Mark W Tiedemann

Category: blog

  • On A Roll

    I’ve been having a productive month.  This morning I polished up and submitted the fifth short story in two weeks.  Granted, most of them are rewrites, but a couple of them are such thorough redrafts that they might as well be all new, like the one I finished today.

    Normally, I let a story sit for a while before sending it out, but right now I just want material in submission.  It has been a long time since I’ve had this kind of productivity in short fiction and I want to take full advantage of it.  Of course, it would be nice if some (or all) sold, especially to the markets they’ve been sent.

    Soon, now, I’ll have two novels to start rewriting, once the notes are finished from the two people going over them.  Then I will set the short fiction aside and bury myself in the lengthier pieces.  There was a time I could finish a novel and write a few short stories with the left-over energy, but since about 2004 I have been in full novel mode almost continuously.  (The last brand new short story I sold was Duty Free for Lee Martindales Ladies of Tradetown anthology.)  During these past years, I either haven’t been able to finish the stories or they’ve come out crooked, sorry beasts requiring much T.L.C. and more time than I’ve been willing to devote.

    Plus there have been the almost nonstop worries that are deadly to the creative process.  For whatever reason, those worries seem to have receded for the nonce.  Oh, they’re still there, they haven’t been solved, but they aren’t looming over me with Damocletian malevolence.

    For the time being.

    The other thing that has been distracting me, of course, is this thing here.  This.  The blog.  It seems my need for short work is satisfied by spinning out the varied and sundry expository forays here.  Granted, I usually pick a topic that I’m interested in, that I have, I think, something to say about, but really, I am no pundit, and if I were really good at this wouldn’t I be doing it for money?

    But I do it and since it’s my blog, I say what I please, and that serves a need.  Sometimes I do this in order to codify my own feelings.  There’ve been a few times I’ve written something and found that I’d changed my mind about the subject by the time I finished.  Not often, but it’s happened.

    However, I want to say thank you to any and all who come visit me here.  Whether you agree with me or not, even if I piss you off, the one thing I hope I never do is bore you.

    I have another non-boring, froth-fomenting post coming up soon, but I wanted some breathing space between the last and the next.

    Have a good weekend.  I’m going to do some more fiction now.

  • Morning Rain

     

     

     

    One of the above I decided to try out for a new banner.

  • Spring, Damp, Coolth

    I haven’t done any new images lately, so…

    I made these on Bellerive, off of Grand, last Saturday evening after a light rain.

    You might wonder what I was doing there.  Well, it was just before the coffeehouse at which I play and of which I just wrote.  I did a few images there, too.  To finish up, here’s one.

    Just thought I’d share a little pleasantness before the forthcoming, which may or may not be…stormful.  We’ll see.

     

  • The Chance of Failure

    Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.

    I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.

    I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.

    I have thousands of little tricks to keep myself from doing the hard, important work.

    But somehow I’ve written over 15 novels, published 10 of them, along with many short stories. My failure, such as it is, will not be seen in my production (though I see it, indeed I do) but in Follow Through.

    I’m terrible at self-promotion, self-marketing, all the little component parts of conducting a Career that are necessary but, to me, intimidating. After all, I’m a writer—dealing face to face with people is not what I do, not what I want to do. If I wanted to do that I’d get a job as a salesman. I’ve been a salesman, I was even good at it long ago and far away, but I loathed it.

    That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.

    The one element Mr. Smith did not discuss is an intrinsic failure of finding the right way to do what you want. I have the passion, I have the drive (though I’m getting a bit frayed around the edges) but I somehow keep driving off the road into a ditch. I can see the road, I just can’t seem to stay on it. All by virtue of producing product that has, in the past, not attracted the right attention.

    Or so it seems.

    Even this, I know, is an excuse, but sometimes a necessary one to maintain sanity. These are the nibbling ducks of chance—the right publisher, the right agent, the right window for publication, the right reviews, none of which are in your control.

    Nevertheless, you need to do, and do well, the one or two things that are in your control, so that when the stars are right and the planets align, the work is ready. The most necessary and often hardest thing to do to facilitate that is to ignore all the other stuff. It is the Work that matters. Never mind the market, never mind the dwindling bank account, never mind the critics who were boneheaded about your last book, never mind all the ancillary shit that is certainly important but only serves to distract you from the Work.

    That’s hard to do. It takes practice. And it’s wearying.

    But I do recommend hearing Mr. Smith out. Because what he’s talking about are all the things people do before they even get to the Work to sabotage themselves.

    What you have to do is take a chance on yourself. Just…take a chance. Regret is a terrible thing on which to end your days.

  • New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement

    I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…

    So, here’s a new look.  I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well.  I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.

    I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.

    I promised a post on the content of the Moyers-Haidt video and that’s still coming.  I’ve been working steadily on finishing a novel and I’m within striking distance of the complete first draft.  Oculus is the sequel to Orleans, which is currently in the hands of my estimably cool agent, Jen Udden.  Once I finish this, I will hand it to my wonderful partner and first-reader, Donna, who will take a red pen and scrawl viciously all over it so that I may take the shredded remains and build from them a better book.  While she’s doing that, I will be doing a number of things, among which include cleaning my office (which is a shattered and broken No Man’s Land, unfit for human habitation), doing some more work for Left Bank Books (link on the sidebar, go visit), working on more writing (surprise!) and penning more annoying commentary to post here on matters political, philosophical, personal…

    Speaking of which, I recently endured one of the pitfalls of having strong opinions and the ability to voice them that, when it involves relative strangers, usually scrapes no skin off any body parts.  I hope I’m wrong, but I seem to have lost a friend as a consequence of one such post.  Politically, we were quite far apart, but managed what I thought was a fairly solid relationship—based on music, good food, good wine, things like that.  After a few political conversations, we had, I thought, opted for detente and simply didn’t discuss it.  But when you have a public face, that becomes a bit difficult to manage.  What do you say to people?  Don’t read this if you know we disagree fundamentally?

    My attitude is caveat emptor.  You come into my online home, feel free to froth and fret or even agree wholeheartedly.  Feel free to take umbrage, throw money, tell me I’m wonderful or the scum of the earth.  It is a public forum.  I won’t back down from my principles or beliefs.  If such offend to the extent that you feel compelled to collect your marbles and never visit again, so be it.

    I will say this, regarding the broader arena of public discourse: I can become furious over a stated position and manage to regard someone as a friend.  I’m willing to talk about anything, with just about anyone, as long as the dialogue is honest and honestly engaged.  I may go away wondering how such opinions over this or that can possibly be held by a thinking human being, but I promptly caution myself that I am no judge of absolute right or wrong and no doubt some react the way to me.  But I will ask that my writings be read completely and taken for what they say and judged according to their content.  Factual mis-statements, hyperbolic distortions, and hissy fits do nothing to further anything and I will call anyone on them.

    As I would expect them to call me on the same.

    So.  If you know in advance that your sensibilities may get rubbed raw by what you may find here, and you come anyway, react as you will, but know it’s on you.  There are plenty other places on the intraweebs to go visit, many of which may offer solace rather than sandpaper.

    That said, all are welcome.  I have a FaceBook page with over four thousand “friends,” many of whom I doubtless disagree with on some topic.  I do not unfriend anyone who disagrees with me.  That’s childish.  I believe we should engage other viewpoints.  The polemical in-group isolation that has arisen from the self-selection of media has caused enormous damage to our public discourse.  It has become far too easy to avoid opinions and beliefs and even facts that make us uncomfortable or that we wish were not true.  I try not to do that.  It is limiting and potentially destructive.  What we are doing thereby is creating entirely separate languages.  Words that mean one thing to one group mean something entirely different to another and because they no longer converse with each other on any regular basis, such meanings concretize and become barriers.

    Anyway, I hope you all like the new look.  The mission, however, remains the same.

  • Just So You Know…

    Recently I’ve received a spate of those nasty politically-naive, rather insipid yet clever emails that go round and round, forwarded from one to another to hundreds, spouting off about the woes of the country, the supposed sins of the Left, and all containing a germ of truth wrapped in misinformation, outrights lies, and substanceless assertion.  Mostly I delete them without a second thought.  They are noise, distraction, mud thrown into the waters of discourse where above all clarity should be our goal.

    All of them have to do with what liberalism has done to our country.  All of them are concerned with telling anyone who will listen what the Right is trying to “save us” from.  And all of them are pretty thoughtless.  It would be funny if there wasn’t so much at stake.

    Below is a post from Lawrence O’Donnell, a newscaster and polemicist who I have listened to occasionally.  I don’t follow such people, on either side.  From time to time I listen to someone from both camps.  I’ve found Mr. O’Donnell more reasonable than most.  But I thought he really captured something with this, so I’m borrowing it to express my own views.

     

     

     

    For the record, I am very tired of the attempt to make me feel guilty for the progress I support.  The only charge I ever heard that had any traction with me about the problems with liberals was the “tax-and-spend” one, but that doesn’t even hold water anymore with me.  Conservatism these days seems—may I stress seems—to be all about preventing people from doing things, about taking rights away from those deemed undeserving.  Liberalism has always, even traditional free market liberalism (which, yes, free market enterprise is a liberal  invention), been about letting people do more, have more rights.  I don’t see much wrong with that as a fundamental principle.

    So, just to let anyone interested know…

  • Stacks and Time (or Time and Stacks, whichever…)

    I am probably never going to read all the books I own.

    The last few years I’ve been dealing more and more with that realization.  I have thousands, maybe several thousand, and the ones in the house are certainly not all that I’ve ever owned.  I have culled a few times over the years and I’ve slowed down acquiring new ones, but it’s a kind of compulsion.  I mentioned once in a post, I think, that owning books for me is a sign of wealth.  By that standard, I’m moderately well off.

    Here’s the thing now.  I don’t read particularly fast.  I can be dogged, and from time to time manage to read a book in one day, but honestly my average lo these last few decades is about one or two a week.  This is down considerably from the few years between 16 and 19 when I could speed read.  I took a course in high school that increased my reading and comprehension to a ridiculous level.  The machine they used to bring us up to speed only tracked at two thousand words a minute and I went past that.  At peak, I was probably reading close to three thousand words a minute, which is about eight to ten pages, depending on typeface.  I was reading all my assignments in home room or study hall.  A book a day? How about an average SF novel in an hour or two?  I’ve talked about my senior year before, during which I cut maybe two thirds of it.  Most days I walked up the street to the local library and spent the day reading.  By the time I graduated high school I was reading a book a day there and another one at home in the evening.

    The problem with that is, I have pretty much forgotten all those books.

    Oh, some of them stuck, certainly.  I went through most of the “classics” section at the library and I can conjure images from a good number of them, but the rest?  I know I read a great many ACE Doubles, a lot of Ballantine SF works, and so forth, and any number of detective and Other, but do I have any memory of them?

    I post my reading lists on-line now.  I have two accounts, one at Shelfari and one at Goodreads.  You may notice that the numbers are different.  I did a much more thorough job of recovering lists of past reading for Goodreads, so there are several hundred more books there than Shelfari.  (I keep the Shelfari account because I’ve been participating in some of the discussion threads.)  Even so, the Goodreads list is incomplete—because I cannot remember all those books.  It lists about 2700 titles.  I conservatively estimate that this is short by nearly a thousand.  Partly, I’m making myself be honest.  I know of a couple of hundred titles that I did read, but I frankly can’t remember anything about them beyond the title (most of Thomas Hardy, a number Theodore Dreiser novels, Trollope, and the like) and so I won’t list them unless I either suddenly remember something about them or reread them.

    Then there are all those paperbacks I flew through that I can’t even remember the titles.  Now and then, in conversation, one of them will pop up and I’ll have an “oh, yeah, that one” moment, but to be truthful I think a book should stick somewhere in your memory for you to claim it.

    Why can’t I remember them?  Probably because I went through them so fast there was no time to form a longterm impression.  Some of them were over my head and I passed through them without having grasped them (I read Joyce during that senior year and it made no impression other than the sense of being completely out of my depth—I’ve since reread Ulysses and so I can claim it).  I read a number of science books that left behind a lot of general scientific information, but nothing about the specific texts.  And then there was a considerable amount of what one might call “trash” fiction—which term I loathe, but I use it here as a handy marker, since I think everyone, whether they admit it or not, knows exactly what I mean.  For instance,  Anne and Serge Golon’s  Angelique series.  I don’t think I read them all, but I read a number, and aside from a vague costume drama residue and a lot of erotic imagery, not a bit of their plots or characters remain in memory. The same can be said of any number of antebellum novels, like the Kyle Onstott/Lance Horner Falconhurst series, some of which I read back in grade school, but again, little of that stuck.  (There was a fad for these things in the mid to late Sixties and several writers indulged–Ashley Carter comes to mind, and Boyd Upchurch.  Ah, well.)

    Sometime after I turned 21 I consciously slowed my reading down.  I realized even then that I was retaining little.  Oh, it stuck for a while, it was the perfect “cramming” technique, but even then I could barely remember what I’d read two years prior.  That, and I was simply not enjoying it.  Everything reduced to “textual experiences” that held none of the real pleasure of reading a good book.

    So I went too far in the other direction.  In a good year I read between 70 and 80 books cover to cover now.  If I estimated all reading, it probably comes up to the equivalent maybe 120 or so.  A far cry from when I read four or five hundred a year.

    But I’m enjoying each one now, and remembering them more clearly.  I would hate to read certain books too fast—books that should be savored.

    So I won’t be getting through my stacks.  Ever.  But I find I am appreciating the journey a lot better.

  • For the New Year

    This took a bit of patience.  For a comparison, here’s a thumbnail of the original:

    Basically, this just took a lot of patience to get rid of the phone lines and such.  I shot the original from my backyard and in future I intend to do some further manipulations and other cool stuff.  But I wanted to put something up for the beginning of the year.  Ad Astra!

  • 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Four…

    Well, four, have a better time.

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

    And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.

  • The Ancient Past

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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