Whatever

It’s raining and the ground is saturated with water and so the earthworms have erupted from the very soil and headed to our garage, which is not saturated with water, but is now saturated with earthworms. The cats are very happy. I’m vaguely concerned I’ll be picking up earthworm-flavored cat vomit for the next couple of days. Life at The Scalzi Compound is not all flooring and painting, you know.

Apparently, before you can lay down new flooring you have to let it acclimate to the house environment for 24 to 48 hours, so last night my new office floor arrived to get cozy and comfortable before it actually gets laid down. Yes, we believe in ethical treatment of flooring. As should you all.

Pretty. AND I KNOW EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS NEXT. Yes I do. Wait until you see the episode with hand puppets!

For those of you who wanted to know what “Scotland Road” and “Traditional Brown” looked like:

The picture was taken with my cell phone, so it’s not the best representation, but it’s close enough so you can see how the colors coordinate together. It’s very mint chocolate. Next up: flooring, followed by custom bookshelves. Followed by LASERS. Because you can’t have a home office without LASERS.

Getting an e-mail from a site saying that’s given my site an award for being famous, and that the site was “has been selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists,” and then going over to see the site and noticing that I’m referred to there as “Joe Scalzi.”

That’s some excellent evaluation there, site specialists.

I do occasionally see myself referred to online as “Joe Scalzi” or “Jeff Scalzi,” both of which make at least a little bit of sense because of the “J” connection, but I’ve also seen me referred to as “Dave Scalzi” or “Richard Scalzi,” which are a little more puzzling to me. But all of them are a little weird; it’s not as if “John” is that difficult a name, you know. And it’s all over the Web site and the covers of my books. Maybe all somewhat-common first names blend together in people’s brains. This is where it’s nice to have a last name like “Scalzi.”

Until my office gets reconstituted into recognizable shape (which should be a few days), I may be a little slow responding to mail, etc. Please be patient. Thanks.

Over at AMC, I do the Oscar post-mortem and explain how the most financially successful film of all time (unless you account for inflation, in which case it’s the 14th most successful film of all time) got skunked at the Academy Awards by a film that took in 1% of its box office. You know you want to know! And I want to tell you. And I will. So there. As always, feel free to leave comments over on AMC.

Last weekend Paul Sabourin of the comedy music duo Paul and Storm had his 40th birthday, and to celebrate Paul’s steep and unstoppable slide into middle-aged decrepitude, his musical partner Storm asked a few pals (including me, Neil Gaiman and a few others you might know if you know your geeks) to talk about Paul in video form. Here it is (parts not necessarily safe for work because of language).

IT’S ALL TRUE. Just remember that.

I noted yesterday that I was spending the day tearing down my office; well, it took longer than I thought and we only finished doing it about an hour ago. This is what it looks like without that massive desk in it; you can see, incidentally, why we’re so keen to get rid of the carpeting in there. It’s over a decade old, and it’s over a decade old in a service of an unbelievable slob.

Krissy is up in the office at the moment with an industrial-strength ShopVac, sucking out the mess and grime, mostly so she won’t feel personally humiliated when the contractors get here on Monday to put down the new flooring. By that time we’ll have painted the walls as well, from their current dingy white to a pale green called “Scotland Road” with the contrasting walls being “Traditional Brown.” Hey, I don’t name the colors. I just put them on my walls.

Until we’re done rebuilding the office, the primary computer is offline; I’ll be on one of the laptops or the other. And then the contractors will be all over the house for the next couple of weeks. I may not have picked the best time to start a new novel. Fortunately I have other, less intensive work to keep me occupied as well; I may focus on that instead.

How are you?

Angels and demons and neuroscientists, oh my! Skyler White’s got ‘em in her novel and Falling, Fly, and she’s not afraid to use them. She’s also not afraid to go deeper and look at what those angels and demons mean – not just in the literal sense of being angels and demons, but what these creatures might represent in the zeitgeist… and to her as an author. And now she’s here to lay it all out for you.

SKYLER WHITE:

Through a weird quirk of timing, the collective unconscious has bubbled up several fallen angel books recently. With one much, much bigger than my debut novel released in the same week, it’s tempting to poke the fallen angel blister here, and hypothesize on tumbled ideals as my ‘big idea’. But to the extent I’ve had any success as a writer, it’s come from writing the things that scare me, so I want to go a little bigger with The Big Idea, because mine is something I’ve been worried about.

My big idea is a bit of a dirty word. It’s archaic and medieval and I’ve spent the last two years concerned some editor or critic will paste it to my work, and I’ll be branded with it. The word is “allegory.” And, shamefully, I love it. I love mythology and Aesop and Orwell and Dante and god help me, I love Pilgrim’s Progress. I love it more than 80’s power ballads and musical theater and every other unsubtle, un-ironic guilty pleasure I’ve got. And I know it’s wrong. I know writers’ ideas must serve their stories. I know story arc and psychological realism are paramount. Nothing may be allowed to interfere with the pleasure a reader takes in a good story well told. The writer’s prose needs to step aside. The writer’s ideas need to move on back.

I’d like to say it was courage or rebellion that put me in opposition to the prevailing wisdom that allegory is naïve, primitive, and inherently didactic, but it was a less noble, more selfish impulse. I had a question I needed to explore, and fiction was the safest battleground to test myself against it. So I’m outing myself here: and Falling, Fly has an agenda. I have an ulterior motive. It’s not a political or moral agenda, and I didn’t have a lesson I was trying to impart, or an answer I wanted to teach. What I had was a question.

The question came out of a game I was playing with a group of friends who had all read Lynda Barry’s wonderful One! Hundred! Demons! and were experimenting together with naming our own personal ones. I was working on a portrait of a capitalist/addict demon who’s haunted me for years, called “Too Much is Not Enough,” and wound up with a single, simple question: what is desire? But it’s a simple question with a fractal edge. Why do we want what we can’t have? Is feminine desire different from men’s? What takes wanting away from a healthy, motivating need for nourishment or experience, and makes it an addiction or craving that cannot be sated? Can sexual hunger be translated to ice cream? What happens if the standard of living or parenting style delays practice or even experience with being denied? What does it mean if the sexiest thing a woman can hear is “I want you,” and she becomes what is desired rather than who desires? The only way I could think of tackling such a complex-but-simple question, short of continuing to muddle through my life-as-experiment, was through story.

Stories allow us to model different realities, to step into different skins, to try-before-you-buy different ways of being in or looking at the world. Some writers make models nearly identical to the world I see out my window. Through close observation and astute description, they offer a nearly photo-realistic experience of someone else’s life. Allegory sits on an opposite ledge. In allegory, what we see every day may still show up on the page, but it’s standing in for something we can never photograph. Even with the best CGI. Allegory isn’t about how acutely you can render the impossible in fantasy or the frightening into horror. It’s about what the magic and the monsters mean.

Allegory allowed me to look at the nature of desire from multiple angles and explore not only its different manifestations, but how they interact with one another. It let me introduce Olivia, the fallen angel of desire – the platonic ideal of desire in its corrupted, corporeal form – to Dominic, a neuroscientist to whom desire is reducible to neurochemical signals, and make them fall in love. With allegory, the son of a wealthy philanthropist can be a bit of comic relief and also a study in money-as-creative-force and privilege as a stultifying or even decaying state. But allegory also let me go ‘meta’ and create parallel story-worlds. In one, my symbolism is overt. A character can “mainline the memestream,” and what he creates in that parallel manifests in the other, more familiar one. I had a tremendous amount of fun playing across these worlds and with the ‘third rail’ of actual reality outside the story. I also found it an incredibly rich framework upon which to structure a plot.

But if an exploration of desire was the magical idea, allegory was the monster. I wanted to use the power of symbolism, but keep it obedient to the characters and their story. I wanted to invoke layers of meaning, but not burden my words. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But I know I want to.

—-

And Falling, Fly: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Watch the book trailer. Follow White on Twitter.

As noted earlier, I’m busy moving boxes and tearing down furniture all day long, so today’s Just Arrived bit will be even shorter than usual. Nevertheless, here’s what’s in the in door today:

* 2010 Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by Bill Fawcett (Roc): Nebula winning fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Kessel, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and others, plus poetry (including from my pal Cat Valente) and essays by Robert Silverberg, David Drake, Mike Resnick and more. Lots of cool stuff in here. Out on April 6.

* WWW: Watch, by Robert J. Sawyer (Ace): The follow-up to Sawyer’s WWW:Wake, in which a woman who discovers a consciousness inside the Internet tries to keep it safe from those who are hunting it. This will be out May 18.

* Directive 51, by John Barnes (Ace): The end of the world is (probably) nigh! Is there a government protocol for that? Oh, you bet there is. You’ll find out more what it is on April 6.

* Ark, by Stephen Baxter (Roc): The follow up to Baxter very moist thriller Flood. This time around humans are looking to save themselves from watery inundation by traveling to a new planet… but our book’s heroine be one of the few who will be chosen to go? Out May 4.

* Destroyermen: Distant Thunders, by Taylor Anderson (Roc): The fourth book in the Destroyerman series, which features an alternate universe World War II. Out June 1.

* Shine, edited by Jetse de Vries: An anthology of optimistic science fiction. Because all your dystopias are just bringin’ us down, man! Editor de Vries will be doing a Big Idea to tell us more on the book at the beginning of April; the book itself will be out March 30.

* Imaginary Jesus, by Matt Mikalatos (Barna): In which our narrator (who has the same name as the author) goes on a quest to find the real Jesus, and meets a whole bunch of other Jesuses (Jesi?) along the way. Written by someone who is both a former missionary and a former comic book clerk, which is an interesting combination, I think. Out now.

Well, some of it, anyway. There are some more plastic containers to the left of the picture edge which contain more books, and then up in my office there are another 20 or so boxes to shuttle down to the basement from the office, which I will do after lunchtime today, which incidentally I will be spending at Lowe’s, picking out paint for the walls. And then this evening Krissy and I will be breaking down the shelves and the desk and the loveseat, and pulling the art off the walls. So by the time we go to bed tonight my office will be almost totally bare.

What I really think when I see all these boxes is how the hell did I fit all this crap into my office in the first place? The topmost box there is at head height; there are a whole bunch of boxes you’re not seeing seeing here; I still have more stuff to bring down to the basement. My office is not that big. There may be some violations of physical laws here.

One thing which will be true is that much of the stuff that was in my office will not be making the return trip when the office is finished. The vast majority of the books will stay in the basement, not just for storage but also because we’re planning to make a more formal library there (someday…). The office furniture is going entirely; I’ve made the executive decision to graduate from particleboard shelving to something slightly more elegant, and I’ve also realized that having two massive wings on my desk just gives me an excuse to pile lots of crap on them, and I really shouldn’t give myself that excuse.

Beyond this, in a general sense I’ll be looking at everything and asking what it really adds to the feng shui. The fact of the matter is — and I know this will sound weird considering all the pictures you’ve seen of my office — at this point in time too much clutter starts being distracting for me when I write, and I am (alas) all too easily distractable. In one sense it would be lovely to have my office be a desk, a computer, a chair and then not a whole lot else. I don’t think I’ll actually make it that spartan in the end — I’m not that spartan a dude — but my office will be sporting a “less is more” philosophy moving forward. So, lots of stuff in the basement, on a more or less permanent basis. Well, that’s what basements are for.

Seriously, I thought you’d never ask.

The picture itself is slightly distressed, a product of being a wallet-sized photo trapped in a wallet for a number of years, and then in box for all the years after that (it’s now being placed in another, smaller box). And I subtracted the color because let’s just say prom pictures are not known for being color stable. But, yup, that’s me, and my prom date Joy, whom I had a huge crush on all through high school in that “I’m a nerd and have no chance but will adore you anyway” manner that I suspect at least a few of you may remember. So naturally I was happy when she let me take her to the prom. We had a nice time, if I recall correctly. So if you are one of those people bitter about the prom, sorry, man. Not in your camp.

And now, back to clearing out the office.

I’m currently deconstructing my office, because we’re literally about to redo it from the floor up (no, really; we’re tearing up the carpet and putting down a wood floor, and by “we” I mean “actual professionals because I would screw it up”). In the process of going through various drawers full of 10-year-old operating system recovery discs and newspaper clippings, I came across this: An engraved pen my wife gave me on the occasion of my very first book tour for my very first book, in 2000. This would have been the book tour for a book on online finance that came out as the Internet bubble was collapsing, taking place the week after the 2000 election, so most of my appearances on news shows were canceled because the fight between Bush and Gore was kind of more newsworthy, and after two stops my tour was cut short because, honestly, what was the point. And then the book flopped. And then the CHUDs came at me.

So, basically, the one good thing out of that entire tour was this pen, from my wife, who loved me and was proud of me for having written my first book. And you know what: Looking back, that’s enough. This pen’s spent the last several years at the bottom of a drawer, but I think in the new office it will have a somewhat more prominent position. It’s nice to have a reminder of just who it is who has been cheering for me from the start of it all.

By day, my pal Amelia Beamer is a writer and editor for Locus magazine, the magazine of record for the science fiction publishing industry. By night, she writes fiction! Note that these time divisions are arbitrary; for all I know she could write fiction during the day and spend her evenings editing. Or maybe a little of both. I don’t stalk her, you know. I don’t have a moment-to-moment rundown on her time. Nevertheless, she does both.

Amelia’s first novel is about sex and zombies and is called The Loving Dead and will be out in July from Night Shade Books. But in the run up to the print publication, Amelia is also serializing the novel on her Web site. Here are the first few chapters; more are on their way, and I expect will be posted here as they go live (Note: the excerpt linked to above is not the sort of thing you’d be reading out loud in a church or a kindergarten class, unless your church or kindergarten were very strange, and I think this is an accurate enough description to allow you to assess clicking through without spoiling the action therein).

If you enjoy what you read, go back for future installments, but also consider buying the book itself, because, hey, buying books from authors is a subtle yet telling way to let them know you enjoy their work. I’m just saying.

How does one write a user’s guide to the universe? After all, the universe is a pretty big place, and although we all use the universe on a daily basis, there’s a lot of stuff in it that we just don’t fiddle with (this is not necessarily a bad thing — most of us just aren’t equipped to handle an entire star, for example). Suffice to say there’s a lot going on in the universe, and even the people comfortable handling their corners of it have questions about the rest.

It’s “the rest of it” that Dave Goldberg and Jeff Blomquist want to explain in A User’s Guide to the Universe, and they came into the writing knowing one thing: when explaining the universe, it’s easy to get complicated, difficult to stay simple, and dangerous to be boring. Here’s how they got the most bang out of everything since the Big Bang.

DAVID GOLDBERG and JEFF BLOMQUIST:

There are a lot of books out there on physics and cosmology, and nearly every one of them touts as their chief virtue that they are “accessible.”  That said, we can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had with our civilian friends about some science bestseller in which they say something along the lines of, “That book was amazing, though I’m sure I didn’t understand a tenth of it.”  There’s probably a bit of undue modesty here, but also a kernel of truth.  It’s our experience that most pop-sci books go for the “Wow” factor and as a result, they end up as beautifully written, almost poetic odes to the universe, but ones that are perhaps better at awing than illuminating.

A couple of years ago, we were teaching a freshman physics course at Drexel University, and frankly, we were bored with teaching students about pulleys and blocks on planes.  And the students were bored with those things, too.  We constantly got questions after class or in the hallways asking about things that they will most likely never get to see in a classroom: time travel, the time before the big bang, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  But it wasn’t just them. At parties, on airplanes, while waiting at the DMV, we got questions from friends, from our editors, and sometimes from complete strangers.

And that’s where we came up with our big idea: answer the Big Questions.  But (and here’s the hard part) they had to be the sort of questions that people actually might — and do — ask, and not read like a FAQ for some freeware CD-burning program.

Can you break the light barrier?  Is there an exact duplicate of you somewhere else in time and space? What happens if you fall into a black hole? These are the kinds of questions complete strangers found so important. Our inaugural question, the one that really got us started, was, “I know the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into?”  From Nova, the Discover Channel, or even other books, most people are pretty aware of the buzzwords and core concepts, but not what, say, it actually means for a universe to expand, let alone what’s on the other side.  And that’s where we come in.

Our goal is to explain not only what we know, but how we know it, and more importantly, what it means. We wanted to leave readers with the sort of gut understanding that physicists have, only without the math gumming up the works.  We wanted to make clear the distinction between what we really know, and what’s still on the fringe.  We wanted to focus on the science, and not the history; we give credit where credit is due, but don’t go in for the narrative description of “Eureka moments.”

Just as important, we didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously. We realize that every “irreverent guide to physics” tries to make physics fun and accessible, but we opted to throw propriety to wind entirely.  At the center of this are our cartoons.  During graduate school, Jeff papered his office with terrible puns, including (our favorites), “The Solar Neighborhood” (which showed Pluto passed out on his lawn), and ridiculously dorky “How physicists can cheat at tag,” which we put into the final book, and which appears below.

We figured that if we were having fun, readers would, too.  We put in (à la Dave Barry) silly footnotes.  We make fun of our readers (see if you can find the Easter egg in the index), and our mascot is an alien named Dr. Snuggles.  In short, we wanted to write the funniest and most useful physics book you’ll read all year.

—-

A User’s Guide to the Universe: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See additional cartoons. Download the coloring book.

Dear Universal Home Entertainment:

You know, when your Blu-Ray discs take several minutes to load (because apparently you’re downloading trailers from the Internet, which I don’t want to watch) only to open up to a menu screen that doesn’t actually work, so that I have to start the disc halfway through the film and then track back to the opening using the “skip” button, you really aren’t making a compelling argument for me to buy a Blu-Ray disc from you ever again.

Beyond this, I’m generally not one for overbearing government regulation in entertainment, but if someone were to introduce legislation requiring home entertainment companies to have a “just play the damn movie” button at the start of every DVD, Blu-Ray or any other future movie-playing technology, I would call my Senators and representative every fifteen minutes until they voted “yes” on that bill.

That is all.

A quick FAQ about all the books I get:

How many books a week do you get sent?

Recently, between 10 and 25 a week.

Why do you get books at all?

Because of the Big Idea feature here, and also because of the “Just Arrived” entries, and also because the site has 40,000+ readers daily and most of them are interested in books, so publicists and publishers think it’s worth the time and effort and postage to send me their stuff. I don’t mind. I like books.

What kind of books do you get?

Mostly science fiction and fantasy (which is no surprise, really), but increasingly I’m also getting, other genres of fiction (YA, romance, lit fic) and some non-fiction as well. I’m happy to get a wide range because, you know. My reading habits are diverse.

Do you read everything you get?

No, and the reason why should be obvious by noting the volume of material I get sent. I don’t have time to read every single thing plus do my own writing. I would say I read one or two books a week fully and flip through a few more casually, usually the Big Idea-featured books that I haven’t already read. I wouldn’t mind being able to read more, but I think people would get annoyed at me, because then my own output would drop to zero.

What do you do with the books you get?

I keep some, and others I give away, either to friends or (after an appropriate amount of time, when it won’t have an impact on initial sales) to the local library, which often uses them for fundraising sales.

Do you sell books or ARCs on eBay or elsewhere?

No. I don’t need the money and I don’t think publishers really want me to sell them anyway.

Why don’t you give away the books you get to your loyal readers?

Because experience teaches me I am terrible at fulfillment on contests; nowadays I do giveaways here only if someone else is responsible for getting the book to a reader (I except the occasional charity auction I do from that, since I’m weirdly more motivated to mail things if money goes to a good cause).

If I come to your house, will you give me books?

No, I’ll set the dog on you and/or use you for archery practice.

Heh. You’re joking, right?

Yeah, not really. Random visits to the house = not cool.

I’m a publisher/publicist/editor/author. Can I send you a book too?

Sure. My publicity guidelines are here.

Hey, did you know people send me books? In today:

* The Midnight Mayor, by Kate Griffin (Orbit): They say that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, England shall fall! So guess what’s happening in this book? If you said “the ravens just signed a new lease on the Tower,” boy, are you ever not paying attention. This is the sequel to Griffin’s A Madness of Angels, and it’s out today.

* The Folding Knife, by K.J. Parker (Orbit): The ruler of country on the verge of empire discovers a choice he made in his past may come to haunt him. Out now.

* Changes, by Jim Butcher (Roc): Another Harry Dresden novel? You bet. This time Harry takes on the Forces of Evil™ to save his kid. And you say, kid? There’s a kid now? Surprise! Don’t worry, Harry’s surprised too. And for anything more than that,you’ll have to wait for April 6, which is when it comes out. I know, I know. Be strong, people.

* Admit One: A Life in Film, by Emmett James (Fizzypop): Being the memoir of journeyman actor James, refracted through the prism of films he’s loved and admired. Out now.

* Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime, by Mizuki Nomura (Yen Press): A book-loving student (who is actually a book-consuming demon) has her appetite whetted when another student comes looking for advice writing love notes. Translated out of Japanese, which for some reason does not surprise me at all. Out in July.

* The Mage in Black, by Jaye Wells (Orbit): The latest installment of the urban fantasy series featuring Sabina Kane. This time she heads for New York City, and you know how New York is. Out April 1.

* The Gaslight Dogs, by Karen Lowachee (Orbit):  A young woman from the frozen north and a soldier of an empire on the edge of war are called upon to use their talents, supernatural and otherwise, to decide the fate of nations. This looks a bit like Inuit Steampunk, and I’m all for that. April 1.

* Shut Up and Kiss Me, by Christie Craig (Love Spell): Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me, I’d be… well. Needing a dollar. Anyway, in this one a photojournalist takes the wrong picture at the wrong time and then has to entrust her life to a sexy lawman. Man, if I had a dollar for every time that happened to me… don’t worry, I’ll stop now. Out in June.

A couple of minor things before I run off and do real work:

* Went 5 for 6 on the Oscar major categories last night, missing only Best Picture, but since I thought The Hurt Locker should win that category anyway, I can’t complain overly about that (I suspected Avatar was off the winner screen when the editing prize went to Hurt Locker, actually). As my friend Anne was over, I actually watched the Oscar ceremony all the way through for the first time since I had to do it as part of a job (a state of affairs which takes the fun out of it), and I thought it moved along just fine, although as always it just went on too damn long. But then I feel that way about the Super Bowl, too. I may be fundamentally unAmerican.

* Thanks to everyone who took my little poll over the weekend; I’ve always had a suspicion that the people who read the blog had overlap but were different from the group of people who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, so it’s interesting to have some initial anecdotal evidence of that being that the case. If you haven’t participated in the poll but would like to do so, please feel free to.

* This will be my final reminder to all and sundry that if you’re going to nominate for the Hugos, you have until this Friday to do so. This is also my final reminder that if you’re a Hugo nominator and are interested in an electronic evaluation copy of The God Engines, here’s how to get that. But regardless of my work, if you can nominate, do so. 2009 was an excellent year for science fiction and fantasy and you have a lot of great novel, stories and other work to choose from.

Now I have to write a column, catch up on e-mail and, hey, who knows, maybe write some fiction. Catch you all a little later in the day.