Hello!

The ebook version of my lit fic novella 11 bookmarks is now available for preorder from the following stores:

Kobo | Kindle | Nook (Barnes & Noble) | Apple Books

Ebooks are DRM-free where the sellers allow.

A print version will be available for sale when the book is published Tuesday, Oct. 13.

The novella is a bit over 22k words. The style and tone won't come as a surprise to anyone with a familiarity with my work (or even my posting style on social media), but it is different from what I've published before. It's literary realism that lightly dabbles with a couple of other genres (and the almost-ness of it is very me and very much the point), and it is about a guy named Grant who is a semi-lapsed fiction writer who works for a nonprofit. He lives a rather routinized, tidy life. One day while on the bus, he runs across a bookmark. He has a mildly negative reaction to it, specifically that it's a folded up sticky note of a color that's not quite blue and not quite green. Over the course of the novella and about ten months, ten more bookmarks show up in increasingly absurd, perhaps troubling, ways.

You can read it in one to two hours. And I promise that it's a true novella, not a novel or short story disguised as a novella.

If you're interested in a free ebook version for review (in any venue, including your own blog, newsletter, social media account, etc.) or you're just curious and don't have six bucks to spare at the moment, reply to this email, and I'll get you an ebook file.

In this month's newsletter, I talk a little bit about how the novella came about and then I discuss the sometimes necessity of the 1B draft.

The genesis of 11 bookmarks

On November 20, 2025, I was riding the bus from the Twin Cities suburb where I live to Minneapolis where I work (when I work on site; I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home two to three days a week), and I opened up a library book I was reading, and when I turned the page, a folded up sticky note slipped out of the book and onto my lap. I experienced a very brief moment of annoyance. Normally, I would just let that go. I'm a white, educated male of a certain age and personality. I tend to bottle stuff up.

However, for some reason I can't identify, I pulled out a notebook and wrote the following (typos left in):

"I was annoyed that someone had left a bookmark inside the library book I was reading. It was a folded up sticky note in that color of blue I can’t stand, the one thar is pale but with too much green in it—or not enough. I already had a bookmark—the hold slip, which was the proper thing to use as a bookmark for a book one has checked out of the library given that it is both superfluous once you pick up the book but also still attached to it until you release it back to the, thankfully, still vast collection of my county library system. I was annoyed not just by the color or the fact that something useful for something else had been sacrificed to create it, but also by the fact that it had been left in the book."

I actually wrote a bit more than that during the bus ride, but you'll have to buy the book to read the rest [or reply to this email if you'd like to review it for somewhere (even if it's for your personal Goodreads or StoryGraph account, etc.) or just can't justify paying for the price; I'll email you an ebook version].

The initial burst of writing was somewhat revised for publication, but it's mostly intact and is how the novella opens.

This seemed like an absurd and utterly boring thing to write about. It also didn't quite seem like a me thing to write about, especially since it was literary realism. Not that I don't write literary realism or the absurd, but when I do, it's not of the sort this was pointing at.

Over the next few days, I probed the idea. I knew it wasn't going to be autobiography or auto-fiction. I don't have those proclivities. Plus, nothing really happened. I put the sticky note in my backpack and moved on with my day.

But then an idea formed: what if more bookmarks starts showing up in this person's life? What if this person is someone who, like me, is a writer and works for a nonprofit, but is also completely unlike me. And I started to brainstorm types of bookmarks, which led to an outline that starts out like this:

• the blue bookmark
• the dropped bookmark
• the green ribbon
• the gold ribbon
• one that he finds tbd
• the leather bookmark

The list went on and also evolved quite a bit during the writing, but I had found a structure for the novella. And I knew there needed to be eleven bookmarks, and that it should titled 11 bookmarks. The numbers ten, twelve, and thirteen all have too much symbolic baggage, and fourteen seemed liked too many and nine not enough (plus nine also has too much meaning).

I started writing the novella on Nov. 27, 2025, and finished the first draft on Dec. 28. It came in at 20,875 words and was written at what is, for me, a blistering pace. The words just flowed, the structure worked, and every time I wondered what the heck was going to happen with the next bookmark I was able to come up with a workable, dare I say even delightful, idea.

Normally, my next move would be to just file the draft away and then maybe come back to it in four, six months, or more. Maybe revise it. Maybe let it sit longer. After all, I have two novels I need to revise and publish, another novel I put on hold when I drafted the novella, another story collection in the works, several lit crit essays I want to write, numerous songs that are almost complete, etc.

I do get stuff complted and published eventually. It just usually takes a few years.

But things had gone so smoothly I decided to keep going. I resolved to revise 11 bookmarks multiple times and put it into production and publish it before a year had elapsed.

And so I did.

I'm very pleased with it. I hope you find it interesting. I'm loathe to say too much more about it because I hope you'll take the time to experience it for yourself, but there are phrases, observations, moments in it that make it very much worth the read.

I can't say 11 bookmarks is me at my most literary.

But it is me at my more literary.

The 1B draft

When I write anything that's less than book length (novellas, long essays, short stories, this newsletter), I write in a text editor, and I keep all drafts of the work in the same file.

I start with a draft zero. This is where I put the seed of the initial idea along with any other ideas I have; any research; an outline if I have one; and the first line or paragraph or two of the piece if I end up starting to write at the idea stage. I add to it as needed and can quickly navigate to it in the text editor I use for reference as I write.

Then when I'm ready to start, I create a header for a draft one. The header looks like this:

DRAFT ONE {July - September 2026; 13,429 words}

When I finish a draft, I create the subsequent header and copy and paste the text below it:

DRAFT TWO {September - 2026; words}

Then I fill in the missing date and word count when the draft is finished and make my revisions.

There are times, however, when I don't make it to draft two without the 1B (or sometimes even the 1C or 1D) draft.

For me, the 1B draft happens when I've written somewhere between 5 and 40% of a project, and something isn't working, but I'm not ready to abandon the piece because I have an idea of how to fix what's wrong. For an essay, this usually means a completely different structure. For a work of fiction, it usually means I need (more often) to change the point of view or writing style/tone or (less often) change the setting or main character or start the work in a different place that will radically change the subsequent scenes.

This is not for when I start a story a bit too early and need to lop off the beginning. Nor is it when the beginning is weak and needs rewriting. Both of those can be left as is to be dealt with in a draft two.

The 1B draft is when I realize I can't keep writing without starting over. It's a sense that the shape and/or tone of the work is wrong. That it's not an adequate expression of whatever is interesting in the original idea that caused me to choose to work on that particular project.

And it is not a revision of 1A. I can pull lines, paragraphs, even scenes or sections from the words in the abandoned 1A, but the 1B draft requires establishing itself in a way that will lead to an outcome that is much closer to what the final product will end up being.

It must be a true starting over.

I had to do this earlier this month with a secondary-world fantasy novella I began writing in August. I was a couple of chapters in and had this sense that if I were to keep going at the same plot pace and writing style that the work was going to end up novel length and bore me to death. And so now all of the action I'd outlined will still happen, but the novella itself will be told during the course of a party (and after-party) taking place over one evening and all that I had decided needed to happen will either be shifted to that time frame or be told within the context of the party. One of the primary indicators I needed to make the change is that I realized the next seven scenes and four chapters or so would be the protagonist in a series of one-on-one conversation with one of three other characters. Just a series of what TV/film would call two-handers. There needed to be more people around, and there needed to be dynamics between the other three primary characters themselves and not just the protagonist and them. So I abandoned my original draft one and created a 1B draft.

I don't know if other writers do the 1B draft.

The prevailing advice seems to be to just write as messy of a rough draft as you need to. I agree with this in theory. If you need to write a super messy first draft in order to get the draft written, that's better than never finishing it. Something to work with is so much better than nothing. And you definitely don't want to get stuck in a cycle of revising the first three chapters of novel or nonfiction book or first 2,000 words of a short story or essay over and over trying to get that perfect but never making progress towards the end of the draft. There are times where you should just power through, especially, if it's a novella or novel or dissertation/thesis/nonfiction book and you've hit the dreaded 2/3 mark and are in danger of stalling out (the 2/3 thing is real—should I write about that in a future newsletter?). If you're at the point, then don't do the 1B draft.

However, if you are able to realize early-ish on that a first draft isn't quite working and also identify a major change that could fix it, then try the 1B draft. You can even start over and do a 1C draft, etc. I just wouldn't go further into the alphabet than D or E.

You also might be able to avoid the 1B draft by doing some pre-writing in your draft zero, specifically testing out writing style and various points of view as well as places to begin. That's not foolproof, though. With the novella I mention above, I wrote the first scene in first person and in third person at the draft zero stage and then decided that doing so was sufficient, and I just needed to choose which POV seemed right. But it turned out the POV choice wasn't the issue (it was preserved from 1A to 1B). I really should have brainstormed a list of structures as well. But hey, it's fine (or so it appears at this point in time): I'm fixing that oversight with a 1B draft.

Let me know if you've seen this idea before and, if so, where. And also if you are a writer, let me if this is something you ever consciously do, and how you are able to identify when it's time for the 1B draft and what changes you tend to make as you attempt it.

That's all for now.

See you in November!

Don't forget to preorder 11 bookmarks.