I’m a big fan of coming-of-age novels that begin during the time period of 1900 – 1910. Inevitably, even if set in dense cities, the children involved spend lots of time outside and often lots of time in nature and the woods. Growing up as I did in the 1980s, in suburbia, I rarely spent any time in real nature and it negatively impacted my life. Nowadays, it’s only grown worse and worse the more we become disconnected with nature, the more anxious, depressed, neurotic, and just plain awful we are.

Well, I suppose that doesn’t have anything to do with the title of this post, it just felt glaringly obvious today while I was watching a squirrel playfully bounce among the trees, and so here we are. I had it on my to do is to do this post at the beginning of March, and have been trying to get back to it ever since, but as it is only a couple days before April will just change it to April and call it a day.

I have long intended to do these posts every single month, mostly as a way to just keep me on track while the modern world does everything in its power to grab my attention and convince me that wasting time is much more important than things of substance, which for me, is writing and reading physical books. So let’s try this again.

In relation to the last few years, so far 2025 has been decently productive for me. I spent a good while re-working the query letter and synopsis for my novel, and I’ll finally be able to start researching agents again. Also, having recently read the Gotham Writers’ Workshop guide to writing fiction (2003), I’ve decided to go back and rework all of my short stories that have not been accepted for publication. I often can’t get through writing guides, but this one was written in such a way that rather than rolling my eyes and throwing it aside, I actually enjoyed it, and felt inspired to make my work better. I’ve already reworked two short pieces, and am deeply into the third, which I can tell is going to be much stronger and hopefully someone will see more value in it that they did before.

Additionally, as I wrote in my post for the new year, I wanted to try to focus on planting the seeds that would lead to fiction, instead of just doing what I normally do, which is getting super frustrated when I don’t have ideas and things don’t flow naturally. That has already paid off, with numerous story ideas, including a decently fleshed out overview of a novel that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. And so I can highly recommend instead of just focusing on what you want to do, focus on planting those seeds which will feed those things that you want to do, thereby giving you a solid foundation of a much more sustained nature.

I’m happy to say along the writing lines that I will have short stories coming out this year in Saw Palm, Levitate, and The Southern Quill, with hopefully more to follow.

Okay, over to reading –

I normally don’t pick up longer books, but as I’ve never read him, and he is one of the most important Chicago writers, I decided to start Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. I’m down to the last hundred pages or so, and have enjoyed it overall, but his style, to me, is certainly overwrought and unnecessary at times. It feels like the book could easily been at least 50 pages shorter and I would’ve enjoyed it much more, but what do I know?

While most of my literary interests lie with classic novels and short stories, I’ve tried to dive headfirst, really for the first time, into more modern stories. My friend was kind enough to gift me a subscription to the New Yorker, so I’ve been reading the fiction in there. I’ve enjoyed a few of them, but the fact that I can’t remember any clearly right now seems to mean a lot. Additionally, I’ve been diving into smaller lit mags, but most of it really just tires me. There were many stories written in second person, which is incredibly hard to do well, and it left me wondering if this is some new trend that I just haven’t heard of, or just writers desperate to do something “different” in order to get attention. There are also stories that were unnecessarily explicit, in different ways, also seemingly just for attention and shock value. I only read lit mags that focus on literary fiction, not genre fiction, and so I expect more subtlety and turn of phrase, but a lot of time that is not what I found.

I do want to highlight two short stories that I found in lit mags that I did thoroughly enjoy:

So there you have it. Hopefully, if I can get myself in a good place, I’ll actually do this update once a month, if only for the grounding that it helps me achieve.

What are you all working on right now? Enjoying any particular books or short stories lately? Let me know, well my list is so long I know I’ll never finish it before I die, I’m always up for adding to it.