Kevin Maloney
@kevinrmaloney
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HORSE GIRL FEVER ( @CLASHBooks , JAN 2025), THE RED-HEADED PILGRIM ( @TwoDollarRadio ), and CULT OF LORETTA. He/Him.
Portland, Oregon
Joined June 2010
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Cover reveal!!! So excited how this turned out! HORSE GIRL FEVER coming to you from
@CLASHBooks
on Jan 7, 2025! Pre-orders are LIVE, and nothing says “official member of the Kevin Maloney Fan Club” like an early pre-order! 🐎📚🔥
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The most important lesson I ever learned as a writer:
When I was 28 I was at a bar on a Friday night. My friends and I were dancing and getting wasted and having an amazing night, when I looked around and noticed that my buddy Clark was missing.
I asked my buddy Jeremy, “Hey
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In 2022 I read 89,794,238 books. In 2023 I hope to read 91,946,003 books. Right now, as I write this tweet, Im reading a book. Two books actually. And listening to an audio book. Also, I’m writing a novel and a short story. Did I mention I’m running a 10K, my third so far in 2023
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I just think some writers treat writing and art as something precious. I recommend watching sports documentaries and cooking documentaries. Learn about the habits of people who are amazing at what they do. It usually isn’t genius or freakish ability. It’s usually just profound
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…experienced a huge leap forward in the quality of my writing. I didn’t wait for inspiration. I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I treated it like my real job. Everything else was a distraction.
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…thinking about Clark in his studio on a Friday night at midnight. I decided to start treating writing the way Clark treated his art. The way professional athletes treat their workouts, waking up at 6am and putting in the time, even when they don’t want to.
That’s when I
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…where’s Clark?”
Jeremy said, “In his studio, painting.”
I said, “On a Friday night at midnight?”
Jeremy said, “Yeah. I mean… that’s why he’s so good.”
I was trying to be a writer at the time but only did it here and there in little spurts.
A few years later, I was still
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For those of you wondering (and worried) about Clark, he’s safe and alive and still making incredible art
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Think I found the secret of writing which is to write between 7am - 9am because after 9am the world starts fucking up your shit
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the healing power of nature, but what about the healing power of cities? Walking around your city, taking streets you’ve never taken before, looking into yards & store windows, noticing plants & cats on porches. It’s my fav thing next to writing
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I think the reason vinyl continues to sell isn’t nostalgia for old things. I think (and here’s where I get kinda witchy) that objects have magical powers. Spotify is lifeless and depressing, but pulling a record out of a sleeve and dropping a needle is a holy act full of meaning
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In the fall of 2011, I was on a road trip in the south, passing through Gainesville, FL, when I mentioned to my girlfriend at the time that one of my favorite writers, Harry Crews, lived there. She said, “Let’s look him up.” She googled him from her phone and his home address…
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Finding myself drawn to novels where characters just sort of walk around a city, meet people, have sex, experience loneliness, eat meals, etc. Like... no heavy-handed plot. Just a few weeks or months in the life of someone. Humor a plus. Any recommendations?
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All my favorite writers and musicians and artists quietly worked at their craft until eventually they figured out that what they were making was out of alignment with the marketplace, and they could have pivoted toward it, but they went the other direction instead and made…
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After using Gmail as my primary form of communication since 2007 and never deleting anything, I have arrived at the doomsday scenario
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& if you liked this tweet, you’ll like my novel way better, I promise
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When I talk to friends who have been writing & publishing for over a decade, they all say the same thing… after the hoopla of a book coming out, having crazy high expectations, having it follow a more humble arc… what you’re left with years later is the actual book you wrote…
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My thoughts on hot takes about novel length/content/rules in general: very few writers make quit-your-day-job money, so why not write out of sheer joy, take every chance, and just fucking go for it? Write the book you always wish you could read. We’re all going to be dead one day
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When you spend an hour tweaking a paragraph and it still isn’t right and you keep fucking with it and it still doesn’t quite work and then you’re like, “Oh wait” and you delete the paragraph and you’re like, “Hahaha. Amazing. Perfect.”
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Stages of a writer:
1) I want to be a famous writer & make a living doing what I love
2) I want to be a medium-famous writer & make enough money to only work part-time
3) I want a small, niche audience who loves my books deeply & make enough money to pay for writer retreats
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…their art weirder, more personal, more authentically strange. And their audience slowly grew on the fringes. That’s where all my favorite art exists
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I feel like the most important thing needed to be an artist is time. Not just time set aside to make art, but time to do nothing. To sit on a couch. To go for a walk. To read a book. To daydream. But our world is designed to steal all of our time from us. Jobs. Addictive phones.
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about it a dozen times but I don’t know what to say. I stumbled into the intimacy of someone’s old age & sickness & felt like a voyeur & maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but also it was weirdly beautiful and I don’t regret it at all. That’s all. Rest in Peace, you beautiful freak.
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The best writing in America is happening on small presses. I think it's some of the best writing ever. Like... ever. I can't stand most contemporary music, but I think we are in an incredible era for wild, badass, underground books.
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I think that being a writer is one of the few things in life that requires you to be a failure. Happy, successful people rarely make good art. To persist, you have to feel broken and like the only thing that can heal you is the art you’re making. Why else would anyone stick with
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what i've learned in 7+ years of submitting:
1) figure out who your literary peers/heroes are. not Raymond Carver, but someone alive & slightly better than you
2) submit where they're getting published
3) rejection is a blessing. rewrite or move on to something else
4) repeat
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Hey non-fiction writers: what are the rules on dialogue in essays? Like, nobody can recall verbatim a conversation that happened in 2003. So like—is making shit up totally fine as long as it’s in the spirit of the truth? How much of this kind of “in-scene” writing is ok?
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And the thing that matters is that you still love it and feel proud of it. Trying to write something commercial and successful generally doesn’t work. So just write the book you want to write. The one that means something to you and not what you think other people want to read
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some kind of spectacle. We walked back to our car and drove away. Six months later Crews was dead and the Paris Review was singing his praises. I don’t have a point to this story other than it was fucking weird and I still think about it all the time and I’ve tried to write…
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The rad part of being a writer is that when u finally publish a book, the thrill lasts your entire life & the empty feelings go away & u don't immediately get the urge to write another one for that hit of dopamine that diminishes more & more each time until u die alone in poverty
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The best part of being a writer or any kind of artist is when your art isn’t working, to get better you literally have to change your spiritual orientation to the universe and hang out with god and talk to plants and cats and then your art gets better
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All of these albums came out during the 4 year span while I was in high school. I was led to believe this quality of output would continue indefinitely.
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Dreamed about this my whole life. Hope everybody in PDX can make it to the reading at downtown
@Powells
this Wed, Jan 25, 7pm 📚✨
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Every day that I spend working hard at my job to make money, I feel dead and empty inside. Every day I play hooky from my job and write for 8 hours, I feel like I'm eating mushrooms with the angels. Being an artist is really frustrating because it's almost impossible to make a...
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getting published on a big press is fine, but have you tried publishing on small presses and having your books go out of print so your ~75 devoted fans have to scour used bookstores across america while you die in poverty?
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Feel like everybody missed the part where I was getting drunk & partying a lot in my late 20s, learned one night that a friend was being disciplined about making art, then went on partying & getting drunk for the next 3 years before I decided to make some changes in my life
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🎉 Huge news! 🎉
My novel THE RED-HEADED PILGRIM will be published by
@TwoDollarRadio
in January 2023! Super excited to be working with Eric Obenauf & Eliza Wood-Obenauf on this book! They've been a dream press for me for a long, long time.
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I know it isn’t healthy to read your own reviews because blah blah blah, but I just got the best 1 star review. After calling me “very creative” and “talented,” Bob says my book is “pornography about a worthless character wasting his life,” which honestly is the best blurb ever
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Music will always be the dominion of 27-year-olds because music is like, "LIFE! SEX! DEATH! DRUGS!" but the best writing is by people who are 35+ because books are like, "WHAT DOES IT MEAN! I GOT DIVORCED! MY BODY HURTS! I REMEMBER MY CHILDHOOD!"
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We need an
@Aaron__Burch
appreciation thread. Like… one night Aaron tweets, “Tried this new whiskey. Got drunk and started a new journal. Guess it’s called HAD?” and 6 mos later there’s a cult devoted to the journal and his followers are like “I earned my skulls tonight” 💀🤘
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The best craft book if you want to learn how to write a novel is your favorite novel. Read it 20, 30, 50 times. Rewrite its sentences. Listen to it on audio while you're driving to the grocery store. Memorize chapters. Say the lines along with the audio book like you're...
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Here's the crazy thing... I got the email from
@CLASHBooks
that they were buying Horse Girl Fever, and FIVE DAYS LATER got the email from
@TwoDollarRadio
that they were buying The Red-Headed Pilgrim. Hadn't sold a book in seven years and sold two in a week. Bonkers 🙃✨
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If you’re ever feeling weird about self-promoting, just remember that Walt Whitman published three anonymous (effusive, praise-filled) reviews of Leaves of Grass and used a sentence from a private letter from Emerson as the cover blurb for the 2nd edition of his book
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Me trying to find a way to fit the darling that I killed back into my manuscript.
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Just ordered a ginger ale and the KC airport bartender said “I can pour you a bar ginger ale. It’s sprite with a little coke in it.” Am I in the Twilight Zone? Is this a thing?
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The marketing budget for most books these days is right around $0. It’s really hard to get people to notice your book! My two cents: instead of knocking people who’ve found a fun way to draw a crowd and get excited about books, recognize that you gotta do SOMETHING to stand out…
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Writing at a cafe, about to go to the bathroom, facing the eternal dilemma:
1) leave laptop on table, risk getting stolen
2) be “hey can you watch my laptop while I’m in the bathroom?” guy
3) bring laptop with me and be “wtf is that guy doing with a laptop in the bathroom” guy
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I may have spilled the beans on this back in 2021, but it's always a good thing to see one of these Publishers Marketplace announcements with your name on it. HORSE GIRL FEVER coming your way on Oct. 1st. I'm so proud of this book and so excited to be working with
@CLASHBooks
🔥
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waters of the Okefenokee swamp. I didn’t realize it, but his home town, Alma, Georgia, was only a few miles from there. He told us about the town and a little about his childhood there. The nurse put the flowers in water. We thanked Harry for a his time. Then the nurse led us…
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to answer despite having obvious problems with his memory. His nurse stood in the doorway the whole time, laughing, whispering to herself, “The famous writer Harry Crews!” The only time Harry perked up was when we mentioned we’d just paddled a canoe in the alligator infested…
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standing in Harry Crews’ bedroom. Crews was naked from the waist down, sitting up in bed, watching NASCAR. He didn’t look good. He was sick. I was immediately glad we didn’t bring him whiskey. I told him I was a big fan and asked a lot of stupid questions which he did his best…
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I feel like the books being written right now by indie writers are some of the best books ever written & we’re in some kind of literary renaissance, but I just don’t connect with any new music as much as Nirvana & Velvet Underground. Am I just old & out of the loop?
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I doubt anything I write will ever be anthologized & forced on college students, but just in case: My stories don’t have themes. All symbols are accidents. There’s no meaning under the surface. It just gave me a thrill when I wrote it, and so I sent it out, hoping for the best.
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I gotta say, the indie lit scene right now feels wildly, wonderfully alive. It's super inspirational. I'm reading stories & books that are just blowing me away. Makes me feel like I gotta up my game. Drink in the magic you all are putting out into the world & see what I can add.
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@meghpatrice
I haven’t written about Clark specifically, but I have an essay in the upcoming book HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL from
@autofocuslit
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For a long time, with a couple exceptions, the only books that excite me, that feel crackling and alive, are published by small presses. When I read Big 5 novels, most of them feel like blandly written screenplays for a potential movie or TV series. There’s a sameness about them
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into his living room and showed us all the black and white photos on the walls of Crews with celebrities. She mentioned that certain people tried to take advantage of his kindness and I was worried maybe she was talking about us, showing up uninvited to gawk at the man like..
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The best thing about accidentally getting my girlfriend pregnant at age 25 is that now, 20 years later, while my peers inhabit a dark world of Huggies and meltdowns and binkies, my kid and I hang out talking about Elliott Smith & Townes Van Zandt ✨🎶
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The hardest part about learning how to write is trusting that the way you talk in life, the actual words you use when you’re telling a funny story to your friends, is where your genius is… not in fancy words or literary jargon.
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only to learn that he had gotten sober in his old age. We went to Publix instead and bought him a bouquet of flowers. The idea of giving a big bouquet of carnations to Harry Crews seemed even weirder and more interesting to me than showing up with some Jim Beam. I’d hoped to…
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THE RED-HEADED PILGRIM is out today!!! My book was just an awkward, hopeful manuscript when the amazing folks at
@TwoDollarRadio
--Eric, Eliza, & Brett--helped me turn it into a polished novel that I'm incredibly proud of. I couldn't have done it without them 📚✨
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woman appeared from the house and asked what we were doing. We asked if it was the Crews residence. She said it was. We said we wanted to leave him some flowers in appreciation for his weird books. She said, “Let me see if he’s receiving visitors.” A few minutes later, we were…
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Just a reminder that this app isn’t “literature.” It can be a great tool for connection and promotion but it can also be a brain vortex. For a good time, grab a book written 50 or 100 years ago, leave your phone at home, and walk to the coffee shop. Drink a latte and read ✨
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The deeper I get into writing, the more I understand exactly what agents/big publishing houses are looking for, the more I feel myself inexplicably pulled to write the exact opposite
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I posted a tweet the other day that went sorta viral (at least by my standards) about developing a good work ethic as a writer. Some of the replies were like, “But you have to have fun too!” I just want to go on the record and say that I disagree. Fun is bad. Art should make you
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🎉 Exciting news! 🎉
My short story collection HORSE GIRL FEVER will be published by
@CLASHBooks
with an expected release date in 2023. Super excited to be working with
@LezaCantoral
and
@christophpaul_
on this project! More details to come in the next year 🔥
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The way they teach English in schools, you’d think writers sit down before writing a book and fill out a form
Theme ____________
Plot _______________
Setting ____________
Characters ________
instead of being like, “I’m haunted by the ghost of my father.”
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be sneaky about it, but when we found his house, it was a long driveway off a busy highway. We drove slowly through a heavily wooded forest and found ourselves parked in his driveway. We took a couple minutes to write note to go along with the flowers. As we were writing, a…
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This is your periodic reminder that the kindest thing you can do for a writer is to
1) buy their book
2) read their book
3) review their book
Bonus points for a simultaneous Goodreads & Amazon review (even if, ideally, you bought it from your local indie)
That is all 💕
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Probably somebody else has pointed this out before me, but one of the most amazing things Denis Johnson does in Jesus' Son is ask questions in his prose outside of dialogue. Here are a few of my favorite examples...
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With the Big 4, nee Big 5, on the verge of turning into the Big 3 (and inevitably the Big 1), just a reminder that indies curate entire catalogues of amazing titles. Here are a few of my favs:
@TwoDollarRadio
@CLASHBooks
@softskull
@autofocuslit
@HouseofVlad
@DisorderPress
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Just a little math…
$8 Twitter Blue subscription x 12 months = $96
Result: make richest man richer
OR
Buy these books:
TELL ME IM AN ARTIST - $17
DUPLEX - $16
BIRDS ARENT REAL - $16
PIZZA GIRL - $16
GO HOME RICKY - $15
TEENAGER - $16
Result: you are fucking rad
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18yo me: gonna write a novel in 3 weeks like Kerouac, high on speed
40yo me: making edits on my iPhone while riding exercise bike @ the gym
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I’m 46 and I’m even less at peace with the concept of death than I was when I was 18 and sitting in my room crying and listening to Mazzy Star all the time. I mean… forever is such a long time. The whole thing seems stupid. Not a fan.
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popped up. We decided to leave a bottle of whiskey on his doorstep. We were on our way to the liquor store when I did some math and realized I hadn’t heard anything about Crews in many years and that he’d been a hard drinker. I got worried we’d show up with a bottle of booze…
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I grew up in a family that strived to be perfect in an outward-facing way, while denying the darkness within. It made me feel crazy. When I found books that detailed the lives of flawed people, describing and exposing their darkness, it felt holy. It felt like medicine. I’m…
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If you want to do something kind for your favorite indie writer (and the world), instead of just buying their book, go to your small (tiny) local indie bookstore and see if they have it. If they don’t, order it through them. This means the small indie gets the profit AND you’re
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Holy shit!!! Final copies of THE RED-HEADED PILGRIM in the house! I started writing this book in 2015 and now it exists as a thing in the world!
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@saderotica
Just called an electrician and told them I’d let them install an outlet on the outside of my house for free, but only a certain type of outlet unless they felt strongly about it.
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I just want to read and write books all day and go to AWP once a year and go on book tour and eat tacos and drink bourbon and have a fairy come out of the sky and wave a wand that pays for everything. Is that too much to ask?
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THE SECRET TO WRITING
set aside 4 hours & give yourself two options:
1) work on novel / short story / essay etc
2) deep clean the bathroom
you will either finish your project or have a very clean bathroom. either way u win
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I’m sick of “good” books. The ones so crafted and precious you want to puke when you read it. Give me the messy ones. Books written with a sense of urgency like somebody was pointing a gun at the writer’s head when they wrote it. Those are the only books I want to read anymore.
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Do you guys remember in late summer 1991, just starting ninth grade, and all these albums came out in a six week period and our brains broke and after that nothing was the same?
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If you view your art as a "product" & your time making art as "labor" you'd probably do well to pivot toward copywriting, something w/ a clear economic reward. Thinking about art in purely capitalist terms is like trying to describe the birth of a horse using an Excel spreadsheet
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Check out my new story “Baby Albatross” over at
@havehadhavehad
. It’s about the time my wife & I ate mushrooms & saw Barbie. Thanks
@misternagel
for plucking this one out of the pile! A few of you heard a condensed version at AWP. Hope you dig it! 💕💕💕
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My hot take: the best books are fucked up, uncomfortable, unpredictable, weird, vulnerable, inappropriate, unconventional, “holy shit did he/she/they really just say that?”, funny, dirty, sexy, repulsive, strange, dark, ugly, holy, horny. They are not… safe.
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But I have made peace with the fact that I will forever be known as Kevin Maloney, the guy who hates parties
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I keep thinking about this part of Brad Listi’s Zoom interview w/
@ChelseaHodson
yesterday. Brad has interviewed like… every writer on the planet and he said he’s noticed that the writers who have the most success 1) don’t seem to care about making money from their art, 🧵
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It’s true in the lit world & probably true of everything, but I notice that the best writers I know:
1) lift up others / aren’t jealous of others’ success
2) meet new things with curiosity
3) acknowledge failure, then immediately figure out how to do better
4) keep going
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More and more, I think the secret to writing is recognizing when something sucks & not rushing to publish because you are afraid of death.
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Not to toot my own horn, but I’m about to send a copy of Cult of Loretta to a friend & I flipped through it for the first time in 5+ years & I’m far enough away from it that I can read those lines like somebody else wrote them & I can say with confidence, “Dang, good job Kevin.”
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What are your fav lit podcasts? I’m already a devotee of
@otherppl
, The Lives of Writers, I’m a Writer But, & Another Fucking Writer Podcast… but I need more. What am I missing?
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