This coming weekend is Archon 39, our local SF convention. For the last two months I’ve been rushing about, often only in my own head, to prepare. This year is special in a number of ways. Harlan Ellison is attending. Now, unless one keeps abreast of such things, that alone is no explanation for the level of anxiety I’ve been feeling about this. For one, I instigated this event, largely without intending to. For another, I’ve been involved in arranging things for him and his wife, Susan. I’ve consequently been more involved in Archon than in previous years. But today, Monday, I can honestly say I have covered as many bases as it is possible. …
Category: career
Bragging
My collection, Gravity Box and Other Spaces, has received some attention since it came out last year. (Last year? Really? Yeesh!)
Two critics in particular have been kind to it. The first, from the estimable Rich Horton, who does one of the Best of the Year anthologies (and I urge you all to check it out), wrote the following in LOCUS last December:
“Mark W. Tiedemann is the author of a fine space opera trilogy, The Secantis Sequence, that deserves a wider audience, as well as of strong stories in places like SF Age and F&SF. He hasn’t been entirely silent the past several years, but he hasn’t been as much in evidence as I’d like, so it’s nice to see a new collection, Gravity Box and Other Spaces, appear featuring a few reprints (including his outstanding early story “The Playground Door”) and a number of original stories.…
Work History, Wages, and Doing The Things
The other day I was taking with friends about that pesky subject, wages. Minimum wage is in the news, a big argument, and the politics are necessarily touchy. Comparisons were made and my own situation caused a bit of raised eyebrows and “What’s up with that” detours through personal histories.
According to some, among people who have known me a long time, I have always been seriously underpaid throughout my working life.
Before we get into that, though, I would like to reference this article, written by my boss, Jarek Steele, about the current anxiety-laden question of raising the minimum wage. …
“That Guy”
Confession time. I have never assumed that I am a good writer. I have never taken the position that I know what I’m doing, that I deserve respect, or that I am in any way special as a writer. My default sense of self is that I’m still trying, still learning, still reaching, and I haven’t “got there” yet. If, therefore, I write something that touches a reader, that evokes a positive response, that, given the opportunity, causes them to tell me how much they liked that story or novel of mine they read, I am always surprised and quietly pleased and a bit more hopeful that one of these days I might fully allow myself to acknowledge my own talent.…
Interview
I did an interview yesterday. Here’s the You Tube of it. It’s not as smooth as I’d like but it’s the result the fact that I’m in the Bronze Age, technologically. I had a difficult time hearing Sally Ember here, though that may not be readily apparent from this. I really need to upgrade all my systems. It would be nice if life would stop throwing me curve balls that keep costing me money I’d prefer to spend on new computers. However, I offer it here as one my few video bits. I recommend checking about Sally’s site, she has a lot of interviews there.…
Spoiling the Punch
This is almost too painful. The volume of wordage created over this Sad Puppies* thing is heading toward the Tolstoyan. Reasonableness will not avail. It’s past that simply because reasonableness is not suited to what has amounted to a schoolyard snit, instigated by a group feeling it’s “their turn” at dodge ball and annoyed that no one will pass them the ball.
Questions of “who owns the Hugo?” are largely beside the point, because until this it was never part of the gestalt of the Hugo. It was a silly, technical question that had little to do with the aura around the award.…
Old New Work
Recently I acquired a couple of new(er) photography books. One is a history of Group f.64 by Mary Street Alinder, which proved to be a joy to read. It chronicled, apparently for the first time comprehensively, the movement known by that label, Group f.64, which changed the way photography as art was done in this country. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange…names to conjure with in photographic history, and still today the names to look for when wanting to know what photographs can do. I’ll do a longer review of it later in the Proximal Eye.
The other two are more straight picture books. …
Intentions 2015
Last year I did one of these, declaring that stating intentions was more honest and less guilt-making than resolutions. As it turned out, I fulfilled virtually none of my stated intentions, although I did manage to make a dent in several of them.
So this time, I’ll ramp it back a little and just sort of ramble about what I’d kinda sorta like to do and maybe might get a chance to.
Rambles, by their nature, tend to be disorganized, stream-of-consciousness thingies with no real direction—though they may have a center. With that in mind…
I’d like to read more books this coming year.…
2014
Should I start with the good…or the bad? Or mix them up?
I’ve been muttering for the last couple of months that I’ve never been through a year I will be so glad to see gone, but the last couple of weeks have been not so horrible and a more sober assessment may be possible. Sometimes, though, sobriety is overrated.
The last time I had a year so replete with highs and lows was maybe 1979. But it was all one thing, then, the high and low orbiting the same subject. This one, this 2014, has been just one-damn-thing-after-another kind of up and down.…
Another Year Gone By
I’ve been doing these annual assessments for a while now and this weekend began wondering why. Maybe a way of marking time and keeping track. Not quite keeping score, I’ve never been much concerned with that. At times, maybe, but I really am not competitive that way.
I’ve also never been one for keeping a journal. This blog has been the most sustained attempt at something like that ever, but if it had all been about my life and what I did today or last week, it wouldn’t have made it much past the two month mark, which was the longest previous attempt at maintaining a journal or diary. …