[Photo note: Just visited Muscatine[1][2] last week. This was a mood.]

If you haven’t figured it out already, these weekly newsletters will remain free for all subscribers, regardless of whatever subscription you have from me. I need to make sure I’m providing everyone a value for their time and support, regardless of whatever level that is.

Also, if you haven’t figured it out, it takes more than a day to put all of this together. At this point, I’m starting to write this edition of the newsletter on the day after the last one came out. It’s fine, though. The less I rush this, the more likely it’s going to be a quality offering[3].

So, let’s talk about the week that was.

Home Front Stuff

I managed to get together with both my parents and my kids last weekend, albeit not at the exact same time. However, I did appreciate seeing all of them, especially my parents since I had not seen them in person since at least Christmas. I’m an only child, and the older I get, the more that I want to treasure and nurture my relationship to them since I know how much people treasure their kids now.

I lived in my hometown with my family next to my parents for about 15 years, and I don’t think that I appreciated having my parents as near to me as I did at the time. I am glad that my kids got to experience living next to their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I didn’t have the opportunity to do that myself, since we were the only members of my family living in Iowa until I got married and started having kids.

I’m also getting a bit annoyed with starting to see weather in the 70 degrees and higher numbers occasionally here in Iowa. I was promised spring for this year, you know.

What I’ve Been Writing

As of today’s post, I do believe that my second revision of The Yank Striker is now in the books[4]. I will likely have to review this briefly before handing it in to my editors, but I feel grateful that I got it done in the self-imposed time limit that I had set for myself. Goal-setting can work, kids.

My hope is that the back and forth with my editors on any changes calms down and that we can finally have a release date for The Yank Striker. I’m now hoping for a summer release for the book, as that would give me more freedom to promote the book when I am on vacation. But, it is getting increasingly close to being a reality. It even has an ISBN number and everything.

As for the rest, work on The Yank Striker 2, other fiction projects, my memoir, and other items has paused a bit. I’m hoping to restart all of them soon after some of these revisions on The Yank Striker are sorted.

As for the next subscriber-exclusive post I have plans for, I’m thinking about a follow-up to the piece I just wrote on worldbuilding. As it turns out, I have to make a presentation on revising for my writer’s group next week, so it can be difficult to have something ready to go by then. However, I am going to make a big effort to have this ready for you, readers.

What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing

Remember when I said that this whole subscriber exclusive thing was going to be longer than a one-day process? Turns out I was overly optimistic about how fast that process was going to take. 

If this was a large outfit or publishing concern, I’d be talking to my webmaster to step up the process and get it done as soon as possible. Of course, I can’t whip my webmaster into shape to get this done right away, because I’m the webmaster here. My WordPress and Substack sites are essentially a one-man band. Of course, all of the revisions I’ve been trying to fast-track as I mentioned above have been taking away time from this activity.

As I had suspected, since the changeover process is a bit more straightforward with Substack than it is with WordPress, I’ve decided to concentrate on getting most of the work done on the former platform first. There, it is merely a matter of switching over whole posts to subscriber-only status and deleting some blogs that I don’t want to muck around with on Substack (including my Wednesday writing journals and any posts exclusive to the WordPress page. That I might get done in the next couple of weeks.

The WordPress page is going to take a little longer. There, I will have to set up subscriber-only blocks of material that are only available for paid subscribers. So, that involves entering the edit function of a particular post, creating the subscriber block, cutting the section of text and material I want to have subscriber exclusive, paste that material in the subscriber block, and then hit the update button. This is at least a couple of steps more than I would have to do on Substack. One advantage to the work on WordPress, however, is that I won’t be planning on deleting any extra posts, so that will save me some time. However, this will not start until after I have finished my Substack work, and I do not have any estimate for how long the entire process will be. I’ll keep you updated, because I’m always looking to talk about something on these weekly newsletters[5].

What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations

Roger’s Bacon is a former evolutionary biologist and current high school science teacher (a latter profession where it is very hard to find good candidates, by the way). He has a Substack named Secretorm. I must say, even his links posts are an intriguing read. I’s say check it out.

Substack is rolling out a new feature called Substack Notes that is sort of a short post format similar in size to tweets, but not quite? I still appreciate how Substack is more about people finding other people because they are interested in good writing, not some algorithmic mumbo-jumbo.

Writing Quote of the Week

You know what, this explains how I felt about reading growing up, so I’ll post it.

We live and breathe words. …. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt–I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted–and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.

Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

Final Thoughts

The day before this newsletter got posted, I received word of the death of the German publishing heiress, music promoter, actress, and model Nora Forster. She might be better known for being the wife of Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd singer John Lydon, and the mother of Ariane Forster, better known as Ari Up, vocalist for the English punk rock band the Slits. I’ve been a fan of Lydon’s music ever since I was a kid, even though some of his recent statements regarding Brexit and other political matters don’t sit well with me.

I had first read about John and Nora’s relationship when I read Lyndon’s 1994 memoir Rotten – No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs[6], and it was a description of a truly wonderful and loving relationship by all accounts. Nora was several years older than John, and she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease for the past five years. John had been her caretaker during that time. Before then he and Nora had served as as the guardian to Ari’s three children when she found herself mentally unable to care for them and, later, after Ari’s death from cancer. Alzheimer’s and dementia are likely the worst diseases anyone can face, and I can only imagine the hardships that John faced seeing his loved one fade away and having to care for her during that time. It’s a hard road for any partners or family of those affected by dementia.

In her and John’s honor, I’m posting this song. As I kid I was more of a Sex Pistols fan, but nowadays I’m an admirer of Public Image Ltd, so this might be my favorite of his. Rest in power to Nora and I hope John has peace.

– 30 –

Footnotes:

1. For new subscribers, that’s my hometown. Google it to find out more – it’s the only town in the world with that exact name.
2. The photo shows the Norbert F. Beckey Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River from Muscatine to the Illinois side of the river.
3. Of course I say that, then I wind up doing revisions on this newsletter less than an hour or two before publication lol.
4. When I say second revision, I mean the second major revision since I’ve submitted it to the publisher. I have completed at least three other major revisions and about the same number of minor revisions before that process.
5. As previously stated, lol.
6. That is a great read that I would highly recommend.

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 will say that I am always glad when this day falls on a weekend. You do not want to be in a school on this day, much less teaching there. Any interest that I once in pranks or pranking people left me a long time ago. My personal opinion is that it gives some people permission to be absolute jerks, not that people need much of an excuse nowadays.

Aaaaaand that was enough misanthropy for a while. Let’s get to the writing talk, shall we?

Home Front Stuff

I usually don’t celebrate my birthday publicly, but I decided to do that to see who might actually be willing to support my writing (more on that later). As I hinted last week, I have started to write these more than a few days earlier than it actually runs, because otherwise I’m going to be rushed to get this up at a reasonable time on Saturdays and the quality might be a little bit low.

Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is because the plan is that today (1 April) I will be having a joint birthday feast and celebration with my daughter, and my wife and son will be there too, maybe even my parents. I do plan on visiting my parents before that as well. It is rare for us to get together since we now live halfway across the state from each other, and I treasure that time with them. I try to call them on a regular basis because I now know what it’s like to be wondering how my kids are dealing with young adulting and hoping they’re okay. Goodness knows how my mom and dad handled it with me being their only kid, and I last lived full-time with them at least twenty-five years ago.

What I’ve Been Writing

I’m deep into a second revision of The Yank Striker this week. Now that I’ve checked to see that all the first revisions got taken care of (good news, the vast majority of them are done), I’m needing to review for any other major revisions (or minor ones) before we go forward. How many more times through the process we’ll go through, I can’t say, but this is coming closer to reality.

Work on The Yank Striker 2 has paused a bit. I want to make sure that I’m going to be productive with the blog since I’m actually expecting people to pay for reading some portions of it lol. The other issue is that I want to make sure that what I have written looks good enough to match with the first part, so much of that work is going to be revisionist in nature rather than new writing, at least at first. As of right now, I already have 15,000-plus words in the rough draft, so that’s a little progress. (I’m not expecting the second book to be much longer than 80,000 words.)

I’m also planning to write my new piece on worldbuilding locations, with some of the experiences that I’ve had with both The Yank Striker series and my first book, The Holy Fool. The plan is to make that the first ever subscriber-exclusive piece for Liegois Media and The Writing Life With Jason Liegois. Now, whether I manage to actually write this piece is a totally different situation. Let’s all watch here to see if I make this deadline. (I think I might?)[1]

As for other stuff, I’m still doing dribs and drabs of the fan fiction, usually just to make sure that I’m at least writing something. I’m not as dedicated to it as I was, say, a couple of years ago, but it is something that is a good creative outlet for me. One advantage to it that other outlets don’t have is that I don’t have as much pressure to like promote it or monetize it like other things that I create.

What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing

At this point, the paid subscriptions on Liegois Media (WordPress) and The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (Substack) should be up and running. Whether it is running smoothly or not is another issue. I mentioned before that there might be some technical complications to setting up some of the paid sections. I do not consider myself a webmaster or programmer by any means, but thankfully being online no longer requires you to have a basic knowledge of HTML programming or anything like that to set up a web site. I’m it when it comes to who’s behind everything, everyone.

I am not too concerned about whether everything is totally perfect for this launch or not. I’ve come to believe that it’s better to jump into this rather than try and tinker with everything and try and put together the perfect plan to run a site, which doesn’t exist. Might as well have fun with this and see where it leads.

Free Piece of Writing Advice for the Week

It is going to be very interesting to see if I can make this a a good section of the newsletter and not be repetitive. It might if I keep it quick.

Remember how I said last time that it’s good not to rely on “crutch words,” words that wind up being repetitive filler in your writing? I would also say that you should make sure to not use “crutch punctuation,” as well. For example, I realized after I had one of my more recent works proofread that I was relying waaaay too much on em-dashes (basically, this: – ). I should not have been using them all the time to try and make these big long pauses, or as a replacement for ending a comment. If I really wanted to merge two sentences together, I can use a semicolon every one in a while, or maybe a colon if the second sentence directly explains something in the first sentence.

What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations

I always feel like I want to try to read something I’m going to learn from, even if I’m not sure that it will be a reading experience that I want to return to. It’s a way of challenging myself, which is why I insisted on buying Infinite Jest and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace and insist on trying to read them, even though I couldn’t even get through the first fourth of each book[2]. I get that same feeling reading Brad DeLong, an economics professor at University of California at Berkeley, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration and the author of a few books. He wrote this breakdown analysis of the new GPT-4 chatbot soon after it came out, and I’m always interested in hearing about how AI will change things or not. Give him a read.

Paul Krugman is not a writer who needs my hype, but I’m giving it to him anyway. A professor of economics at such places as MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton, among others, he’s the winner of the Nobel Prize of Economics for his theories on international trade theory. He’s also pretty much the only columnist at the New York Times that matters. He knows how economies work. If you have the cash to get a NYT subscription, he’s worth a read.

Writing Quote of the Week

As my next big fiction project (other than The Yank Striker series) will involve fantasy, I figured a quote from one of the first fantasy writers I fell in love with might be appropriate.

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.

Lloyd Alexander

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully you, the reader, is getting something out of this, and you should be assured that I’m willing to write something even when I’m not trying to promote something. You’ll hear from me sooner rather than later.

– 30 –

Footnotes:

1. I’ll probably post something quick right after it goes live.
2. I did pick up a love of footnotes from DFW, so there’s that.

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, again. [Please note, the above image is not my actual birthday cake lol.]

Although I find that I am doing pretty well with putting out a weekly newsletter, I have to note that I am starting to put it together earlier and earlier in the week (although not necessarily finishing it early in the week). One of the difficulties that I find on a regular basis is finding readings to recommend and give links to, especially when I find myself busy with writing and the day job (teaching).

Home Front Stuff

As I might have mentioned previously, I’ll be celebrating my 50th birthday soon (no use in denying it when I can use the occasion for a promotional event lol). As for the family celebration of the event, that might have to wait until the following weekend. It appears that we might be combining the celebration of my 50th birthday and my daughter’s 21st birthday (nine days prior to mine) into a single event. This is a side effect of having my kids living in two different cities, none of which I live in.

At least for now, we all live in the same state, but who knows how long that will last. I never lived in the same state as my grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles, but my kids lived in the same area as their grandparents and maternal aunts for most of their childhood. Circumstances can always change, and I just treasure the times that I am around any of my family, especially my wife and kids.

What I’ve Been Writing

I’ve already gotten my second proof for The Yank Striker in the mail on Monday. Now it’s sit around and wait as I get the next proof back and see what else needs to be done. I hope there’s not too much left to do, but I can’t rush things either. Of course, I have to check and make sure that all of the revisions I asked to get done actually did get done. As I started looking at that this week, it appears the vast majority of those did happen, which should help out my second round of revisions.

I thought it might be useful to some of you writers who are looking for a system to help revise your longer projects to give an insider’s look at my process behind The Yank Striker, something I began with my first book The Holy Fool and refined during this project. It’s going to post here about an hour after this post goes live, so go check it out.

As for other writing, once I finish the first look at the new proof, I hope to get back to writing The Yank Striker Part 2 (working title). Like I mentioned last time, one of my issues stemmed from me not really being comfortable with the description of a particular setting in the first book in the series, so I didn’t want to proceed with scenes at that setting (an important one in the book) in the new book until I resolved it in the first book. Especially with it being a series, I knew that I had to get it right the first time to avoid continuity errors and awkwardness.

With that in mind, I’m planning on putting together another article for the following week that covers putting together settings for a fictional place. I might even turn it into my first subscriber-exclusive piece for Liegois Media and The Writing Life With Jason Liegois. Keep checking those spaces.

What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing

I think I might need to explain a reference I made last week when I compared the monthly meeting of my writing group to the plot of the film Saturday Night Fever. I have to remember once again that there are an ever fewer number of people who have a direct memory of the 20th century, although I had to realize it about 10 years or so when I was teaching a class of eighth graders and I started to figure out their ages[1].

Many film fans (and music fans as well) of 1977 saw the music and the dancing and the fashion of the movie and didn’t get much farther than that. But a lot of the perceptive people recognized the film as an exploration of characters looking for meaning and validation in their lives. Gene Siskel, the late great film critic of the Chicago Tribune, was so obsessed with the film that he eventually purchased the white suit that star John Travola wore at the film’s climax. Anyway, this was a long-winded way of saying that writing and my fellow writers are a great escape from the regular grind of my workdays and something I truly look forward to.

Last week, I already talked about preparations for paid subscriptions on Liegois Media (WordPress) and The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (Substack). I’ve already got the payment systems set up for both sites, so it’s just a matter of getting the subscriptions to go live. As I promised, that will happen at 8 p.m. Central Time March 30. For Substack, the process will be more or less immediate.

However, it will be more of an evolving process on WordPress, because you can’t simply have a certain amount of posts become subscriber exclusive. Apparently, you have to have subscriber exclusive boxes so that you can get the subscribers to pay for it. That means I might be more than just a few days reformatting new subscriber box content. Now, I say all this, but watch and see the Substack be more complicated than WordPress. I might be able to let you know how it’s going by the next time I post the next A Week in the Writing Life.

Free Piece of Writing Advice for the Week

During our members’ meeting of the Iowa Writer’s Corner last weekend, we had a great presentation from one of our new members, writer TK Cassidy. It was entitled “Crutch Words and the Dreaded Lack of Definition.” To summarize the presentation, she talked with us about words that we tend to use repeatedly in our writings that can be both monotonous for our readers and not specific enough to be properly descriptive for them as well. They tend to happen in everyday speech quite a lot[2].

Go ahead and use the “find word” function in the word processing program of your choice. If you find yourself using certain words hundreds of times over the course of a book-length manuscript (especially these ones, thanks to Hannah Bauman for them), try to change them out for more descriptive alternatives[3][4].

What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations

Korynn Morrison is an artist from Sydney, Australia, I met on Substack. She’s just as good of a writer as she is a visual artist, like this piece on the concept of stillness and how it can lead to more self-awareness. Check her out.

I had a chance to reread my copy of Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman’s classic 1964 novel of a young female rookie teacher in the New York public school system. The trailer for its 1967 film adaptation appears to be a bit extra. A movie trailer more than four minutes long? Anyway, see it for yourself:

One of the things I noticed about the book was how a lot of the issues teachers had to deal with back then are just as present now, if exacerbated by increased pressures on students and technology. However, it would be quite easy to re-adapt the book for today’s time, switching out those letters, assignments, and interoffice memos with emails, texts, and Google Classroom files.

Writing Quote of the Week

Since I was talking earlier about eliminating crutch words and vivid descriptions, this seems appropriate.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekhov

Final Thoughts

Let’s close things out with a jam. If someone tells you that all of the music of the 1980’s and their music videos were overproduced mush, you might want to show them this little number from Minneapolis, Minnesota’s own, The Replacements.

Thanks to all my readers, and especially my subscribers, for your continued support. I appreciate it very much, and I’m not going to forget it.. Writers keep writing and everyone take care of themselves.

– 30 –

Footnotes:

1. Then again, they could just look up the history like I did. One of my personal mottoes is “I looked it up.”
2. I tend to believe the theory that people use these words in speech to buy time to allow you to think about what to say next.
3. Of course, when it comes to dialogue, this rule doesn’t necessarily count. In fact, a good amount of realistic dialogue would contain plenty of crutch words.
4. Yes, I’m getting on my footnotes again.

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.