I have not been paying attention to the election news cycle. I have dropped out of that system. I am lucky that I was born in the United States. I marvel at the underpinnings of the American constitutional order (an internationalist order). I understand that self-government and elections go hand-in-hand (if only we were all enlightened anarchists).

But I don’t pay attention to the horse race for the presidency. It makes a mockery of all the good things the republic stands for.

I have been taking advantage of the Covid pseudo-lockdown. (Thanks to Nick for the Zoom lesson in opportunity costs.) I wrote one scholarly essay and six short stories. I submitted them to journals. The scholarly essay was accepted for publication in The Independent Review after going through an unusually thorough peer review process. The short stories were all rejected. I am disheartened because I have been trying (slowly) to leave behind scholarship in favor of literary pursuits. I cannot practice my writing craft because the scholarly article (ungated rough draft here) is also the focus of a Special Issue in an open source academic journal (which also happens to be one of my favorite journals: Cosmos + Taxis).

So, I have another 16 months of challenging scholarly work ahead of me. I love this blog. It’s been good to me. I don’t know if the literary journals rejected me because of my style or my substance. I felt like I was tackling difficult topics, but I also know my writing style is a bit old school. I think maybe the rejections were a combination of old school style and old school substance, both of which are not exactly what literary journals are looking for these days.