Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • I Do Not Look Like This Anymore

    I’m a bit vain, I admit it.  I like looking…well, it’s hard to pin down.  I have never considered myself “good looking” by any popular standards.  I have my own and I have frankly never lived up to them quite.  But I have a care for my appearance, which drives me to the gym and to trim my beard and to dress well when I can.

    It’s a struggle against entropy.  It won’t destroy me to lose it, but to do my best without killing myself is important.  I’m not vain enough to do liposuction.  If my hair falls out, I’ll shave my head rather than wear a “laurel wreath.”  Mainly, I try to keep the muscle-to-fat ratio at an acceptable level, make sure my teeth are clean, and watch my posture.  Let the rest go where it may.

    I had this photograph done back in the mid-90s, when I thought I was on my way to being some kind of Big Time Writer.  I’ve used it a few times.  It is now quite dated.  The beard, for instance, is now almost all white.

    I can still get into the mesh shirt though…

    me-1995.jpgme-1995.jpg

  • To Explore Strange New Worlds….

    The number of stars discovered having planets in orbit has grown over the years since we figured out how to find them.  Mostly, though, the planets in question have been big Super Jovians, basically failed stars that, had they been a bit more massive, probably would have ignited and turn their primary into a binary or even trinary star system.  Smaller planets— say, like Earth or Mars—are by definition harder to find.

    But find one we have.  Check this piece at Panda’s Thumb.

    The possibilities inch toward probabilities that there is life—rich life, complex life—elsewhere, not just here.  This is a really cool time to be a science fiction fan.

    Or maybe not.  Once the fantasy becomes fact, will it have the same kick?  It’s a question prompted on a much smaller scale by SF stories that have dated badly.  Technology or even basic science has passed them by and rendered them incorrect, obsolete in their premises.  I’ve seen it suggested that such stories be treated as alternate history, which is a good way around some of the pitfalls.  A lot of Arthur C. Clarke falls into this category.  Most of the apocalytpic tales that had us living in ruins before the 21st Century.  Putting a date on the events in a story can have a detrimental effect in terms of its viability in the future.

    This doesn’t bother some people.  I have a hard time with it and I admit it’s a personal thing with me.  When I read a novel that was published in the 50s or 60s about events in the 90s and those events are, necessarily, wrong, my suspension of disbelief goes out the window.  But mainly if the events of the story are sufficiently large scale—like the Soviet Union winning the Cold War or the advent of a nuclear holocaust or a moonbase or major shifts in geopolitics.  If the story is personal and doesn’t require that kind of overall rearranging of the landscape, it works just fine.  But then, is it science fiction?

    Alternate history really would be a good way to view a lot of old SF.  The exploration of strange new worlds we never found…

    In the meantime, we have some real ones that have been found.  How cool is that?

  • Titles That Amazon Has Stripped of Sales Ranking

    A sample of some of the books that have been stripped of their sales ranking by Amazon’s (now disclaimed) Adult Content Policy:

    • Fiction:  E.M. Forster’s Maurice, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and books by Nicola Griffith, among others.
    • Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs:  Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, Dan Savage’s The Committment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, and Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote.
    • History: David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization, and Tin’s The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience.

    More books that have had their rankings stripped.  Regardless whether Amazon backs off of this, people ought to continue raging against them.  They’ll try something else in future if they think they got by without serious damage.

  • Look What Amazon.com Is Doing

    Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here’s their little explanation:

    “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

    Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

    What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone’s standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it.

    However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these:

    –Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)

    –Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances

    –and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

    These book sell very well, generally, so it’s obvious that there’s a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist—the vast majority of books—will be targeted. Why is this important? Because this will delete titles from amazon search engines. It will make a dent in writers’ incomes. It will render invisible Those Sorts of Books. This is 1950s Era censorship and it is a threat to livelihoods as well as the general public’s right to choose what to read.

    Here is a cogent article about this.

    What I want to say right here has to do with the whole notion of isolating Adult Content to appease the screeching of those who would defend us from our own choices. We see this time and again and it is always the same appeal to Family Values, often expanded with a plea to Protect the Children. I see billboards in certain parts of the country now that declare that Pornography Destroys Families. We are meant to hide that part of ourselves from any kind of public display in the name of some sort of imagined “purity” that must be preserved among children so that they aren’t “damaged” by early exposure to human sexuality.

    I’m tired of it. It’s absurd. Not that I think kids ought to be exposed to pornography—not at all—but the whole idea that adults do not have a right to indulge in adult things, without being ashamed of it, from fear that junior might see something he or she is too young to deal with. It does not proctect the children, it makes adults self-conscious, and it falsely assumes that Adult Content is about things none of us should indulge or admit to indulging. It is the age old game of trying to shame people into denying their own sexuality because some people can’t deal with their own.

    And in this instance it has serious consequences for writers and publishers. Amazon.com is an enormous source of income for the publishing industry. Along with the mega-chain booksellers, they have the power to influence the acquisition choices of publishers. Which means that something like this can have a direct impact on the kinds of books that get bought and published.

    This is an offensive against a wide range of subject matter, topics, authors, and sensibilities. Not to mention that it is hypocritically applied. There is a petition here.

    To be sure, we are not talking exclusively or even largely about pornography. We are talking about work that addresses topics that include matters of adult concern regarding sex. By rights, this kind of policy would once again cast Catcher In The Rye back into the shadows of censorship. Censorship.

    It is illegal when the government does it to an already published book. But this is private industry and they set policy any way they please.

    However the power of the purse ultimately is in the hands of the consumer. We have been in some ways tyrannized over the last three decades by the persistent sensitization of protecting children from adulthood. We have been inundated with the suggestion that the private proclivities of some adults are too odious to be revealed or publicly discussed. In the seventh grade I was caught in class reading Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers. The principle thought this was serious enough to call my mother in for a conference. He made it clear by his word choice and body language that he expected my mother to be appaled at my choice of reading material. Instead, she said that she never censored what I read and that if I couldn’t handle something I wouldn’t read it and she would appreciate it if in future he would not censor me.

    She was largely correct. Most of what I read in that novel then went right by me. I don’t advocate handing out Harold Robbins novels to 14-year-olds, but I believe our readiness to panic over such things is ill-advised. Better to discuss these things with kids rather than slap them down or, worse, pretend such books don’t exist. But most importantly, we have to stop behaving as if becoming and adult and embracing adult things is somehow a degradation. I have said before, quite simply certain things are just not for children.  Parents should deal with it.  I do not accept for an instant that the world ought to be ordered exclusively for their level.

    I will not say for their benefit, because people who engage in this kind of idiotic social engineering are not, by and large, doing it for the children—they’re doing for themselves, for what they think the world ought to be like. Using the children is just an excuse.

    I’m tired of it. I think we should all be tired of it.

  • Hand Made Art

    I’ve been going over the last few chapters I wrote by hand.  Ink pen, by a picture window, sunlight pouring in.  For some reason, with some projects, this works when I’m trying to make things real.  It doesn’t finish the process by any means, but when I take the time to break my paragraphs down and rewrite them in longhand, it seems to draw me into the world I’m describing.  Word choice becomes more precise because, dammit, it’s actually difficult to write this way, physically.  I never recall as a kid getting tired of writing with a pen (although I’m sure I must have when I got stuck with one of those godawful punishments “you will write a hundred time ‘I will not be contrary to the teacher’s arbitrariness.”) but I do now.

    When I get done with this part, I bring everything back to the computer and start entering the corrections, which then trigger other corrections and reimaginings.  I’ve solve a couple of plot points this way.

    And, of course, when the whole book is done, I print it out for Donna to hack to bits and this she does by hand with a red ink pen.  It all starts over, but by that point I have a coherent narrative and all this is just making if live and breathe.

    What gets fascinating sometimes is to be working on a description—for instance, my hero is fleeing for his life just now across the surface of the moon (yes, our moon, which is a place I never thought I’d set any of my fiction, because the moon had been used to the point of cliche so long ago, but there it is) and I have to place him visually in situ.  This demands a peculiar kind of attention.  I must put myself there and describe how it is.  Which is, in some ways, impossible—I’ve never been there—but we do it all the time.  I do, anyway.  You gather enough information about your locale or what have you and then distill it into a kind of gestalt that stands for direct experience.

    This is art.

    When you do it right, people will be just as drawn into it—hopefully with considerably less effort—the way you were in the process of constructing it.

    This is art.

    Seeing.  Making others see.  And feel, that’s there, too.  Coming away at the end with the perception of having been somewhere new.

    This is…

    You get the idea.

  • Bothersome Details

    I have come at last to the section of the new novel that I’ve been looking forward to writing for some time.  The appearance of the eponymous object referred to in the title, the ship which will take my hero on his great adventure, and though I have been anticipating this part for all this time I neglected to do one little thing.

    Figure out what the damn thing looks like.

    This is not a small—nor uncommon—problem.  I mean, I imagined this scene where the hero is confronted by the ship he needs, appearing as if by magic.  An important ship in more ways than just as transportation.  This is the Argo, the Golden Hind, the Chimera, the Santa Maria, Nautilus all rolled into one.  But while I imagined where it came from and the hero’s reaction to it and all the wonderful things it has to do…

    I didn’t imagine its appearance.

    So now I’m sitting her toying with all manner of design, just to make it unique and feeling just a bit chagrined.  I would like to be like those writers who, when they hit a snag like this, can just plug a placeholder in and go on.  But I’ve never been able to do that.  It has to be at least close to what it will end up being.

    Ah me.  At least I know how big the damn thing needs to be.  I think.

  • Serendipity do dah

    Through purest serendipity, there will be a conference on Germaine de Stael here in St. Louis in May.  About five years ago I started working on an alternate history set in 1923 French America.  The conceit is that Napoleon never sold Louisiana to the United States, but managed to keep it.  There are several reasons for this, a few of them historically legitimate, but it is a science fiction novel after all.  In the course of researching the whole Napoleonic era, I stumbled on this woman, de Stael, and came to regard her as a phenom.  She was one of the few people toward whom Napoleon seems to have shown actual fear and the only woman, as far as I can tell, and I became intrigued.  I found one—count it, ONE—biography, an old thing from the Fifties by a writer whose specialty was the Napoleonic period, and it gave me enough to expand my single novel into a trilogy, the last volume of which I intend to be almost entirely historical.

    Needless to say, this would entail considerably more research.  The plan was to sell the trilogy as a package to a house big enough to pay me well enough that I could embark on the research and do justice to the matter.  Alas, I’m still waiting for that sale and now publishing is in something of a tailspin, etc etc etc.

    Anyway, I started making notes for the second volume anyway and decided to see if there were any blogs on the subject.  Plenty, but mostly about de Stael’s views on romance—de Stael ran a salon and collected around her quite an impressive circle of intimates and there was a lot of diddling and dallying going on.  (One of her closest friends was Juliet Recamier, a great beauty and apparently one of the Major Teases of Europe.)

    One blog leapt out—from an academic, Karyna Szmurlo—announcing an international conference on de Stael.  I contacted her and she responded kindly, suggesting I attend.  Since it will be held at Washington University—practically my back yard—I am going.  I have subsequently discoverd a small uptick in the popularity of Germaine de Stael, with several new biographies and at least one novel, all published pretty much since I started this project (trust me, they weren’t around when I was looking) with one or two exceptions.  Serendipity indeed.  Check the schedule.  Heavyweight academic.  I doubt I will learn as much there, on the spot, as I will if I can make a couple of good contacts.

    Of course, the major work in this area won’t take place on my part for a couple years yet—the second volume is still to be set in the 1920’s, but it will inbtroduce de Stael on stage (yes, I said it was SF, didn’t I?)—but I don’t think that will be a problem.  The trilogy will sell or it won’t, no matter when I finish it.  Naturally I’d prefer that it sell.  Naturally.

  • Nebulas

    It is a bright award, a tower of lucite with a galaxy suspended in the upper half and a gold plaque on the lower with a name a title and a year.  A Nebula Award.  I’ve held two of them in my hands and I’d like to have one of my own.

    Alas, it is likely not to be.  I fly too far below the radar of those who vote on such things.

    Be that as it may, as a member of SFWA, I always vote.  I do try to vote for the best piece of work on the ballot and it’s always gratifying when it turns out that I’ve read enough stories and books to have somewhat of an informed opinion.  I just now finished voting and I feel righteous.  A good friend of mine has something on the ballot and I hope she wins, I do.  The story in question is stunningly brilliant, of course—my friends tend to be better than I am and I happen to think I’m pretty good, which means they’re fucking brilliant.  And that always makes even nicer, to be able to vote for quality and sentimental reasons.

    I’d like to win a Hugo Award, too, but that seems even less likely, as one must sell enough copies of one’s book to those who nominate and vote on those, and I fly even farther below their radar.  I will say this—while occasionally some titles of dubious merit have landed on the shortlists of both awards, I’ve rarely found a book or story nominated for either that was a complete waste of time.  Between them they make good recommended reading lists.

    So here is a hope for good fortune to my friend.  May she get the lucite tower and the bright galaxy.  She’s earned it.

    (psst!  That’s Kelley Eskridge, a novella called  Dangerous Space.  Treat yourself, go read it.)

  • Catcher In The Rye

    I just completed an essay for a newsletter about books we never read, but it is assumed, because we are Readers, we have.  Catcher In The Rye is such a book for me.  Never read it.  Know a lot about it, through some kind of osmosis, rubbing up against people who have read it.  You can glean a lot that way.

    I made the statement in the essay that I probably don’t even own a copy.  I just checked.  I do.  It’s not actually mine, the name of the person who apparently loaned it to me is stamped inside the front cover.  But there it is, on my shelf.  Accusing me.  “You never read me, but I won’t go away until you do!”

    Some books, I think, are alive.  They find their way, by many avenues, into peoples’ hands.  Some of us never seem to have to purchase these books, they just show up.  They’re always there.  This is one of them.

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be another.  We have never been without a copy in this house, though we have never bought one.  I haven’t read it.  Read in it, sure.  Open at random, do a few pages, close and reshelve.  I’ve got a few books like that.  But I never paid for a copy.  How did it get here?  And by “it” I mean the book itself, not just one singular copy.

    We used to give books away.  We’d buy them for people and hand them out.  I did that for Time Enough For Love once, I bought ten copies and just passed them to friends.

    What other books just seem to follow you around?  I suppose it depends on what kind of people you hang with.  I know people who have never bought The Lord of the Rings, but they have it, and have read it.  (Yes, I bought my copies, but there was one set of them passing among my friends at one time.  Wonder where that ended up?)

    For years I had a tattered copy of To Kill A Mockingbird that arrived in my collection one day from where I do not know and stayed there.  I finally bought an anniversary edition hardcover of it and the paperback has subsequently disappeared.  Moved on, I suppose, to some other needy shelf.

    When I say books live, this isn’t exactly what I have in mind, but it is kind of freaky.  I’ve never actually caught my books having relations and reproducing, but several years ago I discovered four full editions of The Foundation Trilogy.  

    Occasionally, I know where these copies come from, but it is also true that many of them have just shown up, like unemployed people looking for work.  “Will Tell You A Good Story For a Warm Shelf for the Night.”  I’m looking at my shelves now and I see a copy of Lost Horizons that I did not buy (or borrow).  Likewise a copy of Dr. Zhivago.  That one baffles me.  Why would they pick my library in which to seek refuge?  Who passed the word to them that they’d be safe here?

    Well, it’s true, I won’t turn them out.  Who knows, I may even read them.  Maybe not Catcher In The Rye, though.  I’m kind of holding out on that one.  It’s the kind of book everyone thinks you really must read, that I’ve got my back up about it.  Obviously, it thinks I should read it, but it slipped in here on the sly, probably in company with a few others (like the volume on Chinese Philosophy that I cannot imagine the origin of) and thinks it will taunt me into cracking it open.

    We’ll see about that.

  • Getting There

    I’ve always been impatient.  So much so, it could almost be considered pathological.  I’ve had to learn patience like a religious observance, and it chafes, it does.  My father is one of those people for whom the act of doing is a pleasure in and of itself.  An attitude I’ve been able to emulate consistently in only one thing.  He was once a  gunsmith and I recall watching him—for short periods of time only, mind you—sanding a rifle stock.  He’d work on it for days, running the papers in ever finer grains over the wood until he had achieved such a penetrating perfection as might be possible before moving on to painstakingly applying the varnish…ah, he was rapt.  In just about everything I ever saw him do, there was a level of immersion in the process that I at first found baffling and now envy, because he really loved the doing.

    I did not.  I wanted the finished product, to hell with the path to it.  I would always have preferred, for instance, to buy the model cars and ships and planes already completed rather than go through the essentially tedious process of assembling them.  Building them did not fascinate me, it was an obstacle to what I wanted, which was the thing itself.  Even among my peers, at a certain age, I found this careful, cautious approach to doing things frustrating.  Get on with it!  Let’s finish it!

    I recognize now what I’ve missed and on some level it pains me, but the fact remains that I am not enamored of the steps between point A and the final finished object, whatever it is.

    So what business do I have trying to be a writer?

    Well, because—just as in my photography—I have found pleasure in the reception of the finished product, and for that reception to be worthwhile, the finished product must be of a particular quality.  I have learned to appreciate the emergence of that final product as I see it improving under careful construction.  I still don’t actually want to do the steps, but I’ve learned to enjoy watching the resultant improvement along the way.

    I had to trick myself years ago into this state of mind, because I abhor rewrites.  And yet that, for me, is where the Good Stuff happens.  My first trick was to never finish a story before starting on the rewrite.  I’d stop short.  Somewhere in my subsconscious, the djinni of my imagination believed that it was still, somehow, a first draft.  Later I no longer found that necessary, because I’d stumbled on the emergent quality aspect, even while really disliking the actual rewriting.  (Perverse, yes, I know, but there you are.)

    The current book I’m working on is giving me a new problem—or rather an old problem in a new guise—along these lines.  I’m rushing to get to where I really want to be.  Which means…

    Wait.  Back up.  Let me explain.

    That was an example.  I have a core idea for the book, which is soon to be revealed, but I have to get my main character to the place where it can be revealed in such a manner that he is ready for what he discovers.  He must go on a quest.  He doesn’t even know he’s on one at this point.  But to be effective, the events of the quest must be plausible, they must be exciting, they must ramp up the tension.  And I’m rushing through these steps, impatient to get to the Cool Part.

    This is where I come to another one of my little tricks.  I will finish these chapters, lame as I now see them to be, and print them out.  I will take them to another part of the house and go over them in pen.  Then I will pick up a fountain pen and start rewriting them by hand.

    Don’t ask me why, but it works.  It slows me down enough that my conscious skills come to bear on the material that came out basically from my unconscious in a thick stream.  I break it down, I order it, I add in what needed to be there all along.

    Then I return to the computer and start rewriting.  Further modifications are then made on the hand-written text.  But when it’s over, the words convince, the scenes make sense, the excitement I was about to muffle under a blanket of impatience manifests.

    Pain in the butt, really.

    I don’t have to do this so much when I’m writing something that doesn’t have such Cool Scenes as the one I’m rushing toward, wherein the coolness comes along in due course just through the writing itself.  But the last book I wrote I found myself having to do this in order to make sure I had the period right.  Adding detail from the 1780s in by hand, restructuring with the new material in front of me.

    I sometimes wish I were otherwise, but it’s a bit late now, and like I say I’ve learned a whole suite of tricks to make me do the work properly in spite of my urgent desire to see if finished.

    One of these months I intend to try an experiment.  When I was a kid I had a model of the H.M.S. Victory, the British three-masted warship.  It was a beautiful, complex model, and I did not put it together.  My dad did.  He didn’t want to see glue runs on the hull or badly-fitted joins.  He assembled it and it drove me insane because it took the better part of two weeks.  But it was gorgeous.

    I’ve acquired that model kit.  Maybe not exactly the same one, but the same ship and it appears to be just as complex.  One of these days I will clear space on my workbench and start on it and see if I can find that joy of process.  I may by now have tricked myself into it.  We’ll see.