of course, with more submissions come more rejections. But I long ago decided that they aren’t rejections; they’re credentials!
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The picture at the top of this page is of some buckeyes I collected from one of the trees I planted years ago in front of my cabin. I have two plantings of these, each at a front corner of the cabin. I can’t remember when I did this (tho I’m sure I’ve written it down somewhere) but the plants had to grow for I think six years before they came out with flowers, and a few more years before they produced buckeyes.
What is different about my plantings is that these are red flowering buckeyes. Most have a creamy white flower. I had bought these at a reasonable price from a mail-order nursery in Missouri. They were tiny plants in pots and I planted and fenced them so they had some hope of surviving the marauding deer. That worked and I’ve long wanted to plant more, but that nursery is apparently out of business. I asked at one well-stocked nursery where I live (in suburbia) and they said they do carry these red-flowering buckeye in the spring. The price, of course, was eye-watering and I passed on that.
But now that my two plantings are bearing fruit, I’ve begun collecting the buckeyes with the fanciful hope that I can germinate some of them and encourage their growth in pots at home. Then maybe I can plant them around the cabin next fall. I need to stratify them for a few months before I plant them. Basically, this involves mimicking a winter on the ground for the buckeyes by putting them in my refrigerator for a few months. So I’m trying that. Next time I go to my cabin, I intend to collect a few more husks and get the buckeyes from them to increase my chances.
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It’s currently Banned Books Week here in the U.S. Given the state of the nation, reading is both a recreation and a form of resistance to the forces of darkness. Get yourself a banned book and give it a read. (Every librarian in the world will help you make a selection!)
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Somehow I read 6 books in September. Several of these were in the 300-400 page range. One I finished in a day. I’m currently reading The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie, and given his past with censorship, I hope it qualifies for Banned Books Week.
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This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“The great events of eight decades had managed to occur without any effort on his part to help them along.”
Source: “In the South” in The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“Here was the terrible truth had hadn’t wanted to see: he was on his own.”
Source: Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo
I hope to see you tomorrow at the Tonganoxie Public Library from 1:00 to 4:00 for the Author & Book Market. I first wrote about it here.
Along with books of every kind, including my two novels, there will be other vendors, food trucks, a raffle, children’s activities inside the library, and a scavenger hunt for charms. Scrapefoot will be there.
Tonganoxie is about a half hour west of Kansas City in Leavenworth County, Kansas. The community of 5,000+ touts itself as being halfway between the east and west coasts and halfway between the Canadian border and the Gulf of Mexico. The word “Tonganoxie” derives from the name of a member of the Delaware tribe who had lived in the area at the time the town was founded.
What you see above is the shell or husk of two or three buckeyes, growing on one of several buckeye trees I have planted beside my little cabin in the woods. Unlike the more commonly seen variety of buckeyes, the ones I’ve planted have red flowers in the spring, which the hummingbirds love (and so do I). One day in the past, I decided that I wanted to have red-flowering plants around my cabin. I had built an entire bed of (expensive) topsoil behind a retaining wall in front of my cabin, and I filled it with bedding plants that would bloom red and make life wonderful. The deer found them wonderful, and the plants did not find the Ozark heat wonderful. The topsoil bed was a failure, and it’s now covered with gravel to help hold the upper retaining wall in place. (For a sense of this structure, have a look at the photos in this post.)
My hope this year is to collect the buckeyes in these husks when they are ready (when the husk splits open) and try to cultivate them into new plants that I can encourage in little pots (after four months of stratification in my refrigerator) until they are ready to plant around the cabin. (The price of a sapling red buckeye tree is astronomical! I think I got lucky when I bought mine years ago.)
Most of our day at the cabin yesterday was spent on the front porch, looking at the rain falling on the lake and listening to it drumming on the metal roof. We had no specific agenda other than to make good use of an opportunity to flee the city for a while, and I think we fulfilled that. We ate lunch. We peered across the lake through my wife’s newish spotting scope. I used my Merlin app to listen for birds to identify. I made notes in my visit journal (humdrum things, but the son finding his father’s visit journals in the family cabin in my novel One-Match Fire is profoundly important to the plot).
The forecast called for the rain to lesson as the day drew on, and it did, so we outfitted ourselves for a march to the top of the lake to see about our efforts to eradicate the Tree of Heaven incursion we found there some months ago. I had taken my chainsaw out there and slashed as many of them as I could (I estimate there are 50) until a nut loosened itself on the saw and the chain jumped the bar and the wielder lost his courage and the sun continued to beat down. That was about three weeks ago.
I’ve since learned that cutting is not an effective way to eradicate this invasive tree, as you can see from the photo below, taken yesterday. (Also, the cut wood smells like peanut butter, and for some people it’s a skin irritant. Such a lovely tree!)
I’m not sure what I’m going to do about these. (I welcome any suggestions.) Since they grow in the headwaters of the lake, I don’t want to use chemicals on them. Yanking them out of the ground is also ineffective if even a few root hairs remain in the soil. And lopping off their green parts is clearly only a temporary fix (above). I’ve noticed that they don’t seem to grown is shade, so I think their spread will be localized. I guess what I’m going to try to do is slash as much and as often as I can. Maybe I can get ahead of it or at least halt its spread.
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.”
Source: Severance by Ling Ma
Parent Imperfect is my second novel. It is a sequel to One-Match Fire and follows the family into a fourth generation as two men adopt a son of their own to love and raise as well as they can. Many familiar characters return, new names and faces are introduced, at least one character has left, and the family cabin in the Ozark hills remains as anchor and solace for these men and their fragile souls. (There may even be a talking fox in this tale, though only a troubled boy seems able to see her.)
Parent Imperfect was published in 2024 by Blue Cedar Press.
Parent Imperfect is available directly from the publisher (and purchasing it from them gets me an extra nickel or two in royalties), but you can also buy it from all of the online booksellers. And any bookshop in the world can order it for you. You might also check your local library. Many have it on their shelves or in their electronic book selections.
I’d love to know what you think of this novel.
My first novel, One-Match Fire, was published in 2022 by Blue Cedar Press. It tells the story of three generations of men: a reluctant father of an adoring son, who then becomes the adoring father of a reluctant son. It is a tale about fathers and sons and the difficulty they can have finding and expressing the love they have for each other. It is a generational saga filled with secrets and misjudgments, hesitations and doubts, redemption and restoration.
Among the cast are wives and girlfriends, buddies and boyfriends, a dog, and a little cabin in the Ozarks where all of them can drop their defenses and find peace, with each other and themselves.
One-Match Fire is available from the publisher directly (I get an extra nickel or two if you buy from them) as well as from all of the online booksellers. And any bookstore in the world can order it for you. Also, check your local library. Many now carry digital copies (ebooks) you can check out.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this novel.
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“When a new book comes out, I derive comfort from a drag show I saw in Provincetown years ago.”
Source: unsayable – A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham
