Dave Kress, author of the novels Counting Zero, Martians, and Hush joined Mark Seinfelt last week to discuss the work of Thomas Pynchon on Mark's "Word Patriots" webcast. In addition to his works of fiction, Dave served as contributing editor for the edition of Harold Bloom’s Major Novelists Comprehensive Research and Study Guides devoted to…
One dictum I coined to keep my writing on track is this: Do things in prose the Hollywood machine cannot reproduce. For me, this means exploring characters, and even objects and other phenomena, from the inside out. It's writing that trades the forward momentum of plot for the deep dive into character or situation. It's…
This week I've been busy cutting, honing, and polishing a chapter of Housebreaking the Muse. The editor of a well-regarded literary and arts journal has kindly agreed to have a look, so naturally I want to put my best work forward. The process has once again reminded me of my attitudes about fiction, which are…
The dynamic writing duo Dimitri Anastasopoulos and Christina Milletti join Mark Seinfelt this week to discuss the work of Paul West on Mark's Word Patriots program. Both Dimitri and Christina studied with West at Penn State in the 1990s. Dimitri is the author of the 2001 novel A Larger Sense of Harvey and Christina is…
309 Days Remaining ... This post reports my recent progress on Housebreaking the Muse and describes some major reworking to the novel's opening section. Several weeks ago, I began to realize the opening section of the novel was just too disjointed. Because of the many narrative entities and the multiple universal planes at work in…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 