Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Remains Still Available

    A couple days ago I received my royalty statement on my last novel, Remains.  There are still copies available and if you go directly to the publisher’s site here you can pick one up at a discount.

    One of the things I’ve gotten very little of is feedback on my work.  At conventions I’ve spoken to readers about one or another, but aside from the Robot novels, very few people have let me know how they felt about either the Secantis books or this one.

    I’m still looking for a new publisher for my work and at present feel pretty cut off.  I thought I’d put it out there that new copies of this book can still be had and eventually I will put up a link here for people to buy what stock I have of the others.

    But let me know what you think.

  • End of A Long Week…

    I’m at sixes and sevens, waiting for Donna to read the manuscript and give me her notes.  I sort of want to work on something else, but I also want to clean my office, but I also want to read about a dozen books, and I can’t settle on any one thing, so I end up doing a great deal of very little. I should be used to this, but I’m not.

    Once this book goes out the door it will be the first time in about four years that I will not be working on a novel.  (Yes, I do still have two novels “in process” and I can go back to work on either one of them, and I will, but I don’t have to.)  It’s been that long since I’ve actually had down time.

    I’ve been futzing with electronics.  A couple weeks back I bought Donna a new computer.  She wanted a flatscreen, but her old computer was quite old and I wasn’t altogether sure a new screen would connect to it.  But she also wanted a CD burner, which we lost when I got my new computer.  After pricing what I thought she wanted and the software to run it and this and that, it was only slightly more expensive to just replace her whole system.

    And she’s been using it.  Especially after I then went out and bought a router and got her connected to the IntraWeebs.  Which was a chore.  “Oh, you won’t have any problems with this,” the helpful techie at Best Buy said,  “it’s plug-and-play.”  Three and a half hours on the phone with my ISP and it works.  And works well.

    I then made the mistake of buying another piece of electronics online.  I know better.  We have never bought anything electronic mail order that worked right.  Never.  But Donna’s car stereo can handle an MP3 component and with her new computer we can do that, so I ordered one.  The damn thing didn’t work right at first and then ended up not working at all.  This morning I packed it all up and sent it back.  We’ll got to a store, with a People, and buy it there, so we get explanations that haven’t been translated twice from some language barely within the IndoEuropean group.

    I now have to do some serious thinking about the future.  I have a couple months of unemployment left and still no book deal.  This is becoming seriously annoying.  I have had some nerve-wracking news, but no sale.  With this novel, there will now be four of these things knocking on doors, bringing its sad bowl up to the front, plaintively  saying  “Please, sir, may I have a contract.”  So I have to start thinking about a new day job.

    I really don’t want to go there.  I’ll think about that next week.

    This morning I booted up an old short story that’s been lying in my hard drive, incomplete and forlorn.  I don’t know why I can’t get a handle on these anymore, they just don’t go where I want them to.  Granted, what I always wanted to be was a novelist, but even so…

    It is Friday.  We have a weekend ahead of us.  Next week…

    Ah, next, March 6th—-this is rather stunning to contemplate—is our anniversary.  One of them.  Our First Date.  March 6th, 1980.

    Yes, folks, Donna and I have been “going together” for…*gulp*…three decades!

    Breathtaking.  Yes, it is.  Thirty years.  If you’re impressed, think how we feel.  Three decades.  And you know what?

    I still like her.

  • Meanwhile!

    Coming down to the last two chapters of the final draft of (drum roll, please)  The Drowned Doll.

    The title may change before it sees print, but that’s what it’s called now.  It ties into the plot, trust me.  My first shot at a contemporary murder mystery.  In describing it to my agent, she termed is “a cozy” which I gather means it’s in the vein of Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot rather than Thomas Harris or James Lee Burke.  Minimum of gore, emphasis on problem solving.  Except for a smidgin of bad language and the fact that there is, y’know, some sex (none on stage/page), kids could read this.  (Actually, I think adults are far too worried about what kids read, as if they couldn’t handle it—I was reading Harold Robbins at 13.  Of course, considering how I came out…)

    Anyway, I’m going to take pains with the last two chapters, so I probably won’t have this draft done done till, say, Wednesday.  At which time I print it out and hand to Donna, who insisted on one more read-through before sending it to my agent.  Two weeks tops, I think, before it leaves the house on its lonely journey into the world of savagery that is modern publishing.

    Just wanted to let everyone know how it’s going.  After I mail it I’ll have a few new bits of blog for the Muse.

  • Buy Books Elsewhere

    IndieBound  is a website that helps connect people to independent bookstores.

    Why am I putting this link up?

    Because this nonsense between Amazon and MacMillan is the latest in a long history of corporate warfare that results in hurting writers more than it does in hurting the corporations involved, and despite what the Supreme Court said recently, corporations are not people.  Corporations are enormous digestive tracks that use people for nourishment.  They take them in, churn them up, dismantle their constituent parts, and shit out the excess they don’t use.  We really ought to get over the idea that corporations are good citizens.  They are not.  That many of them do beneficial things is not at issue—the fact is they are not designed to do beneficial things and if they do such things it is only because it is easier for them to function by so doing than otherwise.  The instant it becomes in their best interest to function maliciously, they do.

    Political screed done.  For the moment.

    This situation is directly impacting authors.  You can’t go buy certain books from Amazon because Amazon is having a control dispute with a major publisher.  John Scalzi has a very sensible recommendation at his site.  He is dead on, I think, about the idea of boycotting as a useful tool.  That just hurts authors more.  What needs to be done is for people to pay more attention about who they buy from and how that money funnels through the serpentine system to the people who need it.

    Go find an independent book dealer.  I mean it.  Get off you duffs and go to a bookstore.  You do two things that way—you support a local business and you keep money going, eventually, to a writer.  This is important for two reasons.

    The first is, the fewer independent book dealers there are, the more entities like Amazon can control our book buying choices, which eventually leads to their controlling the publishing scene in general.  We’ve already been through all the nonsense of superchains becoming so powerful that they can dictate what books publishers buy.  It hasn’t resulted in quite so dire a situation as the doomsayers predicted, but it’s been bad enough.  The publishing model in the last thirty years has changed so much that many previously supportable authors can no longer publish through national or global entities because the numbers mitigate against them.  You might feel that this is only natural, since if something doesn’t sell, maybe it ought to be left to dwindle away.  As far as it goes, this is true, but we haven’t been talking about work that doesn’t sell for a long time, we’ve been talking about work that doesn’t sell well enough, and the fact is the numbers are partly arbitrary and partly tied to leveraged debt.  If corporate stomachs hadn’t gone through a massive period of cannibalism and gobbled each other up in leveraged buy-outs, the debt burden of the resulting super stomachs would not be so high that previously moderately-selling authors could no longer get a slot in the next catalogue.  This situation is not helped by near-monopoly command of market-share by a small cadre of retailers.

    So go support a local bookstore.

    If you really don’t want to get out of the house and visit a brick-and-mortar store, many of them nevertheless have online sites and you can buy from them that way.  It may not be as cheap as Amazon, but paying a little extra can start to alleviate the situation where publishers can’t make enough from the retailer (Amazon) to keep many of those authors on their lists.

    On that aspect, go find some small press sites and buy books directly from them, bypassing the retailers entirely.  Small press is the future of independent publishing.  They need your help.  If you don’t want to do that, order small press publications through your local independent bookstore.

    Corporations are very efficient at making it easy for you to screw your longterm benefit by buying from them.  Mind you, when I say “Corporation” here, I’m not talking about a mom-and-pop shop that is doubtless incorporated, making them, legally, A Corporation.  I mean those entities that are large enough to be commonly known as corporations.  You all know who they are, I don’t have to list them.

    Start by going to IndieBound and setting up some accounts with some folks who know what a book is all about.  It may seem like a struggle over a just cause, this frakkus  between Amazon and MacMillan, but believe me, MacMillan isn’t getting pissy over ebook pricing because it wants to give the authors a little extra.  These are just two big dinosaurs ripping at each other, unconcerned about the scurrying little mammals trying not to get crushed in all the stomping.

    Oh, the second reason buying local is a good idea?  Getting out of the house occasionally is good for you.  Especially when it’s to buy something as important as a book from a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  It’ll keep you from being digested by a corporate stomach, at least in this instance.  And who knows?  You might decide to start doing all your buying locally.  And that can’t hurt.

  • Bridges In Need Of Crossing

    Busy stuff today. It’s warm enough (again) to go to the gym, but I have to get an oil change in Donna’s car (which means I get to drive the new one!) and then run a grocery errand. Donna is doing a quick review of her second go-through on my new book, which means some time this week I’ll be starting on final draft stuff. So I have to get a few things out of the way.

    Last night I had a phone interview for a job. I have serious problems with this, of course, but that’s a post for another day. Suffice it to say, I need Book Deal sooner than later, but that’s like (apparently) forestalling the advance of a glacier with a hair dryer. Grr.

    Which brings me to my image for the month of February. This—

    chicago-iron.jpg

    —was shot in Chicago, back in 2000. I like it. There’s symmetry, there’s detail, there’s iconic inference.

    February is my month for crossing bridges. Sometimes you get stuck in the middle of a bridge that needs crossing because it seems like such a cool and safe place to be. Solid. You know where you are. The other side? Not so much.

    Cross it, though. You’ll be glad you did.

  • Kage Baker, A Fine Writer, Gone

    Following upon the previous post, Kage Baker has passed away.

    A few years back she was guest of honor at ConQuest, in Kansas City.  Here in St. Louis some folks at the public library contacted me to see if I could get her to come here to do a presentation.  In my office at the time as president of the Missouri Center for the Book I made inquiries, set up a venue, and actually made arrangements.  A couple of local fans who were at the Kansas City convention volunteered to drive Kage and her sister to St. Louis.  They said they had a marvelous time with her and were pleased to take Kage around the city on tour.

    I’d expected more from the library.  Of course I sent around a notice that Kage would be in town, doing a reading, but book events are notoriously hard to get people, even dedicated readers, to attend, and we ended up with a very small gathering in a hall much too large.

    Kage was gracious.  We huddled around and she read a pirate story to us and we had a terrific conversation.  It was a fun evening and I came away very impressed by her wit and charm.  That’s kind of a cliched expression, but it was true.  I liked her very much.  I’d already been quite taken by her books, which are the kind of treasures you find from time to time that you come to feel a special warmth for.  Great characters, wonderful storylines, and a terrific premise.

    She actually published quite a bit.  There’s plenty there to read and reread.  Nevertheless, there doubtless was much more we will never now discover.  She will be missed by some of us.  She should be remembered.

  • Celebrity and Unread Books

    J.D. Salinger is dead.  Age 91, he died, according to reports, of natural causes, at home, away from the media.

    I confess—I never read him.  Catcher In The Rye is one of those touchstone books everyone had read, but not I.  For whatever reason, it never crossed my path.  I remember those bright red covers in high school, sort of wondered about it, but…

    We can’t read everything, and some books, if you don’t get to them at a certain period in your life, you might as well not bother.  I doubt Holden Caulfield’s adventures would mean to me now what they would have back then.  Besides, I have a lot of other stuff to read and I know I’ll never get to it all.

    Not long ago, the screenwriter Josh Olson (A History Of Violence) did an essay about the problem of time and professionalism.  I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script nails on the head certain issues all professionals face, that of giving time to those seeking validation, unwarranted assistance, or just some kind of reason to feel put upon.  I’ve been guilty myself of violating some of these strictures—wholly unknowing, naively—but, once I realized the mistake, never repeated it.  Some authors get downright strident about this issue and occasionally sound like screaming paranoid misanthropes when they finally come back at someone for not getting it.  See, it’s a no-win situation.  You take the piece and read it and it’s awful, you have a choice—tell the truth or lie.  Either one will get you into trouble and you end up looking like an ass.  But what if it’s good?  You still have a problem.  There is a lot of “good” work out there that will simply never find a publisher or producer.  It ain’t fair, it just is what it is.  There’s not enough room in the world for every piece of work.  So what do you do?  Recommend this person to your agent or publisher?  And what if it continues to be unsalable for any of a hundred reasons that have little or nothing to do with the work in hand?  You don’t run the universe, but if your acquaintance still can’t sell it, you look like either a moron or obviously someone who didn’t sincerely go to bat for the work.

    But in my case, this seldom comes up.  I’m one of those who doesn’t sell well most of the time.  It hurts, but there are reasons, and I’m not going to take advantage of people who have no stake in my career to either vent my frustration or climb over other people who may be just or more deserving.  (Maybe I’m a sap for doing that, but you have to live with yourself and shouldn’t do things that might make that difficult.)  But it does apply to reading in general—there just ain’t enough time for all the great books in the world.

    Salinger is not likely to be on my shelf anytime before my own demise.

    What I don’t get in people like Salinger is the recluse stuff.  I admit, to me it looks like a pose.  He’s never been out-of-print.  Nor has he ever had to write another novel.  I sometimes wonder if he engineered it so that he could just stop when he was on top.  Not a bad strategy, especially if you subsequently can’t finish another book.  But I admit, one of the reasons I’ve always done the work I’ve done has been a secret desire to be in the limelight.  Art of any kind has a bit of performance about it and artists who shun the stage always struck me as insincere.  I’m probably wrong about that and that’s okay.  I just don’t get it myself.

    But J.D. Salinger, who published his three volumes way back when and took the accolades to the bank ever since, who eschewed publicity and thereby generated mountains of it, has died, and has done so quite publicly even though he was at home, out of the limelight, with family and friends, apparently getting what he wanted.  Famous for rejecting fame.

    In the meantime, another writer, of considerable talent and certainly more productivity, is in the process of dying on the other side of the country, and except for the community of people who love her books will likely die largely ignored by the media and the public at large.  Kage Baker writes science fiction.  Her series of novels and stories of The Company are fine pieces, the first few exquisite disquisitions on history.  She writes fun yarns about characters who are both fully realized and compelling.  No, it’s doubtful any of them would ever become iconic in the way that Salinger’s relatively meager output has, but then I bet Kage’s, page for page, are a lot more fun.

    I’m not suggesting that there is any cosmic unfairness going on here.  The Universe doesn’t give a damn about fair.  The very idea is absurd.  I’m just saying that the perverse manner in which our attention gets manipulated often results in overlooking wonderful things.  Such is the case with my own indifference at age 15 or 16 when I should have read Catcher In The Rye, but instead…let me see, that was 1970 or 71, so I would have been reading Heinlein and Clarke, Bradbury and Zelazny, Henderson and Asimov.  (I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged about that time as well, not to mention a goodly dollop of Dickens, Hugo, Twain, and Hemingway.)  I had my sites set on what I thought were loftier planes of literary territory and this one just…slipped by.

    My point?  Only that it makes no sense to regret what you haven’t gotten to, especially if what you have discovered has enlivened your existence and widened your vistas.  If you haven’t read certain books because your were busy reading others, well, good for you.  The only sad thing would be is if you didn’t read certain books because you couldn’t make up your mind which and didn’t read any.  Or, worse, if you didn’t read any because you had no idea there was anything worth while inside them.

    But I would urge anyone reading this to go find a Kage Baker novel right now and indulge some wonder.

  • New Draft and Other Stuff

    This morning I completed the second draft of the new murder mystery, The Drowned Doll.  The first draft came in at about 70,000 words, this one is just shy of 93,000, which is right about where I wanted it.

    I then got dressed and went to the gym.  January has been abysmally cold, so I haven’t been going.  I used to be very susceptible to colds at below 25 degrees, and although I’m not so much anymore, I still draw the line at 10 degrees and stay home.  It’s been push-ups and aerobics for the last few weeks.  This week the weather broke a bit and it’s been up in the 30s and 40s.  But I wanted to get this book done, so I haven’t gone.  Pumping iron as partial celebration.  How perverse is that!

    Anyway, I kind of like the new book.  It’s got a nice shape, interesting characters (I think), and a serviceable mystery.  Tomorrow I’ll print out this new draft and let Donna tear into it, after which I’ll pick up the bleeding corpse and fix it up and it should be really good, then.  (All my books are, at some point, Frankenstein creatures, sewn together parts and repaired viscera.)

    Also this morning I got an email from BenBella.  They’ve put up my essay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide anthology they did, The Anthology At The End of the Universe, and you can read it here .  It’s a strange piece, even for me, but I had a good time writing it and every time I read it I think “my, I was reasonably clever with this, wasn’t I?”  Or something like that.  I’d like to think Douglas Adams would be pleased with it.

    I’m going to go upstairs now and read.  I get to rest now.  Tomorrow I can print the manuscript and start cleaning my office.

    Oh goodie.

  • Avatar

    Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore).  I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.

    Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored.  Visually, this is a stunning achievement.  But that’s what everyone is saying.  It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen.  Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high.  This was neither.  And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements.  Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized.  Cool stuff.  Real gosh wow.

    The biology is problematic.  You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth.  Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger.  It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much.  Dinosaur analogs.  Most of them apparently four-legged.  But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats.  How does that play out in evolutionary terms?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble.

    How then do you evolve humanoids out of this?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too.  This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.

    Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched.  I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best.  Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered).  If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings” all mixed in.  There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.

    The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing.  All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date.  And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed.  The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke.  We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…

    The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.

    In this case, Unobtanium.

    Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.

    Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems  and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.

    Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.

    Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work.  With a bit more imagination.  With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.

    Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues.  It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story.  Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…

    Why am I bothering to detail all this?  Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.

    End of rant.

  • 2009…Assessment

    Annual reassessments are dicey things.  If you have a terrific year, they can sound like bragging, which would be nice for a change.  If you had an absolutely lousy year, they sound like whining, something I do enough of as it is.

    On the other hand, they can be autobiographical in instances where the possibility of anyone (including yourself) ever doing an “official” biography is next to nil.  In this instance, honesty is called for, the kind most people rarely indulge in public.  It gives one pause to consider the responsibility latent in such an enterprise.

    But, as they say, it’s my blog and I’ll bloody well write what I want.

    I don’t have many secrets.  A few, none so dire as to be prosecutable.  But I do have things I don’t wish to share generally.  One, I should get off my chest right now so everyone understands from whence I speak in what follows.  Ever since I was a kid, the one thing I wanted to be was famous.  You keep that secret for the most part for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s pretentious.  Two, if you fail, you look silly.  Three, if you don’t fail, it sort of comes across anyway, so there’s no point in declaring it.

    It’s not in itself a worthy goal.  We all know people who are famous for being famous—Paris Hilton comes to mind, although she did try to beef that up with some media choices that, well, anyway there’s Paris Hilton.  I think there were (and are, but at the moment I don’t know who they might be because I frankly don’t pay much attention anymore) people who got famous for something substantial and then continued being famous just because they were famous and never weren’t famous.  Truman Capote comes to mind, unfortunately.  I actually talked to people who had no idea he’d been a writer.  He was just that weird old guy with the hats and the high voice who snorted coke with other famous people at Studio 54.  This is not the sort of fame I wanted.  I wanted fame based on product, on work and effort, on stuff I made.  Photographs, paintings, music, but mainly writing.  I wanted, in fact, the work to be the famous part, with me sort of attached by the fact that it was my work.

    In any event, I am not famous.  Not widely.  Known, yes, but not so well known that I can rely on it for anything more than an occasional tip of the hat, as it were, so to speak, you know what I mean.  I can’t take it to the bank, an issue that presses any artist unmercifully from time to time.  You can’t keep making art if you can’t eat, house yourself, pay bills, etc and so forth.  Do we do it for the money?  You bet your ass.  Do we do it because of the money? Not at all.  If that sounds like a paradox, it’s not.  Dr. Johnson said anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool.  I choose to read that as the act of creating art of any kind has no rational basis, but that human beings are not at base rational creatures, so there is no insult or derogation in being a fool for art.

    But to do it publicly and not get paid…well, one should not carry one’s foolishness to the point of starvation.  Dr. Johnson may have considered himself a noble fool as far as that goes.

    I have not secured a new book deal.

    I have written book reviews, thus far for two venues—my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and an online mag called the Internet Review of Science Fiction.  The latter is becoming more reliable than the former.  The Post-Dispatch book section continues to shrink and aside from an essay requested of me this October past they’ve more or less stopped running my columns—which means I don’t get paid.  I had a couple month hiccup with IROSF, but they’ve just taken a new review so I hope to be back on track with them on a regular basis.  I need to find a few more paying review venues.

    I have sold no short stories.  I wrote (and rewrote, at request) one novella, but that has not been taken yet.  Part of the problem here is that I’ve been in Novel Mode for the better part of nine years and I just can’t seem to find my way back into short story mode.  I have a handful of short pieces from Back Then that still haven’t sold—don’t have a clue what’s wrong with them, if anything, it may just be a matter of taste, and that’s what makes this game so difficult and unreliable.  You can’t do a damn thing about Other People’s Taste.  But I’d like to haul my brain back into short story space eventually, because at one time I think I was fairly good at it.  I’m disappointed that, after a few invitations several years ago, no one has asked me for a story, so maybe I wasn’t all that good.  New anthologies are appearing, but I learn about them after they’ve been filled, so…

    I am working on a contemporary murder mystery.  (Still doing the genre jumping thing—since 2005 I have written a new space opera, an alternate history, a historical murder mystery/thriller, and now a contemporary MM, looking for something that will, you know, Sell.)  First draft is done, first rewrite nearly complete (just identified a whole thread that needs major repair, requiring the possible dumping of at least one chapter).  In the hopper?  Well…another big fat space opera that’s maybe tow-thirds done.  The sequel to the alternate history, half completed.  Assorted other projects in sketch form.  Once I finish the current project, I intend to rebuild my office and continue noodling on the alternate history sequel until Something Happens.

    There was the possibility of my getting a contract position at a university mentoring undergraduates in putting together submittable novels.  A friend of mine was fairly confident I could get on.  That fell through.  For whatever reason, I didn’t make the cut.  It does solve a problem—the work load appeared to be large, so the time thing regarding my own work would have been a factor.  But that will be a factor if I end up having to get a day job again (which is looking more likely).

    So did anything good happen this year?

    Sure.  I achieved some personal goals.  I’m still going to a gym, lifting weights.  At age 55 I reached (for the second time) my goal of bench pressing 225 lbs.  It’s an arbitrary goal, yes, but it has represented a psychological barrier to me since I started working out, and I made it.  I go three times a week and do a very full workout and I feel enormously good about that.

    I’ve started reading Dickens again.  This is a big deal for me.  I’d read several Dickens novels as a teenager (a few before I entered high school) and had thoroughly burned out on him.  Too much, too soon, or whatever, but I spent decades loathing him—unjustly.  I decided to get over it.  So I acquired a set of the Everyman’s Library edition of all his novels and set about reading them.  It will be fun.

    As I said in an earlier post (somewhere) I stepped down as president of the Missouri Center for the Book last April.  I had actually achieved every goal I set for myself with that position.  A lot of it was serendipity and some of it may not even be permanent, but we have a vital organization again (for the time being) and we’re about to select our second state poet laureate.  I turned the reins over into good hands and we’re moving apace with the few necessary things left dangling when I stepped aside.  I’m proud of the work I did.

    A very personal, though not private, set of accomplishments sort of garnish the year.  I finished my first historical novel back in March and sent it to my agent.  A departure, sure, but I think I have a solid idea for it and for a potential series.  It was very tiring but I’m proud of the result.  After completing it I attended a conference at Washington University, a symposium on Germaine de Staël.  Germaine figures in Orleans, the alternate history that has now been sitting at a publisher for three years now waiting on a decision.  (It has sat at another house for two years and a third has had it going on a year.  I have likewise experienced a similar hold-up with the last full-blown SF novel I wrote.)  The conference provided me with a number of academic contacts I may use when I get around to the third novel in that trilogy, which will be set back in the 1800s and feature de Staël through most of it.

    I’ve also completed the first draft of the contemporary murder mystery.  I’ve been hacking away at it for the last month.  I hope to have a final draft ready for submission by February.  This is my first attempt to write and complete something completely contemporary, completely non SFnal, and so far it feels pretty good.  Given the molasses slow sales progress on my others, I feel the need to expand my horizons.  Who knows, at some point I may be writing Louis L’Amour westerns.

    I just learned that one of my book review venues is closing down in February.  The Internet Review of Science Fiction has been running my pieces for over a year now, except for the last two months, but I’ll have a new one in the January issue.  My hometown newspaper seems to have stopped taking my reviews, which were all fantastic fiction anyway, something many newspapers continue to have an odd, uncomfortable reaction to.  So I’m back to looking for another market or two for reviews.

    Occasionally, I feel like entropy is having its way with me.  This is a wholly personal, utterly subjective impression, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.  But then I go to the gym and do what I do and walk out, sweaty and stressed, and can feel good about the fact that at 55 I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.  Perhaps this isn’t important in terms of all the rest of my goals, but it’s personally important to me.

    I’ve read some damn fine books this past year.  I just finished Iain M. Banks’ newest, Transition.  I enjoyed it immensely, but it is flawed in a way that none of his other novels have been.  He’s playing with superhero motifs and it feels like a cheat.  Ultimately, I’d have to say it’s a failure, but it is a fascinating exercise.

    China Mieville’s The City and the City is just plain impressive.

    Cyberbad Days by Ian McDonald is a short story collection set in his future India milieu, which comes from the novel River of Gods, which I have yet to read.  I’m way behind on some of my favorite writers and McDonald is at the top of my always-recommended list.  This collection is wonderful.  I also read Charlie Stross’s Saturn’s Children , which turns a number of classic SF motifs inside-out even while remaining true to its sources.

    I also read all three of the available volumes of Kay Kenyon’s new series from PYR, “The Rose and the Entire,” starting with Bright of the Sky.  A World Too Near and City Without End continue it and there will be a fourth volume this spring.  I was hugely impressed with the world-building.  She veers perilously close to a fantasy plot with destiny and fate and all that nonsense woven in, but never quite gets there, and in the near miss creates a compelling tale.  I’m looking forward to the last book.

    A smattering of other recommendations: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams, Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison, House of Windows by John Langan, Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Blindsight by Peter Watts, The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins…

    Those are the highlights.  The last reminds me that I’ve paid more than a little attention this past year to the Culture Wars over evolution.  Dawkins, Hitchens, and a handful of others (plus regular reading of P.Z. Meyer’s wonderful blog Pharyngula) serve to remind that the idiots and numbnuts are ever with us and sometimes they can seem so reasonable.  We find ourselves driven to continually defend territory already won, revisit arguments already made, and engage fools for the sake of those who have not yet committed to one side of the debate or the other.  If anything will destroy us it is the ambivalence, indifference, and inattention directed toward a firm grasp of the real and a commitment to the truth that allows for those who want neither truth nor freedom to argue persuasively that the future is one clothed in chains we should willingly don.  To stand pat and simply say repeatedly “You’re wrong” doesn’t work because that is the same tactic the deniers and scientific ostriches use.  But to make the argument work requires that the audience know a few things, and our current state of education in the United States often makes that seem a continually receding goal.

    I’m not sure I even want to get into the politics of the past year.  I am ever-so-grateful the Bush administration is gone and I am trying patiently to withhold judgment on Obama, understanding what a mess he has to deal with, but we have a Supreme Court that will be hearing cases this winter on whether the restraints we have placed on Big Money are constitutional and I fear that they will decide corporations really are the same as individuals.  In which case, as they used to say, Katy bar the door, the wolves will be out.  I am not sanguine.

    Somewhat more than a year ago, close friends of ours challenged us to Be Happier by a certain date in 2010.  I’m trying to decide if that will happen.  On the plus side, I am no longer working at a day job I came to loathe.  My health has improved as a result.  Donna’s hours at her job decreased, giving us more time together.  I have been writing steadily and I am quite pleased with the work.  We’ve managed to adjust to my lack of income and we’re physically comfortable.

    On the minus side?  I’m still waiting for a new book contract.  Without that, I don’t really know what will happen or how I will manage to be content much less happy.

    I was told categorically in a job interview that my lack of college makes me unhirable in any academic institution.  Not because I cannot do the work—the job in question which led to the conversation was one I could do practically without any preparation, in photography—but because they could not in good conscience market me to prospective students.  “How can we ask them to pay for a degree their instructor doesn’t have?”  Naturally, I think that is shortsighted and stupid—expertise ought to matter more—but we live in an age of markets and advertising and spin.  Most people I’ve spoken to over the course of the year are impressed by my credentials and abilities, they whistle in admiration, but they won’t hire me.  “What,” they seem to be saying, “would we do with a dancing bear?”

    So I’m exploring the possibilities of getting a degree.  There’s a way that it won’t take four years and a big loan.  In the meantime, though, I have little choice but to make my choice of careers work.  Do or die time.  Hence the murder mystery (and, possibly, the western).

    So it is, as usual, a mixed bag.  A toss up what will happen in 2010.  When I do this next December I hope to report huge successes and breakthroughs.  But I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, it won’t be anything expected.

    Happy New Year.  Be safe.