Matt Bell

I’m so sorry, Cathy. You’ve been on my mind so much this past year.

A perfect movie.

Neon Night Mic AWP Offsite Reading Hosted by [neonpajamas] Alina Stefanescu Michael Martone Nicky Beer Johannes Goransson Katie Jean Shinkle David Simmons Kenyatta Rogers Matt Bell Jon Woodward Jose Hernandez Diaz Annelyse Gelman Chen Chen Alina Pleskova C.T. Salazar David Wojciechowski Henry Goldkamp Grant Wamack Old Major 900S. Carey St. Baltimore, MD Wednesday, March 4 Doors: 6:00pm Readings: 7:00pm-10:00pm

Baltimore is the sister city of Philly in my mind & heart—so, so pleased to be here exactly ONE week from today, with this dream blunt rotation (it’s one of those ultra-long ones, okay) 🌆☁️

I’m not sure I realized there were seven of them That’s so many wrestlers in one house!

Ha! I’ve had this conversation too

Friends on the internet, mortal enemies on the mat. So it goes!

It's funny, because I'll never be as strong as I was in high school—I could bench 275 my senior year, and I'm not sure I could do 150 today—but I couldn't run a mile back then and last year I ran 70 in a single day. Same weight, two completely different bodies and modes of athleticism.

As of today, I'm back down to my junior/senior year high school wrestling weight, after dropping almost 30 pounds since September. Now to go buy a singlet and find some 172-lb men my own age to fight!

Ha!

Yes please!

Me too!

I hope we run into each other! I love Baltimore and am glad to be coming back.

Haha, it’s always the worst news!

Just now booked my flight for AWP. Glad I finally admitted "next month" is in fact "next week"!

keep seeing people talking about Hugo and Nebula nominations which means it is my professional duty to remind you that nominations for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize open on SUNDAY

I loved it so much!

Oh, my family is getting so many copies of that!

I draft in single space blocks probably until the first time I share some of it with someone else!

Yes! I was also an editor for a long time too, and I wonder how much of it is simply that if I'm writing a book I make it look like a book!

Haha, doing it to someone else's book was what made me think this!

I just opened up the first day of work on the novel I'm finishing, and on day 1 it had a title page, page numbers, a table of contents, and three epigraphs. I think I start pretty formal!

A mystery of other people's manuscripts: why do so many writers not insert page numbers into their documents? My guess: they never print anything, and so don't need to navigate their manuscripts by page. But who knows! It's been a mystery to me for as long as I've been in workshops.

Congratulations on the NYT review today too! So good to see you right at the top of the NYT when I opened it today.

That's really what it is here too!

Ha! Would also watch!

No argument here!

Yes! I really should've pick up my off and on guitar habit during this!

Often I retreat to graphic novels and video games (not that these aren't part of my normal fare) because I can get narrative without the prose. But whew, I'm out of energy this time!

Which is all to say, it's probably not good for you to read nothing but your own book for hours a day, weeks on end, but I don't know any other way to get this part of the process done for me except total, exclusionary immersion.

At the very end of a novel revision, I tend not to read prose, because I'm so head down in my own book that I can't enjoy it. This time, I also seem to be unable to watch TV or movies? Last night, I watched an hour of a guy silently skiing and making a winter camp on Youtube, and I almost relaxed.