Category: Publishing

Come One, Come All!

Posted on May 15, 2014May 15, 2014 By Mark Tiedemann

One of the things I have been notably bad at over the years is promoting myself.Â I’ve published ten novels and still have a hard time sounding my own trumpet.Â So this is a departure for me.

Announcing the official release party for my new book, Gravity Box and Other Spaces, published by Walrus Publishing.

June 25th, 2014, at Left Bank Books— here —we’re having a book release party.Â There will be refreshments, there will be fascinating people, there will be copies of my new book (plus copies of some of my other titles).Â Seven PM, in the Central West End, St.…

Gravity Box

Posted on March 13, 2014March 13, 2014 By Mark Tiedemann

So now it can be told…

I have a new book coming out this May.Â It is my first short story collection* and will be published by

Walrus Publishing, a small press right here in St. Louis.

Here’s the cover, done by the remarkable John Kaufmann, also local to the area.

There are eleven stories, a mix of previously published and new, a mix of science fiction, fantasy, “slipstream,” and a mix of short story and novelette.Â I am, needless to say, very excited about this, and I throw myself on the mercy of anyone reading this to spread the word.…

It Was Many Years Ago…

Posted on June 24, 2013June 24, 2013 By Mark Tiedemann

Twenty-five years ago I arrived on the campus of Michigan State University to begin the six weeks of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.Â Donna had driven me up, along with a friend (because I didn’t want her driving back alone—which led to a small bit of confusion because while Donna was catching a nap in my dorm room, everyone else met Drea and then when Donna picked me up, there was some, as I say, confusion…) and then left me there for six weeks of the best pressure cooker experience I’d ever had.Â I’ve written about it here and here.…

On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths

Posted on June 10, 2013June 10, 2013 By Mark Tiedemann

I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism.Â Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women.Â While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.

There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community.Â The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles.Â Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…

On what?…

2012

Posted on December 30, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I was never so glad to see an election done than this past one.Â The only comparable year in my experience was 1968 and I can’t honestly say that comparison is viscerally valid, as I was 13 most of that year, 14 right before the election, and most of the issues washed over me leaving me unfazed.Â But ’68 was the year of Nixon and Humphrey and George Wallace, Vietnam, the Counter Culture and the Anti-War Movement, and a resurgent Republican Party in opposition to LBJ’s Great Society.Â I sensed the acrimony, the bitterness, the ugliness, but most of it made no real sense.Â …

The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

Posted on June 21, 2012June 21, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I just finished skimming through a fascinating little bit of fannish history, Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?Â Fannish in the sense of science fiction fandom.Â It has a rich and varied history and the concerns within the genre are as fraught with angst, ennui, and ambition as any literature.

I am always a bit bemused when I read about this sort of thing, because I came into science fiction through the rotary rack at my local drug store.Â (Literally—Leuken’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Shenendoah and Compton, a good old fashioned drug store with a soda fountain, a magazine stand, and two circular racks for paperbacks, two blocks from my house.)Â …

Missouri Has A New Poet Laureate

Posted on April 16, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

From the Governor’s Office we have the announcement of Missouri’s third state poet laureate:

Gov. names university professor poet laureate

Jefferson City – Gov. Jay Nixon announced the appointment of William Trowbridge, Lee’s Summit, as Missouri’s new Poet Laureate.

Trowbridge is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo., and the author of more than 340 published or forthcoming poems. His appointment will run for two years, and during his term, he will present and lecture on poetry to school, community and civic groups throughout the state.

“Professor Trowbridge is one of the country’s outstanding poets, and we are honored to have him as Missouri’s poet laureate,” Nixon said.…

The Chance of Failure

Posted on March 12, 2012March 12, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

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.…

2012

Posted on January 1, 2012January 1, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

So we survived the night.Â The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all.Â 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.Â 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.Â I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.…

There Is Contact…

Posted on October 20, 2011October 20, 2011 By Mark Tiedemann

Hey, something of a more lit’rary nature now.Â I have a stored reprinted in the new collection Alien ContactÂ edited by Marty Halpern.Â Here is the cover:

I am very jazzed about this for a whole bunch of reasons.Â One is that I have had very few stories anthologized this way (as a reprint).Â Another is the superb company I’m keeping in here—Le Guin, Swanwick, Silverberg, Cadigan, Gaiman, King, Stross, and so on and so forth.Â Still another is that Marty took one of my own personal favorites, Texture of Other Ways.Â This is a kind of prequel story to my Secantis Sequence.Â …