Tag Archives: process

Advice to me from Isabel Allende

I met Isabel Allende once and had a moment to chat. I asked her, “If you have a project you’re try­ing to move a moun­tain with, and you’re there star­ing up at the peak, how do start?” She smiled and said, “Move it peb­ble by peb­ble, and cross the road with one peb­ble at a time.” I …

09.21.2010 – 1:46:PM | By Matt Carney | Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Travel in Two Stories

Among the recent set of sto­ries I sent out to mag­a­zines was one called “Sin­gu­lar­ity,” a reac­tion to my time liv­ing abroad in India. It’s about one Colin Rezo, a pow­er­ful oil exec who is taken hostage by his foul imag­i­na­tion on his trip back from Chen­nai, Tamil Nadu, and launched into a spec­tral tail …

08.28.2010 – 8:31:PM | By Matt Carney | Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Search and Destroy

Search, cat­e­go­rize, print, sign, pre­pare, send. Repeat. The con­stant and well pol­ished  sub­mis­sion machine–powered by Excel–rolls on. Two sto­ries launched into space , one more pre­pared now. Twelve mag­a­zines, four vol­leys of three sub­mis­sions apiece. And then, of course, three to five months of wait­ing, wait­ing, waiting…

08.10.2010 – 1:33:PM | By Matt Carney | Posted in Blog | Tagged , | Comments (0)

One’s Place in Contempoary Writing, One’s Writing Process, and One’s Insane Rant

Hard real­ism. Or maybe just dense but not impen­e­tra­ble real­ism. Regard­less of the title, it seems the new real­ism is in vogue at the moment with con­tem­po­rary writers—at the moment, mind you. Today’s lit jour­nal mas­ter­piece will be tomor­rows depression-era emer­gency toi­let paper. Or at least can be. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not say­ing …

08.03.2010 – 7:41:PM | By Matt Carney | Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)