I had thought I hadn’t been doing this series for too long, but a quick review of past posts indicated I’ve been doing this now for at least two years. It’s wild I’ve been doing this for that long.
In a glance at the file I’ve been using to store this year’s poems, I counted 29 poems I’ve written, both published and unpublished, since the start of the year. Considering I only ever wrote poetry once in a blue moon for nearly all my life, this is a massive increase in productivity.
Hopefully, I can keep this up. I have to say I’ve never put as much attention into my poetry as I have my fiction work, but I do hope putting in the time and work pays off in the end, if not financially then at least artistically.
I’m glad it’s becoming late fall/early winter now. I’ve always felt I did better in colder climates than warmer ones – maybe some heritage from my Wisconsinite parents and grandparents. But I also wonder if it would be everything I’d hope for, so this poem grew out of these thoughts.
It’s getting close to the end of the year and I’m trying to race to reach my word count goal before New Year’s Day 2026. The possibility of me making the deadline can be described as possible but with no more time to lose. However, ever since my journalism days, a tight deadline has always inspired me – as well as this next poem.
Since Substack doesn’t have the setup for this (that I’m aware of), I’ve set up something at my WordPress sister site, Liegois Media. I have my own Internet storefront page where you can order my chapbook for $6 per copy. The link is below.
2026 is coming down the road. I’m wondering what words it will bring along.
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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Welcome to The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights into the craft of writing I’ve learned during the past thirty years.
For the past four editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, the start of the writing process where you begin to develop your ideas, transferring them for the first time from inside your head and onto the printed page or electronic file. After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting, taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, how to build characters, and a quick discussion of plotting. let’s spend this weekend talking about another important aspect of prewriting, which is setting.
[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well.
The setting of a work of fiction is based on two different factors – when the story takes place and where it takes place. I would say the latter has the more impact on the story rather than the former, for reasons I’ll get into in a little bit. One thing I will say, however, might be one of my rules of thumb, which I will list below:
The difficulty of constructing a setting for your story is in direct proportion to how similar your setting is to your existing time-space circumstances. The farther removed your fictional setting is from your own surroundings, the more difficult it will be to develop and maintain it.
Into the Time-Slip
I plan to keep this section brief.
The vast majority of stories told in the past, told now, and will be told in the future are presented in past-tense – essentially, a story told which occurred sometime in the past. Few stories are told as if they are occurring right now (present-tense) and much fewer act as if they are telling a story occurring in the future (future-tense). It takes considerable mental energy to keep when is happening straight in your heard, especially if what happens is fictional1.
Again, the same rule I mentioned above applies: the farther away the time period of your story is, the less you know about your setting. For example, if your story is set in the 1920’s, do you know what life was like without the Internet, or without mobile phones, or functioning electricity in half the places you traveled, or with the presence of however many mentally traumatized veterans of the Great War wandering around? Unless you’re a ghost or you’ve done your homework on those times, the answer to this question is likely “not very much.” So, you will either have to pull your story back to a time more familiar to you, or you need to buckle down and get your homework done2.
This also works in reverse if you ware thinking of future settings. Even though the whole point of science fiction writers is to prognosticate and consider what is to come after us, it’s always a tricky process to do well3. I won’t get into the issue much here, but especially if you are working on a first draft, go ahead and make your best guess. Don’t worry, you can always sort out your issues in the later revisions.
Now, let’s talk about place.
Where are You? Where is Your Story?
First, as with time, the further away the place of your story is from your own experiences, the less you will have personal knowledge of it. As with time, you’ll have to do your homework, or in the instance of you fantasy and science fiction writers out there, you’ll have to think long and hard about what this place and the affiliated people, societies, and cultures are all about. And maybe you borrow ideas from other cultures, blend them together into your own ideas, or you come up with your own “unique” ideas you don’t realize you borrowed from multiple cultures and/or places until months or years later. However, you should also know if you borrow from your own experiences, you are going to want to alter that setting a bit so it doesn’t precisely mirrors your real life4.
When I think about the concept of place in fiction, at least two stories come to mind.
When I was in high school during the late 1980’s, a Nintendo NES console replaced my aging Atari 2600 get-up which had served me for much of that decade. Of course, I was addicted to console gaming at the time, but what surprised me then was my mother becoming nearly as interested in my console as I was. In particular, she was addicted to the original Zelda game. In this game, Link would find certain maps to the underground area of Hyrule or whatever it was and you would have to walk through each area to show where things were at on the map you can see from the pause screen.
I remember hearing a story attributed to Mark Twain (I heard it retold in the science fiction classic film Deep Impact years ago) that riverboat captains along the Mississippi River back in the 1800’s would switch pilots during different parts of their journey upstream or downstream. These pilots would have a clear and extensive knowledge of given sections of the river – where the shallows were located, where the navigable river channel was located, and things of this nature. They would only have knowledge of their given sections of the Mississippi, but not as much for other places.
The idea behind these stories is an idea behind my understanding and approach to setting. Some people might use the metaphor of setting as an iceberg, with sailors traveling on the ocean’s surface only seeing a small percentage of the entire iceberg, with the majority of it hidden beneath the waves.
However, I think a more fitting metaphor for this purpose would be the reader as an explorer in a new land. An explorer enters a new land with either incomplete maps or no maps at all. I see the reader as an explorer in the world you as a fiction writer create. All they know is what they see as they come across it, whether that is locations, those who live there, and the societies they have created. You as the author of this setting is aware of what is in this wider world, but the audience is not.
We’ll get back to this last point in a moment, but let me advise you that in your role as storytellers, you never want to reveal everything about your setting even by the end of your story. First of all, the only way you could even begin to tell all about your setting is with the clunkiest, most awkward info dump which would take up half of the book or story. Secondly, your readers are explorers in the lands you created. They want to discover the lands for themselves. They want to be surprised and amazed, and to be an effective storyteller, you have to give just enough information to inspire them to keep exploring your world, your story.
How much you yourself know about the setting of your story is another issue.
Some writers might choose to only know, or find out about, the parts of a story’s setting a reader will encounter during the course of a story. Others, however, will want to know about all about what that world is. I would count myself among this latter group.
My reasoning is this: you want to see what is behind the curtain and how it works even if your audience doesn’t manage to see this view. You want to be able to see how your world functions so you can represent it accurately. I’m reminded of Alan Rickman acting as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series in strange ways but ways that made sense to him because he knew the whole shape of his world, which included the motivation of his character. That made Alan’s performance5. I want to know every inch of my world. Even though it might take some time, I believe it is time well worth spending.
But…
As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:
If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.
Next Time…
With the new year, I’m going to get into what I consider to be definitely an extension of setting, but is also related in ways to other parts of the prewriting process as well, which I will term world building. This is essentially developing your setting with a par more detailed eye than a simple plan. We’re talking about building an entire history and backstory to your story, which will prove helpful even if your readers only see a fraction of what you eventually develop. I’m looking forward to tackling this.
Hope everyone’s writing is going well. I’ve got the rest of the calendar year off from work, so when I’m not traveling to see family, I’ll be trying to meet my personal writing goals for the year. Just about 10 days left, so it’s going to be a good spring to the end.
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As always, if you can manage a present or future-tense story, go right ahead with it. But I don’t want you to go a step too far if you realize it’s beyond you. Sometimes the old ways are best. ↩︎
I was a bit reluctant to do a “research for fiction writers” post because it can lead into numerous complications, but the further I get along in this series, the more I see the need for it. We’ll get to world building first, however, trust me. ↩︎
And just now, I realize I might have to do a separate post for science fiction world building. Not that it is going to be easy, but then again, most of the good material isn’t. ↩︎
I have a bit of experience on this regarding my most recent writing project, but that’s a story for another Writing Lab. ↩︎
It wasn’t exactly the amount of writing I wanted to get done this week, but it was a far better sight than what I ended up with last week, so I’ll take it as a draw if not a minor win. Whether it works out in the greater scheme of my yearly goal … I’ll guess we’ll see.
With that, I’ll review the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending20 December 2025: Words: 4,122 Days writing: 5 of 7. Days revising or planning: 0 of 7 for 0 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
So, not the level I was hoping for, but much better than last week’s total. I’ll call that a win, especially since it’s 1,500 more words than last week. But is it enough?
The overall stats:
Overall Statistics for 2025: Word count goal for 2025: 225,000 words. Word count for 2025 as of 20 December 2025: 219,864 words. Words remaining toward goal: 5,138. Confidence level in meeting my word count: HIGH.
One good writing week. All I need is one good writing week and I’m going to be right at my goal. I can taste it, lads, lasses, and others, I can taste it. I’ll have written more words than I’ve ever written in my life, and all I can think of is producing more, getting more product out the door than the three novels, poetry collection, blog posts, and various unpublished short stories I’ve written.
The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker) is still my top project now, an environmental horror tale set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa. I’m now up to 22,000 words for the first draft, and to make progress with the story, I took the clever and cunning idea to only write the interesting parts of the story first so I don’t get bored with it. It’s something I came up with a few years back to knock out writer’s block. Turns out writing all of the cool scenes first helps out with this problem (although I always save the final scene for last). It’s also a good way to tighten up your story if that is your thing (it definitely is mine).
In putting this together, I came upon two realizations: first, this post would be running on Christmas Eve (Happy Holidays, by the way), which is no big deal because I always do these writing journals in advance. But the other realization is that if I stick to this schedule, I would make the next writing journal on 31 December 2025. Since I will be working to get my writing total wrapped up and total up all the numbers for the year, I’m going to make the decision to make this the last writing journal of the year and wait until doing the first newsletter of the year (call it 3 January 2026?) to report on whether or not I made all of my writing goals for the year. No big deal to wait for a bit, and I’ll do the first official writing journal for 2026 on 7 January 2026. It’s all good.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
While I have always considered myself a writer, I always had a suspicion it would always be a uphill battle for me to make my entire living from writing, even though I finally decided to get into the writing game seriously anyway. For every Stephen King, James Patterson, and Jackie Collins, there were always thousands and thousands of writers who never found that type of success.
Many years after I began considering becoming a writer, it has not become any easier to make a living as a writer, although perhaps it has become easier to get your stories published, whether through smaller indie houses or self-publishing. And while I certainly will make some money through my fiction, the idea I would be able to pay any major bills with said income would be foolish. It’s been a fantastic experience, but a career I would not call it – so far1.
I typically don’t base my posts on someone else’s posts, but every so often, I see something on Substack which is vibing with what I’m thinking2. And when I ran across this post by Tasmina Perry , a Sunday Times bestselling author and owner of her own digital media company, a couple of days ago in my feed, I had to give it a good long read.
The first couple of paragraphs got me:
Over the past few months, my author group chats have taken on a slightly funereal vibe. Friends are getting dropped by their agents. Novels go out on submission and then… nothing. Editors are being laid off. And people keep muttering the same dread-filled phrase:
Is this the end of the career author? The writer who lives entirely off book deals and royalties, the dream so many of us were raised to believe in.
Oh, jeez … other people have been facing this problem? Even all the ones making more money than I have? I had to continue.
Basically, it appears a combination of smaller advances on books from those publishers who still offer advances, a smaller middle of the road publishing list, and an overcrowded market is squeezing authors3.
So many times, I always felt no matter what word of promotion or work I’ve tried to do to get the word out about my books, it’s never been enough. But as it turns out, I’m not alone … and I’m going up against forces many other authors are facing.
Worse than the instability of all this is the shame. So many writers assume it’s their fault. That their book wasn’t good enough. That they somehow failed.
But it’s not their fault.
The truth is that the desire to make a full-time living solely from writing books has always been a gamble, far riskier than most of us are willing to admit.
The point that Perry, who has been heavily in the writing business for twenty years, is trying to make is trying to make a living as an author is hard. There are so many variables out there, from distribution and related logistics to promotions and acts of God that can screw things up for anyone, even someone with the level of success that she has. She shares several examples from her own experiences, including a funny story involving Waterloo Station in England and the Fifty Shades of Grey series.
However, as Perry points out, it’s never been easy to make a living solely from their book sales. Most historical authors like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and others made their living from a variety of other methods other than just book sales, whether that was from public lectures and readings, journalism, or a variety of day jobs. I paid my bills with money from a variety of newspapers and radio stations in eastern Iowa and western Illinois, and (at last count) a half-dozen or more public school districts and at least two junior colleges.
Looking back on the history of publishing, Perry asserts there was only a brief golden era of the 1960’s to the early 2000’s when mass-market paperbacks and other factors made publishing houses flush with success. I might say this golden era might have extended from roughly 1920 to 2020, but maybe I’m more of a fan of nice round numbers to be an unbiased analyst of this phenomenon. However, both eras happened to coincide with my childhood and my childhood obsession with fiction, and I don’t think that is a coincidence in my case.
However, now that we don’t have these unrealistic expectations, I have to agree with her that we have to consider writing to be just another aspect of our personal and professional lives. We as writers have to develop many different ways of supporting ourselves, back to the way things used to be. And maybe it’s for the best.
I often said if I had to pick the biggest misconception of my life, it was the idea I had to make my passion my career. Maybe it would have been simpler of me if I joined the post office like Charles Bukowski or the Veteran’s Administration like Harvey Pekar and left my intellectual exercises for my writing. However, I’ve enjoyed journalism and teaching and believe I contributed something to my community in both professions. I believe everyone has made weird turns in their lives, but have gotten something out of it, some hard-won knowledge, in the end. I’d like to think I am no different.
In Conclusion
I’m going to keep writing the way I’m writing. It’s not because I think it’s my path to unimaginable fame and fortune. It’s because I can’t picture doing anything else other than expressing myself through writing.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Remember, Sean Connery once said he’d never play James Bond again and then proceeded to star in a Bond film literally titled Never Say Never Again. Anything can happen, I guess. ↩︎
And in all honesty, I’ve been on a dry run of writing for at least three days and I usually get a bit eager to break that spell by any means necessary not involving cutting and pasting or AI foolishness. ↩︎
It’s also obvious that fewer kids are reading books, but I think I’m too much in love with the written word to worry about changing fashions now. ↩︎
Six weeks of good productivity, and the seventh week it goes into the tank. Well, all I need to keep in mind is to keep things trucking for the next two and a half weeks and I’ll be good to go for my writing goals this year.
With that, I’ll review the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending13 December 2025: Words: 2,610 Days writing: 3 of 7. Days revising or planning: 2 of 7 for 60 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
Unlike last week, I didn’t quite manage to pull it out at the end, but oh, well. I just have to remind myself of all the days, weeks, months, and years where I went without even bothering to write anything. Those days seem to be far away from me nowadays, thankfully.
The overall stats:
Overall Statistics for 2025: Word count goal for 2025: 225,000 words. Word count for 2025 as of 13 December 2025: 215,742 words. Words remaining toward goal: 9,258. Confidence level in meeting my word count: HIGH.
The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker) is my top project now, an environmental horror tales set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa. As the writing this week slowed down, so did progress on this project as well. I think part of it is the reason that I am wrapping up the first act of the book, and now I’m starting to think of whether any of the new scenes are necessary or not. Or maybe I just need to push forward because it’s just a first draft and I can mold things around if I need to later.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing1.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
I was proud of my productivity this week. Not because it was particularly good, but because I was falling behind at one point. However, instead of just accepting it, I started pushing myself harder and had a good last couple of days.
With that, I’ll review the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending6 December 2025: Words: 4,228 Days writing: 5 of 7. Days revising or planning: 2 of 7 for 180 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
Again, if it wasn’t for the last two days of the week, I would have had something more closer to 3,000 words or less. I’m glad I pushed back against myself on this issue.
The overall stats:
OStatistics for 2025: Word count goal for 2025: 225,000 words. Word count for 2025 as of 6 December 2025: 213,132 words. Words remaining toward goal: 11,868. Confidence level in meeting my word count: HIGH.
Again, The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker) has been my most active project, not including my blogs. It’s an environmental horror tales set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa, not unlike the ones I’ve lived in for most of my life. I’m now close to 20,000 words into the first draft. I think, from where I feel I’m at in the story, that I’m approaching the end of the first act of the story. I could do with a good 75,000-word novel, I think.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Hi to both subscribers and anyone new to this page, The Writing Life with Jason Liegois. My official Writing Life blog, which I post on the first weekend of each month, is my monthly newsletter discussing my upcoming writing projects, things having to do with writing, and what’s been going on with me in my corner of southeastern Iowa along the Mississippi River. It’s basically my way of keeping in touch with the rest of the world1.
Let’s talk about writing and life, then.
Personal Items…
First tea of the season. And #gohawkeyes.
After a too-short fall (as it often tends to be in Iowa) some heavy snows this past week have heralded the arrival of winter. Again, I’m not sure whether my parents coming from Wisconsin or the mix of Norwegian and German heritage in my background, but I usually don’t get phased by the onset of winter. It’s time for herbal teas at night, huddling beneath fleece blankets to keep the chill away, and moonlit snow and ice.
Of course, there’s the inconvenience of icy sidewalks and roads, but I can manage it (and the decline of sunlight) easier than I can deal with the near tropical heat you can find in Iowa between June and August. I mean, I can always go outside in December as long as I have a sensible parka, gloves and hat, and footwear with sturdy treading. In late June I only head outside if I want to lose a pound or two to the sauna outside, and there’s not too many types of clothing which will help with that type of heat.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if I did get a chance to live in colder climates where winter is a serious thing. I was scrolling around on YouTube the other day and I saw some videos produced by a couple who live in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Svalbard is a group of Norwegian islands north of their mainland and well above the Arctic Circle, and right about now they are seeing sunset at 2 p.m. in the afternoon. Part of me fears if I was dropped into that environment, I’d want to run back to Iowa in a fortnight. Or maybe it would be the opposite and I’d get interested in narwhal hunting out on the open sea. It’s a fun “what if?” scenario, at least. For now, Iowa’s cold enough.
I’ve decided to change things up a little in how I present these projects, so you’ll see that here. Hopefully, it will be easier for anyone to follow along.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: All project titles of works currently in development are working titles unless otherwise noted. I often have solid titles in mind for these projects, but I’m a bit superstitious about revealing them until they are close to publication2. The names of the series I mention in this newsletter, however, are the true names.
The Land, The River, and the Waste
LRW, for short, is a sci-fi/horror novel set in Iowa, leaning on the environmental damage being done to my home state. I decided, “What would it take to really get people’s attention to this issue, enough to do something about it?” In speculating on this question, my mind took some wild twists and turns. I started writing this on Halloween Night of this year, and I do believe I might as well set the climax on a Halloween night. Think of Night of the Living Dead, The Purge, The Crazies, Fast Food Nation, Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest, and The Swine Republic poured into the creative stew of my head, along with some hometown and later memories.
Motivational reading by my desk. If you want to get the books check out Ice Cube Press at https://icecubepress.
I’m now more than 17,000 words into the book and probably around the end of the first act already. Part of me feels like I could use more research into this world, but I have the feeling at least with the rough draft, I need to just to let things rip and get it down on the page.
This is the story that seems to be calling to me now. Every time I return to this setting along the river, to these people, it feels like I’m home. I have no idea how it’s getting published, but it will even if I have to do it myself, I want to get it done.
Timetable: Rough draft completed by the first half of 2026, publication (in one form or another) by the holiday season of 2026 (hope, hope?).
My Ongoing Series (The Yank Striker and The Fool Series)
The Fool 2: This is the sequel to my debut novel, The Holy Fool, which I’ve decided after the fact will be the first book in my The Fool Series.Briefly, The Holy Fool was a story about Iowa native Samuel “Sonny” Turner, a newspaper columnist for the Chicago Journal, a longtime journalistic institution in the city. In the fall of 2008, in the shadows of the 2008 presidential election and the oncoming Great Recession, he’s tasked by his editor and mentor with protecting his newspaper from sale by its unscrupulous owner. In part, it is my own autopsy of the state of American journalism and what might take its place. The Fool 2 revisits Sonny in 2024, sixteen years after he’s left Chicago and founded his own news site, The Fool, with a combination of old Chicago comrades and new recruits. In addition to the US’ chaotic political situation and Sonny’s plan to cover it from a distance with the help of his American colleagues, he’s dealing with life as an emigrant to the unfamiliar land of Switzerland, and raising his family and children there. I’m past 10,000 words on this rough draft. Of the sequels to my works, this is the one I want to get wrapped up first. Partly, this is a mathematical equation, since a series, by definition, needs to have more than one book in it. It’s probably going to take me longer to write this since under the circumstances, I want to see how the events of 2026 shake out in this country and around the world before I decide on how to wrap it up. The fact that much of the action of this year has occurred in Chicago will be useful for my purposes3. Timetable: Rough draft by the end of 2026, publication ASAP afterwards.
Timetable: ??? for a rough draft and publication, but I’m too far ahead to stop now.
Some Acknowledgements
I want to thank the Burlington Public Library for inviting me to be part of their Sterling Lord Author’s Showcase earlier last month. It was a fantastic experience and I definitely would like to return next year. The keynote presentation by Iowa journalist Robert Leonard was an excellent event, as well.
I don’t have any new events scheduled in the near future, but I’ll be back in contact with some of the locations I’ve been at during this year and see what the plans are for next year. I also plan on contacting some of the local independent book stores which are carrying my books and see if I can make some arrangements with them. I’d love to do some holiday-related events if possible.
This is my obligatory announcement that if any podcasters or bloggers are interested in new fiction, if you are interested in stories based in the worlds of journalism and soccer, or if you are interested in featuring writers from Iowa or the Midwest, I would absolutely be open for a feature or interview. Get in touch here or at jasonliegois@liegois.media.
Writing Quote(s) Of the Month (Special Stephen King edition):
Decided to go with two inspirational quotes by one of my literary heroes, Stephen King. The first one touches on why I think writing is special to me, and the other one is about how he sees storytelling.
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
― Stephen King
Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up
― Stephen King, On Writing
When I Post
Check out this post for when and what I post on a regular basis.
How to support me😊.
As always, go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile on mobile. If you follow the links, you will be able to buy both the paperback and ebook versions of my books on Amazon. If you just put “Jason Liegois” in Google. you’ll find them on the first page of search results.
I have quite a few places that now carry at least some of my books, some of the many great and fantastic independent bookstores in Iowa and the Midwest. These are the bookstores you’ll find at least some of my work4:
Bent Oak Books, 619 7th St. Fort Madison.
Burlington By The Book, 301 Jefferson St, Burlington.
The Corner and More, 703 Main St., Mediapolis.
Green Point Mercantile, 217 E. 2nd St., Muscatine.
The Brewed Book, 1524 Harrison St., Davenport.
The Black Rose, 116 W. Main St., West Branch
Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave. # S1, Des Moines.
Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
The Atlas Collective, 1801 5th Ave, Moline, Illinois – my first out of Iowa bookstore, very proud of this.
I’m always looking for some new places to place my books, so feel free to hit me up in the comments if you have a suggestion.
For those who are budget conscious among all of you, my books are part of the collections of the Fort Madison, Burlington, and Musser (Muscatine) public libraries.
My poetry book The Flow and the Journey is available at Bent Oak, Green Point, Burlington By the Book, and The Corner and More, but it is also available online but not on Amazon. I’ve set up a new online store for copies of my chapbook on my WordPress site, Liegois Media. If you want to get a physical copy, go ahead and click on the button below.
The Flow and the Journey
The first collection of poetry from author Jason Liegois.
As usual, all you writers keep writing, and all of you keep safe. See you down the road.
Also, happy holidays.
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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Apologies to regular readers if some of this is repetitive. With these newsletters, I have to balance giving you all good original content and getting all the new viewers of this blog up to speed. There’s a reason I cut down writing the regular newsletter to a monthly post rather than a weekly post. 😄 ↩︎
Feel free to tell me if I’m just being wussy about this. I don’t think I need to truly name a thing in public unless it is closer to becoming a reality. It seems to be bad karma in my mind. ↩︎
And some of the action will take place in Iowa, trust me. ↩︎
Back at the end of August this year, when I was getting ready for the upcoming school year, I was very much nervous about doing what I had to do to make my goal for the year. I was way behind.
Now, however, I’ve had the third-best month of the year so far, and my fifth consecutive week of writing more than 5,000 words. How momentum changes.
Let’s talk about the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending29 November 2025: Words: 5,447 Days writing: 7 of 7. Days revising or planning: 1 of 7 for 60 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
Writing statistics for November 2025: Words: 23,431. Revising/planning: 120 minutes. DWGM: 97%
Once again, my goal for the calendar year 2025 is to write 225,000 words. (I was also shooting to make my minimum daily quota at least 80 percent of the time, but since I am feeling quite confident of making this goal, my focus for the most part has been on word count.)
The stats for the month ahead are looking good.
Ongoing statistics for 2025: Word count as of 1 December 2025: 208,904. This number is 2,654 words above the “pace” to reach 225,000 words by the end of 31 December 2025.
I now have 16,096 words left to write before reaching my yearly goal. To keep this in perspective, I have exceeded this word count during nine out of the past 11 months of 2025, including the past two months. Confidence level in meeting my word count: HIGH.
It’s been a feverish run since Halloween 2025, when I began writing The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker). It’s an environmental horror tales set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa, not unlike the ones I’ve lived in for most of my life. I’m now above 17,000 words into the first draft.
I’ve not had a chance to write much on some of my other projects during the past month other than my regular blogging and the odd poem or two, but that’s all right. I think. This is the project that is motivating me and the rest can stay on the back burner for now.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Even though I had a slightly slower week than the past three weeks, this was still the fourth consecutive week I’ve written more than 5,000 words. And from my math, I’m on pace to make my goal … and maybe then some.
Let’s talk about the numbers.
Writing statistics for the week ending22 November 2025: Words: 5,257 Days writing: 7 of 7. Days revising or planning: 1 of 7 for 30 minutes. Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 7 of 7 days.
Once again, my goal for the calendar year 2025 is to write 225,000 words. Since at least August, I’ve felt I was falling behind on my expectations, with just 12,447 in August, 15,559 in September, and barely more than 20,000 in October.
Now, however, I’ve crunched a few numbers and things are looking very much up for me.
Ongoing statistics for 2025: Word count as of 1 November 2025: 185,473. This number was 2,027 words off the “pace” to reach 225,000 words by the end of 31 December 2025.
Word count as of 22 November of 2025: 203,457. By my recollection, this is the earliest I have reached 200,000 words for a calendar year ever.
I now have, as of 22 November 2025, 21,543 words left before reaching my yearly goal.
Also, by my calculations, if I wrote at least 5,000 words this week, I would then be more than 2,000 words ahead of my desired pace.
But I’ve turned things around this month. And there’s a little environmentally-themed sci-fi horror project I have to give plenty of credit to for helping my productivity.
On Halloween 2025, I began writing The Land, The River, and The Waste (working title due to me being a superstitious sucker) Set in a little river town on the Mississippi River in Iowa, and this has been the project that’s grabbed my attention and not let go. I’m already close to 14,000 words into the first draft.
This might be one of the most personal stories I’ve yet written. During a conversation with one of my students last week, I suddenly slipped and referred to my hometown by the fictional name of my town in the book, and not my actual hometown. That gave me pause, but the students I was talking with didn’t notice it.
Have a good week everyone, and all you writers keep writing.
If you don’t have the budget for a paid subscription, feel free to just send me a one-time payment of whatever you have the budget for.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
Tonight is Poetry Night for me, as I continue my journey as a poet playing around with words and ideas, scrambling both up into what could be called a decent dinner or a very late brunch. We could go with either one.
Before we get into the poetry, however, I have a brief poetry celebration to commemorate.
Last year for the first time, I became a dues-paying member of the Iowa Poetry Association, a small effort on my part to try and take my poetry seriously. For the first time this year, I participated in the IPA’s competitions for their annual anthology, Lyrical Iowa. Although I did not place in any of the competitions I participated in, my poem “Peace of Mind” was selected for publication in the 2025 version of Lyrical Iowa. You can pick up a copy here: this year’s edition was dedicated to Rodney Reeves, a fellow IPA member and a member of the Burlington-area Society of Great River Poets I also belong to.
Now, on with the poetry
I’m glad it’s becoming late fall/early winter now. I’ve always felt I did better in colder climates than warmer ones – maybe some heritage from my Wisconsinite parents and grandparents. But I also wonder if it would be everything I’d hope for, so this poem grew out of these thoughts.
I entertain images of ice-wind gusts over rocky and remote lands
Mountains standing sentinel over a modest hamlet
The stark beauty of winter in twilight.
However, my mind ponders
The cool images warming my overheated soul
And I question if they are mere delusions.
If my dreams became some form of reality
And I arrive at my ideal lands,
Would it merely be a cold hardship rather than one overheated?
I only once lived in a home near the ocean, the modest-sized town of Seabrook, Texas. It was southeast of Houston, on Galveston Bay with Galveston Island a bit further southeast.
I ended up spending most of my life on the banks of the Mississippi River, but I’ve sometimes wondered whether I would have developed something of a similar kinship to the ocean I did to the river. I’ve come to consider that it might be slightly different due to apprehensions I have about very large bodies of water.
I have the type of fear of heights that has no effect on me if I’m at the top floor of a building or flying in a plane1, but leaves me almost paralyzed at the thought of me hanging off the side of a building on a rope or even peeking over the balcony of a tall place. Similarly, I have no fear of crossing an ocean by ship, but I wonder what type of panic I would have if I ducked my face underneath the waves and all I saw was dark blue fathoms and prowling sharks below2.
Since Substack doesn’t have the setup for this (that I’m aware of), I’ve set up something at my WordPress sister site, Liegois Media. I have my own Internet storefront page where you can order my chapbook for $6 per copy. The link is below.
Take care, everyone, and I’ll see you down by the bend in the river, road, or line.
-30-
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
