A Good Rejection

Posted on August 27, 2025August 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

Flower Buds painting by Neil Carroll — A painting I recently purchased from Neil Carroll, an artist I follow on Instagram. I love square paintings and oil on panel is my favorite medium. I’m often inspired by art.

Since my last blog post, I slipped from being eleven weeks ahead of my publishing schedule to ten weeks. I don’t want to make excuses, but at the beginning of August I had Covid. It was the third time I’ve had it, and the symptoms were comparatively the most severe. The worst part is that I was extremely tired for weeks and was sleeping thirteen hours each night. I did still write every day, mostly to uphold my streak which is currently 654 days in a row, but my overall word count was low.

But Covid isn’t the only reason for my reduced productivity. I’ve been struggling a bit to write lately because I love Orly and I’m at a point where things are going to happen that are going to hurt her, and it hurts me to hurt her. I ran into this problem especially while writing Scribbles of the Empress, because Orly was grieving so hard and for most of the writing, I didn’t know if she was going to survive the book.

In other news, the short story I wrote titled My Darling Tragedy, which is sort of an Orly origin story has been rejected by a few journals so far, including Electric Literature, but I received a note from the editor telling me it was close to being selected for publication and she gave me some encouragement. Even though it was a rejection, her words boosted my confidence.

I’m well now and will keep writing. My Darling Tragedy is nearing 100K words and I may try to daydream up another short story.

My Darling Tragedy

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

It’s been a difficult month. At my day job our fiscal year ended on June 30, so this is my busy and stressful time of year. Despite this, I’ve been writing consistently. Today, I finished writing Entry 70 of…

If you were expecting me to end that sentence with Orly’s Journals that would make sense, but I have an announcement to make…

I’ve retitled Orly’s Journals to My Darling Tragedy. I’ve never loved the title Orly’s Journals and feel like My Darling Tragedy is more personal to Orly, it being her nickname. I don’t know why I didn’t think of My Darling Tragedy when I first began the online serial—after all, I have it tattooed on my shin.

What prompted me to think of retitling leads me to another announcement…

I’ve begun posting the online serial to the free platforms Royal Road and Substack. So, My Darling Tragedy can now be read for free. I posted the first eight entries already and a new entry will post every Thursday. Patreon will remain 50+ entries ahead of the free versions and only Patreon will include bonus content like Scribbled Secrets and allow readers to contribute to the story by participating in reader polls. But I’m hoping the free versions will attract more readers to Orly.

On Substack, I’m also launching a monthly author newsletter next month, so I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

Signing out.

Hope, Hope, Hope

Posted on June 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

Manga drawing from Orly's Journals — A scene from Orly’s Journals Entry 33: “Hanabi”

Since my last post, I wrote two more short stories. The first, entitled Yote, is about my childhood best friend Gote. I wrote it in response to a call for submissions by The Sun for stories about nicknames. I felt so good about the story that I submitted it to two other journals as well.

Inspired by the No Kings protests, I wrote another story entitled Five Years. My beta reader and ChatGPT had strong, positive reactions. I haven’t sent it anywhere yet but hope to next week.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I commissioned a manga artist to do a drawing from Orly’s Journals. I just saw the final yesterday and am very happy with it.

Speaking of Orly’s Journals, I’m currently 10 weeks ahead, and am currently writing Entry 66. I also added two new perks to my Patreon. The first is that I’m now posting screenshares of me writing, to show my writing process. The second is that I’m now calling out my favorite sentence/passage posted during the month and explaining what it means to me.

So, if you’re not part of my Patreon, I hope you’ll check that out. I hope you’ll also wish me luck with finding a publisher for my two new stories. Finally, I hope you like the manga illustration from Orly’s Journals Entry 33: “Hanabi.”

Forever Yours, Button

Posted on May 18, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

I sent My First Scribble to three literary journals but have since stopped submitting. The reason is because I entered it into The Masters Review Anthology Contest and they don’t allow simultaneous submissions. It’s a contest for emerging writers. It’s a total longshot but it could potentially gain me a lot of visibility if my story was one of the ten selected.

Between wanting to keep submitting and since Fractured Lit just announced a flash fiction contest, I wrote another story on Friday called Forever Yours, Button. It’s a short story told from Mayuko’s perspective. At 213 words, it ended up being micro fiction instead of flash fiction, so I plan to submit it to other journals or enter a micro fiction contest.

I’d like to share both stories with you here, but I can’t publish them anywhere until I hear back from everywhere I’m submitting. Hopefully when you read them it’ll be on a journal website.

Again, please wish me luck.

My First Scribble

Posted on April 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

This week I wrote a short story called My First Scribble. If you guessed that it’s a story about Orly, you are correct. But it does not use the word “vampire” once. This is because Orly is only six years old in the story and is not yet a vampire and has not yet met Yelena. The story is about the first time she learns of her ability to see the evil in others in her scribbling. Does that count as an origin story?

It’s short, approximately 1,400 words. It’s meant to work as a standalone story and will hopefully appeal even to those who have never read her trilogy or journals. I plan to send it out to literary journals and hope one will accept it for publication. Until that happens or until I’ve had my fill of rejection slips, I won’t be able to share the story. I hope you don’t mind me telling you about it anyway.

Please wish me luck.

Ahead

Posted on March 11, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

I ordered a new MacBook Air. Even though I probably didn’t need to, I splurged on an M3 processor because I figure I’ll have this laptop for at least six years. I had to wait longer for it to arrive because I also ordered 1TB of storage. But even after it arrived, it took me 17 days to open the box, because getting new things (especially tech stuff) often stresses me out. But I finally opened the box and on Saturday, I wrote in public again for the first time in weeks.

I took this week off from work to write. I had been struggling recently and slipped behind in schedule to where I was only six weeks ahead. Though I’ve been spending a lot of my break sleeping, I’m working very hard while I am awake and am already again eight weeks ahead. At the outset, it was my goal to end up ten weeks ahead, but at the rate I’m going, maybe I’ll end up ahead by eleven weeks.

I’m pretty happy with how Orly’s Journals is going again. I did end up slowing things down a little, or at least it feels like it’s going in that direction. I’ve given a longer view to her relationships with Vance and Silviu and it’s made things feel more real and less constructed.

Right now, I’m at Starbucks, listening to Deafheaven, sitting at a communal table where three highschoolers are shooting a boomerang of them doing a cheers with their grande cups, and my phone is blowing up with MS Teams messages. (Apparently someone Zoom bombed the Budget Forum today and something inappropriate appeared on screen—the things you miss out on while on vacation.) I just finished Entry 48: “Cap” which I began writing yesterday. It’s a complicated entry and was difficult to get the ending right.

I might write more later, but now, I think I’m going to switch gears and read War and Peace. My second goal during my vacation was to finish it. I’m in the Epilogue now. My third goal was to go to the gym every day for just 30 minutes, but that hasn’t happened once. I think the chances would increase if I didn’t sleep so much.

I was just thinking… If I could ever get enough weeks ahead, maybe twenty, maybe I’d step away and try to do a writing sprint of Forever Candy just to get it all down and then I could clean it up at a slower pace while writing Orly. I really want to write that story. It’s just a thought, but maybe I should make it a goal.

Slow Down?

Posted on February 3, 2025February 3, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

My Instagram post honoring my MacBook Air

This past weekend, I wrote six hours on Saturday and seven hours on Sunday. The whole time I was working on Orly’s Journals Entry 43: “Obscure.” It felt like a difficult entry to reach a point where I felt satisfied. But overall, I think writing the journals is going well. I’m maintaining a pace of completing one entry per week and am still eight weeks ahead of the publishing schedule. I don’t know how they’re reading though. Instinctively, I feel like things have become compressed, with too much happening in too small a space. I mean this for the relationships Orly is developing. I feel like things should be progressing slower so that they have more time to take root into something that feels lasting because it’s now deep. But I’m also wary of slowing things down as I don’t think it will appeal to the journal readers. I feel like I’ve lost my global view of the story, and though that’s uncomfortable, part of me is okay with it because it’s a serial and feels closer to real life where everything can’t be planned, things unexpectedly pop up, and your short-term goals shift quickly. But I really do wish I had a better feel for what the reader experience is like.

Sunday morning, I was writing at Starbucks and my MacBook Air crashed twice, both times causing me to lose text. I’ve had the laptop since 2014 and apparently, it’s going to continue to crash because I haven’t been able to update the OS since 2023. So, I’ve decided to retire it as I can’t continue to lose text while writing. I feel very grateful though for all this laptop has given me. The entire Black Wax Vampire Trilogy and The Last Midnight were written on it over thousands of hours (I’m guessing). But until I replace it, I’ll do all my writing at home on my Mac Mini.

Oh Fengxia!

Posted on December 16, 2024February 3, 2025 by Robert Tomoguchi

An image of My Favorite Reads of 2024 — My Favorite Reads of 2024

2024 was a good reading year for me. I’m happy about that. It’s a big bummer when it hasn’t been a good reading year. My Goodreads goal was 52 books and it looks like I’ll finish at 57. My favorite reads this year were To Live by Yu Hua and the manga I Want to Eat Your Pancreas written by Sumino Yoru and drawn by Kirihara Idumi. Both touched my heart. Both made me cry. (Oh Fengxia!) Both stayed with me. I’m thinking of getting a page from Pancreas tattooed on me.

Another book that stayed with me was For Whom the Bell Tolls. What masterful writing. What emotion. I hope I learned just a little about writing from Hemingway during that read. Other books I really enjoyed were Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee, and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy which I’m almost through but love in advance of finishing. I also reread a favorite read from 2023: All The Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami.

At the end of the year I always enjoy Spotify sharing my listening habits. My most listened to song in 2024, I believe was the same song in 2023: せかいでいちばん(Sekai de Ichiban) by Inoue Sonoko, the theme song of my favorite show, Ainori Love Wagon. According to Spotify, I’ve already listened to it 636 times this year, and I know I listened to it at least three more times today.

But if anything, 2024 has to be the year of ILLIT for me. I learned of them through Instagram in April and they became my most listened to artist of 2024 and three of my top five played songs were by them. I believe in the past three years, MXMS was my most listened to artist, but this year they didn’t make the top five. I’m guessing because they stopped releasing new work and that was a big bummer, but they’re still my favorite band.

I definitely think what I read in a year affects what and how I write in that same year. I believe music does as well as I’m usually listening to music most of the day, every day. I become obsessed with songs and listen to them on repeat and this definitely impacts my mood which I believe filters into what I end up writing even though during my longer writing sessions I tend to listen to ambient noise.

Anyhow, I just wanted to share that. Sorry if it was of no interest to you. Even if it wasn’t, I hope you had a good reading and listening year yourself.

Table For One

Posted on November 27, 2024 by Robert Tomoguchi

ChatGPT drawing of Orly Bialek and Yelena Solodnikova — ChatGPT’s rendition of Orly and Yelena

I’m still at it—writing Orly’s Journals. I had another slump like the one I mentioned in my last blog post, where I was stuck on a single entry for a couple weeks. I’m now only seven entries ahead. But with the time I’ll have off for the holidays, I’m hoping I’ll get caught up, if not get ahead. So far, all the journal entries total just under 41K words. That’s half the length of The Scribbled Victims, and I only began writing in April. Despite my depression being very bad and work being tough in recent months, I continue to sit down to write every single day. Of course, some days are more productive than others. My best days usually involve activating my Freedom internet blocker.

I recently started asking ChatGPT for author advice on how to grow my readership. It’s given me tips I’ve heard before, but it also suggested things I hadn’t heard and never considered. To my surprise, it knew about The Scribbled Victims. It got some plot points wrong and knew less about the subsequent books, but I was still amazed it had a general understanding of the characters and storyline. Because one of the things ChatGPT suggest I do is hold a fan art contest, today I prompted it with: “Can you create a picture of Orly Bialek and Yelena Solodnikova?” What it returned was more than I expected, although I think it still doesn’t understand Orly’s scribbles. Still, it made me feel my books are more recognizable than I thought. Maybe I’m fooling myself though—maybe ChatGPT knows I’m the author and is just being nice to me. If anyone reading this post uses ChatGPT, I’d be very interested to know if it recognized Orly or Yelena or The Scribbled Victims for you.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m going to Shojin in Culver City for a vegan Thanksgiving omakase dinner. Table for one. That’s my life. On Monday, my shrink and I talked about loneliness, and how, because of wanting to write, I often make choices that result in being alone even though I feel lonely. What to do?

On Patreon last week, I asked readers which characters they’d like to see more of in Orly’s Journals. To my surprise, the most votes went to Ji’Indushul. Because of this, my next “Scribble Secret” post on Friday will be about that character.

So that’s basically all that’s going on with me. With so much nothing going on, it must be no surprise that this is only my fifth blog post for 2024. LOL.

Orly’s Journals Update

Posted on September 17, 2024 by Robert Tomoguchi

Orly’s Journals, my serialized online novel through Patreon is going quite well. I have eleven subscribers already and am hoping for more. I want more subscribers to increase discussion among the readers regarding Orly’s new ongoing story. I’ve been posting a journal entry each Thursday. This Thursday will be the be the sixteenth post. To keep up with the demands of serialization, I’m nine entries ahead in writing and am currently working on Entry 25.

In addition to the journal entries, I’ve been posting image-based previews, solicitations from readers for character names and plot points, and my favorite—what I’m calling Scribbled Secrets where I post trivial information about Orly’s universe, inside and outside her trilogy, that the reader is likely unaware of. It’s fun to tell mine and Orly’s secrets.

As an independent author, I do have a small budget for marketing and promotion. But because that budget is small, I must be very selective when choosing what to throw my money at. Should I spend it on Amazon book ads? Instagram sponsored posts? Book review services? I’ve tried various approaches with limited success. But I feel like I should be more active in my attempt to increase awareness about Orly’s online journal and her book series. If anyone has any suggestions, my ears are open.

Other than that, I recently went through a minor writing slump where I was just spinning my wheels on the same entries. I think, at one point, I was only five entries ahead of what had already posted. I’m sure some, if not most, was due to depression. But I feel like I’ve gotten back up and am enjoying the substance and pace of what I’m writing again. If you’re one of the eleven people subscribed, I hope you’re enjoying reading the current work as much as I am enjoying writing it.