Retirement is awesome. I am interested in rebranding it though. I’m still working. Harder than ever maybe. But now it’s my work at my desk.
At some point I need to reconcile the work with what is going on in the world, but for now I’m down in the micro. For now I’m down in the books and the manuscripts.
Between June and August and I rewrote my novel. I started with a blank document and rewrote the whole thing. I converted it from Third Person / Present Tense to First Person / Past Tense. This helped me challenge every sentence, but it also got me closer to the characters.
I set a goal of 1000 words a day and for the most part hit it every day. Life stuff got in the way occasionally but I worked to catch up easily and as I got closer to the End of August goal, I started doing 2000 words a day. I feel like I’ve learned a lot this year and I’m excited to keep that momentum going.
I’m super proud of it. I thought I had written a pretty good book, but now I know I have written a better one.
I’m working on conventional revisions of it now and hope to have that complete by end of year. I’m doing a manuscript exchange with one writer and have room for one more if anyone has a work ready and wants to exchange that kind of effort?
When 2026 hits, I’ll start trying to find a home for it again and hopefully find a new project to work on.
I have a new story up at Bull, one of my favorite online journals: Early Forms. It’s part of a little series I’m doing using fictional encounters with famous artists. This one is the punk band Butthole Surfers and Timothy Leary with cameos by Buzz Aldrin and William Burroughs. I’ve got another one completed on Bukowski. That one is out to some journals and hopefully live somewhere next year.
I love the fall. My cat is in the open window. The morning fog has cleared. Dylan is on the bluetooth speaker. It’s time to keep reading and writing.
Al Kratz 