My name is Mark Tiedemann, Mark W. Tiedemann on the bylines (the W stands for William, in case anyone is interested) and I am a science fiction writer. I was born in 1954, in St. Louis, Missouri, a town I have grown more comfortable in over the years. Without any real plan, I’ve set a number of stories and novels in St. Louis, and the plans I have for future projects seem to be centered here. At least, those not set out in space, on other worlds, in other star systems.
Briefly, I am an only child–a condition I do not mourn–whose parents did what they could to indulge me and still give me a sense of discipline and a set of values. As far as I’m concerned, they did a good job. Nevertheless, I was not the most amenable of children and they feared for my survival, watching the path I took through life with equal parts bewilderment, pride, and alarm. At any given period, I wanted to be a musician, an artist, an actor, a photographer, a writer, an architect, and probably a few other things I’ve since forgotten. I did learn music; I was a competent enough sketch artist that for a time I thought I’d go into drawing comic books; I took one year of architecture before giving up on it; I acted in three plays and one musical and for reasons I cannot fathom just walked away from it.
Of the two things that I managed to do professionally, I became a decent photographer, though I never went into the aspect of it I dreamed about. I had wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic. Instead, I spent thirty years in custom photofinishing.
There are reasons for this.
The writing has been the thing that has gone where I wanted it to go.
To date I have published ten novels. You can find them listed here. I’ve published over fifty short stories as well. I’ve written book reviews, a few articles about various things, and I’ve been blogging the last couple of years, both here and occasionally at www.dangerousintersection.org.
I’m working on more novels. As they are sold and published I will let you know on the blog page.
I intend to do an occasional essay here. Blogging is like letter-writing, though, and Mark Twain said long ago that if his correspondence was current, it meant he wasn’t working on a book. So I’ll limit my blogging on this page.
If you care to, sign the Guest book. Below I’ve put in a slide show of my photographic art, most of which is available for purchase. If you like something, go to my Zenfolio site, locate the image, copy the URL and paste it into an email and send it to me. I hope you enjoy it.
Glad you dropped by. Welcome.