christopher cocca

I’m working on my novel.  A lot.  And on short stories.  And other commitments.  I’ve set up a tumblr blog for occasional (hopefully regular) short fiction. But over the last few days I felt a push to otherwise shut up.  I don’t intend to explain it any further, since doing so runs exactly against the urge.

Well, actually, I will say this. The harder I work on my fiction, the more I choose for that to be my voice.  This blog is gratifying, instantly. But you know the long term value of that.

That is not to say that I don’t value the still-living conversations generated here or their record.  I do.  I’m only speaking for the part of the conversation I contribute to, and it’s becoming hard to post things that don’t seem to somehow compromise the future art.  My writing brain needs a break from so much of what I do here.

Thanks for three years of very varied discussion.  When this blog started, it was entirely dedicated to my short fiction, and as I found my blogging voice and audience I felt comfortable blogging about a wider range of topics. I’m not shutting this blog down and I’m not going to stop posting.  But new posts will be more exclusively about my program at The New School, things I’m reading, and things I’m writing or publishing.  Otherwise, I’m at  twitter.com/ccocca and christophercocca.tumblr.com.  You can also find me on facebook.  Now back to our originally scheduled programming.

A few days ago, I saw someone in public that I only know in a blog way.  That was a first. Has that ever happened to you?  This wasn’t a famous person, just a person I recognized (from some context) as a blogger I sometimes read and follow on twitter.  This reminded me of Nick Currie’s supposed recasting of Andy Warhol’s  fame meme.  Currie (you may know him as Momus) is apparently among the first to say something like “in the future/on the web, everyone will be famous to 15 people.”

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the force behind LoudPoet.

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is an old and new media pragmatist, and marketing technopologist.

Professionally, he’s a multi-faceted sales, marketing and audience development professional with an entrepreneurial spirit and 15 years experience in publishing (print and digital), event planning and public speaking. Personally, he’s a father, husband, poet, writer and long-suffering NY Mets fan. The combination is wonderfully complicated and quite simple, really.

LoudPoet is full of good content and links for writers.  You should check it out.

Three MFA-related items tonight:

The MFA Chronicles:  this is a cool idea that I’m looking forward to being a part of.  Contributers to this blog are all incoming first-year MFA writing students from programs around the country.  Check out the personal blogs of the contributers on the left side-bar of the MFA Chronicles.

Barbara Jane Reyes shares her perspective on the culture of MFA-hating and getting over the idea of the MFA (or the industry) as enemy. Great post.

Writing Advice from The Faster Times is also considering The System this week and says ”No one gives a rat’s ass about your MFA.”   Like I’ve said here and in the comment sections on blogs getting down on the practicality of the degree, Nancy Rawlinson says make sure you’re getting it for the right reasons. For me, this has always been about being in a community of writers and teachers who are writers in a program that excites me.  Sure, there are other goals, but people missing the point of this whole project in the first place (or going in thinking it guarantees you something), well, that just makes me sad.  

I’m bored with the limited template options on wordpress.com. Any suggestions? I could self-host through wordpress.org, which I’ve done before and liked.

I was at the Bach concert on Friday with homeslice and TRock and TRock asked me about my blogging process.  I updated a lot in April and he asked if I had things planned out in advance or if I write whatever I’m thinking.  His own method is to think through things for a while and blog them when he has a really good sense of what he’s going to say.

I do a little bit of both, but answering the question made me consider one of the basic running assumptions of this blog more concretely: writing about things is actually how I think about them. Sometimes this is quick.  Sometimes 4 paragraphs takes a few hours.  A perfect example is my real time one-half review of the Manning book this morning.  It’s more distilled and generous than what I was initially thinking, but as I read and reconsidered, I realized what an ass I was being in the original draft.  Some what you read now is still kind of jerky, but the other risk you run with things like this is death by qualification.  Still, thinking about how others might hear my critique made me think about the people who want what Manning is offering and about how hard it is to judge the book without seeming to pass judgment on those longings.  I don’t really think I succeeded, and that bothers me.  Maybe if we were talking about things that people don’t hold so closely I’d feel differently. Usually, by the end of a post, I know exactly what I think and I feel good about the process.  In this case, though, I don’t.  It’s too easy, when talking about things like this, to be jaded about all kinds of human frailty.

I suppose that’s why I write fiction.  So that my characters can say the things that I think need to be said, considered, reacted to.  If readers assume that I as the author am saying these things I can’t really help that and I don’t worry much about it.  Fiction, war and all, is fiction for a reason.   There’s freedom in it to move and breathe and think and to learn from what you’ve written as much as from what you’ve read.

Better late than never.

Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog and this post about the 10 most frequently-submitted piece titles.

Herman The Manatee is always a good read.

Nathan Rein teaches religion at my undergraduate alma mater.

LiturgicalCredo and this post about Brett McCracken’s recent piece on irony.

Emerging Writers Network and the beginning of Short Story Month.

The self-proclaimed Best Damn Creative Writing Blog Period and a note about Chuck Palahniuk reading fan work on tour.  Been talking about Chuck a lot here lately.  Pygmy comes out May 5.  I could be wrong, but I think to qualify for a chance at having Chuck read your work you have to be a paying member of the writing workshop at chuckpalahniuk.net.  Not that that’s a bad thing.

Emerging Writers Network and a post about Wag’s Revue and a follow-up.

Ken Foster and a great 4-year-old conversation with Amy Hempel about the boundaries of life and art:

“I know where one ends and the other begins. I use a lot of real places to literally ground the work,” she explains. “I use a lot of things I know, that have happened to me or to friends. There’s also a huge element of each story that is imagined. The only thing I worry about—which is what I’ve worried about since the beginning—is ‘Is the writing good?’ I don’t worry about ‘revealing’ something personal because there’s nothing I could write about that would not be familiar to a million other people. The concern really is just ‘Is the writing good?’”

I love this, and I actually hadn’t read this post before writing this one just a few hours ago.

You Will Get Papercuts and their raison d’etre. See also my post here.

Fiction Writers Review and a post about a post about a “needlessly bitchy” review of Jon Paul Fiorentino’s novel Stripmalling.

Enjoy!

Another good collection this week.  I’ll post that later tonight.   If you want to be considered for future inclusion, find a post here that interests you and leave a  comment.

The Blogg, long O, hard G.  Chad Hogg’s Blogg is thoughtful, timely, winsome, and eclectic.  Chad is a computer science PhD student at Lehigh University who doesn’t let everyone in on the secret that when he’s not Blogging, he’s busy creating artificial intelligence, playing Settlers of Catan, busking “Heart of the Matter”, and leading Bible studies at South Side Bethlehem bars.  All at the same time.

Also on WordPress, Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog is maintained by Brevity editor (and, I believe, fellow Pennsylvanian?) Dinty W. Moore.   More about my love of all things brief (and my gratitude to Brevity) here.

Bookish Us by my new blog friend Joe.  This piece about Books In the Digital Age from a few days ago reminded me of A.O. Scott’s NY Times piece we’re discussing (slightly) here.

Brian Russell is Another Chicago Writer. He’s halfway through his MFA in Creative Writing.

My old friend Nathan Key shares some link love of his own and considers the Interactive Music Revolution (which may or may not be televised).

Notes From A Room is responsible for turning me on to Leonard Cohen’s poetry and prose and for generally sharing fantastic art (orginal and from others) that I wouldn’t know about otherwise.   These pieces are challening, refreshing, illuminating, and continue to make me a better reader and writer.

Enjoy!