The Mark Williamson Creative Universe

Want to see every animal phylum in one place? Just your luck.  My latest Williamson Variety Show video has just been released. View it here and get ready for a lot of animals that can be described as worms.

As I've opined before, I love naming things.   Auroch: Sigismund von Herberstein, Public Domain In a previous post , I used book-title generators to make up random science-fiction and fantasy books and write a 5-minute excerpt from the book, making up names of things as I went. That was a lot of fun and a neat creativity workout. Now, I'll try something else. Lists. I've come up with several lists prompts and taken a few minutes to generate list items for each prompt.  Feel free to try it out yourself. Ready?  Go! Top Patents from 2090 sarcastic self-driving car interface (non-sarcastic version, separate patent) iHunter 3500 (hunts down rogue, ambulatory iPhones) cold-fusion coffee maker hyper-bread slicer sentient broccoli anti-lepton detector Newly Discovered Dinosaurs Timorraptor (fear thief) Aureuceratops (golden horn face) Tyrannointerfectorem pelta  (tyrant-killer shield) Arcanutitan  (mysterious giant) Archaedracomimus (ancient dragon mimic) Trucu...

Can't get enough of every animal phyla?   Below is the size chart from my Every Animal Phyla video .

I have a lot of baking clay figurines.   Growing up, I enjoyed shaping clay creations of all shapes and sizes.  While my multitudinous creations crafted from modeling clay were ephemeral, like the clay explorer above, others were made from baking clay and hardened into lasting forms through an oven excursion. I filled a crate with my clay figures, now stored in my basement. Soon, I'll be cracking open that crate and delving into those figurines.  Stay tuned for upcoming posts where I'll showcase my most notable works.   Get ready to for  Explorations in Clayland .

Tired of Christmastime temptations?   Have no fear.  My latest Williamson Variety Show video has just been released. View it here and let all your gastrological troubles melt away.

Merry Christmas, intrepid reader.   I'll be taking off writing tomorrow's post and instead be celebrating Christmas Eve.  To make up for the lost post, I'll be making an extra post later today. In this post, I'll provide an easy way to cover the annual " Is such-and-such movie a Christmas movie " debate. https://www.citywest.ca/blog/movies-more/2021/12/18/christmas-movies The debate rages on for  Die Hard .  Other movies, like Gremlins and A Nightmare Before Christmas, are also common fodder.  However, none of that matters... I have a simple plan.    🎄 Take any movie and add a falling snow filter .  Voila, it's now a Christmas movie. Lord of the Rings?   Christmas movie. True Grit? Christmas movie. Independence Day???   Christmas.  Movie. May all your holidays be bright.

I have a lot of notepaper drawings.   All through my schooling years, I filled many pages with otherworldly creatures, thrilling battles, and fantastical concepts.  Piles of them are stored in a tote in my basement.   Soon, I'll be cracking open that tote and delving into those drawings.  Stay tuned for upcoming posts where I'll showcase the most notable works.   Get ready to for Adventures in Sketchtopia .

Think well on the week ahead.   I create a weekly work schedule.  Using a large sheet of paper, I write hourly increments of each work day, Monday to Friday.  Each hour has a task to be accomplished.  If necessary, I subdivide into half-hours. I usually start by looking at my Outlook calendar and enter any known meetings.  Then, I fill in the rest of the blanks.  If needed, I jot down a jumble of important tasks on a separate piece of paper beforehand, rank them, and add them by importance (to be covered in more detail in a later post). I give myself wiggle room by penning in  [open time] to account for projects taking longer or assignments that come up within the week.  I also typically mark completed tasks with a highlighter and  cross out and then  update tasks when higher demands announce themselves. This method helps me to stay productive and make progress on important tasks.  It is especially important for large, mult...

A blog entry, Monday to Friday, isn't trivial.   Despite finding the time and commitment to write and edit one book (A Knight of Ur), draft half of a second (The Dark Between Worlds), and throw myself into several short story projects, it turns out that a regular blog is a different beast, a neo-challenge rearing its many-pronged head. The main difference is that the commitment to my other writing projects was personal.  In contrast, putting out a daily blog post is a public thing.  I have to have something ready to go by the end of every day and there is a record of it if I don't. So, to help myself out, I have a creative process that I'm learning to implement.  Here's how it goes.  Whenever I get the idea for a post, I immediately go and start a new draft with the post's title.   That's it. Because I have a decent flow of ideas, I always have a collection of drafts to select from each day to craft into a finished blog post.  As of this post...

A welcome winter treat. My local library, the Grand Forks Public Library, has an annual Six-Word Story Contest in November.  This year, I won in the adult category.  Better dust off my degree and get to translating hieroglyphics.    Check out all the winners here .

 A record of your past, a tool for your future. I keep a daily journal of all my work tasks.  I split the day into morning and afternoon and create a bullet point for every major work task.  Sub-bullets can be used to split up big tasks into their subcomponents.  An outline is found below. Why do I do this?  Two small reasons and one really big one. First, it helps me track how productive I am.  It provides a handy visualization of how much I did during the day. Second, it helps me review my day.  Again, I can see at a glance what I got done during the day. Third, and this is the big one, it gives me a record I can refer back to.  This is especially important when I've done something technical--like several iterations of coding, several months ago--and I need to remember what I did so I can do it again for a current project.  Another use is being able to determine what, when, or how much of something I did.  Because I often write out fil...

I freaking love naming things. If I could do only a single thing with writing, it would be to generate names for things.  The best part about starting a new writing project, whether it be short story of exposition, is the naming of things within the worldbuilding process. To show you what I mean, I'm going to try a quick writing exercise.  I found a science-fiction book title generator ( https://www.imagineforest.com/blog/sci-fi-book-title-generator/ ) and proceeded to generate a random title.  Here it is. Distant Android Now, I have five minutes to create an introduction.  Three minutes to write it up and two minutes to edit.  Ready?  Go! This point of space was so cold.  It was too bad that the Sylian Fields were as dead as his companions.  Darkened eyes frosted over, chrome lips void of sound, antimatter cores cooled to near the heat death of the universe.  There would be no sunrise for them, as for him. Epsilon-387, the last Hellbender An...

Eighteen flavors vie to overthrow Pumpkin Spice. I recently finished my three-part series called Better than Pumpkin Spice.  The series revolves around brainstorming and then crafting a variety of interesting latte flavors.  The crux of my exploration is an attempt to the following questions: Can we figure out what the next big coffee craze will be? More importantly, can we dethrone the reigning champion of the Pumpkin Spice Latte? Does fluffernutter have what it takes to take the crown?  Can tiramisu overcome its finicky nature to wow the judges?  Will everything bagel defy all odds and flavor conventions? You can find all three parts at the Williamson Variety Show. Part 1: Introduction and Batch 1 Part 2: Brewing Batches 2 and 3 Part 3: Finalist Selection and Judging

"Captain, the aliens are dissolving my insides..."   I had an idea several years ago about how to produce a low-budget science fiction movie.  If you've ever gone to a modern playground, they're often filled with bizarre structures of metal and plastic that look straight out of a bad sci-fi film. So I thought, why not include them in an actual, bad sci-fi film?  The ship's command center--where our main character, Captain Starship, pontificates from--could be a garage decorated with chrome finish, flashing buttons, and crewmen intently looking at blinking screens. The playgrounds would be the action scenes on alien planets.  Add some 'space marines' in hockey helmets, 'aliens' in Halloween masks, arm them with nerf guns, and slap some laser effects during edition. Kablammo, you've got yourself Captain Starship and the Reaches of Space .  Now coming to a low-budget YouTube channel near you.

 Cataloging fifteen years of stories.   As mentioned before, I've begun publishing stories on my website as I work on getting my book, A Knight of Ur, published.  So far, I've posted short, exposition, and writing exercise stories.  Later on, I'm planning to include more literature fragments from the Knight of Ur universe, similar to the pieces that are found at the start of each chapter in my book (see Chapter 4's example below). Even further out, I'm assembling plans for building out the world of a major story universe.  Four story arcs are set in this universe: 1) the Immortalities of Kia, 2) the Thousand Worlds, and 3) the Darkness Legion, and 4) the Wasteworlds.   But where do all my stories come from?  Well, until recently, they were all just in my head or scrawled as pictures in school notebooks.  So, to bring them from idea to word, I've begun cataloging as many of the stories and sub-stories I can remember.  My running tit...

Gods and monsters, revelation and evolution, Those gods who wanted to play the Game of Biokinesis could influence the unscrolling of form and function, but not directly intervene... My first exposition has dropped!  You can find it here at my writing website.  I enjoyed writing it and really got enthused about the world building.  Hopefully, there will be a place for it as a full-fledged story in the future.    

A gap exists between books and short stories. I am currently working on getting my first book, A Knight of Ur, published.  I'm also drafting the sequel, The Dark Between Worlds.  At the same time, I'm developing my writing skills by putting out short stories on my writing website .  However, I have a sprawling list of narrative ideas that are neither within the canon of the Knight of Ur universe nor are short enough for a short story.   Rather than investing right away into drafting another book-length story, I've decided to start fleshing out some of those stories in a shorter form I'm calling an exposition .   How does an exposition work?  First, I sketch out the various details of the story.  Second, I draft a short narrative sequence, aiming for 4 pages of content, but let the words expand as needed.  Third, I write the narrative and edit it.  The end goal is to introduce the plot and universe in a compelling short form tha...

 Invisible, tasteless, odorless, but potentially fatal.  Those are hallmarks of two important health issues: radon gas and hypertension.  Radon is a naturally occurring, radioactive gas that is undetectable to the human senses.  Unfortunately, it is a leading cause of lung cancer, second only to smoking.  Furthermore, smoking combined with high radon exposure increases the risk of lung cancer several fold [1]. Likewise, hypertension (high blood pressure) usually has no warning signs and can lead to a variety of health issues if left unchecked.  Health risks include heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease [2]. Both of these issues have fairly straightforward management once detected.  Radon mitigation in basements and other locations can often be accomplished for under a thousand dollars.  High blood pressure, for its part, can be managed with lifestyle changes and medication. So, the major issue with radon, hypertension, and other health risks of...

 What comes knocking? My latest short story, Barring the Gate , is now available to read at my writing website.  Check it out here .

In celebration, The first part of my Better than Pumpkin Spice video is now up on the Williamson Variety Show. So, I thought I'd throw up my Pumpkin Spice Sandworm.  It's a silly comic I made years ago, but now is finally relevant given the Fall season and arrival of Dune Part 1 to theaters. Old Man of the Dessert.  Shai-Hulud.  Extra Whipped Cream and an Everything Bagel to go.  

 A drop of orientation is warranted, Because this blog is in part to tie together the whole of my creative universe, I thought I should provide links to my major projects.  They come in three flavors right now, my writing, my video work, and my games.  If the universe expands, I'll make a note of it.  Maybe I'll try a podcast out sometime.  Certainly, I'll link to a site once my book has been published.  Who knows what lies beyond the horizon?

Hello Traveler, This blog is meant as a cosmic thread to connect all my creative projects together. Here are some things I have in store. Links to various projects as they come up. Writing that is less formal than my short story or novel projects. Drawings, short comics, and other visualizations. Book and movie reviews. Concepts, commentary, and ideas.