Everyone is the hero of their own smartphone.
— Mark Barrett
| CARVIEW |
Select Language
HTTP/2 301
server: nginx
date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:37:54 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
location: https://ditchwalk.com/
x-cache-enabled: True
expires: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:37:54 GMT
cache-control: max-age=3600
x-redirect-by: WordPress
x-httpd: 1
host-header: 6b7412fb82ca5edfd0917e3957f05d89
x-proxy-cache: MISS
x-proxy-cache-info: 0301 NC:000000 UP:
HTTP/2 200
server: nginx
date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:37:55 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-cache-enabled: True
link: DITCHWALK – A Road Less Traveled
The Ditchwalk Music Sampler
If you’re looking for new music — by which I mean music new to you, not necessarily new to the world — I would point you to this compilation on Bluesky.
There are currently 211 songs listed and linked, all of which can either be viewed on that page or on YouTube if you prefer. (If a song is playing on Bluesky and you scroll the page, the song will stop. To avoid this, just right-click on and launch the visible link, or click the ‘Watch on YouTube’ link in the lower-right corner of the video window.)
The songs are all broadly pop, but span virtually every conceivable genre over the past seventy-five years or so. They are loosely grouped either by…uh…group, or by genre (say, disco hits) or thematic associations, so if you find one song you like there should be others nearby which will appeal to you as well. [ Read more ]
The Invalidation of Caitlin Clark
Whether you are an ardent sports fan or prefer to do something productive with your spare time, even if you live outside the United States you have probably heard of a young female basketball player named Caitlin Clark. Having literally graduated over the past year from the college game to the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), and having recently concluded her first season as a professional, I want to look back not only at her accomplishments, but at the cultural narratives which swirled around, at at times obscured, her play on the court. And the first step in that journey begins with a series of disclosures, so you know where I am coming from. [ Read more ]
The Year of the Elm
If I had to pinpoint when I finally decided to head down the self-publishing road, there is no question that impetus occurred as a result of writing this collection of short stories. I wrote the first story decades ago, with no thought to writing a second, but then a second story showed up, and a third, and after a while I had a dozen contemporaneous stories about the same little boy. When I contacted agents and publishers about the collection, however, I invariably received the same response. No one published short story collections, and if I wanted anyone to sign me as a client I would have to convert those episodic stories into a novel to satisfy the demands of the market.
While I was grateful for that insight into the brute realities of the publishing industry, I also believed in the structure of the work as it was, and I didn’t want to lose the effect that my authorial choices had on the reader. I have never written under the flag of art because that banner is itself routinely co-opted by the whims of the marketplace, but I am a firm believer in craft, and I could not convince myself that a novel was the best form for those stories or that character. In another era my conviction would have consigned the collection to a desk drawer, but with the advent of self-publishing — as differentiated from what was then known as vanity publishing — I could finally convey the work to readers as originally intended.
The first edition of The Year of the Elm was produced in 2010 on CreateSpace, an entirely distinct subsidiary of Amazon. If you dig around on this site you’ll find all sorts of posts exploring and debating every aspect of that initial foray into self-publishing, from pricing to cover art to ISBN registration and everything in between. And that would have been the end of it, save two related events which transpired over the past few years. First, and most importantly, Amazon killed off CreateSpace as an independent subsidiary and converted the entire CreateSpace catalogue into KDP titles. Second, while I was thinking about moving The Year of the Elm to a new self-publishing platform, I made the mistake of reading through the collection to see if there were any formatting or publishing changes I might want to make. Which is when I also discovered several glaring and hilarious botanical errors that had previously escaped my notice.
Now, if you’re not a writer yourself you won’t know this, but no work is ever really finished. Instead, you just get to a point where you either stop or go insane, and for that reason, if you’re smart, you don’t ever revisit old texts. Having proven myself not so smart with The Year of the Elm, I went ahead and fixed everything that was broken, adjusted the formatting, tweaked the cover, and otherwise improved the work and book in a dozen little ways that most people never would have noticed in the first place. And hopefully that will prevent me from making the same mistake again — at least until the next round of corporate upheaval in the self-publishing space.
Despite all of the time and effort over the years, however, I don’t regret any of it because I learned a lot. I’m also glad I decided to protect the integrity of the collection, whatever that may or may not have meant in terms of writing as a career. And I say that because one of those short stories is probably the best piece of fiction I ever wrote, and if I had smudged and smeared the stories into a novel I think I would have inevitably diminished the effect of that story, and of the collection overall.
— Mark Barrett
Homestead on the Range
My maternal grandmother, Pearl Mirich, had a significant and enduring positive impact on my life.
When I was growing up in Iowa City, Iowa in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, I simply knew her as Grandma, and that she was a long-time Cedar Rapids junior high schoolteacher who enjoyed playing bridge with her friends on weekends. The older I got, however, and the more I learned about her life, the more I came to realize that we also instinctively shared a similar spirit and outlook, even as the context of our formative years could not have been more different.
Like many Americans who lived through the Great Depression — and later, the long and lingering toll of World War II — Grandma Pearl could be tough and even uncompromising, but her stoicism was more than a cultural convention. In the early 20th Century, when she was born, the world really was a much more dangerous place, and not just because antibiotics had yet to become commonplace. Survival often hinged on resolve and strength of will, and left little time for processing or even acknowledging traumatic events.
I didn’t know much about my grandmother’s upbringing until late in her long life, when she set down her memories of several summers spent on her older sister’s Wyoming homestead. In that text — which was passed around in the family in manuscript form for over a decade — I was able to see young Pearl finding her way in life. Later, following her death, I produced a self-published volume of that book which was given to friends and members of her large extended family.
From the consistent positive response to her simple personal history, one of the tasks I set for myself in my own old age was producing a publicly available version of her memoir. Now, after plenty of dawdling and fits and starts, that version is available. (Click the image here, or on the Books page.)
There are a lot of things I like about this particular work, but I think it’s also an important reminder that everyone has a story to tell. If you know of people in your own family whose history might be of interest to others, consider this book a testament to the value of such homespun tales. (Self-publishing isn’t trivial, but it’s worth it.)
In any event there is a lot of interesting history in this little book, including a a compelling story of sisterhood and family. And family came first for Grandma Pearl.
— Mark Barrett
Ditchwalk and Artificial Intelligence
It has been roughly a year now since the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble took hold in both the tech world and associated financial sectors. While the utopian marketing push from those symbiotic industries has inevitably lost steam as tangible benefits fail to make themselves known to the average first-world citizen, the degree to which AI is becoming a corrosive aspect of online life and internet communications is only accelerating. Couple the concept of deepfakes with the ease of generating convincing AI content, and the very premise of media authenticity crumbles to dust.
How to Pronounce Jaguar in American English
If you are one of those people who have a difficult time preventing your jaw, lips, tongue and throat from turning the two-syllable word ‘jaguar’ into a harrowing, three-syllable vocal adventure, then I don’t have to tell you that you’re one of those people. In fact, just reading the title of this post may have caused you to break out in a cold sweat at the thought of saying ‘jaguar’ in public. Well you are not alone.
Not only are there a lot of people who have difficulty pronouncing ‘jaguar’ as a two-syllable word, that includes sports announcers who are ostensibly paid to speak clearly. Given that those announcers probably threw everything they could at their own struggle, you would be forgiven for thinking the problem can’t be solved. On the contrary, however, I think most people can make progress by following a few simple steps.
That said, in the scheme of things this is obviously a trivial issue, and if you don’t care how you pronounce ‘jaguar’ then you shouldn’t let anyone else tell you you’re doing it wrong. Not only is there no stigma, but some of the variants I have heard over the years have been quite charming. If how you say ‘jaguar’ does bother you, however, please read on. [ Read more ]
The Case of the Missing Emails
If you attempted to reach me using the address associated with this website between mid-June and mid-September of this year — including responding to an email I sent, or using the contact form — it is likely that I never received your message. If you were fortunate you may have received an error letting you know your communication did not go through, but if you use Gmail you may have been blocked from seeing any failure notice for the same reason you were blocked from seeing my email. This post explains what happened and why, so you can make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
The Assumption of Point of View
Imagine a grand old stained glass window in a grand old house. It is imposing, arresting, defining. From the wooden trim surrounding the window, to the pieces of colored glass held by the snaking, soldered cames, every aspect of the window shrieks of mastery. As futile as it may ultimately be, you are so possessed by what you see that you decide to communicate your amazement to others through inherently feeble words. And so you begin to write….
As long as I have been writing — and that is now a very long time — I cannot think of any aspect of craft that has caused me more consternation than point of view. And here I mean point of view broadly, across all mediums and writing types. Whether fiction or nonfiction, the choice of point of view is not only critical to the effects you aim to achieve, but often seems inherent in the original conception. So much so, in fact, that at times you may not stop to consider whether the point of view you have chosen is the best point of view to use.
I mention this because I recently went through a frustrating period in which I had to deconstruct a complex nonfiction argument that originally seemed self-evident. When I revisited what I had written, however, I realized — after pages and pages of failed revisions, beseeching questions and aggravated comments — that I had instinctively adopted the wrong point of view. What I had originally said was that because the issue at hand was poorly defined, the people advocating for that position were objectively wrong. What I needed to say was that while the issue at hand was narrowly correct, the people advocating for that position were effectively blinded by that truth.
In the first instance the point of view I adopted meant that I wrote myself into a logical corner from which I could not extricate myself. In the second instance the point of view I adopted opened up all of the logical avenues I wanted to discuss. As for what it cost me to belatedly come to that realization, that was a few weeks of complete insanity as I went around and around restating and reformulating the arguments I made, without once stepping back and questioning the authorial point of view from which i made them.
That said, I’m not convinced that I could have reasoned my way to the proper point of view in advance. In fact, I think there are times when the only way to find the best point of view in fiction or nonfiction is to make an educated guess and get to work. And no, it’s not fun if you go down the wrong path and have to back up, but from that work you will likely be certain about your final choice.
If you’re relatively new to writing you have probably only wrestled with point of view at the higher levels, including choosing between first-person and third-person in fiction or nonfiction. It’s probably also best to stick with one point of view or the other in a given piece, both to keep your writing on track and to avoid confusing the reader. At some point, however, you may find yourself struggling with everything from the overarching conception of a work to a specific passage or chapter, and then you may profit — as I ultimately did — from questioning any assumptions you made about point of view.
And by way of example, consider again the grand old stained glass window in that grand old house. When you were imagining that window, were you outside the house looking in, or inside the house looking out? Because I’m willing to bet it was one or the other, even though you didn’t think about it at all.
— Mark Barrett
Authors, Publishers, Thieves and AI
By Mark 2 Comments
Among my eclectic, self-directed writing projects I have several books I intend to self-publish sooner rather than later, then make available by some yet-to-be-determined means. In book culture the publication of those titles would be cause for various forms of genuine and transactional celebration, from in-person launch parties and book signings to online ask-my-anything interviews and marketing blitzes. While I don’t plan to do any of that, even at my most excited — and here we are talking maybe a three on a ten-point scale of delusional euphoria — I don’t even find myself thinking about potential sales or profits or reviews, or even the quiet joy of providing a single reader with a moment of entertainment or enlightenment. Instead, what I always find myself thinking about is the technologically sophisticated black market which exists solely for the purpose of exploiting the work of authors, and the abuses of which that have only worsened over time. And when I say abuses I’m not only talking about criminal conduct, but corporate practices which are legal but also clearly designed to usurp power, authority and profits from authors and their works.
To publish or promote any writing anywhere these days — even on widely recognized platforms in the United States — is to provide fresh content for rapacious, voracious thieves, who are, ironically, likely faster and more efficient at distributing pirated and knock-off titles than the best commercial publishers will ever be at making the content of their own authors available to the paying public. Along with outright theft of content, however, there is also money to be made by providing a marketplace for content thieves and their purloined wares, in much the same way that Craigslist and eBay became known as the local and national/international distribution centers, respectively, for stolen and counterfeit goods. And of course in the book world the unquestioned king of for-profit abuses aimed at authors of every rank is the perpetually, willfully and preposterously credulous Amazon.com. [ Read more ]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 69
- Next Page »