Miklos Mattyasovszky

9/25/2024

Two more rejections--one for fiction, one for poetry (#17 and #18).

09/18/2024

One month in to the MFA, and about seven weeks into living in Ithaca. Working as an editorial assistant at Epoch and getting a sense of how these magazines I have been submitting to work. Prompted a revision and then a few submissions of a story, "Oh, Mark," that I've been working on for a while. 

On the topic of submissions: I saw that a writer I admire, Jac Jemc, used to post her rejections as she received them (I know she's not the first or the only). I've heard many writers cite their rejection tally as a point of pride. So I thought that would be a fun thing to track.

So far, here are the results of this decade's submissions, categorized by genre. My next rejection will be #17. 

Fiction: 0 acceptances, 4 rejections, 7 pending

Essays: 1 acceptance, 6 rejections, 0 pending

Poetry: 0 acceptances, 6 rejections, 1 pending

Mary and I (and Cassie, our dog) are settling into life in Ithaca smoothly. (Our cats are still struggling with the move). 

04/18/2024

After a full year of freelancing, working on a consulting startup, doing a small amount of carpentry, and writing a lot of fiction, I will be moving with my wife Mary (along with dog Cassie and cats Butternut & Gilly) to Ithaca this upcoming August, where and when I'll begin the MFA program in fiction at Cornell.

The funding, which is perhaps the best in the country and for which I am impossibly grateful, will allow me to really make a go at a career in creative writing--mostly fiction, with a few pinches of essay and a pinch of poetry thrown in. I'll get to teach, work as an editor at the literary magazine Epoch, and spend a lot of time writing exactly what I want to.

As such, I am reformatting the site a little. In addition to the About page, there will be a Publications page*, a Commercial Writing page--I am still working on some projects and would love to find more projects with exciting clients--and this page, a blog that I will update, if history is any indication, very sporadically. 

*which at the moment contains only the essay I published with PopMatters last fall. But I've got two stories--"The Firmament" and "Big"--out on submission as well as a poem, "Helsinki, November 2022." May they eventually find a home.