Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by mark leidner

Ian Denning @ian-denning.com · 13h

🙃

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 1d

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

50 Questions to Ask About Your Story

Does my story have a big enough concept? Does my story have interesting characters? Does my story have interesting set pieces? Does my story have an interesting conflict? Does my story have big eno...

joylandpublishing.com

1 1 1

Reposted by mark leidner

Ian Denning @ian-denning.com · 13h

Waiting for notes from my agent like

43. Do I, on some level, want to be haunted by my own fiction—in a Rube Goldbergian method of self-destruction—somehow unconsciously craving the very anxiety my story generates in order to obliterate all potential forms of pleasure that writing my story confers?

1 2

Reposted by mark leidner

brock (toby the tiger music) @broxel.bsky.social · 13h

39. Is the writing part of the self a separate self that can lead the non-writing part of the self into a higher.. more resilient echelon of selfhood?

40. Even if that is possible, is anyone who even asks such questions too neurotic to ever participate in that type of transformation?

🫠

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 1d

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

50 Questions to Ask About Your Story

Does my story have a big enough concept? Does my story have interesting characters? Does my story have interesting set pieces? Does my story have an interesting conflict? Does my story have big eno...

joylandpublishing.com

1 3

Reposted by mark leidner

Aimee Jodoin @aimeejodoin.bsky.social · 1d

Had me in the first half.

"Will publishing this story make anyone other than me feel anything other than my own urge to have written it?"

"Is this ... my clumsy attempt at confronting myself with myself in the vain hope that I will be reborn as a new self?"

Gets better and hurts more as you go.

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 1d

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

50 Questions to Ask About Your Story

Does my story have a big enough concept? Does my story have interesting characters? Does my story have interesting set pieces? Does my story have an interesting conflict? Does my story have big eno...

joylandpublishing.com

1 3

Reposted by mark leidner

nari @tenlinetales.com · 1d

This is really funny in like a hurtful kind of way

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 1d

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

50 Questions to Ask About Your Story

Does my story have a big enough concept? Does my story have interesting characters? Does my story have interesting set pieces? Does my story have an interesting conflict? Does my story have big eno...

joylandpublishing.com

5 5

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 1d

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

50 Questions to Ask About Your Story

Does my story have a big enough concept? Does my story have interesting characters? Does my story have interesting set pieces? Does my story have an interesting conflict? Does my story have big eno...

joylandpublishing.com

10 37

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 12d

Garri Saganenko

5

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · 22d

I wrote about being very good at something very hard to do, which is also very wrong to do: stealing what people smell like.
open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

Sorry I Keep Stealing Your Smell

On the scent exploitation crisis, and how I’m not helping.

open.substack.com

2 5

Reposted by mark leidner

Tim Howard @tmhwrd.bsky.social · Aug 30

Love it when the ragtag group of survivors I’m in reaches a place of apparent safety and we drop our guard, laughing a little too loud, sleeping a little too soundly, as we enjoy the fleeting, simple pleasures of a world now lost.

1 2 20

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Aug 23

bro last night we lived in a beautiful old farmhouse that got featured in a regional magazine

5

Reposted by mark leidner

Grave Abandoner @questabandoner.bsky.social · Aug 16

Can't early humans and megafauna just get along

10 66

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Aug 13

Boycotting Mario Kart until Nintendo lets us race God against the devil.

1 7

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Aug 8

Damn dude. Last night we really captured the hard, amoral emptiness of the age.

7

Reposted by mark leidner

"max" @ringworm.bsky.social · Aug 5

my new book YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THIS IF YOU WANT TO LIVE is out now. it has 45 short stories, including some of my favourites from the last four years of INFINITE GOSSIP, and unreleased ones. buy it from maxlavergne.square.site

1 11 56

Reposted by mark leidner

"max" @ringworm.bsky.social · Aug 5

two of my favourite current writers, @markleidner.bsky.social and max easton, hit me with that good blurb. and you can trust them

2 2 6

Reposted by mark leidner

sara @saraburke.net · Aug 1

From @markleidner.bsky.social

Share the Good News While the News Is Still Good O 2
Mark Leidner
©
I like to think that to give is to prove that the gifts that you received were not given in vain.
If you search the terrain of your own happiness, you will probably find that everything that makes your life worthwhile resulted from someone's gift.

1 6

Reposted by mark leidner

Ben Niespodziany 📚🎪 @neonpajamas.bsky.social · Aug 4

Mark Leidner

@markleidner.bsky.social
@fonografeditions.bsky.social

OPENING DAY

If they ever really did clone dinosaurs
and built a real Jurassic Park
it would be funny if a tiny, little
asteroid arrived
and destroyed only it.

1 5 25

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 31

The next eleven James Bond films should be one Ocean’s Eleven actor at a time.

3

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 25

Taking a mission trip to the foreign country of Target to see if the people who live there want my Christian dollars and loving attitude in exchange for their heathen merchandise.

4

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 24

I love it when something named Paramount merges with something named Skydance.

5

Reposted by mark leidner

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 24

I read the new novel STATE CHAMP and interviewed its author Hilary Plum. The book is about a washed-up track star who protests the rollback of abortion rights by going on a hunger strike. It has a good plot.

open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

What Is Plot? and an Interview with Hilary Plum about her new novel STATE CHAMP

Interview with Hilary Plum about running, protesting, and writing a novel in diary form.

open.substack.com

1 2

Reposted by mark leidner

Bloomsbury Books US @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social · Feb 20

“A mordant and morbid narrative of post–Roe v. Wade America…The distressing tale is buoyed by Angela’s incisive narration and frank humor…Readers won’t want to put this down.”

Read Publishers Weekly's full review of STATE CHAMP by Hilary Plum here: www.publishersweekly.com/9781639735433

State Champ by Hilary Plum

Plum (Strawberry Fields) delivers a mordant and morbid narrative of post–Roe v. Wade America, centered on a young woman who stag...

www.publishersweekly.com

1 2 3

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 24

I read the new novel STATE CHAMP and interviewed its author Hilary Plum. The book is about a washed-up track star who protests the rollback of abortion rights by going on a hunger strike. It has a good plot.

open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

What Is Plot? and an Interview with Hilary Plum about her new novel STATE CHAMP

Interview with Hilary Plum about running, protesting, and writing a novel in diary form.

open.substack.com

1 2

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 18

Some of y’all are out here playing quidditch while Hogwarts burns.

5

mark leidner @markleidner.bsky.social · Jul 16

I hate when I'm speed-eating cereal, hunched directly over the bowl for max efficiency, and while opening my mouth to shovel in a new spoonful, some unswallowed bits from the previous bite fall out of my mouth into the bowl, causing droplets of milk to splash into my eyes, momentarily blinding me.

2 1 18