Happy New Year and welcome 2023!

Now, I promised a literary agent a revised copy of my manuscript by the end of my winter break (January 16^th), and so I really should be revising. But I’ve had some time off because of the holidays and because, in the last week of the semester, I fell ill. I guess therefore I am writing this blog post to ease myself back into my writing routine.

I’m also not inclined to lash myself over some time off because one, it’s the holidays, and two, I had a pretty good year in reading and writing. In this post, I’ll share my book list and talk about my reading and writing log.

The log is what I’m most excited to share. I’ve been keeping a log of how much and how often I write for a while now, but in 2022, for the first time, I kept up the log for the entire year and now have a complete record of the work I did. Not only that, but it’s also color-coded, as you can see from the picture. The left column is the reading I did for the day, the right, the writing.

I got the idea for a log like this from my days of competitive running. Here too is a sample of an old running log. I found that keeping track of the running I did motivated me to train each day, and reflecting on my entries months later was encouraging and fun.

I decided, shortly after I arrived at NYU for my MFA, to start a similar log for my writing. After some experimenting, I think I’ve found a format that works. I like keeping the record longhand rather than in a word document—that’s just my preference. But however you do it, I strongly recommend a writing log to young writers of all ages.

I also recommend keeping a book list. I got the idea for the book list from my little sister, who, a few years ago, was trying to read a hundred books in a year. I said wow, a hundred books! What a goal! I was also struck by the idea of simply keeping a list. I couldn’t believe it didn’t occur to me to do that. In 2020, I kept a book list for the first time, and read 67 books. I’m positive that if I had not been keeping a list, I would not have read so many—which is precisely why I recommend that writers consider listing.

If you want to write good prose, good books, good stories, you must read as much as possible. To me, that’s not a burden—it’s an exciting mission. After all, there is so much to learn, and we’ve only got eighty years or so to read and learn what we can.

I’m not wild about all the advice in Stephen King’s On Writing, but he says something similar: a writer should always have a book handy. He recommends reading 2-3 hours and writing 2-3 hours per day. This isn’t easy—at all—and if you don’t consistently do that, you’re not lazy or doomed as a writer. I certainly don’t live up to that standard. I just think it’s a good standard.

A friend of mine—I’ll name no names—once scoffed at Stephen King’s advice to read and write that much. “There’s no way you need to do all that to be a great writer,” he said. But I’m thinking, how do you expect to be a good writer if you don’t want to read and write?

Again, I haven’t lived up to that high standard this year–my writing log proves it to me. But today, I will focus on successes, not shortcomings. In 2022, I read 59 books. It’s not as good as 2021, when I read 63, or 2020, when I read 67, but I’m still proud of the number. You’ll see if you look at my book list that I read some titles more than once, yet still counted them as separate books. I make no apologies for this.

2022 Book List:

1. God Knows, Joseph Heller Thumbs Down
2. The Awakening, Kate Chopin Thumbs Up
3. Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
4. Coriolanus, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
5. The Captive, Fiona King Foster Thumbs Down
6. Timon of Athens, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
7. Eugene Onegin, Pushkin Thumbs Up
8. Pericles, Shakespeare Thumbs Down
9. Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke Thumbs Up
10. Paradise Lost, Milton Thumbs Up
11. Cymbeline, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
12. Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton Thumbs Up
13. A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera Thumbs Up
15. David Copperfield, Dickens Thumbs Up
16. Soldier in the Rain, William Goldman Thumbs Down
17. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane Thumbs Down
18. Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville Thumbs down
19. Washington Square, Henry James Thumbs Up!!
20. Henry VIII, Shakespeare Thumbs Down
21. Fathers and Sons, Turgenev Thumbs Up
22. Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
23. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
24. Madame Bovary, Flaubert Thumbs Up
25. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy Thumbs Up
26. Gay Marine Blues (my own manuscript)
27. The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr Thumbs Down
28. Love’s Labours Lost, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
29. Anagrams, Lorrie Moore Thumbs Down
30. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton Thumbs Up
31. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather Thumbs Up
32. Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie Thumbs Up
33. Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare Thumbs Up
34. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte Thumbs Up
35. City of Thieves, David Benioff Thumbs Up
36. Nox, Anne Carson Thumbs Down
37. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner Thumbs Up
38. Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald Thumbs Up
39. The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway Thumbs Up
40. Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams Thumbs Up
41. Still Life, Jay Hopler Thumbs Up
42. Elements of Style, Strunk and White Thumbs Up
43. Fat City, Leonard Gardner Thumbs Up
44. Elements of Style
45. Machete, Tomas Morin Thumbs Up
46. Catch-22, Joseph Heller Thumbs Up
47. Chess Story, Stefan Sweig Thumbs Up
48. Great Gatsby Thumbs Up
49. Best Barbarian, Roger Reeves Thumbs Up
50. The Old Testament Thumbs Up
51. Gay Marine Blues (my manuscript again)
52. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Mike Chabon Thumbs Up
53. Elements of Style
54. Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin Thumbs Up
55. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry Thumbs Up
56. On Writing Well, William Zinsser Thumbs Up
57. Men at Arms, Evelyn Waugh Thumbs Up
58. 40 Short Stories, an Anthology
59. The New Testament Thumbs Up

Least Favorite: The Red Badge of Courage.

Favorites: Antony and Cleopatra, Washington Square, The Age of Innocence, Love’s Labours Lost, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Sound and the Fury, The Old Testament, Death Comes for the Archbishop, City of Thieves.

That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.