Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Whimsy

  • 2012

    So we survived the night.  The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all.  This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…

    I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans.  Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself.  I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.

    But that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish.

    I think I’ll keep most of it to myself.  Anyone keeping up with this blog has a pretty good idea what my ambitions are, and they don’t really follow an annual cycle.  If there is one thing, though, that needs to change, it is my deep conviction that much of what I wish to do will never happen.  I surprised myself between 1990 and 2001 by doing exactly what I had till that decade thought I’d never manage—publish.

    The fact is, I have always held back from myself the kind of faith that opens up possibilities.  I’m ready to accept successes when they happen, but I always seem to keep myself from believing they will.  Sometimes—often—this can result in self-sabotage.  Never intentional, always unconscious, but effective all the same.  And I don’t know why.  Thirty or forty years ago, untried and with nothing to show for any effort, it made a kind of sense.  I hadn’t proved anything to myself or anyone else.

    Starting in 1980 that changed and I have a track record now.  So it’s maybe time to start believing in myself.  At least more than I have been.  And enjoy it.

    So here’s a few things I’d like to try to do this coming year.

    One, publish a new novel.  At the very least get a contract for one.

    Two, take a long vacation or two with Donna and travel to some new places.

    Three, maybe actually mount a decent photographic exhibition.  It’s long overdue, I have a lot of good work that will, if I don’t do something about it, disappear into oblivion without anyone ever seeing it.

    Four…

    Well, four, have a better time.

    So, irresolute but with purpose, I welcome 2012 and wish you all the very best in the coming 12 months.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

    And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.

  • The Ancient Past

    Over the weekend my mother presented us with something that surprised, pleased, slightly embarrassed, and produced a slew of other less-definable reactions.  Mothers do this sort of thing, I’m told.  We have no children to whom we might have inflicted this on, so I’m unable to say what must go through a parent’s mind on such occasion.

    But it’s sweet and important and after my initial “What the hell…” reaction I was really very pleased.  She came out with a big file folder full of “stuff” from my grade school years.  Among the items were class portraits and…well…

     

      Yes, this is me, circa 1965.  Note the three-piece suit?  I was very much into my James Bond period at this time and dressing well was part of it.  Obviously I didn’t wear a suit every day—this was special—but when I did, I took Sean Connery as my model and did it up right.

    Of course, I didn’t really know how to wear it.  Posture was still a work-in-progress and my hair has only ever been in control one year, about two years after this when I went through my heavy Brylcreem phase, with pompadour and everything.

    And of course note the smirk.  I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, to produce such an expression, but doubtless it had little to do with what was going on around me.  Doubtless I was trying to exude some semblance of cool, something I’ve never possessed in any measurable degree, but in my own head I certainly was.

    Now here is the next year’s version—same school, mind you, Emmaus Lutheran School.

     

    Note the sartorial change.   This would have been my Man From U.N.C.L.E.  phase—that or Lost In Space—and turtlenecks were the fashion of the moment.  Now this I likely would have worn most days.  I had some notion then that clothes made the boy, hopefully into the version of the boy desired.  Illya Kuryakin cool, someone not to mess with, in the know, capable and maybe a touch dangerous.

    Yeah, right, with that face.  Dangerous.  Uh huh.  Cute kid, isn’t he?  In 1966 I would have been 11 or 12, depending on the time of year this was taken, and I don’t recall that anymore.  I look at that face now and I wonder what happened to that kid.  He actually looks happy.  And I suppose most of the time I was fairly happy.  Not in school, though, but I learned to play a part, and I was playing one there, I’m sure.  The pictures were always for that, I remember, the chance to get down in the record what I thought I was and what I wanted to be.  It never worked, I always ended up looking like any other hapless kid, goofily unaware, and absurdly pleased to be getting my picture taken.

    But that smirk…that, I think, stayed with me.  Take a look at this one from almost 30 years later.

     

    A friend shot this for me as a promo image for the writing career I was convinced I was about to have.  You can still kind of see that kid there, cocky, a little divorced from reality, and somehow knowing something the photographer or the audience doesn’t.  A bit more practiced, obviously, and the freckles are gone.  In a way I kind of miss the freckles.  (For many years I actually found freckles erotic—I’d had a couple of girlfriends who had them in ample supply, fair-skinned and somehow the freckles just…anyway.)

    Now, along with the pictures, I found in my mother’s file a couple of report cards.  Mind you, this was from a parochial school, and for the most part I was unsurprised.  I was a poor student.  Mostly Cs and C-s.  The surprising grades were in Religion, which generally were Bs and As.  I tell people when it comes up that at one time I was a righteous little christian and evidently it showed in my classroom performance.

    What else? There was one composite, one of those sheets with thumbnails of the whole class, and I was asked if I remembered them all.  This was the 4th Grade and I did amazingly well.  I think I named 80% of them.  There were a few I didn’t recognize, and a couple I did but could not put names to.

    There were also merit badges and such from my Boy Scout days.  I didn’t do well in that, either.  I had a merit badge in fire safety, marksmanship, basketweaving (yes, basketweaving—don’t ask), first aid, and a couple others, plus achievement patches from state Jamborees.  I’ll tell you about those sometime—the second one I attended was cause for me quitting the scouts.

    It felt more like a record of someone else’s life, to be honest.  Not me.  I’ve worked to distance myself from that kid in a lot of ways.  He did not impress me at the time, though he hid it well.  But I have to wonder how much is still in here, still influencing, still informing who I am and what people see.  I mine my own past for material to build stories with and I have utilized my childhood often.  I am still surprised sometimes by what I find.

  • Season’s Wish

    We didn’t get around to sending out cards this year.  It’s been busy and in some ways not particularly festive, but we’ve had worse years, so there really is no excuse.  Time just got away from us.

    Which happens more and more lately.  So in lieu of a card (which we promise to send out next year) I thought I’d post this and for those of you who come by, we can wish you well and hope for a terrific next year.

    We had Changes of Great Significance happen in 2011.  I signed with a new agent(s) and promptly spent a good chunk of the year rewriting a pair of novels at their requests, which is a good thing.  The attention they have given me, shown my projects, has increased my optimism and I now have real cause to believe this writing thing will work out.  For Jen and Stacia I am most grateful and wish them particularly wonderful holidays.

    The two novels in question are much improved.

    Donna is free from a job that was slowly killing her.  Money really isn’t everything, not when it comes at the cost of health and well-being and the time to do anything worthwhile with it.  We were able to put enough in the bank that she can be a bit choosy in her next job and I can still concentrate on my writing.  For now.

    I acquired a new camera and have begun—tentatively—to do photography again.

    Most of our friends are doing okay, some better than others, but none of them are in dire straits.  We haven’t seen enough of most of them.  (Sorry.)

    We didn’t take the trips we’ve been intending to take—but that’s been true for a few years now.  Perhaps with the time we now have we can do that.

    I started working part-time for Left Bank Books, doing a kind of goodwill public outreach task to bring people into the stores.  I have no idea if my efforts had anything to do with this, but they showed a sharp increase over last year, especially in the downtown store (which is the one for which I was hired to act) and this is a Good Thing.  The people who work there are great, every one of them, and now that I’ve seen it from the inside, so to speak, and I can say that a special thing is going on there.

    I read a bunch of good books this year, which I’ll talk about in January (still reading) and we ate some great food, made some good music, smiled a lot, and have come through in good spirits.

    We’re both going to the gym now, something we haven’t done together in many years.

    It’s been okay.  It will be better.  So while I apologize for the lack of a card in the mail, please accept this instead and know that we wish you all well and look forward to another year on a planet with such fine people living on it.

    Be well.

  • Many Lives

    This is just very yeah.

    When asked why I write, I have many answers, but this captures the entire inner gestalt of why.

    Not getting to live all the lives I wanted to. I know what she means. I assumed at one time I would be a writer, an actor, a musician, a producer-director, and all the other things that attach to these ambitions. In a way, I did get to do them, but not the way I thought I would.

    Anyway, this is marvelous.

  • No Politics

    Not this morning.  It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could  comment about, but…

    The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done.  Done and at my agent.  I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.

    Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.

    We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon  office and began.  I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away.  That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.

    It was good stuff.  I say that because much of it is gone.  I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went.  But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should.  (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)

    Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—

    It crashed.  Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down.  When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-

    The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter.  All of them.

    By which time Donna was home and I was fuming.  No, that’s not quite it.  I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.

    We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.

    In all this, I had forgotten the dog.  Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot.  I’m a bad owner.  Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.

    And I finished the last chapter.

    Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent.  (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)

    When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.   It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion.  In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.

    You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work.  Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it.  I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling.  Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.

    What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office.  I have piles of stuff everywhere.  It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable.  When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment.  So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.

    In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause.  You can imagine the task before me.

    So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?

  • Dressing Up

    It’s Hallowe’en.  No news to anyone, we’ve been immersed in it for weeks now.  But this year I’ve been doing a lot of introspective reminiscing and I’ve come to realize that Hallowe’en should always have been my favorite festive occasion.

    See, I’ve been wearing costumes all my life.

     

    The last time I went out on a Hallowe’en night in costumes I was 14.  A little old you say?  I agree, but I wasn’t doing the trick’or’trreating, I was being part of the security detail accompany a group of littler kids.  Nevertheless, I always liked getting into costume, into a character, and I went as a town sheriff, complete with a six-gun on my hip.  That would be questionable today, especially as the weapon I wore was a Mattel Fanner Fifty, which looked real.  Except for some high-end models, toy guns don’t look real anymore, and I understand the thinking behind it.  Even when I was a kid there were incidents of robberies done at (toy) gun-point, because for over a decade toy companies, following the Mattel model, made more and more realistic guns.  The Mattels were all like three-quarter size, but in the heat of the moment that’s not going to count for much.  So gradually, authenticity yielded to social reality, and now you have all these bizarre looking things out of bad SciFi movies with tell-tale orange tips screaming TOY!

    Anyway, I went out for a couple of hours, acting as protector of the smaller children, wearing a beard made from burnt cork, a dime-store Stetson, and my six-shooter slung low on the hip.

    I loved it.

    But you get older, some things that were adorable at eight are just weird at eighteen.  Going to dress-up Hallowe’en parties in my adolescence and early adulthood were not that common.  Besides I lost all my toy guns.

    (I had a double-holster set of Mattel “shootin-shell” pistols, black holsters, silvered with fake ivory grips.  They were wonderful!  You could get bullets for them with pressure-plate releases on the back of the spring-loaded cartridges that, when the hammer struck, launched little plastic shells about five or six feet.  I was rough on my toys, always was, and eventually the grips came off, they broke, they ended up neglected and one day tossed.  Here’s a picture of the set:

     

     

     

     

    I loved that set.  Outrageously expensive now.  Here is a site with all the Mattel western toys of the period.)

    Even before that, though, I used to get creative.  When first introduced to Hallowe’en, the costumes were less than wonderful.  Basic sized pull-overs, like jump suits, tied in the back, and a molded plastic mask with large eye holes.  The fabric was cheap, the costumes usually ill-fitting, and almost always ending up in the trash.  The last one of those I had was a Superman costume when I was eleven—it was a little embarrassing because they insisted on tricking it out with glitter on the chest sigil and there was no symbol on the cape.  No matter what, you didn’t look like Superman.

    (Yes, I know—eleven?  Seriously?  What can I say?  I prolonged childhood as long as I could.  In some ways, I’m still a kid.)

    Childhood for me was a series of roles in which I would immerse myself.  Anything, I suppose, to escape the prison of my own self.  Despite my “delicacy” I was really invested in being a soldier.  One year I even had “real” fatigues.  Never had a steel helmet, but I recall the Sixties being a very cool time for toys like this.  I had a G.I. helmet with the mesh for stuffing camouflage in—leaves and the like—which my mother hated because I tracked debris into the house after a hard day fighting Nazis or Japanese.  I had a real cartridge belt with canteen, the envy of the neighborhood, and a couple of very cool rifles.  I had one of the first battery-powered M-14s in the neighborhood.  This one actually made a very neat sound, a heavy thum-thum-thum as the tip of the barrel moved in and out (in what now I can see was a rather disturbing sexual motion, but then it was all about killing bad guys).

    I took on a James Bond persona for a few years—my best dressed time in childhood, even my hair was perfectly groomed (lot of Brylcream) and I had a couple of automatic pistols—but never a shoulder holster.  Awkward when trying to carry a replica Luger in the small inside pocket of a sport coat.  It kept falling out every time I bent over.

    Much of that faded through high school, but by then I was trying to write.  I look at it now and I see that I never stopped putting on costumes, only now I do it in my stories.  Try on a character, go through an adventure, be the cool secret agent or starship trooper or whatever.

    We dabbled briefly in costuming when we started attending SF conventions, but drifted away from it fairly quickly.  That wasn’t the aspect of the community that really attracted us, though I confess to a deep admiration for the skill and dedication some costumers bring to their passion.

    But tonight we will sort of dress up for the kids coming to the house to receive their booty and admire and enjoy their glee in being Something Else for the night.  Looking back, I admit that sometimes I got a little weird with some of it, but in the long run it did me no harm and probably a great deal of good to try out different personae.  And I haven’t actually stopped.  Just that the wardrobe is more expensive now—and fits better.

    Have a boo-tiful evening.

  • 10/12

    It has never bothered me that my birthday is on Columbus Day.  I feel no affinity for Chris and except for the fact that I was born in the United States find no reason to take on any kind of anniversary significance.  It’s my birthday—and the birthday of many others—and that’s it.  I’m not even particularly moved by the celebratory excuse such a calendrical coincidence provides.

    Legally, anyway, Columbus Day has been moved.

    I’m a bit stunned today.  I went to my FaceBook page and found nearly 70 well-wishes on the occasion.  But I’m also a bit surprised at myself for sitting here now remarking on the day.  I usually do what I can to treat my birthday as just any other day.  There may be a bit of disingenuousness about that, something of a pose, a “oh, it’s no big deal, notice me not making a big deal out it, it’s just my birthday and I’m so cool about it that I don’t care who notices” act that’s mostly true—but I wonder how hurt I’d be if no one did notice.

    Here’s a photograph of me taken at the most recent Archon by Elonka Dunin, who very kindly updated my Wikipedia entry.

     

    Aside from a few scattered images over the last few decades taken on my birthday, this is probably the most recent associated with the event itself, just a couple weeks past.  I’m a bit dismayed by what I see.  This is not how I thought I’d look at age 57.  I’ve tried, with varying degrees of success, to stay in shape, but there have really only been two things I’ve managed to consistently work at in my life—my writing and Donna.

    Plus I never counted on the frustrations.  Who does?  Even if someone tells you at an early age that there will be frustrations, what does that mean?  It’s kind of a null warning.  Frustration is not getting a A on a math test or being turned down for a date for the nth time or being forced to go here when you wanted to be there.  Not the kind of grinding crap that real frustration is.

    So I carry a few more pounds  than I’d like, but I enjoy my food too much.  I’m 57 and the other day I ran three blocks with my dog, full out.  Sure, it took another three blocks for my breathing to return to normal, but hey, that ain’t bad.

    I wish the beard hadn’t turned white.  I’m vain, but not vain enough to dye it.  Maybe for next year I’ll shave it off completely.  I haven’t seen my upper lip since high school.

    I said my writing and Donna.  I’ve got great friends.  I mean, yeah.  My dad always told me that as you go through life you will find many acquaintances but very few friends.  In his case, he has one—his wife.  In my case…

    I have great friends.  I have Jim and Greg and Tom.  I have Tim and Bernadette.  I have Lucy.  I have Allen and Linda and John.  I have Nicola and Kelley and Peg.  I have Terry and Terry and Russell and Rich.

    But mainly I have Donna, who asks me every year what I want for my birthday and every time I tell her I already have it and silently wish for one more year with her.  I didn’t really know what I wanted to be until I met her.  She is just amazing and I get few chances to say it.  Without her…

    Well, you can guess the rest.

    Thank you all for your well wishes and kind thoughts.  You’re all amazing and I’m lucky to know you.

     

  • An Unstaged Moment

    It’s Wednesday, a few days since Archon, and I’m now reconsidering the convention.  I didn’t have a bad time.  I had some great conversations (thank you Vanessa, Jill, Rachel, Lorenzo, Tom, Selina, Lynn, and the folks who showed up at the workshops and no doubt several others I’ve neglected to name) and the art show held some nice pieces, etc.

    Usually when I get done with a convention, I’m inspired.  I get jazzed up and come home rarin’ to write deathless prose.  Not this time.  I’ve been writing constantly on one thing or another for the last six years, almost all novels.  (The state of my office is indicative of this.)

    But it was not a bad weekend and I was caught having a good time.

     

    Jill Lybarger, who once long ago worked at one of the last stand-alone B. Dalton stores in St. Louis and did me great favors by keeping my books on the shelves there, and who has since moved to Chicago with her husband Dane, snapped this of me contemplating—nay, drooling over—a possible purchase of a fine first edition (signed!) something or other at Basement Books in the dealers’ room.

    I’m always a bit dismayed at profiles like this.  I somehow can’t quite make the connection to “That’s me!” because I’m always startled by the disconnect between my actual self and my imagined self (which is stuck somewhere about a decade ago).  Looking at this you’d never know I work out.  I kind of look like an aging private detective.  The developing hunch (from years of leaning over an enlarger and trays and prints in darkrooms) is something I’m probably stuck with.

    Oh, well.  But here is an off-guard moment of me indulging myself.  (I did buy one book from them—a 1st edition of Joe Haldeman’s underappreciated novel 1968.)

    One for the historical record.  With appreciation to Jill for permission to post the picture.  Thank you.

  • Without Naming Names

    I didn’t really enjoy Archon very much this year.  I hesitate to pin blame because so many things are going on right now that my dissatisfaction could be result of factors completely unrelated.  Any number of them might have coalesced into the hazy funk that seemed to follow me around all weekend.

    But there did seem to be a lack of focus at the convention and I was surprised at the lack of meaningful programming.  I volunteered to do two workshops, one on Saturday the other on Sunday, but except for titles and brief descriptions, there was no structure to speak of.  I showed up and improvised and the people in attendance seemed satisfied.  Copious notes were being taken in any case.

    I did get to spend time with people I only see at conventions.  A tip o’ the hat through the internets to Selina and Lynn, Vic, Tom, Rich and Michelle, and a handful of others who made it worth my while to show up.

    One thing I will say, the convention returned to Collinsville, Illinois, which is about 15 miles from my house.  Not an onerous drive except for getting over the bridge, on which this weekend there were repairs and therefore traffic jams.   The convention facilities themselves are okay—it is, after all, a convention center (Gateway) and it is designed for such things.  It used to be there was only one good hotel there, but a Drury has been added.  The dearth of decent restaurants is a problem.  I don’t consider Arby’s, Bandana’s, Ponderosa, Ruby Tuesday, or  Steak’n’Shake decent restaurants.  Fast food, sure.  But there’s still only one really good restaurant there, Porters, which is fine eating and expensive as hell.  Last year Archon moved to Westport Plaza.  I know there were complaints about it being spread out and the dealer’s rooms were on the other side of the plaza from the actual programming, but it was a cool setting, good food, decent hotels, and…

    Yeah, it’s closer to my house, but more importantly there’s no bridge that is always being repaired.

    Even so, that doesn’t explain my loss of enthusiasm.  I think I’m just really tired from the last eight months.  I’m not working on anything right now but what I want to be working on, till my agent tasks me with more revisions or something, so I’ve decided to work on the small stack of short stories I have.  Rich Horton was at Archon and pointedly lamented my non-output of short material.  So that’s what I’m doing now.

    And learning my away around Twitter.  One more distraction, but I’m told it is necessary for my coming popularity vis-a-vis my career.

    Things just seem unsettled lately.  There are reasons which I won’t go into here, but they seem to be ganging up on me.  I’m so easily distracted, I throw my hands up at merest provocation and put off till tomorrow work I really need to be doing today.  For instance, the story I should be working on is staring at my back just now, on the other computer, while I explain all this to you.  It’s a cool story, too, if I can just bring it home.  So while it’s pleasant chatting with you here, and you’re such a terrific audience patiently listening to me gripe about not much, I’m going to hit the publish button and go do that cool story.

    But I wanted to tell you about Twitter.  Really.  (See? I’m not a Luddite.)

  • Position Statement