Podcast interview - New Write

Chatting with Matthew Pegas and Dan Baltic

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Matthew Pegas and Dan Baltic of the New Write podcast.

You can listen to the episode on different platforms which are available here:

• Apple Podcasts link to episode

• Spotify link to episode

• Patreon link to episode

I’ve been looking forward to chatting with

Dan Baltic

&

Mattp969

for quite some time. When I was working on polishing my novel for publication through the COVID pandemic years, listening to New Write was a hugely uplifting and motivating experience. It was one of the first times where I felt that I’d found a literary community who was interested in the same types of literature I was interested in, but more importantly, they were writing it too.

For that I am grateful, because oftentimes in life it’s very hard to imagine a path forward unless you’ve seen it traversed by others. Sometimes you just need to see someone else do something in order to believe that it’s possible. This is one reason why I try to do my part and encourage new entrants in the space who I think have potential.

During this discussion, the three of us had a very enjoyable conversation about a number of interrelated topics like the structural difficulties of being an androgenic literary novelist and the differences between androgenic literature and new wave literature.

I’ve noticed that a lot of writers have connected with my forays into literary taxonomy (i.e. my attempts at literary world-building), and I think this demonstrates that the old categories are losing relevance because they don’t capture all the different types of niches that are blossoming.

This is one thing I love about the literary arts: because the universe is constantly spawning ‘a new type of guy,’ there’s always new types of characters to write about (and literary fiction, being character-weighted, is well equipped to respond to the de novo character-builds spat out by the recombinant forces of gene-culture evolution).

Perhaps most interesting was the trilateral discussion comparing each of our three takes on the modern incel novel: Dan’s Nutcrankr, Matt’s Dragon Day, and my INCEL. In a sense, one might argue that we all wrote a novel about ‘the same type of guy,’ but each of us approached it with a different style that reflects our own idiosyncratic strengths and preferences as writers. This is another reason I love the medium of text. It really does feel infinitely generative (which it literally is, lol). In this respect the novel feels like the ultimate anti-algorithm. Natural variations in human phenomenology produce natural variations in textual representations of human interiority. Such is the dao of the wordcel. Flattening this variation produces the modular story mechanics and character tropes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Lastly, the thing that most excited me about this interview was the announcement that Matt and Dan are working on a new press. Since they have yet to push out a formal announcement, I won’t mention the name of it here, but given their excellent execution with New Write, I fully anticipate that they will go from strength to strength.