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Monday 19 August 2024 “Where are you going for vacation?” a curious friend might ask.  In other words, what is your destination?  And usually their follow-up question might be: “Why there?”  The etymology of “vacation” is straightforward enough: “freedom from obligations; a release from some occupation;” moreover, “vacation’s” word origin also stems from vacare: “to […]

Monday 12 August 2024 Before having worked as a writing and literature professor at West Point, I knew what the Katyn Massacres were.  They were parts of my wife’s family history; I heard the stories many times.  Ania’s maternal great-uncle was Captain Stanisław Mazur who served in the Polish Army and was one of hundreds

Monday 05 August 2024 The older I become, I find great wisdom in the following adage: “Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.”  Although the saying is misattributed to Kahlil Gibran, the advice is true enough.  Not only

Monday 29 July 2024 After all, if I hadn’t been detained and interrogated by Russian security forces, the FSB (the “new” name of the former KGB), and if I hadn’t co-taught and co-led with King Arthur that Summer 2008 West Point study abroad course for Army cadets, I then wouldn’t have been able to write

Monday 22 July 2024 As a writer having revised my Katyn manuscript for over two months, I often wondered what the ending of that process would look like.  Even now, a week after announcing in my previous blog entry that I was “finished,” I’m not entirely sure that I am.  How do I know that

Monday 15 July 2024 This week’s The Revision Diaries entry is incomplete; there’s only one journal entry—Thursday.   Although this singular piece may suggest I wasn’t working on the revision, I was.  In fact, I think I have finished revising not only BOOK 2 but the entire manuscript!  I drove myself to finish the work of

Monday 08 July 2024 I have entered the two month-plus mark with my revisions.  I started revision work on BOOK 2.  Hence, I am entering the final or last phase of the Revision of my Katyn manuscript.  I postponed working on BOOK 2 for this long amount of time because I wanted to get a

Monday 01 July 2024 Week Eight was an important moment in the revision of the Katyn manuscript.  By midweek, I began to see the “beginning of the end.”  After revising BOOKS 3 and 4, I will have the (major) revision of BOOK 2 and the rewriting of the opening sequence of FADING OUTRO.  And the

Monday 24 June 2024 I knew that BOOK 6 would take several weeks to revise.  After all, it is the longest chapter in the manuscript.  It narrates the summer abroad trip to Poland and Russia.  It dramatizes the awful experience the cadet had in Moscow Metro.  That experience was the first realization that the book

Monday 17 June 2024 These entries from Week Six of The Revision Diaries candidly describe the emotional process of revising and adding new written content for BOOK 6 of the Katyn manuscript.  Although this work was slow going—in large part due to the highly emotional content I was creating—I enjoyed the methodical nature of the