From the opening moments, when a naked man with a shotgun kills Detective John Tallow’s partner in a burst of intoxicating gore, Warren Ellis’s Gun Machine takes the reader into several ghost maps laid out over New York City like superimposed squares of vellum. Tallow begins his case at the very crime scene where his partner dies after discovering that, in the next apartment, someone has been stashing guns going back 20 years. This is the gun machine.

Read It on The Brooklyn Rail

The weapons—all previously used in notorious murders, some lovingly restored—range from antique flintlocks to a .44 Bulldog, like the one used by the Son of Sam. As Tallow and his partners in the Crime Scene Unit explore the forensic ballistics of each gun, they discover they’ve been used to kill only one person, and were involved in hundreds of unsolved murders that span decades. Before long, Tallow’s own unhinged brain—both traumatized and liberated by the death of his partner—begins to imagine a conspiracy that threatens to reach through the veil and implicate powerful members of New York’s élite.

The killer, known as “the hunter,” complicates the plot by moving through his own map in crosscut chapters, appearing to move between the time periods of Old and New Manhattan. Whether he’s a ghost or a schizophrenic isn’t clear. Early on, he meditates near a pay phone, trying to keep himself in the present moment:

As the case’s connections begin to form a map of their own—the gun machine and its work—Tallow must rely on his new partners at the Crime Scene Unit, Bat, a neurotic genius, and Scarly, a take-no-shit lesbian. Together, they disassemble the gun machine, which, Tallow realizes, is a tapestry itself, a work of art that tells the story of the man who created it. The resulting book is funny, smart, and inventive, punctuated by unspeakable violence. The slaughter appears as part of the narrative action, but also decorates the recursive scenery, particularly through Detective Tallow’s police scanner, which vomits a never ending stream of horror through his dashboard.

Ellis’s prose fits the plot, because it reimagines the tropes found in the best detective fiction. His protagonist lives in a world of smart phones, novelty sex robots, tablet computers, and wi-fi pods; his enemies understand the dynamics of this digital ecosystem better than he does, but they can’t match him for disconnectedness. His advantage is that, while he dimly understands their world, he hasn’t completely linked his electrons up with it. In many ways, he mirrors the hunter himself, inhabiting both the 21st century and the hardboiled 1930s. This makes the book chiaroscuro—a collection of bold contrasts made with alternating pools of light and darkness—as opposed to classic noir. Or, to put it another way, Gun Machine is noir at light speed.

This technoir style describes much of the interaction between characters. For example, early on, when Tallow interviews a Wall Street executive, he is schooled on the subject of “pingback,” the time it takes information to travel back and forth to the New York Stock Exchange in the surrealistic atlas of global commerce: “The real maps of the great cities of the world are invisible. They’re underfoot, or they’re wi-fi fields, or they’re satellite links. On a global basis, the financial markets’ biggest problem is the speed of light.”

But the novel also revels in context and history, from the origins of Pearl Street to the enigmatic Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, eccentric hoarders who died in their Harlem Brownstone alongside 140 tons of debris. Both John Tallow and the hunter have what Bat calls “history fu”: the ability to see history and to understand its impact on and relationship to the present. Thus, as the book investigates Manhattan’s future, it also describes the arc of Manhattan’s own etiological myth.

Every cylinder of Gun Machine gets loaded with something for both casual readers and casehardened fans of the detective genre. The action, characters, structure, and syntax travel with the speed of photons and connect with the unsentimental impact of hollow point rounds. Until the very last page, Ellis pulls the trigger on each and every one—sometimes taking his time to aim, sometimes shooting from the hip—but always hitting his mark.

As books gradually established their dominance as a form of entertainment and instruction, they spiraled off into hundreds of fractal genres and sub-genres: from histories and treatises to epic poems and metafiction. To the consternation of punctilious readers everywhere, genres have always intermingled and mixed themselves up. One of those mixed-up genres, the “autobiographical novel,” once served as a catch-all term for some excellent books, including The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.

Read it at The Rumpus

But autobiographical novels like Andrea Hirata’s The Rainbow Troops seem less common today. Some novels contain an autobiographical element, but few marketing departments type it up in their promotional materials. Usually, unless they need to manipulate the truth extensively, authors opt to write a memoir, a genre that sells better and that remains a bit further out along on the fact continuum.

Indeed, when he spoke at the Iowa City Public Library as part of the International Writing Program in 2010, Hirata said, “The novel is a memoir that was written by trying to balance and associate personal issues with bigger ones concerning government policies on education, natural resource management, and human rights.”

Hirata has no need of the sales an official “memoir” tag would bring his book. According to a 2010 interview with The Jakarta Globe, his novel, Laskar Pelangi, has sold three times more pirated copies—15 million—than official copies—5 million—although it’s hard to know exact sales figures. The Wall Street Journal reported that the book “sold more than a million copies in Indonesia within seven years after its publication in late 2005, or roughly about 140,000 copies annually.”

Either way, Laskar Pelangi, translated as The Rainbow Troops, remains the country’s “bestselling book of all time.” Now, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published a translation by Angie Kilbane in an effort to bring its author’s story—and presumably some of his success—to English-speaking markets.

The novel tells the story of how a boy named Ikal, his friends, and his teachers face hardship in a poor village school on the island of Belitong. The boys emulate two young genius classmates, a mathematical virtuoso Lintang, and an artistic prodigy Mahar, who inspire their peers to learn and grow despite socioeconomic disadvantages. As Ikal describes it, “Lintang and Mahar created an intellectual and artistic set of goalposts in our classroom.” The boys are also inspired by their teachers, Bu Mus and Pak Harfun, “guardians who helped us prevail in whatever difficulties came our way.”

The book’s title references a nickname Bu Mus eventually gives to the talented group of students, because the boys often climb a filicium tree after storms to search the sky for rainbows. This act—searching for light and color on an overcast day—serves as a simple but effective metaphor for the narrator and his childhood friends as they aspire to more than their circumstances have promised them.“We survived the economic difficulties that strangled us on a daily basis,” Ikal writes. “But above all, we survived the most immediate of threats: the threat of ourselves, our disbelief in the power of education.”

Although Belitong became one of the richest islands in Indonesia after the Dutch discovered tin, many of the Belitong-Malays and other minorities continued to live in poverty. This irony drives the narrative for much of the book. Despite their willingness to dream, Ikal and his friends must attend a dilapidated school in the richest area of Sumatra. Even after the end of Dutch colonial rule, a company called Perusahaan Negeri Timah—literally “The State-Owned Tin Company”—move in to exploit the island’s resources. They have their own staff and private school on a walled estate plastered with signs reading “no entry for those without the right.”

As a narrator, Ikal often looks back from adulthood onto his childhood, editorializing and leaving the poor village school refracted in a prism of sentimentality. The book’s jacket advertises it as “classic storytelling in the spirit of Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner,” but The Rainbow Troops lacks a tight-knit narrative structure, and exists as a collection of legends, anecdotes, aphorisms, historical accounts, and inspirational speeches designed to give the reader a lesson on the importance of education and the evils of capitalism: “But in the end, our school finally lost. We were brought to our knees by education’s strongest, cruelest, most merciless and hardest-to-fight invisible enemy. It gnawed away at the students, teachers, and even the education system itself. That enemy was materialism.”

The short, crisp sentences comprise the novel’s greatest strength. Hirata’s romantic style, combined with attendant detail, form a controlled, cohesive vision. His passion for education and his criticism of the corporate state are tempered by humor and context, and structured around a framework of specifics: Ikal’s school, friends, and teachers. Whatever you call it—novel, memoir—The Rainbow Troops provides plenty of heartfelt prose for readers inclined to cultural tourism, and for those who find themselves missing the tiny, ramshackle village school, Hirata has written three sequels to Laskar Pelangi, books that might someday find their way to English-speaking readers.

My essay, “Early Failures,” appears at the Paris Review Daily.

Read about Woodrow Wilson’s plan to send thousands of Allied troops into Siberia in an effort to prop up a White Army against the Red Guard. During Russia’s civil war, which ultimately saw the rise of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, America made the first, early failure it would see in terms of interventionism, a failure that would continue to go ignored for years.

If we had learned from our failed Siberian invasion, could we have changed history in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

¶

Every year for three years I attended the Eckerd College Writers’ Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, and this year is no exception. The first two years, I came as a student, and I studied fiction with Stewart O’Nan (Novel Writing) and Tom Perrotta (Short Story Writing). The next year, though, they invited me to serve as the faculty assistant, which essentially means functioning as a driver and helper for the writers who teach at the conference. I even sat in on Michael Koryta’s Narrative Workshop and gave my opinion on the submissions. This year I’m not sitting in on the workshops, but I am back to assist, and in the hours when the authors are teaching, I’ll be writing on my novel. It’s a writing vacation, you might say. A chance to sit and think about my book. Usually when I write these days it’s very early in the morning or late at night.

The book isn’t finished. But for a story I conceived almost 3 years ago—and, no, I haven’t been writing it continuously for 3 years—it has come along remarkably well. All of the story is outlined. All of the characters are connected. Many of the words are written. They’re just not in the right order yet. I know the structure, the conceits. I know the emotion behind the book, the complex architecture, the small, strange moments. I know exactly how many words the book will be, approximately, how many parts it will contain and how many sections in each part. I have a title and an epigraph. I’ve written almost all of the key scenes. On the plane to Florida, I made a list of the scenes I have left to write. Then I need to continue polishing what I have. I need to make it into a manuscript. And then, while I wait for an agent to sign me, I need to start writing the next book. For the first time in ages, I feel proud of what I’m doing as a writer. I’m determined to see this through to the end.

I can’t think of much else to say. Even though it’s dark outside, I’m going to brew some coffee and stay up, writing, puzzling over this scene and that sentence. Tomorrow I get to wake up and drive to the airport to pick up some of the faculty. The drive will take us across the open waters of Tampa Bay. But that’s in the future. Right now, in the room where I’m writing, there’s nothing stopping me from finishing this book. I’d better post this, close my browser window, and get to work on it.

In the first year of my MFA program, it became clear that the university had no intention of giving us real-world publishing experience. It’s not their fault; they were set up primarily to train graduate students how to teach, because every freshman had to take English 101 and 102, and they didn’t have the budget to pay full-time adjuncts. A lot of universities balance their budgets on the backs of graduate students, and I don’t resent them for it. However, it did mean that if we wanted experience in the publishing industry, we would have to find it ourselves.

The English Department already had at least three literary journals: the first, Kiosk, was an undergraduate journal, as was Comma, Splice, founded by Natalie McAllister and Nathan Barbarick (who would become our fiction editor); the third, Cottonwood, was run by professors who had no interest in letting anyone take over the editorial board. I don’t blame them for it, because our ideas must have sounded overly ambitious, even crazy. Not only would they not give us editorial control, they didn’t want a website, or a subscription service, or anything like that. So in the end, we decided, if we wanted to form a literary journal, and to make it count, we would need to do it ourselves. At this time, we didn’t have a name, although we did have a core group of students.

Ultimately, the final group of editors, led by Chloé Cooper Jones, decided we wanted to make (1) a physical object that would be beautiful in addition to containing high-quality poetry, fiction, and art, and (2) we wanted the journal to have a presence beyond the university, that is, beyond our small community, interaction with the world of writing in a way the other journals did not have. Our design editor, Dan Rolf, came up with a design that celebrated the physical aspect. He insisted on an open-stitched binding, high-quality paper, and a strict black-and-white, high-contrast color scheme. The result, as you can see above, was striking. Chloé called in a lot of favors to solicit the writing for the first issue of what became Beecher’s. She spent hours and hours editing the text, putting the stories in order, and making certain the work was as excellent as she could make it. The other editors were no less diligent. You can read some reviews of that first issue at HTMLGiant, where we were selected as part of Literary Magazine Club. You can also read a four-way interview with me, Dan Rolf, Iris Moulton, and Chloé Cooper Jones.

You can read a post our assistant managing editor, Caitlin Thornbrugh, wrote for Portal del Sol. It includes a short conversation with Dan Rolf, Design Editor, on creating Beecher’s One:

“The book has a naked spine and rigid, toothy, absorbent white paper that is meant to show evidence of the reader by literally absorbing and recording the reading experience: the hands holding the book, the fingers on the page, the bending of turned pages, the weakening of the unprotected spine. This recording of a reader’s interaction happens with every well-used book, but with Beecher’s One we wanted to lay bare this interaction, allow the recording of the interaction to become the adornment.”

The second year, although a lot of us graduated, we kept on; sales of Beecher’s One combined with three or four fundraisers to give us thousands of dollars when considering how to print and execute Beecher’s Two. Although Chloé was gone, Iris Moulton and I took over as co-editors, and several others stayed, too, including Caitlin Thornbrugh and Mark Petterson, who became our fiction editor. We also gained the talents of some fresh faces, including Kara Bollinger and Amy Ash.

Most importantly, I think, Dan Rolf agreed to design the second issue, even though he’d graduated. He chose a gold-and-gray color scheme, a wilder, more visceral look for the second issue, which set a precedent for future editorial boards: do whatever you like, you don’t need to mimic what’s gone before. I’m happy to say that the second issue turned out well, and that both the first and second issues continue to receive attention. You can keep up with their adventures on Beecher’s Facebook page and on their official website. Recently, Print Magazine selected Beecher’s One for inclusion in  their Regional Print Annual. We sold out of the first issue, sending copies to New York, California, and Texas, and to most of the other 50 states besides, and to several international buyers in countries including France, Germany, Singapore, and Indonesia.

All of this brings me to my ultimate point, and my reason for writing this post. Beecher’s was built to pass on to a next generation of editors. It was built as a way to give the graduate students publishing experience. Right now, the new board, headed by Amy Ash and Stefanie Torres, is raising money to print their third issue. They’re using Indiegogo, and you can find their site here. Also, if you’re interested, you can submit your work here for the new issue. You can even submit to their excellent contests, which are judged by famous writers. In short, I’m very proud of them.

Last year, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, I spoke on a panel of editors who all ran graduate student literary journals. One of the guys had founded a literary magazine at his alma matter 20 years before. Another participant was that same magazine’s current editor. The two had never met. I do hope, someday, that I can meet the 20th editor of Beecher’s; that I can admire what subsequent generations of aspiring writers have made out of the little magazine we started together when we were too young to know what a crazy, stupid thing we were doing, when we still had no idea what kinds of conflict, fun, and satisfaction were in store for us. So, to future editors, readers, and contributors, you heard it here first: Good luck.

¶

In this digital age, though, purposes get conflated easily. Take Facebook, which for me began as a way to keep up with old friends and acquaintances, and to meet new, potential friends, but which also functions as a kind of cut-rate publicist. Twitter, of course, is worse in this respect, magnifying the solipsistic tendencies of even the nicest people. Logging on to Twitter is like walking into a gymnasium filled with millions of people (it’s a big gym) and they’re all yelling at the top of their lungs. Nobody’s listening. Sometimes they listen just to re-shout what another person shouted a few minutes ago in a different corner of the gym.

I’m joking on the square, but I’m not giving up the digital life. I’ve had far too much success (and fun) online. I love Facebook, and, yes, Twitter. The night after we met, my future wife messaged me on Facebook. It was on a blog like this one that I first published interviews with some of my favorite authors. On Twitter, well, nothing has really happened on Twitter yet, but it might. You never know. I’ve made the acquaintance of writers whose books I’ve reviewed, writers I admire. I’ve even had some editors solicit work from me, and more than once. For connecting with the world, social media, if used properly, can provide a wonderful experience.

But I do feel a bit conceited about sharing my writing-related posts with my friends (just because they’re my friend or I met them once doesn’t mean I expect them to read everything I publish). And I feel doubly self-conscious about sharing my private life with wholly professional contacts. Does that famous writer I met one time—and who only dimly remembers me, if anything—really need to know how I feel about my grandmother? Does that person I met once at a party in college really want to read another book review I published in The Rumpus? Well, they might. Plenty of my professional contacts are also friends.

However, this post signals the end of my private and public internet presences getting mixed up. As much as I can, I’m going to untangle them. I know that the line of demarcation might be blurred, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try. What it really means that if you want to know anything about my writing, you’ll need to “like” the page on Facebook where I’ll post writing-related things, including literacy initiatives, articles by friends or interesting essays, jokes about writing and books, and, yes, my own work, although I’ll try to keep that to a minimum. The big thing is, I don’t want to double post something. I hate when my newsfeed fills up with the same posts from people. So if you don’t like my page, you’re going to miss a lot of what I post about. For some of you, this will be very sad. For others, it’ll be a huge relief.

I know well enough that I don’t really deserve what used to be called a “fan page” on Facebook. I haven’t accomplished much in the world of writing. However, at the same time, I am publishing consistently. I have 3 outstanding assignments right now, plus an article I’m writing on spec. I’m also working on the novel. In fact, last night, I stayed up well into the morning with one of my closest friends, talking about the book, taking notes on how I can make it come to life. I have over 10,000 words in the First-Time-Out (1XO) Draft. I have countless notebooks filled with scribbles that I’ve yet to transcribe. In less than a week, I’m traveling to the Eckerd College Writers’ Conference, where I’ll be working as a faculty assistant. In April, I’m traveling to Moscow, and, with another of my good friends, I’ll give a reading in the Third Rome, the Whitestone, the… Well, those are actually the only nicknames I’ve heard for Moscow.

When you add someone on Facebook, I think, they feel vaguely obligated to add you back. Not so with signing up for a feed. This is the last good reason to make a Page and Twitter (along with this blog): Anyone who follows me wasn’t pressured to add me after I met them at a conference or a party. They have a choice. Anyone who sees another post about a book review or a forthcoming short story brought it on him or herself. If you “like” the Facebook page or follow me on Twitter, I know that you believe in me, you enjoy my posts, and you want to keep hearing about my upcoming (mis)adventures: My time in Florida, my attempt to turn a typewriter into an iPad dock, my quest to build my own Little Free Library.

Everyone is invited. I hope you’ll seriously consider opting in.

Since the 17th century, certain people have feared the number 13, ostensibly because of the connection to the number of guests at history’s first soon-to-be-a-murder-mystery dinner, The Last Supper, where one of the guests ended up betraying the Son of God and getting him executed. Later, of course, on Friday, 13, October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested and eventually executed, too, under the direction of Philip IV, also known as “Philip the Fair,” King of France.

But as I sit in my office and look out my second-story window over the snow and ice, I can’t help but feel optimistic about 2013. In fact, for whatever reason, I’m almost superstitious about it—as an agnostic and a writer I obdurately retain my capacity for any and all kinds of unfounded belief—and whatever your goals, hopes, or aspirations, I hope 2013 is a watershed year for you. Right now, I’m going to cut this blog post short, since I have time and quiet to write on my novel. Still, I’ll be thinking of you out there while I work, my friends who also write, or who act, or who compose, or who teach, or who are doing exceptional work in their chosen fields.

You know who you are.

Good luck.

To Whom It May Concern: Long before technology enabled users to converse with their friends and loved ones in 140-character tweets, people had to inform the world about their mundane lives the old-fashioned way: by writing letters.

Over time, these missives could form quite a collection, impressive in scope and subject and voice. Today, though, letters are rarely collected in book form unless the person who wrote them became famous for something else.

Kurt Vonnegut received literary acclaim for his masterpiece of a novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” a book about the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War, an event he experienced as a prisoner of war. In the years that followed, he gained a reputation as a humanist, intellectual and ardent defender of the First Amendment. His body of work comprises metafiction, science fiction and political criticism, including titles such as “Cat’s Cradle,” “Breakfast of Champions” and “A Man Without a Country.”

Now, in “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,” his longtime friend Dan Wakefield has compiled more than 60 years’ worth of Vonnegut’s correspondence, and the result is an intimate, far-ranging monologue by one of the 20th century’s funniest, sharpest, darkest minds. The mostly one-sided conversation goes on for decades and contains Vonnegut’s praise, rants, rebukes, apologies and dreams, directed at family, friends, antagonists and editors.

The book can be difficult to follow at first, but Wakefield has written an introduction to each decade and takes pains to introduce letters with italicized passages explaining the time, place and people involved.

Because the letters are arranged chronologically, from the 1940s to the 2000s, personal letters appear between letters to public figures or business partners, which can cause an abrupt shift in tone. However, once one acclimates, it’s difficult not to marvel at Vonnegut’s depth, warmth and wit.

In addition, readers will experience the off-color vocabulary that landed Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” on the American Librarian Association’s “Banned and Challenged Classics” list.

But, as Vonnegut, who would have turned 90 on Nov. 11, wrote to Knox Burger, the editor who discovered him: “It’s o.k. to be in bad taste as long as it’s interesting.”

The book spans not only Vonnegut’s time as a famous author, but also his struggles as an out-of-work veteran, a graduate student whose thesis was rejected twice and a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Together, they give a comprehensive sketch of his personality. They show who he was and who he became before his death in 2007.

In a letter to Norman Mailer, Vonnegut admits to reading his fellow author’s “Advertisements for Myself” but declines to comment on it: “Since my reputation is worthless, my comments on the book would be worthless, so (expletive) them.” Decades later, responding to someone who seems to have written lamenting the inability to write a masterpiece of his own, Vonnegut asks, “Where indeed is your Slaughterhouse-5? Have you considered cutting off an ear and sending it to a prostitute?”

Some of the most poignant moments come in Vonnegut’s letters to his loved ones, especially to his children and his close friends, such as this letter to his daughter Nanny:

“… Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice. My good advice to you is to pay somebody to teach you to speak a foreign language, to meet with you two or three times a week and talk. Also: get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. What makes this advice especially hollow and pious is that I am not dead yet. If it were any good, I could easily take it myself.”

A letter from 1971 to a former student, writer Gail Godwin, contains a haunting passage that might have served as the book’s epigraph: “A queer thing has happened to me: I have completed a self, which turns out to be exactly like completing a game of solitaire. The deck has resolved itself into four suits — face up. It is time to shuffle and deal again.”

The completed selves in “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters” add up to a patchwork memoir written for many audiences over many years. And like all memoirs, Vonnegut’s contains primarily the author’s opinions as opposed to a list of boring facts. His unique voice means that longtime fans — and even aspiring writers — will find a wealth of jokes, schemes, anecdotes and advice between the covers.

Or, as Vonnegut wrote in a letter to his friend Miller Harris, “If it isn’t 100% true, it’s true enough to be interesting — and maybe helpful.”

¶

This Sunday, The Kansas City Star published their list of the 100 most important books of 2012. Of course, I don’t agree with all of them, and neither will you—still, I contributed a few, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to pick them up and peek between the covers. Particularly, of course, those I would endorse, books I loved when I read them: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, You Came Back by Christopher Coake, Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins, and The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty.

From my editor, Steve Paul:

If you think books have begun the inevitable death spiral in the overcrowded circus of our entertainment culture, here’s a reminder that much is alive and well in the world of literature and reading.

Our contributing reviewers, friends and other avid readers who helped compile The Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of 2012 had no trouble finding passion, quality and transporting armchair experiences to highlight.

This year seemed an especially big one for fiction and our top picks — the books that stand out as the best of the best — include an unexpected and eclectic range of page-turning hits, somber emotional journeys, suspenseful escapades and cogent, firecracker satire.

Inside you also will find recommended reading in nonfiction, history, biography and poetry as well as books for young readers. There are enough books here to make it through the coming winter, a season made warm by climate change, fireplaces and/or the power of words on page and screen.

via Word power: The Star’s top 100 books of 2012 – KansasCity.com.

A couple of weeks back, I fell behind on my novel-writing schedule. My goal was to polish a draft from my extensive hand-written notes and passages. I always write in a black Moleskine notebook with a Uniball Vision Rollerball pen, waterproof, fadeproof, with a micro point (.5 mm) tip. Usually, I write a sentence 7 or 8 times, crossing out my previous attempts, until the words form a construction I can live with. By the time I type it into a word processor, the sentence itself is several drafts ahead—in this way, I tell myself, even though it makes me a slower writer, the finished product has higher-quality workmanship. There is no scientific way to prove this.

I also keep my daily word counts in an Excel spreadsheet, a deadline-based form that calculates my goals on a rolling basis. It takes a deadline I set for myself (e.g., January 15, 2013) and then calculates how many words I need to write per day to reach my goal. On each line, a box turns from FALSE to TRUE if I hit that daily word count number. On the main page, a couple of charts tell me my overall percent progress into the book or project. Right now, those numbers are too low, and there’s far too many red boxes with the word FALSE in them. But I’m not giving up. I’m redoubling my efforts.

It’s time for a hard return to writing. Especially now, as so many people gear up for National Novel-Writing Month, or, as the abbreviation-obsessed call it, “NaNoWriMo.” So this week I set about writing and thinking about writing even as I struggled to keep from getting sick. Even as I planned to remodel my house, even as I worked at my full-time job during the day. I just forced myself to find the time. I also forced myself to read, and I’m about 75 pages into The Best American Short Stories 2012.

In the hours in-between, late at night, or early in the morning, I pitched freelance work. I sent out queries, and, in some cases, heard encouraging things from editors. I also set to work on the novel again. There’s nothing quite like the swollen, bloated, complicated anatomy of a novel, the sheer size and scope of it, the number of words a novel comprises—100,000 words for a 300-page book—and the number of ways you can go wrong when writing a creature like that into existence.

If you feel so inspired, feel free to share your stories of deadlines and goals with me in the comments section. I’d love to hear how your work is going. But even as I type this, I know that, if I write tonight, I might be able to get back in lockstep with my word-count deadline.

So it’s time to wrap this blog post up and get back to writing.