Tag Archives: writing

Applicable?

I am now ankle deep in appli­ca­tions for grad school. Ankle deep, mind you, not knee deep yet. And I’m already hem­or­rhag­ing money, get­ting in argu­ments, and unable to write a piss blasted thing. Some of my appre­hen­sion rests on know­ing that I don’t mas­tur­bate to books like I know lots of MFA appli­cants do.

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

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

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…