"In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it
for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so
on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very
interesting."
—John Cage, Silence
Writing is difficult. It's tedious, lonely, time consuming. Hardly anything is harder, except getting started writing.
Which is entirely impossible
I think so many people —among them, writers— admonish us to WRITE
EVERY DAY just because of that impossibility. They know how
easy it is to stop… and simply never start again.
Things, anything, that interrupts writing for more than a day verges
on stopping it altogether. Many people will say: I should get back
into writing.
But you can tell them, from me: The world is not waiting on your
masterpiece!
No one is holding their breath
Still, guilt-tripping oneself to try jumpstarting (again) one's writing… I mean, it might be worth a try.
I prefer misdirection. David Byrne, in an interview with Boing
Boing says, against musical tracks, he records "nonsense
syllables" —but with a "weirdly inappropriate passion."
Listening back, he'll try to make out what that guy might be
going on about. He'll attempt to transcribe that gibberish, as
if they were real words.
And then they are real words. Abracadabra! By
magical action.
This belongs in the category of "writing exercises" but I want to
shift that notion into the category of spells.
Spelling is writing is magic: So mote it, yeah!
dM
20250605 Reading, PA
Until the correct names are on the contract, all prior discussion I
call Hollywood Talk. And to me, that's not worth repeating
outside the loop.
I guess that makes me not Hollywood, since such must represent
99.9% of chatter in the City that Never Comes Down.
But it's not like I need more evidence that I'm not. Not Hollywood. Not at all
So I won't say what, won't say who, but I want to talk about pivoting, since that's what I'm doing, and it bears mentioning, as preface, that a story of mine's been accepted by one of the heavy hitters in the field.
When and if the paperwork's settled, I'll qualify for SFWA —a
long-cherished goal.
That's the Science Fiction Writers of America, if you didn't
know. Or it's what the acronym stands for —name's gotten longer but the
branding hasn't changed.
When I got (back) into writing fiction, my strategy went:
1. Publish Stories
2. Develop a Novel
3. Join SFWA
4. Find Representation (an "Agent")
5. Sell Novel
6. Crowds Cheer
Somewhere in there, a sub-strategy arose of "peeling off" stand-alone
sections of the novel, to sell as short stories.
I may be wrong but I imagined potential agents would see this as
positive, re: the saleability of the work.
Especially if any peel-off (I really should change my terminology, as
the sound of that just makes some people hungry) sold to one of
the heavy hitters.
And it looks as if this one has, or will —when the
right names are on the right lines of the right document.
The scramble to publish had become all-consuming —and took
longer than I'd imagined.
Early on, I made a couple of "professional-level" sales (I won't say how
many cents-per-word the industry reckons is "professional." It's
embarrassingly, laughingly low and never seems to rise) so it
looked easy!
Two and a half years passed without another
During that time I had some close calls, relentlessly positive
rejections (We all loved this story, but no. Send
us another real soon!)
Which is, frankly, much harder to take than —engaging, well paced,
but the protagonist sux— ever could be! Actionable
rejections, you know?
I continued placing peel-off (see what I mean? Craving anything with
rice, yet?) and other shorts with venues I admire.
Happy to see my stories go to them —proud, you know, of
all my children! But entry to SFWA is predicated on
pennies —stacking up enough of them…
Again, an embarrassingly small stack.
All I can say is: No one gets rich selling stories
So now I'm interested in at least dipping my toe into
self-publishing.
SFWA would have let me count these pennies too, but the number would be
unknown until some time after publication, and I didn't like
throwing away good stories on a bet.
Bad stories either: a lot of what I see, self-published, strikes me
as not good enough. I hope I don't sound like a snob
here.
Because there's some really great stuff out there. I'm eager to
try my hand!
I think of the work of qntm
whose amazing There Is No Antimemetics Division I've read in
its initial online form, bought as a self-published paperback and am
just about to purchase as a "traditionally published novel."
Not only does this represent a "success story" for the guy, it's been
fun, really inspiring, to watch the material and the author
progress together.
I admit, I think that's a marvelous process.
Do it in public! Frighten the horses!
dM
20250530 Reading, PA
When you see a film director portrayed with hands splayed, palms pushed forward, looking across their bridged thumbs through the framing of their fingers, what that gesture encapsulates is mise en scène.
Everything they want you to see on the screen is there between their hands.
And everything you see, that's mise en scène.
It may extend, as well, to everything you hear, but it's common to think of it this way and it's clear:
If I push the camera a little to the right, we'll no longer see the lamp that sheds light on the scene. We'll see the door to the patio instead, and out, over the darkening lake.
Making those decisions, that's, like, the directors whole job
That getting this includes working with actors is incidental. What's captured in the frame of film is all the director's business.
If they need their star to ugly-cry, they'll do what they need to get it.
But that's not the art of cinema. Cinema, like other arts, is in the business of giving the audience the feels.
The carefully composed images, the lighting, blocking, the movement of the camera, the cut —these are the crafted elements intended to produce those feels.
And it's not so much each scene, each picture, each frame, but the ways they all add up, follow one another, suggest things about each other that does the trick.
And while a film has an audience, may address itself to "the viewer" what stories have is readers
The writer has different kind of frame, faces different choices. The director will have set dressers, lighting, wardrobe and the actors themselves to help fill up the screen.
The page? The writer is responsible for every element that comes across to the reader and —right down to the dot and tittle— all of it is made of words.
The words used, the ones left out, the rhythm and sound of them —even if they're never read aloud they don't lose this property— that's what the story world is made of.
dM
20250203 Reading, PA
There's a hell of a good timeline next door, let's go
The original of my title comes from e e (nocaps) cummings, except with him it was "universe."And while your alternate universe has that can't-get-there-from-here feeling? Same can't be said for timelines. We're constantly tripping between them.
I vividly recall my first time slip,The Two Day Coup, August 1991. Yeltsin on a tank?
If you don't remember, just say so; you've got your own, I know.
The significant thing is to notice, hey, this isn't the movie I walked in on!
A dear old friend tells me "they" have spent decades prepping us all for the big reveal. You know, about the aliens. But it's much worse than that.
I mean, we're ready for aliens, right? Been ready. Hell, we're hopin on em!
Cause you want a fundamentally undermining event? Figure out that the future controls the past.
Nothing to it: Somewhere downstream, begin broadcasting in tachyons (particles born traveling faster than light —nothing says you can't start there— and so moving, as it were, counter clockwise) and the first upstream dope who invents the tachyon detector belatedly realizes it's a radio, and that you're speaking to him from the future!
Then just Connecticut Yankee his ass till you own it
I mean, some people got Stonehenge built just by predicting eclipses —and that shit was expensive! Got a whole lotta henges goin on, just by knowing about equinoxes and all that.Once you got the past's attention —to them you are an all knowing god— you start ordering them around. Make them jump through any hoop you choose.
And don't haul out your bullet-ridden granpaw, that old chestnut, the whole go-back-and-kill. Such concepts are positively medieval.
Paradox is the hobgoblin of little minds. Not a bug but a feature. You think a universe governed by strings is afraid of a few loops? They're what hold the skein together!
So the only real question is: When did the tachyon detector go live? When did we all cross over?
We now resume our show, already in progress
dM
20250117 Reading, PA
Science likes it, coming and going. To a physicist, if you
believe them, the shot might all as well go bounding back into the
cannon's mouth again, as
anything.
Entropy comes as a shock to young minds. But in a very few
revolvements, you learn —local
star burns into you:
☛ The Sun drives everything
☛ Interaction between Hot and Cold is an engine of change
☛ Equilibrium is difficult to obtain; chaos a certainty
Physics casts also a cold eye on futurity. The Sun, all
swole, heats up, eventually eats up Earth. Just about
everything we can see ends up
in the same, or very similar supermassives, heavy holes, from
which, it may be, even
information can't escape.
If y'ain't busy bein born, yer busy
dyin
So even though the physics is the same going either way,
there's a distinct —and it seems downhill— overall
trend to time. A great leveling coming, always
arriving, every minute.
Egyptian iconography depicts a dung beetle, rolling backward,
the Sun.
Everything goes to shit
Thankfully, we have Boltzmann
to explain it all to us: It's not
physics but statistics which winds down the wold, lends a
vector to causality —keeps
eggs scrambled, rather than the reverse.
If I may, let me unscramble the egg by inverting one of his
most famous thought
experiments, re: entropy:
So, within your box of gas
—you've got yours, yeah?—
pinpoint the
current location of every gaseous molecule. Take a 3D
snapshot.
Now, what are the odds that, say, a millisecond hence
(just
one-thousandth-of-a-second later) all the same exact
positions remain occupied? It could be
some individual molecules swapped places…
Maybe all of them did, we're not interested.
Just say how often you'd expect to see that exact
result, in a billion tries?
A trillion?
Given the number of molecules
and the volume of
the box, we could maybe
figure out how many times you'd have to sit through
the current age of the cosmos,
waiting.
dM
20250110 Reading, PA
There's plenty of writing advice out there, all kinds! Write down
the
bones of the cat, do it… into the dark!
But other options are available. I
structure my own storytelling
by an adage I détourned myself:
Don't Show; Don't Tell!
Rather than attempt either, I try
to invoke, to induce the
feeling I intend within my reader.
I do this by careful manipulation of all the formal elements of
mise-en-scène: setting,
lighting, ensemble action, you name it.
I even control the weather!
All in service of the vibes
Vibes are the carrier wave of feeling
and the way I see
it, if I can resolve moods in my reader, I'm doing the job
of a
storyteller.
Understanding isn't a given in life.
I think we're
all used to navigating our experience without it.
I don't think we want or need our feelings
explained to us,
either.
I can't tell you how to tell a
joke.
That, famously, kills it. In my stories I'm giving
off
vibes. You pickin em up?
dM
20250104 Happy New Year!
I'm expanding a story I already sold. It
otta
come out in a couple
weeks and I'll add it to the clickable sidebar, where you can catch
me in the
reals. But it's meant
to be part of a larger work, and that project needs this quirky little
tale,
"Reset", to
do its own
reset, grow into more than it is.
Working on this, today, I was struck by a
direct and
inescapable conclusion forced on my secondary character. A
conclusion
predicated on
the original text, but not previously clear to me.
I'd written a kind of mystery for the
reader to
solve but this
was a solution I had to come to myself, and would
serve as the
moment
my character surpasses the
reader in deduction
If only I could remember it! I
recall
having the thought,
Should I maybe just jot this down at the bottom of the
document?
and
replying, as to myself,
You won't be able to miss it, it's staring you in the
face!
Sometime not long later, I realized I'd
lost the
idea.
I
tried re-reading the bit where I must've had the thought…
But finding that spot turns out to be tougher than you think
it's
gonna be.
I reckon its always
further on than you think it is.
I didn't panic: I knew, somewhere, a clue would jump out at
me, if
approached in the proper
mindframe. I could re-crack the case!
I went back through the text I'd been working with so far
(to my
presumed
jumping off point)
making changes as usual.
I did catch one sort of
glaring error.
Hope my
note to the editor
(of the publication where I sold the story) doesn't
cause too
much
fuss, but at least in
my new version Ligurian has to become
Basque!
When that didn't jar it loose I
got out of the
house, had a light dinner, did a little grocery
shopping. I
puttered
around for a while,
submitting stories to a couple untried markets. Then I
maximized
the
document and started in
again at the top.
I kept up my changes, developed some ideas, and when I
got to the
moment, the very line, I
had the same thought I must've had the last time
through.
It was further on than I'd
thought
it
was
What all this is about is
Writing
Things Down: David Lynch talks alot about
"fishing for
ideas"
and one of the things
he repeats is: "You have to write it down!"
This makes perfect sense. When writing, its the
basic job
description!
But David has gone on to say that losing an idea (he
claims
only,
ever to have lost two
of them) can lead to thoughts of
suicide.
So I just wanna suggest,
here, dinner,
instead.
dM
20241226 Merry Xmas!
Resolved:
I never participated on the Debate team in school but
I was
always
sort of struck by the
way
the topics were presented.
Resolved: That Smoke Detectors be Required
by Law in
all
Dwellings
Which I guess they generally are,
today, but I specifically remember that one.
And then you'd be assigned randomly to argue For/Against, before
judges whose
houses
had just burned
down or
who maybe had some burr in their saddle about government overreach,
whatever.
There were points scored, no knockouts (or very few) and, to be
honest, none
of it
appealed to me -so
arbitrary!
I was the type who went in for competitive poetry reading.
Dramatic
interpretation. I tell you I
had
flair!
But the format, the "Resolved: That" bit. It stuck with me.
I am a maker of resolutions.
At every possible new year, including
the Lunar
kind, observed in Asia and other parts of the world.
First day of Spring? That's an ancient new year.
And, not content with these, I'm inaugurating half-year
initiatives. Like
today:
At the present solstice, I intend
to make a
resolution -good only
till
the
next!
A lot of people reject resolutions
of all kinds and I
think we all know why: They'd at one time or another,
resolved to…
Lose thirty pounds, give up their filthy habits, change
their
ways.
That, kids, is not me.
My resolutions look like:
"Dress up more in the new year" or
"Experience
more
live music" -to do
things I enjoy, not to stop doing things I
clearly
enjoy,
as I've done them now
for years and
years.
I'm not going to give up drinking; I clearly like
drinking.
But I
might switch to
wine.
Or just
higher-end hooch. And I've done things exactly like
that, by
fiat, as it were:
Resolved:
So at this solstice,
I resolve to write a weekly essay
for this
page.
To continue until
next
solstice. I'll think about what to do after
that, as
the day
approaches.
I mean, I've just
refreshed it, the site, adding lots of publications.
With
maybe a
little animation
coming?
We'll see!
And you don't have to scroll far to find that the
last (and
first)
of my Don Mark
Blogs hails from October '23. So, yeah, its time.
I welcome you to come and
try
to catch me out. It may happen
that I
miss a
week (things like
that do
occur) but you won't find me explaining
things.
Explanations only come from
liars.
Descriptions will do. And that's what I've done,
describing my
intent, my plan, what
I've Resolved
dM
20241221 Reading, PA
Just before the world shut down
I wrote my first short story in
twenty? Maybe twenty-five years.
I'd written things in the mean time, sure: some small part of my
ever-evolving
career
required scripts & scenarios, ad copy, journalism, lyrics & librettos as
well as a certain amount of what you might call microfiction.
So I'd kept my hand in, as it were.
I was putting what I thought were final
touches
on the miracle baby, conceived long after I'd
thought
myself barren
—story of a frozen astronaut intercepting, from
orbit, an
alien Ping— when the Governor shut down
the
State
of New York and my profession
shifted en masse to remote learning.
I teach screen stuff so there I was, stuck on learners' screens
showing
them from my screen things to try on their screens…
Turns out it was really our chances that would prove remote.
It's no wonder I retreated into fantasy.
I dunno if I'd seen it coming,
the shutdown. Of course I'd like
to say I did…
That's supposed to be the job, right? I certainly think about
the
future an awful lot. I mean, I practically live there!
But the only foresight I can lay claim to is seeing how a
writer's group might help -groping my way through what looked to
be
a
Plague
Year.
I asked everyone on social media who I knew had ever made a
dollar
from
their writing. Not
to be at all elitist, just looking for a certain level of
experience.
There's no substitute for being told 'no' you know?
Sobers a
person.
Anyway, I found one taker, who brought one, and a Loose
Unsyndicate was
born.
Our lineup has changed, in the years
since.
I'm currently the only founding member
active
in
the group.
What hasn't changed is the marvelous benefit of
relying
on a
small cadre of writers sharing
regularly, exposing their writing to trusted eyes in an
ongoing
effort to make their work sell, or
sing, or ring the way they want it
to ring.
Committed to improving. Bit by bit, crit by crit.
It's really to them, to
that,
the
Unsyndicate
I dedicate this inaugural essay of my
spanking new writer's site. I don't
guess I'd have this little tidepool to float the scum of
my
mind, if not for the group.
Been a long time comin.
dM
20231015 Reading, PA