mark leidner

Ladies and gentlemen, after the bride and groom have their first dance to "Streets of Philadelphia", we will have a daddy-daughter dance with the bride and her father to "Streets of Philadelphia". Afterward, please join us on the dance floor for four hours of "Streets of Philadelphia".

Arriving at the poetry reading wearing chain mail made of interlocked mini pretzels, a helmet hollowed out of olive ciabatta, and wielding a rosemary and sea salt encrusted baguette like a legendary sword. Telling the people in attendance to address me as “Sir Bread” or they will be dispatched.

That story is crying right now because it’s realizing how lucky it is to have you as its champion

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

simply mining less coal to curry favor with my coal-hating wife

🙃

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?

Waiting for notes from my agent like

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?

🫠

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.

This is really funny in like a hurtful kind of way

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...

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...

Garri Saganenko

Sorry I Keep Stealing Your Smell On the scent exploitation crisis, and how I’m not helping.

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...

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.

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

Can't early humans and megafauna just get along

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

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

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

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

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.

From @markleidner.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.

Mark Leidner

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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...

“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

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.

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...

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

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.