December is finally and truly here. It seemed like at times earlier in 2024 this year would never come to a close, when it stretched ahead of me like the long highways I was constantly on as I probably drove enough miles to make a few complete circles around Iowa. Lot of tough times, some of which I talked about here and other issues (politics, cough cough) I haven’t and won’t touch on¹.

Let’s talk writing again.

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The Home Front

Other than the fact snow can still exist in Iowa and my wife has wrapped up our Christmas decorating, there’s not much to talk about on the home front. I got to see both my kids and my parents over the Thanksgiving week, which in both cases are becoming rarer treats especially with my kids having their own personal and professional lives to attend to.

I hope Thanksgiving week worked out for all of you. All of the students (and many of the teachers) are likely counting down to the Christmas break, so we’ll see how that goes.

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What I’m Writing

Current progress on my ongoing projects:

• The Yank Striker 2, the sequel for The Yank Striker: I’ve continued to make good progress on this rough draft. I’ll talk about this a little more in the next section of the newsletter, trust me.
• The Untitled Pro Wrestling Family Drama project: Again, no real progress recently. I might hold off on further pronouncements on this until I actually work on this.
• The Untitled Liegois Poetry Chapbook: Um, about that… check out below for a bit of a surprise.

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Writing Goals

Way back some time ago, I set some goals for myself for this calendar year.

At the time, just before the start of the new year, I set for myself three goals in particular for 2024. They were the following:

1. I want to write at least 200,000 words this year and meet my daily quota at least 75 percent of the time. So, these will be my quotas for this year (and I think for the subsequent years to come).
2. My preference would be to publish The Yank Striker 2 by this summer. However, if I manage to get the rough draft finished by the year’s end, I’ll consider it a win. I prefer to keep positive, however.
3. I want to write more poetry this year. In fact, it would be great if I managed to get some of my poetry published in some journals, or perhaps in a chapbook format. Hopefully, my Poetry Nights will produce some more material for this project.

So…, how did I do on them?

1. As of the end of November 2024, I have written 202,212 words for the year 2024, meeting my minimum quota. I had hoped to reach it by Thanksgiving Day, but it actually happened on Black Friday.
   As of the beginning of December, I am 12,940 words away from matching my personal best record of last year (215,152). I only have to write about 417 words per day for the rest of the year to match it. Considering I’ve exceeded 12,940 words a month in all but two months this year, another personal best record appears in sight.
2. As of this writing, I’m now at 70,000-plus words on the rough draft. I will need to only average about 200 words per day on this project from now until the end of the year. This does not seem to be much of a difficulty in itself. Now, I’m wondering whether I will have to add some more to the text later. I’ve shown the last big game of the book, and now I am hoping to wrap up things soon. We’ll have to see whether I have a nice, neat tale by 31 December 2024.
3. As for the poetry book…

I am delighted to announce I have self-published my first collection of poetry. After months and maybe a couple of years wondering how the heck I should go about doing it, I just went ahead and did it.

The title ties in with the theme of the collection, which is river life and traveling. I grew up around the Mississippi River and had to do a lot of traveling over the past year, so I ended up writing more than a few poems about traveling recently. My decision to set aside every fourth weekend of the month on this blog as Poetry Night ended up motivating me to do a lot of poetry. There are nineteen poems in this collection, spanning from one as early as 2010 and some as recently as this fall.

To be honest, there is a lot I do not know about the poetry world. I recently became a member of the Iowa Poetry Association and am hoping to find more opportunities to publish my work either by the poem or in collections.

I’m planning on announcing an official holiday launch and/or places to obtain my collection soon, maybe on this month’s Poetry Night post. Stay tuned.

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Writing Advice that’s Really Just a Saying

I often have a problem with my own first drafts of being too wordy, of using too many unnecessary words to describe something when two-thirds of the amount would do just fine.

I have a new saying describing this phenomenon. Here it is:

The words are managing to tackle the story.

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Writing Quote(s) of the Week:

I don’t feature a lot of poets in this space, but this comment from a past poet of the previous century seemed to harmonize with my thoughts on writing.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

• Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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What I’m Doing Having to Do With Writing: Social media

I’ve gotten onto social media for a bit as a way to reach out and get the word out to more people about what I’ve been working on. Frankly, if you put “Jason Liegois” into any halfway decent search engine, you’ll be able to track down most of them. I can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at the moment. I was on Twitter for a bit, but I’m not on there now.

And now… I have joined with many other writers and creatives on Bluesky.

You can find me on Bluesky at @jasonliegoisauthor.bsky.social . I try and cross-post all of my blogs there as well as check in and get to know other writers. Maybe I’ll see you there².

Podcasting!

By the way, over the Thanksgiving break, I had a great conversation with a fellow writer in Iowa and friend Amber Rodgers as part of the Saga Studio Podcast. We talked about The Yank Striker quite a bit, as well as The Holy Fool and some of my upcoming projects. Check it out here if you want to give it a watch.

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What I’m Doing Having to Do With Writing: Personal appearances

first want to thank the Fort Madison Area Art Association for hosting a book signing for me and several other area writers at their headquarters last Saturday. It was a great event and I’m definitely eager to do another event with them.

I’m still hoping to be part of the DSM Book Festival at the at Franklin Junior High Event Center, 4801 Franklin Ave., Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, 22 March 2025. This is being sponsored by one of my favorite independent book stores in Des Moines, Beaverdale Books.

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How to support me😊.

Go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile to check out some of my other links. For example, in those places, you can find out about my first book, the journalism thriller The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, as well as the first book in my The Yank Striker series, The Yank Striker: a Footballer’s Beginning.

If you go follow the links above, you will be able to buy both the paperback and ebook versions of my books on Amazon. Again, if you just put “Jason Liegois” in Google you’ll probably find them on the first page of search results.

If you happen to visit these fine independent book stores, you can find my books there:

• [ABSOLUTELY BRAND NEW LOCATION! 😊] Bent Oak Books, 619 7th St., in my new hometown of Fort Madison, Iowa. They’ve been open for just about a year and just recently opened up a new used book section at their store. I can’t recommend them enough.
• Burlington By The Book, 301 Jefferson St, Burlington.
• Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave. # S1, Des Moines
• Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
• The Book Vault, 105 S Market St, Oskaloosa.

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.

I love it if you are signed up for my free subscription, but I would love it if you signed up for a paid one. The monthly rate is the lowest I can put it ($5 per month) but my yearly rate of $35 is a steal at less than three/fifths the monthly rate.

Now, if you are interested in supporting me but can’t quite afford a full subscription, I am now on Venmo. If you are interested in a donation of whatever you can provide, you can just send whatever you can afford. Just click the button below or scan the QR code below to help out. Anything you can provide helps me keep things going.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for now. All you writers keep writing, and everyone else keep safe.

-30-

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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.

1. This has always been and always will be a writing blog, not a blog about politics, no matter how tempting all those eyeballs interested in politics are. While politics naturally seeps into everything (including fiction and poetry), it does not have to be front and center, and for more than a few reasons I have elected not to keep it front and center. ↩︎
2. In these newsletters I might post all of my social links in one place at the end for those who can’t find them in the sidebar of the desktop site or in my profile area. ↩︎

[AUTHOR’S NOTE]: The featured photo is a glance at the notebook I’ve been using to keep track of my word count.

The end of the year is coming faster than I anticipated. It feels like at times my fingers or mind are weighed down with lead even though I have a clear idea of what I want to write when it comes to fiction for certain.

46 days left in the year. If this was a 5,000 or 10,000 meter race, this would be the time when I’d have to start sprinting. I’m not too much for the actual sprinting nowadays, but I might be able to manage the literary equivalent.

Let’s talk writing again.

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The Home Front

We (my wife Laura and myself) are continuing to settle in the new homestead. All of the essential work took place a couple of weeks ago – at least, all of the things needed to live there and be there.

Now, we’re in the process of doing little things for the place, like reinstalling closet doors, having someone else install a garage door opener for us, and beginning to sort through the boxes of belongings that have been transported between four different residences over the past five years. That’s a lot of moving, and I think my wife and I are of the same mind that we want to stay in the same place for a while.

Not too much else to mention about home, except my son has moved into his new home in Des Moines with his girlfriend. He has a lot more to do, but he’s far more talented with home improvements and repairs than I’m ever going to be, but I was glad to help him finish moving in there.

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What I’m Writing

Current progress on my ongoing projects:

• The Yank Striker 2, the sequel for The Yank Striker: I’m proud to have rushed past the 63,000-word mark for the rough draft. Like I said in the beginning, I know where I’m headed to with the text, I just need to get over my insatiable need to have a perfect first draft rather than what I need to be doing if I am an actual serious writer, which is throw something as fast as possible into a document or onto a page and then wait to make it into something coherent somewhere around the fourth draft.
  My mini-goal is to have a completed 75,000 word rough draft by 1 January 2025. With 46 days left in the year, I’d have to average just over 260 words per day on this project alone just to make the quota. I think it is absolutely possible.
• The Untitled Pro Wrestling Family Drama project: No real progress recently. In my planning, this is the project I want to work on when I let The Yank Striker 2 rough draft sit for a while, so I want to have something to work on. I just need to figure out where I want to take the storyline from where it now is.
• The Untitled Liegois Poetry Chapbook: No recent progress on this, but I am feeling good about the book’s layout and design based on some feedback from my poetry friends. I want to check in with some local printers and see what it would cost me to move forward from here. I want to be a published poet, even if I am publishing myself.
• In addition, I toyed around with some fan fiction I’ve left long dormant, and a glance at some of the writings in my “morgue” of old projects might have inspired something. All that I’ve got on a document is the document and a title, but the rest of the story is cooking in my head. We’ll have to see about it.

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Writing Quote(s) of the Week:

I decided on not one, not two, but three quotes this week from a writer I discovered in college and has become one of my authors ever since. Rest in Power Octavia E. Butler (1946-2007).

I don’t write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people.

• Octavia E. Butler

Everything is political in one way or another.

• 1997 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

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Writing Advice

It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Whether I have given this advice in the past or not, I think it is still valuable for those who have not heard it. It might seem simple, but I’ll discuss it here.

The following is a paraphrase of a conversation I had with a high school student about an essay he was writing. Writers sometimes don’t think they have enough to write about. They might not have been curious enough to ask enough questions.

Student: I’m not sure what else to write about. This is what I’ve written so far.

Me: All right. Show me what you’ve written so far.

(The student does so.)

Student: I don’t know what else to put in here.

Me: Okay. You wrote this sentence that told us this, right?

Student: Yeah.

Me: So, why did this happen? If you explain it, there’s another sentence there.

Student: Oh, all right.

Me: What about this next sentence? What happened because of this?

Student: Oh, okay.

Me: You did it with the following sentence here, right? You showed how this happened because of this.

Student: Yeah. Honestly, I just threw everything in there and hoped it was enough.

Me: Yeah, I get it. But you doing that is the same as you writing a whole bunch of information on a whole bunch of 3×5 cards and tossing them at me expecting I’m going to make sense of it. And I’m a good reader, but I’m not that good.

Student: Okay.

Me: See how “because” shows why this happened? See how “then” and “as a result” show what’s coming up? See how “for example” lets the reader know you’re going to give some more explanation for what you just wrote? You need to connect the ideas.

Student: All right. Thanks.

I tell my students: I can do one particular trick. But I do it pretty well.

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What I’m Doing Having to Do With Writing

(AKA personal appearances)

I (also sometimes known as The Dude In Purple) have some events coming up this fall and some others I’m tentatively adding to the schedule. All these events will be me appearing live and with my books, The Holy Fool and The Yank Striker.

Here are my current events¹:

• I will attend the Fort Madison Area Art Association’s Meet the Author Book Signing event from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, November 30, at the FMAAA’s center at 825 Avenue G, Fort Madison. This would be my first author’s event in my new home of Fort Madison, and I am overjoyed to be part of this gathering.
• I’m hoping to be part of the DSM Book Festival at the at Franklin Junior High Event Center, 4801 Franklin Ave., Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, 22 March 2025. This is being sponsored by one of my favorite independent book stores in Des Moines, Beaverdale Books. I’ll provide more information, hopefully, as the event approaches.

I’ll be looking to add some more dates on the appearance calendar, and this weekend I’m hoping to reach out to some other groups as well. Hope to see you at one of those places.

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How to support me😊.

Go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile to check out some of my other links. For example, in those places, you can find out about my first book, the journalism thriller The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, as well as the first book in my The Yank Striker series, The Yank Striker: a Footballer’s Beginning.

If you happen to visit these fine independent book stores, you can find my books there:

• Burlington By The Book, 301 Jefferson St, Burlington.
• Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave. # S1, Des Moines
• Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
• The Book Vault, 105 S Market St, Oskaloosa.

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.

I love it if you are signed up for my free subscription, but I would love it if you signed up for a paid one. The monthly rate is the lowest I can put it ($5 per month) but my yearly rate of $35 is a steal at less than three/fifths the monthly rate.

Now, if you are interested in supporting me but can’t quite afford a full subscription (although my paid subscription is just five dollars a month or an even better steal at thirty-five dollars a year), I have a new option for you.

I am now on Venmo. If you are interested in a donation of whatever you can provide, you can just send whatever you can afford to there. You can choose to buy me a cup of coffee or whatever you can afford. Just click the button below or scan the QR code below to help out. Anything you can provide helps me keep things going.

Final Thoughts

That’s about it for now. All you writers keep writing, and everyone else keep safe.

-30-

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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.

1. Promotional image courtesy of the sponsoring organization. ↩︎