fiction reader/writer and an entire, whole person. husband, dad, war correspondent, second cousin twice removed. debut novel: CHAR ACT ERS (2022, Expat Press).
Borges. That’s the answer. There are many, many great short story writers of all time. The greats. Lots to talk about there. But you asked me the best. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo.
My first novel came out today. I am doing a book launch right now in my truck in the parking lot of the Red Lobster on Buck Jones Road.
I’m not eating here or getting out of my truck. Just doing my book launch. Reading to follow, order here:
This is going to be such a fucking hard year, I can already feel it. In bed crying at Noon, between Teams meetings. Just heartbroken in a way that I can’t even put to words. I honestly thought I had one of those great loves. And I guess I did. I cannot imagine a happiness.
If you ease your foot off the gas you’ll shatter. The good problem you’re looking to have,
@mainely
’s speaking in code, an antidote to all known variants, bottomless interpersonal harmony an oral manifesto written on the wind. Characters, conduits, sigh.
If you see all this literary "drama/bs" & feel lost or lonely: every Friday night there is a reading series where anyone & everyone is invited to come & read their work & chat with & meet other writers/artists.
@miserytourism
tweets out the zoom link at 8EST & you should come.
What is the defining novel of our century so far?
What is the best novel of our century so far?
And what is your favorite novel of our century so far?
And are they all the same answer, or different?
The Hobart interview and resulting controversy is, I think, overall good for a literary community.
It sets a clear line between those writers interested in teaching positions & literary careerism in a corporate/academic world & the writers that are not.
@Matt_Fortuna
They misspelled “winning football games on the backs of the unpaid labor of primarily young minorities is more important/valuable than protecting women from domestic abuse and Urban Meyer is good at the winning.”
I can never get into books that (try to) approximate the experience of being on the internet. I think it’s just a preference and not some serious aesthetic principle or whatever, but the internet as form/structure for storytelling, bound, does nothing for me.
My uncle drove his ass here, taught my twelve year old son three (3) disgusting jokes, complimented my wife’s figure, told several racist stories, and told me my bookshelves made me seem like a commie or a queer. No notes, Wayne.
Bolaño convinced me that the most interesting writers were unknown, possibly non-existent, only spoken about in conspiratorial tones. A few lonely people would spend their lives chasing rumors of a manuscript or public appearance.
If your identity is tied to your trauma then you run the risk, subconsciously or consciously, of constantly seeking new traumas to feed the identity. And you will find them.
19 years ago today, camping on Carolina Beach, I asked a girl if I could kiss her. She said “no, you have a girlfriend & she’s here.” I went over, broke up with my cokehead girlfriend, & kissed the girl. Haven’t left her side since.
On a dreary, rainy, December Saturday I am finally sitting down to work a bit on my own passions and not in the service of making other people more money.
Detectives in old noirs will have a lunch of fried steak, roast chicken, Waldorf salad, creamed potatoes, corn, carrots, pie with ice cream, pot of black coffee, two martinis
The inaugural Seven Readers & An After Party, on zoom, hosted live from the Winston-Salem Art Hotel is this Friday eight eastern.
Lineup is set. Please share. Zoom link posted Fri at 7:50 or you can DM me & I’ll send you link via DM at 7:45.
I need a literary agent and a publicist and a hair stylist, a piece of jalapeño cornbread from Husk in Charleston, SC, and a long bus ride, a joint, a place to crash in Queens, cabin in Montana, fresh live bait, sex, hot tea, read Suttree for the first time, and silence.
I absolutely love the idea of thousands of writers and presses flying to a convention center to try and sell their books to thousands of other writers and presses trying to sell their books.
I was twenty-one years old and I told her my dream was to write (and publish) novels. I’m forty now. I have two incredible kids with her and a life I could never have imagined.
And that first novel:
The sort of discipline Cormac McCarthy had to not write autofiction when his wife pulled a gun out of her ****** during an argument about aliens. Incredible.
41 years old today. If you’d like to celebrate consider buying a copy of my debut novel, Characters.
Or share, tell the word, spread the people. I’m at an Alamo draft house watching a movie about a video game. I’m trying.
I published my first book in 2022. It is titled “CHARACTERS” and if you have any interest in buying it the link is below. No Amazon, just straight from the publisher.
Every reader means the world to me, as those who’ve read the book know.
Almost every single house I drop my kids off at / pick my kids up from has “it’s wine o’clock somewhere” and “BELIEVE” wood carved signs and a woman in a “Resting Beach Face” tank top. I’m heavily medicated and trying to understand this century, underneath it all.
One time I noticed someone I dug unfollowed me and I said to a friend “isn’t that a bummer?”
And my friend say, “oh don’t take it personally. She is trying to improve her ratio while she shops a manuscript.”
And I was like very normal very cool human behavior
I miss punk houses, something unexpected happening, a band in town for just the night, The Seventh Seal playing in the background, an argument breaks out, buggy screened-in porches, if we leave now and drive through the night we could
Sending you love + dimples.
Underneath the smile I’m nervous, white-knuckling dark evenings lately but I’m here. I’m fucking here and I’m making snacks for the kids & I am present for my life.
People talk about doom scrolling (and I get it), but there are so many people on here that inspire me, delight me, make me smile, fill me with light & even sometimes optimism, and help stave off my own moments of loneliness or unease.
There is so much love in this world.
Right wing talentless ideologue shitheads love art spaces, in my experience. They weasel their way into outsider groups and make everything about them & their stupid insecurities & petty grievances. Nazi punks fuck off.
Isn’t the rent too damn high for NYC to foster a counterculture or subversive art scene at the moment? I’m not surprised it seems to be littered with rich kids.
No Wave thrived because it was cheap and dangerous.
@miserytourism
Everything is not a constant barrage of clout & promotion & petty disagreements & market positioning. There are real people out there trying to make a connection to others. People that have felt like they don't belong anywhere else & need this. You can too.
Footage from my reading at my book launch, edited to exactly the amount Twitter allows me to share. Thank you all for coming. I am going to the pool now.
“I drove to the DQ Grill & Chill at or around eleven a.m. By seven p.m. I was on the news.”
New fiction up in the always excellent, brand spanking new issue of
@bcgazette
Many of the people in the literary community wailing about leaving the site if a different billionaire owns it are the very same who publish, promote, and distribute all of their work through Amazon POD. Their idea of “running a press” is sending Amazon a file.
I am really fucking loving The Sun Also Rises on this my third read, at age 40. I keep thinking about how there were not commercial airplanes or television or even a metaverse or Klonopins and my grandfather was like eight and working 15 hour days milking cows when this was publi
I don’t think of writing or literature as some struggle between “real artists” and “losers.” I don’t think, generally, in terms of “us and them” combative paranoia when we are all made of the same stuff and suffer the same fate.
Still very unsure, but it’s out of my hands.
You can buy my novel, ‘Characters,’ directly from Expat Press. It is my first. It came out in June. I am 40 years old.
$16.00, 136 pages.
Like many people that she orbited, I have had a difficult time with the death and loss of Elizabeth V. Aldrich. Last night
@GabrielHart77
read a piece, filled with many remembrances & brilliant observations from her friends & fellow writers & it felt good. Thank you Gabe.
My life has not gone as I thought, but that’s what lives do. To stand tall and face it, clear-eyed, open to the possibilities and pain meted out by a universe unknowable.
@GoodPoliticGuy
Not sure how old you are but I’m 40 and the rightward shift has been on in this country since I was born and there have been countless studies dating it a bit further back than that. These things take decades of planning & execution, and clear vision which one side has.
The most embarrassing thing I ever learned on here was that authors are told my aspiring agents or literary grifters that they need to maintain a “good follower ratio,” and so they mass follow to gain followers and then unfollow to improve their ratio. And it’s also very funny.
I did the twitter blue thing for a month and my tweets got something like 8x the views/reach/whatever.
Doesn’t matter for me but if you’re running any kind of scam or editing services then figure you’d want to know.
I had an extremely unproductive day in a frustrated depressive state. My first novel, Characters, came out in June on
@ExpatLitJ
& you can order it here:
I have met people through here that have had an incredibly profound impact on my life and also Josh Sherman. Will be sad if the pale king kills us all.
My ten favorite novels today as I walk past the shelves.
2666
The Sun Also Rises
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Shadow Country
Suttree
They Shoot Horses Don’t They
Life: A User’s Manual
The Day of the Locust
Speedboat
Falconer