Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Readingless Writers—Not Right

    I’ve heard of this phenomenon, but never before encountered it directly.  Excuse me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the utter vapidity of this…

    I have a MySpace page.  Admittedly, I pay less attention to it these days in lieu of my Facebook page  (all these Pages…for such a functional Luddite, it amazes me I navigate these strange seas), but I do check it at least once a week.  I post a short blog there.  And I collect Friend Requests.

    I received such a request the other day from someone whose name I will not use.  Unless it’s from someone or something I recognize, I go to the requester’s page to check them out.  Saves on a small amount of embarrassment.  This person had a legit page.  Aspiring writer.  Claimed to be working on several short stories and a novel.  Great.  I’m all about supporting other writers.  Sometimes we’re all we’ve got.  But I scrolled down to the section where he lists his interests and find under BOOKS this:

    I actually don’t read to much but I do like a few. Twilight, Harry Potter, Impulse, Dead on Town Line, etc.

    I sat back and stared at that and the question ran through my head like a neon billboard, “How does that work?  Just how the hell do you want to be a writer and not like to read?”

    So I sent this person a message and asked.  I told him that to be a writer you have to love words, love stories…

    Well, here’s the exchange, sans names:

    Okay, you sent me a friend request, so I looked at your profile. It says you want to be a writer, but then under Books you say you don’t read much.

    How does that work? You want to be a writer you have to love words, you have to love stories, you have to love it on the page, and that means reading A LOT.

    You might just blow this off, but don’t. If you really want to be a writer, you must read. That’s where you learn your craft, sure, but more importantly that’s where you nurture the love of what you say you want to do.

    Either that, or you’re a poser.

    Apologies for the bluntness, but I am a writer and before that I was a reader. You can’t have one without the other.

    Mark

    REPLY:

    You don’t have to like both to be a writer. That’s a ridiculous thesis to be honest. That’s like saying that you have to like listening to someone else to you how their day was in order to tell them how your day was. It’s just true. Reading bores me, and prefer to witness a story as a much faster pace, eg. a Movie. Writing, however, doesn’t bore me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know why people always over complicate simple things like that.

    MY RESPONSE

    Well, good luck with that. It’s like being an auto mechanic and not liking cars. Or being a musician who doesn’t listen to anyone else’s music.

    Maybe someday you’ll get it.

    Mark

    You don’t have to like both to be a writer?

    Well, I suppose in the absolute strict sense of wanting to write things while disliking going through other people’s work, he’s right.  But that, it seems to me, is legitimate only insofar as a narcissistic indulgence.

    But a ridiculous thesis?  How do you even come to a notion of what it means to be A Writer without some affection for the product in general?  This is so alien to my experience, my way of thinking, that I’m still struggling to make sense of it.

    It only scans in one of two ways.  (A), it’s not that you want to be a writer.  Being a writer is hard work, it’s paying attention to all manner of triviality that goes into the making of Life, sorting it into piles of Meaning and Dross, and from that compiling and elucidating an observation that is relevant to strangers, because if you publish you have no idea who will read your words, and the viability of what you do must find a resonance with people you do not and will never know.  Being a writer is living through the word, through the paragraph, the scene, the story.  The way in which story operates—how it comes to be, how it is constructed, how it moves—can only be learned by responding to it yourself, both in life and on the page, but on the page is where the art happens, and you cannot learn how to do that unless you read, widely and deeply.  So it is not that you want to be a writer, you want to be an Author, someone with titles strewn beneath your name, who is adulated by the public, respected for what wisdom may be found in works you presumably did by some mechanism (but not, apparently, by actually being a writer).  You like the idea of being a writer, but having no idea what the purpose of it is, you cannot be one, only, if you learn the trick, an Author.

    Or (B) you are simply in love with the sound and look of your own voice on the page.  Nothing wrong with that, but unless you have some external input what you write will only be relevant to yourself.  It will be indulgent.  And it will have resonance to others only by accident—not because you are so different from anyone else, but because you have no notion how to convey your commonality.  It is a form of masturbation, and while that is legitimate, it is done in isolation, born out of a fantasy of connection and, in time, if it is all you do, an inability to touch anyone outside yourself.

    But what genuinely troubles me is the whole disregard—the blind ignorance—of what writing is all about.  It is an art and if you cannot respond to the art you cannot do it, not so that it means much to anyone else.  It is, to stretch a metaphor from the previous sentence, like having sex with someone you don’t much care to spend any time with.  You like the orgasm, but you don’t want to be bothered with other people and their desires and needs.  It’s selfish, true, but it’s also tragic, especially if you then go and pose as a Great Lover.

    We do have a generation (and I’m using that term to define an age bracket—this group includes people from 10 to 50) that is enamored of film.  That’s where it is for them.  But a lot of flawed and failed films get made and often—not every time—but often the failure is because someone doesn’t read and has no idea what it is that good writing conveys.  It begins with the word, but they want to bypass that.

    Why?  I have a theory, of course.  Because it’s hard work to make the translation from words on a page to images in the mind.  Most of the people I know who do not read for pleasure—read fiction for pleasure, I should say—seem incapable of running the story in their imagination.  The words do not make pictures for them, do not open vistas of the imagination, do not convey the essence of character.  They’re just words on a page.  This is sad and I think a failure of education on a basic level.

    But it’s sadder still when these sorts then try to do film.  Or fail to do film.

    I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it till I have no more breath with which to say it—reading is fundamentally different from almost any other form of entertainment (the closest is radio drama) because it is interactive and participatory.  You must do the work of creating the images suggested on the page in your own mind.  It is a trick best learned young, but it is a trick that will give us the stars, because the imagination is a living thing that must be nourished from both within and without. If you cannot envision, you cannot build.

    There are many reasons to read and I was encouraged more this year than ever before to learn, via and NEA report, that reading in America had increased substantially for the first time since they’ve been keeping track in 1982.

    But you run across these bizarre confluences from time to time and you wonder how this happened?  I can live with the idea that there are people bored by reading.  But then to be told that these same people want to be writers baffles.  If reading bores them one can only assume that what they write will be boring—because they’ll have no clue how it can be otherwise.

  • The Bubble and Warehouse 13

    I just finished watching the new show on SyFy called Warehouse 13.  I enjoyed it, it was a good ride, even though they clearly went after the X-Files crowd with this one.  It could be worth a few hours to see where they go with it.  They took the endless warehouse from Indiana Jones, added some National Treasure grace notes, stirred in a dollop of Muldur and Scully, and introduced a bit of humor.  That last is very important, because when you have a premise that is this borderline, taking it too seriously is risking alienating a lot of audience.  The main reason the X-Files worked was the mood, the color, the textures that Carter wove into it, and he played the conspiracy theory game like a master.  But for me, it got very old very fast.

    The problems with the X-Files were manifold and manifest.  The biggest one was Scully.  She was the dumbest “scientist” I’d ever seen on television or read in fiction.  To remain so obdurately unseeing through all that she was put through required zero imagination in the character, zero sense of humor, and probably some sort of serial fixation or related pathology.  If they’d played that up it might have worked, but for pity’s sake she was just dense.  And therefore unbelievable.

    The other problem with it was the profundity of the secrets ultimately being kept.  It worked well when Muldur was just going through a bunch of old case files no one wanted to tackle because they led to bizarre places.  Kept modest like that would have allowed the concept to work on the fringe, where it started out, and could have been very entertaining.  But when it became this all-encompassing, “the aliens have been here and we are in league with them” kind of schtick, it became ridiculous.

    Because they were trying to keep it consistent with mimetic fiction.  They were trying to convince us that the world really is this way, only we don’t know it.  They tried to make it mainstream.

    Doesn’t work.  Fringe stuff has to stay on the fringe.  Now you can use the premise that what’s on the fringe is really there, but it’s kept on the fringe, and the agents in charge are tasked with keeping the rest of us from knowing it, and in so doing keep all this weird shit away from everyone.  You build a bubble attached to the “real world” and populate it with fun plots and wild extrapolations. but it doesn’t have to bear the burden of supporting itself interwoven with the rest of the world.

    Which one can do as well, but not at series length.  A single movie will work.  A novel, a short story.  Once you extend the concept into multiple seasons, you run into problems.

    The Warehouse 13 people aren’t making that mistake.  They’ve created their bubble and there is a conduit attaching it to the real world, but it is not in the real world.  The two agents are tasked with removing the weird stuff and quarantining it in South Dakota.  That will work.

    They will, certainly, imply that what is secreted in the warehouse has, in one way or another, over time, here and there, now and then, affected the real world, and that’s cool, too, but with the conceit that the three habitues of the warehouse are supposed to bottle this stuff up we are not burdened with the implausibilities and inexplicabilities of having the government know about this stuff and attempting to use it.

    And keeping everything looking like it still does when we step out our front door.

    The way science fiction would work in that instance would be to set the show in the future and posit that everything is now different.  It would not then be burdened with selling the audience that this is “our” world, but a world yet to come.  Suspension of disbelief proceeds apace then without fear that some major difficulties with the audience b.s. detector will come into play.

    Part of this problem is also with what I call the Escalation Problem, which has been part of science fiction almost from day one.  Look at, say, E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensmen.  Each succeeding book—indeed, each succeeding chapter—required a bigger bang than the last.  It was almost a Hollywood approach—to feed the expectations of the audience, the special effects have to keep getting bigger, wilder, more impressive, almost to the point where the storytelling and plot become little more than vehicles for the next cool thing.  Smith could match his plots and ideas to his effects, so it wasn’t a disaster, but today, especially in television, this is a Big Problem.  It leads to escalations of the absurd in many instances.  It leads to cul-de-sacs out of which the writers cannot write.

    But it’s a real disaster when  stories are set in the given world, the mundane world as it were.  Because eventually you have to explain, subtextually if nothing else, why the world hasn’t changed when the tv is turned off and we turn on the news.

    Hence the bubble.

    I’m looking forward to seeing a few more episodes of this show.  I like the premise (such as it is) and I love Saul Rubinek.  He’s one of the better character actors working today.  For a treat, you should see his portrayal of Lon Cohen in the Timothy Hutton Nero Wolfe’s.

    So, with a caveat or two, I’ll give Warehouse 13 my blessing.  As if it needs it.  Let’s just hope they can keep it on track.

  • A New Short Story!

    I finished a new short story.

    Why is this worth commenting on?  Well, because I haven’t actually finished a new short story in several years.  I think the last one was in 2004.

    When I start really cranking on novels, back in 2000, they swallowed so much time and, frankly, gave me the illusion that I had finally “made it”—I’d all along wanted first and foremost to be a novelist, not a short story writer—that my short fiction muscle atrophied.

    I’ve published about 50 short stories.  I know well respected writers with Big Names who haven’t published that many short stories.  I actually got fairly good at it and I look at my oeuvre now and I’m damn proud of those stories.  Some of them, I think, are pretty good.

    But inadvertantly I let go of the skill when it seemed I’d be doing novels, like I wanted to.

    Well.  I’ve actually missed being able to do short fiction and it would be nice to resurrect that part of my career since it seems that my novel career is in limbo.  No rejections, mind you, but no acceptances, either.  I can only do so much.  It would be nice to sell a couple of short stories now and then, just to keep up my presence.

    So a couple of weeks ago I had a remarkable event.  An appreciation from someone over something I wrote, and the someone was one of my… I don’t want to say idols, because I don’t idolize anyone anymore, but…was one of those for whom my respect is enormous.  It gave me a bit of an unconscious kick in the pants and I started working on a short story for which I had the opening scene done long ago, but no clue how to end it.  This is not abnormal.  I’ve had short stories take as long as four years to be finished. It sounds cracked, I know, but these things sometimes just can’t be rushed.

    Well, I say I’ve finished it.  That is to say I have a first draft, and it is an ugly, nasty thing to behold.  It will require a lot of work on the rewrite and even then it is not going to be a cuddly story by any means.  It is at heart a nasty piece of work.  Those are often the hardest kind, because you need to sell them, and people don’t often like to be mugged by a story.

    So it may be that this will be one of those that will not sell.  No matter.  I finished the sucker, that’s what counts.  If it remains unsold for long enough, I may post it here just to get it out.  But for the moment, today, I mark it as a Good Day.

  • No Excuse

    Generally speaking, I don’t like to criticize books.  Tim Powers told us at Clarion that a sale negates all criticism.  That may be more true with fiction (though I reserve the right to privately diss any book that’s badly done, regardless) but when it comes to nonfiction, I find it inexcusable.

    I’ve been slogging—slogging, mind you—through a history of the rise of the Spanish Empire under Fernando and Isabel, the period during which the New World (?) was discovered by Europeans and Spain became the pre-eminent power on the global scene.  The book is called Rivers of Gold and it was penned by one Hugh Thomas, published in 2003.  I’m finding it virtually unreadable.

    Partly this is a style issue.  The prose are flat, lifeless.  He makes the mistake of introducing casts of characters in one-paragraph lumps, as if the average reader is going to remember all these people, many of whom do not seem to matter in later parts of the narrative.  We are given chunks of delightful detail about some things (the make-up of Columbus’s crews on both the first and second voyage, which is very telling about the geopolitics of the day) and the rather revolutionary nature of Fernando’s and Isabel’s co-rule (for it was genuinely a partnership) and then little about other things (like the ultimate disposition of the Muslim populations after the fall of Granada and what happened to their libraries, which directly impacted the rest of Europe).

    But these are small quibbles.  Thomas seems to have a bias toward Christianity, but he is clearly restraining himself throughout and attempting to be even-handed, and largely succeeds (sincere mourning for what became of the Jews).  He orders the events well, so that we see the relevance of Fernando and Isabel adhering to Law rather than acting as autocrats and their background and education as it affected their judgement concerning what Columbus found and what his enemies told them.

    But the writing is…dull.

    Obviously, there was a mixture of motives.  An economic purpose is certain.  The monarchs knew that, after the conquest of Granada, they would lose money in the short-term…It would be silly to neglect what might be another source of income.  Cabrero, Santangel, Pinelo, and other Genoese bankers would have taken up this position with the King and Queen.

    A second motive was a desire to outmanoeuvre the King of Portugal…In the fifteenth century as in the twentieth, rulers allowed their imperial claims to be affected by what their neighbours were thinking.  (pg 87 & 88)

    After three or four pages of that, I find myself falling asleep.  Perhaps that is an unfair criticism, perhaps others do not find such lines quite so soporific, but if one is to learn from a text one should be able to take it in without the brain shutting down from the drone of seeming indifference.

    On the part of the editor if not the author, for heaven’s sake.  “…would have taken up this position…”?

    There is material in this book which I would like to know.  I bought the book for a reason.  But I find that I must sit in uncomfortable positions in order to keep my attention focused, that if I recline or rest against soft pillows, Morpheus descends too soon for the experience to be valuable.

    As a comparison, I’m reading another history, this one of the French and Indian Wars—called, appropriately enough The French and Indian War—by Walter R. Borneman.  Published in 2006, this is written with rigor, attention to detail, and a lively, engaging voice that took me zipping along the first 50 pages in short order, with a satisfying increase in my knowledge of the events leading up to and the beginnings of a very complicated period of history.

    Edward Braddock—the soldier used to giving orders—arrived in Virginia and proceeded to do just that, managing in the process to alienate almost everyone he encountered.  Braddock immediately went to Williamsburg to confer with Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie and then summoned governors De Lancey of New York, Shirley of Massachussetts, Morris of Pennsylvania, and Sharpe of Maryland to meet with them at Alexandria.  Rather than ask the governors’ cooperation and assistance, Braddock demanded, indeed expected it.  That attitude didn’t go over very well with anyone.

    “We have a general,” wrote William Shirley’s son, also named William, “most judiciously chosen for being disqualified for the service he is employed in almost every respect.”  Assigned to General Braddock as his secretary, the younger Shirley would have cause to feel Braddock’s inadequacy all too personally within a few weeks.

    Perhaps I’m showing my bias, but I find that infinitely more fluid, insightful, and engaging than the Thomas.

    But they are about such different periods, one might say!  Yes, they are, but the writers are not.

    I suppose this is what makes one writer “better” than another, the ability to engage, to draw the reader in, to bring the subject to life.

    I complain about this here because I’ve been working through a variety of history books of late in preparation for a new novel (a couple of new novels) and while I’ve encountered, as usual, a range of styles and varying levels of what might be called Accessibility, I find that across a spectrum of authors the ability to tell the story is what makes the book worth reading and what makes it readable.  This is not a side issue.

    We complain all the time about students coming out of school with less than adequate knowledge, pitiful grasps on subjects, and ill-prepared for anything other than an almost assembly-line life as a career.  Many factors contribute to this.  But one, I recall vividly, though I did not quite realize it at the time, is the dudgeon paucity of style in school texts.  I have seen this complaint registered elsewhere, by people much more qualified than I am to assess such things.  School text books are more often than not chosen for their inoffensiveness rather than their ability to impart knowledge.  The duller, simpler, unemotional texts have a better chance of being purchased by school boards than books that engage their topics in lively—dare I say, relevant—manners.  As if a text which might elicit pleasure from a student cannot possibly be “suitable.”

    Obviously, this sets a standard.

    But such “liveliness” may forgo objectiveness for the sake of engagement!  The author may be interjecting biases for the sake of enlivening the story—and this is not a story, it is history!

    To which I say, nonsense.  History damn well is a story.  And if you’re worried about objectivity, then read more than one book on a subject.  Viewpoint is essential, because history is not irrelevant to the present, it is essential.  The confusion with which so many face tomorrow is at least partly a consequence of their ignorance of what had gone before.

    And if they can’t get through the turgidity of approved texts, no wonder the level of historical knowledge and perspective is so low.  It seems occasionally as if the purpose of school is to deaden the mind, reduce to average the inconvenient possibilities of a questioning public, to create a vapidity of general awareness.  (What it really is about is trying to move x-number of students as efficiently as possible through a system that is overburdened by oversight demands, paperwork, accountability assessments, and budget meetings, which take their collective toll on class time and the ability of a teacher to engage students meaningfully.  The negative consequences of all this are, sadly, little more than byproducts of an unspoken social assumption that very little of this stuff means anything against one’s ability to make money.)

    If I were a history teacher, here is what I would do.  I would find ten books on a given period and assign a different one to groups of three or four in the class.  Then we could all discuss what we learn from those texts over the course of a semester.  there would be a master template giving the principle elements of the period—names, dates, etc—but the classroom activity would be a controlled argument over differing viewpoints.

    That’s ideal, of course.  It would be nice.  Unlikely to happen, though.

    In lieu of that, I’d like to see a policy of adopting text books based on a community response to a given selection with one major criterion—no more dull books!  The school board should hand out copies to a number of citizens and let them decide which are the best written, most readable—most fun!  Because if there is one thing we have come to learn about education it is that if the students aren’t having some fun with the work, they won’t learn.

    Hell, given the state of prose in some of these books, they can’t learn.  All they can do is fight to stay awake.

  • Plans…

    The book I’m working on is the second of a trilogy.  Back when I became seriously engrossed in science fiction—the second time, not the first; the first was at age 10 or 11, when everyone is supposed to fall headfirst into this wonderful amalgam of weirdness— in the late 70s, early 80s, there was a running joke in the field that for a bunch of science geeks, SF writers couldn’t count because we didn’t seem to know that there were only three books in a trilogy.  I think it was Piers Anthony who began getting joked about this way.

    I never intended to write series.  I have a problem with most series work, even reading it.  I get bored with the same characters in x number of successive novels.  I have attempted from time to time to write a number of short stories with the same characters, but it has never gotten past two stories.  And when I originally constructed the Secantis Sequence it was with the idea that the books shared a common background but no common characters.

    (It turned out that I did have one character that I intended to carry over, Sean Merrick.  There are in boxes three complete Sean Benjamin Merrick novels which will likely never see the light of day.  In a very minor way, minor, mind you, he is my Lazarus Long character.)

    As time has advanced and I find myself trying to figure out how to write something that will both sell and stay in print, I am coming inexorably to the point of committing serious series.  Much as I like and usually prefer to have novels as stand-alones, especially as I get older, it is equally clear to me that Readers like consistency.  It’s a relationship thing.  You meet someone, you have dinner, take in a show, the conversation is really good, and later…well, readers have grown weary of one-book-stands, apparently, and like to settle down.  At least it’s not a monogamous desire.

    So I have devised works of late that will go to sequels and/or series.

    With the same characters.

    Orleans should it ever be published will introduce everyone to Claire St. Griffe, who is what I have termed a voyant—one who can shift her consciousness into another’s mind.  I have a nifty skiffy rationale for this, it is not fantasy, but it is just barely SF.  This is an alternate history as well and I finished it a few years ago.  It has been seeking a publisher since.

    Having gone recently (as reported here) to a conference concerning a central character to this trilogy, I decided upon the eve of the day job’s end to start working on book two.  Oculus is well under way.  The third volume will be called Orient and the working title for the whole project is The Oxun Trilogy.  Have fun looking that one up and wondering how it will tie in.  If I handle it right, it’ll be cool.

    Now, I have it in mind to establish a premise wherein I could conceivably write more Claire St. Griffe novels if the need arises—like a publisher waving vast sums of money under my nose—at which point the newer books will comprise a different series.  Same character, different background.

    Meantime, there is the historical I finished last year, The Spanish Bride.  Now I fully intend that this be a real honest-to-god series, with several novels, and I have the hubris to believe I could pull this off.  Main character is a man named Ulysses Granger who is a (secret) officer in the Continental Army.  After the Revolution is concluded, he moves to St. Louis to find out who murdered his best friend there three years earlier.

    This book is also finished and looking for a publisher.  Should it sell, I have the outlines for the next two.  I could do ten novels in this series, there is certainly enough historical material at hand to do twenty.

    I have just put a proposal together for another trilogy.  I don’t want to talk about that just now, though, so forgive me.

    The Secantis Sequence?  Sure, I have outlines for two more.  I always did intend doing a direct sequel to Peace & Memory, a diptych so to speak.

    What would all this do to the stand-alones I have in my files waiting to be written?

    Don’t know.  It’s a problem I’d like to have just now, being committed to two trilogies and a possible long term series.  I have brief synopses for at least three stand-alone novels.

    Right now, I have to admit, I could happily jettison any one or four of these plans for the one or two that get picked up and work.

    As I said, I’m well into Oculus and having a ball with it.  I’m writing this just now as sort of a record of my state of mind.  Right now, career-wise, I am not where I want to be, but I’m doing the part I like to do.  I have a library full of books to read and the one I’m writing is about to require that I read at least two of them I haven’t yet touched for background.  Paris in the 1920s.  Hmmm, he hmms as he rubs his hands together.  Crazy stuff.  It is, you know, they were crazy people back then.

    So I’m blathering.  It’s my blog, I get to blather.

    Tomorrow I finish chapter seven.  Then, the world!  Bwahahaha!

    (Clears throat to indicate abrupt self-consciousness.)

    Anyway, have a good one, whatever it is.  More later.

  • Work In Progress

    I’ve been unemployed now for just over two weeks.  Gotta say, Ilike it.  Not the lack of money (I am after all applying for unemployment compensation) but the fact that I’m not going in to a smelly day job five days a week.  The fact that I’ve got a few hours per day more to work on what I consider important.

    And I have been.  We found out back in 1995 to 1997 that I could manage my time in a disciplined manner.  I wrote, or finished, three novels in those two years, as well as about twenty short stories that mostly sold.  Not all and not soon enough to keep me unemployed, hence for the last 12 years I’ve been toiling at a job I did not want and came eventually to loathe.  (Not, I hasten to add, the fault of the job.  I just didn’t want to be doin’ it, y’know?)

    I do have this little problem of no income…

    I know what I want to have happen, but the only thing I can currently do is to work at my craft and bide my time and, frankly, hope someone decides I’m worth taking a chance on.  It is indeed absurd that I have ten published novels under my belt and can’t currently get a contract.  Did I say absurd?  It is ridiculous.  It is the butt end of a cosmic joke for which the punchline is the heat death of justice, an irony so dense it is a short way till light cannot escape, a joyless black comedy filled with unfunny counterpunches to leave Mike Tyson baffled and depressed.

    Yet I slog on.

    It may turn out to be that I’m really not good enough, that what I do doesn’t hold up in some unfathomable way that keeps getting me passed over.

    Nah.  The worst you could say is that I’m not “commercial” enough.  Don’t know what to do about that.  You write what’s on your mind and in your heart at the moment or you hang it up and go do journalism.

    But I am writing like a fiend now.  Two weeks, I am on chapter six of Oculus, the sequel to Orleans (which damn well better sell now, as there will be two books in the series), and I have personal proof of the power of the unconsious—or the subconscious—or whatever it is, that which Damon Knight called “Fred” and refers to the pre-conscious machinations of the mind working on a problem absent one’s full attention or even awareness.  I’ve sort of experienced this before.  Anyway, I wrote a pretty long synopsis for this book about seven, eight months ago, and apparently the hindbrain has been working on it ever since.  Because when I opened the file, wrote CHAPTER ONE across the top of the first page, and began writing, well, it just went.  It’s going.  I haven’t had the usual hiccups yet.  Knock on polystyrene, perhaps I won’t.  I’m nearly 25,000 words into it, which will count as roughly one fifth of the completed novel.  In two weeks!

    I am encouraged.  This may well work out.  Stay tuned.

  • Compassionate Fangs

    Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison.  I’ve watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it.  Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called “Harlan Ellison” and I think he’s spot on.  Harlan—he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name—is very much part and parcel of his work.  You don’t get the one without the other.

    Which is not to say the work doesn’t stand on its own.  It does, very much so.  No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it…well, however they found it.  Anything, I imagine, but trivial.  If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth.

    He’s fascinating to watch.  Sometimes it’s like watching a tornado form.

    Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now.  This seems incredible to me, sobering even.  He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age.  The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he’s just as sharp as ever.

    I have been in his actual presence on two occasions.  In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result.  He dominated a good part of one day for us.   The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor.  On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn’t On.  That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, “off duty” and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic.  And it was a great pleasure.  It is easy to see why people are drawn to him.

    He is something of a contradiction.  He is a fine writer.  Even if one doesn’t care for the subject matter or even finds his style abrasive, it is clear to anyone paying attention that this man can write.  He deserves to be read.  At the same time, he is a class A, high functioning extrovert, one able to extemporize brilliantly and fluently on a wide range of subjects, and exhibits all the traits writers by common apprehension are thought to lack.

    He is also dramatically confrontational.

    In many ways, he reminds me of my father, who is also a man who brooks no foolishness, suffered fools not at all, and generally always said what was on his mind.  Harlan seems to be less controlled so more of his mind gets said than many people can stand.

    The weekend of Readercon way back when  gave me a chance to observe him working and I noticed that—also like my father—Harlan is a 110 percenter.  That is, he gives more than he really has to give, especially when he’s fulfilling an obligation, in this case the duties of the guest of honor.  I suspect he’s like that in his personal life, too, and it certainly shows in the work.  Which also means that when his efforts are in some way betrayed, his disillusionment is also great.  I’ve watched my father end friendships, lose deep interests, and walk away from whole careers because something soured it for him and because he had committed so much of himself there was no room to shrug off the slight and go on from there.   He engaged too deeply, more deeply than the person or object could return or could suspect, and when the break came there was no space for backing off and starting over.

    In Harlan’s case—as, indeed, with my father—the work is and was paramount and would not have been done with as much passion and precision if they were otherwise.

    As far as I’m concerned, Dreams With Sharp Teeth could have been another hour longer.  There are details, aspects of his life and his work, that I would have liked to hear more.  Harlan did not live the life of a writer—he lived the life writers are sometimes said to have lived, and a few did, but most are ill-suited to living.  Hemingway sailed boats, hunted lion, led men in war, boxed, took lovers, and did it all with the kind of gusto that fits someone a writer would write about, not the writer himself.

    Harlan marched with King to Selma.

    I am in no way suggesting he and Hemingway are the only ones to have done such things, certainly not, but they are among a handful who are known for those things as much as for the work.  That takes a lot of presence, a lot of person, a lot of spirit.

    In a way, one could describe Harlan as a perfect storm.  The man matches the words, and the words are…

    I defy you to read Jeffty Is Five or Shatterday or The Whimper of Whipped Dogs or All The Lies That Are My Life or The Executioner of the Malformed Children or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream or Shattered Like A Glass Goblin and come away unmoved, unaffected, for that moment unchanged.   One Life Furnished In Early Poverty is an homage, a justification, an epitaph, and an elegy all rolled into something that also contains enormous glee and childish wonder.

    Or go find his two volumes of television criticism, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, books which were the objects of actual censorship (something that never happens in this country, of course) under Nixon.  Though they were written and published in the Sixties, the observations are fresh and if anything more relevant today.

    One thing that I’ve always found interesting, and didn’t quite understand until I met the man and saw him before an audience, is that he is the only writer I know who consistently appears on the covers of his books.  Usually in marvelous illustrations by artists like Barclay Shaw or Leo and Diane Dillon, but consistently enough to be remarkable.  Once you see him and listen to him, you begin to understand.

    Anyway, I recommend the film.  And if you haven’t read any of Harlan’s work, do so before you die.  He really should be up there with Pynchon and Mailer, Vidal and King, Burgess and Hemingway, and others.  In my mind, he is.  He’s that good.

  • Hands Across the Water (water…)

    Usually when I am contacted by, or have to contact, someone in India, they wish to sell me something or I am trying to get some kind of tech support that often doesn’t work.  This is the first time I’ve ever been contacted by someone in India who wishes to do me a service.

    I received this email this morning:

    Hi Mark,
    I am Mohit from flipkart.com, we are an online book store in INDIA.We have your books on sale http://www.flipkart.com/remains-mark-w-tiedemann/1932100490-m2x3fd1ajb
    It would be great if you could put our link www.flipkart.com on your website and blog www.marktiedemann.com , as it would facilitate the sales of your book in INDIA.

    Yours sincerely,
    Mohit kapoor
    www.flipkart.com

    That’s nice.  First of June, first Monday of my new attempt at freedom, I thought, why not?  I may post the link on my sidebar.  For now, it’s kind of cool to see that I have a book on sale in India.

  • Last Week

    Today is the first day of work for the last week I will be employed, at least employed at Advance Photographics.  I have, as you might imagine, mixed feelings.

    Interesting phrase, that.  Mixed feelings.  If they were truly mixed, mashed together as it were, would we be aware that there are several feelings, some conflicting?  Wouldn’t it be one feeling of a particular alloy?

    Be that as it may.  I have mixed feelings.  I have never particularly wanted to work there.  As is my habit, I have tried to make the best of it.  I’ve liked most of the people with whom I’ve worked there over the last 12 years.  I mean no disrespect to any of them when I say that I’d rather not have worked there long enough to know them.

    Not that I didn’t get a lot out of it.  Advance paid off our house.  I was able to continue doing photography on some level by using the place as my own lab.  I’ve made my first halting steps into digital photography from there.  It made possible certain things that were clearly not possible otherwise.

    But it is a testament to failure on my part in many other ways.  Just the fact that I have been forced to keep that job means that I have not succeeded at the thing I want to do, which is writing.  For a few short years, I thought my goal was in hand.  Between 2000 and 2003, I thought I was on my way.  But then everything collapsed, and the sudden spurt of novels appearing between 2000 and 2005 came to an end, as did two of my publishers, and the third one did not make enough money on my last novel to entertain buying anymore.  Those of you who may read this blog regularly are well aware of all that.  I made a nice little piece of extra change during those years and it helpd in many ways, but until the house was paid off it was never enough to allow me to quit a job that I had come to despise.

    Not for any reason other than what it symbolized to me.  Oh, like any job it had good days and bad, and occasionally I was really pleased with the work I did.  But the fact remained I didn’t want to be there.

    But I am not a quitter.  It’s not in my nature.  If I accept a task, take on a responsibility, I may not perform it as well as others, but I do not quit.  Sometimes to my regret.  But this is part of who I am.

    So I have stuck it out to the end.  Digital overwhelmed the wet-process, “traditional” photofinishing industry, bringing in changes much faster than we expected.  That stove in a goodly part of our business, certainly reduced my job.  Till the point where what used to require six to eight people now took two, one of them part time.   Nevertheless, we were holding our own, according to the boss, until October, when the economy really went into the crapper.  It was obvious to me what was happening, but I wasn’t going to quit.  I was curious to see how long this could last.

    When Advance opened its doors in downtown St. Louis, we had at one time 23 or 24 employees, all busy, most working overtime, with one or two part time people besides.  We had a fulltime delivery driver on staff, two salesmen, three color printers, two black & white technicians, etc etc etc.  Including the boss, there are now five of us, and only one of us is getting any overtime—the digital tech.

    So this coming Friday is the last day.  I intend drawing unemployment and writing for a year or so.  I don’t know what is going to develop.  I have plans, of course.  For one thing, paradoxically, I’ll be putting on my very first gallery exhibit in July.  Fortunately I have all the prints already.  We’ll see how that goes.

    I have projects mapped out, so it won’t be a question of not knowing what work on.  But the question of how to sell it remains.  I’ve recently had a long conversation with a close friend about that, how the concern over money can utterly sabotage what you do, what you try to do, always second-guessing yourself, thinking oh, this is crap, this won’t sell, and not finishing or even starting on something that very well may be just fine, except that you’re looking at it with the wrong lens.  To a certain extent, I’ve never really had those kinds of doubts about my novels—I’m not doing anything so outre and experimental that no market exists, but that only makes it more frustrating for me, wondering why the books won’t sell.  Perhaps they’re too ordinary, but I doubt that as well.

    But as I said, I am not a quitter.  In this regard, I may be exhibiting a profound intellectual fault, not being able to recognize the futility in something.  But I doubt that, too.

    I may post something this coming weekend on the Last Day.  Stay Tuned.

  • De Stael Conference

    This past weekend I attended an intensive three-day workshop on the apparently much debated, highly-regarded Germaine de Stael.  I audited this because Stael (pronounced, according to these folks, Stahl) is going to be a central figure in my alternate history.

    Well, not “going to be”, she is, but so far she’s been mostly in the background.  In the second book, she will be onstage, although in slightly bizarre, nonhistorical form (this is SF after all), but in the third book she will be central—my protagonist will be in her entourage from 1797 until her death in 1817.

    Germaine de Stael nee Necker was at one time one of the most popular and well known intellectuals in Europe.  After the fall of Napoleon, the quip was made that “there are three powers in Europe now—Russia, England, and Madame de Stael.”  When I began researching her, I had no idea.  Never heard of her.  I was told this weekend that in France, she is still widely regarded and talked about, but here in the U.S.A. I’d never heard of her until an odd paragraph in a Napoleonic biography—which did little to illuminate just how significant this woman was.  (I’m particularly annoyed at the short shrift Simon Schama gave her in his otherwise marvelous history of the French Revolution, Citizens.) Well, this is the sort of thing that feminist writers are always complaining about, and rightly so.  Napoleon’s ultimate fall can be directly laid at Germaine de Stael’s feet—she brokered the Grand Alliance that defeated him (the first time).

    (She was instrumental in keeping the Republican spirit alive even in the face of Napoleon’s destruction of everything the Revolution had aimed at achieving—and largely missed, to be sure.  She was a networker par excelence and a philosopher of the first water.)

    In that she will be a major character in my trilogy, I wanted to know as much about her as I could find out, and through the machinations of internet serendipity I found a blog that led me to a woman who is a specialist on Stael and  got me invited to attend this conference, which fortuitously was held at Washington University right here in my home town.  It may be two years before the material I gathered will be required, but the conference—only the Second International one, the last held 11 years ago—was now, so I had to go.

    Very worthwhile, extremely informative, I have a wealth of data to work on and several contacts who will gladly answer emails, etc etc, and maybe even one or two new friends.  My head feels stuffed to bursting.  My thanks to the co-organizers, Karyna Szmurlo from Clemson University in South Carolina and Tili Boon Cuillee here at Washington University.

    I say all this up front because I want it clearly established that 80% of this conference was worth the money and the time and I am delighted that I went.

    One problem.  And this is an academic problem.  It has always annoyed me in books, but this weekend I ran into it in lecture form and it just, well…

    At least four of the presentations and virtually all the direct quotes in the course of two and a half days of lectures were done in French.  Without translation.  I was apparently the only person out of about 35 or so attendees that could not speak or read French.  I did not make a fuss—what would be the point?—and I ended up blaming myself for never have acquired another language, especially when one lecture was conducted partly in Italian as well.  I missed what were evidently excellent talks through being hopelessly monolingual.

    But what really annoyed me was that in two or three of these instances, handouts were passed around containing the major quotes from the lecturers, and these were likewise all in French.  No translations.  I have the papers, I have at least three friends who can read them to me.

    As to the rest, well, like I say, it was excellent and I have much to work with.  So it’s a minor complaint, really.  I sat there, expression neutral (I hope), feeling stupid, and said nothing, then or later.

    This practice really annoys me in history texts.  I wonder if it is done that way in other languages—say, for instance, a book published in Brazil and written in Portugeuse, but with direct quotes in another language without benefit of translation.  I realize Americans are notoriously monolingual, but I doubt everyone everywhere with an interest in history is multilingual.  Making that assumption is, forgive me, rude.

    At the final banquet, we were treated to an address by another scholar who is working on a book about the French experience in North America, and he began the talk in French, and I thought  “shit, not again…”  But he switched to English after a few paragraphs and the rest of the speech was fine.

    The thing that really bothered me about not understanding the French parts?  I missed the jokes.  Sitting there, listening to the musical meanderings of the presenters, all of a sudden the room would erupt in laughter.  I didn’t get it.  Obviously.

    But.  I think now I ought to go to work on the alternate history.  I feel charged up now.

    What was also nice was the reception by these folks of the idea behind my novel.  You know, you’re never sure how that’s going to go over.  But generally, there was sincere interest and a little excitement.  Even the suggestion by one of the organizers that when I finished the project, perhaps I could come to a future conference and read from the novel.  Well.  Not too shabby.

    I am thoroughly mentally exhausted, though.  I am not a formal scholar and “keeping up” can be something of an effort—a lot of assumptions get made and acted upon in such a narrowly-self-defined group.  But I managed to “decode” enough that I kept up and even, finally, contributed a modest remark or two.  All in all, really great stuff.