UK science fiction magazine SFX has listed Whatever as a finalist in its Blog awards, in the category of “Best Celebrity Blog,” along with the blogs of Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Jane Espenson, Kate Griffin and James Moran. They’d like for you to vote for your favorite. And there are five other categories as well for you to vote in. You know you love voting for stuff online, so go knock yourself out, kids. And while you’re there, go ahead and follow those links to the blogs you see there; chances are decent you’ll find some good reading (and in the case of Podcast category, good listening).

I could totally tell you wanted one of these. Well, here you go. Enjoy.

Blake asks:

Can you ever just accept a compliment when you get one? Just a curious thought that passed through my mind when reading your answer to the poll that OMW was number one on.

In fact, my standard operating procedure when someone compliments me or my work is to say “thank you,” without too much else in elaboration. I went ahead and overthought the Tor.com poll and what it meant because, hey, it’s Reader Request Week and I don’t think Gareth wanted a one-answer response to his question. But in a general sense I think it’s bad grace, or simply just awkward, to get defensive or overly modest when it comes to being complimented by someone. It’s also not a good idea to go the other direction (“I enjoyed your book.” “Well, of course you did, how could you do otherwise?”). So I find a simple “Thank you” will suffice on nearly every occasion.

That said, there is a certain type of compliment that I go out of my way to respond to in a qualified manner, and that are those compliments I get that come wrapped in a dismissal of someone else or their work, i.e., “I love your books, they’re so much better than the crap [insert author name here] is putting out these days.” Well, thanks, but now I feel that if I accept your compliment, I’m implicit in your trashing of [insert author name here]. If I’m going to trash [insert author name here], I’d prefer to do it under my own steam and not get backed into it. Also sometimes [insert author name here] is a friend of mine; I mean, I know a lot of authors at this point.

I’ll also usually say something additional if I’m complimented for something that I didn’t do. I’m occasionally complimented on my book covers, for example; in which case I’ll say “Thank you. John Harris (or Vincent Chong, or Shelley Eshkar, etc) did a great job” or something along that line, because there’s nothing wrong with crediting work and sharing the love.

I do think people and particularly authors aren’t always comfortable accepting compliments, partly because of standard-issue neuroticism, and partly because no one wants to look like a smug prick. But just as being an author means learning to accept negative reviews, it also means getting used to the idea that people really do like your work and genuinely want to thank you for giving them something they value in their life. You don’t want to make a big deal of it, but I don’t think you should dismiss it, either, because when you do that you in a small way and quite unintentionally devalue their experience of the thing. Don’t do that. The best and simplest thing to do is to say “thank you.”

Conversely, how to give a compliment: Whenever possible, keep it simple. For authors, “I really enjoyed your book,” is always a good short one, as an example. I think there’s a temptation to try to overelaborate compliments because you want them to be different, but speaking as someone who gets compliments from time to time, sincerity and simplicity almost always work, and almost never get old. I think there’s nothing wrong with saying more, if for example there’s something specific about a work that speaks to you; additionally if your attachment to a work is really profound, it’s okay to say so (“What a fantastic book. It was my favorite this year”). I also think there’s nothing wrong with being silly or elaborate with a compliment, if you’re complimenting someone you know well and who can tolerate your silliness. But when in doubt, as with so many things, sincerity and simplicity are always good strategies.

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It’s not too late to ask questions for Reader Request Week — post your questions at this link.

Via e-mail, Gareth asks:

Old Man’s War was voted the best science fiction/fantasy novel of the last decade in that Tor.com poll.

Is it?

And if not, what is?

Well, let’s take this in two parts.

OMW certainly did place number one in the Tor.com poll, but let’s keep two things in mind about that. One, I mentioned the poll here and encouraged readers here to vote in the poll, thereby introducing to the voting pool folks who were probably more inclined to think favorably of my work than not. This may or may not cause harrumphing from people who feel this unduly influenced the voting, but, you know: Dudes. You may be failing to grasp the concept of a popular vote. And I feel fine about it because a) people could vote for more than one novel (and did), b) I  encouraged folks to vote for the novels they felt were best, and not my own if they didn’t believe it was, c) hey, OMW is a pretty good novel. So there you have it.

Two, getting the number one ranking in a poll where you are allowed to list as many novels as you felt were “best” in the last decade (and all those votes are weighted equally) doesn’t necessarily mean the number one ranked novel is considered the best novel out of all the books nominated. It means that when people made their lists, OMW was on the largest number of lists. There may have been books on those lists that the voters felt more passionate about than mine — i.e., would have ranked higher than OMW, had ranking been involved — but a plurality of list makers had my book on their lists.

So in the end what the number one ranking on the Tor.com poll means is that OMW is the book the largest number of people who voted thought should be ranked among the best — not that it is, in actuality, the best science fiction and fantasy novel of the last decade.

And you know what? I’m good with that. I’m delighted to have my novel considered among the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the last decade (or in Tor.com’s case, a baker’s decade, since it has an extra year in it), since I think it’s reasonable to suggest there is an overall consensus as to what novels have had recent significant impact on the genre. I think the list the Tor.com voters ultimately compiled is not a bad stab at attempting to get a bead on the last eleven years of our field.

I think polling a crowd to pick out just one book as the best — either on that last or off it — is a bit of a fool’s errand, however. “Best” is necessarily subjective. There are those who genuinely think Old Man’s War is the best science fiction novel of the last decade; I thank them. Then there are also those who feel like the fellow who wrote this memorable, and in its way totally awesome, one-star Amazon review of the book:

This macho fantasy reads like the work of a clever but disturbed schoolboy. It exists only for the scenes of nasty, meaningless violence that punctuate the tedious clichés. ‘Earth’ is represented exclusively by the USA: the only mention of the developing world is so racist you have to suppress all memory of it if you want to continue. The rest of the world seems never to have existed. American geriatrics (who talk like schoolboys) are given super new bodies and sent to fight various aliens (who talk like schoolboys). There are no characters to speak of, no psychology, no development, no suspense. The brief attempts to provide some kind of scientific background are just silly and ignorant. The underlying assumption – that all species are the same, and all are driven by a mindless urge for expansion – is crude, shallow and dreary. One curious aspect: from time to time the ‘characters’ pause in their slaughtering and dismembering to hold conversations which almost but not quite acknowledge how absurd and unpleasant it all is. Then it’s back to the gore. The professional reviewers who have praised this horrible little book ought to be ashamed. It is the literary equivalent of pulling wings off flies.

Old Man’s War has been around long enough now that I’ve been able to watch the different ways people react to the same elements in the book. What some people classify as “compulsively readable,” other people file under “glib and shallow”; scenes some find “visceral” other find merely “gory”; some people praise my talent for dialogue and characterization while others complain that all my characters sound the same. Who’s right? Well, inside their head, every reader is right. You can’t make them feel about your novel any other way than they do. You shouldn’t try. No one has that much time on this planet.

I think Gareth is angling to know if I think OMW deserves its perch on the top of the Tor.com list. Well, qualified as above, sure. I’m not exactly an impartial observer of the book, nor am I without ego as a writer, so when you read the following keep these two facts clearly in your head. With that noted: I think OMW is probably one of the best recent examples of popularly-written, classically-styled science fiction out there, and it does pretty much what I intended it to do as its author, which was to inject a contemporary sensibility to an old-fashioned form of science fiction storytelling. My style is often shorthanded as “Heinleinian,” but I think it might be more accurate to describe it as “Campbell Modern,” which is to say an updated take on plot-oriented, transparent-prose writing that editor John W. Campbell favored. This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course — remember that the New Wave of science fiction arose as a reaction to Campbell’s influence, and the entire field benefited from that uprising — but if it is your cup of tea, then chances are very good you like what I’ve got in my teapot. As a representative of that particular strain of science fiction, and I think on its own merits as a tale well told, OMW deserves to be considered among the best SF/F books of the decade.

Is it the best SF/F book of the decade? No. My vote for that is China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, and to be clear I don’t think the vote’s even close. Bas-Lag in itself is a monumental achievement in world-building, a place Miéville so cannily describes that I can picture it in my head better than I can imagine some places here on my own planet. I love re-reading Perdido simply to go walking the streets of New Crobuzon once more. The novel’s story is less of a direct narrative than it is following around people too wrapped up into their own concerns to realize just how much they’re pushing their world toward oblivion, but this is a feature, not a bug, in my opinion. And then there’s the fact that as a formal exercise in genre, it’s a bomb lobbed into the intersection of science fiction and fantasy — Perdido is neither, it just is and is enough so that the term “New Weird” was either created or retconned into service to accommodate it.

The way I would explain Perdido, in reference to Old Man’s War, is as follows: Old Man’s War is a thick, juicy steak that when you put it in your mouth you go, “Damn, I forget how much I love steak.” Perdido Street Station, on the other hand, is molecular gastronomy: a whole new way of looking at cooking, which when the results are put in front of you, you go, “Wait. Is that food?” Both are good, and depending on your taste, one may suit you more than the other. But at the end of the day, one is a truly excellent steak, and one is an invention. And that matters.

So, yes: I think Old Man’s War is among the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the decade. But for my money I think Perdido Street Station actually is the best science fiction/fantasy novel of the decade. You are of course free to disagree. Indeed, the fact that you probably do disagree is part of the fun.

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It’s not too late to ask questions for Reader Request Week — post your questions at this link.

Over at FilmCritic.com this week, I rummage through the mailbag and answer questions about the magnificent floppitude of Mars Needs Mom, how I would plan an alien invasion, and why there are so many science fiction movies scheduled this March. It’s all the stuff you need to know, none of the stuff you don’t. As always, comments can be left over there.

Charles asks:

If you were born in the dark ages, and couldn’t be a writer, how would you earn a living? Technology related jobs are out, because remember it’s the DARK AGES. I don’t see you as the farmer type, so what would you do?

Well, first, I’m not 100% behind the phrase “dark ages,” which implies, basically, that from the collapse of Rome until roughly the time of the Renaissance, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in Europe, intellectually and culturally speaking. This is not entirely true, as any student of European history will tell you. Likewise, as French historian Jacques Le Goff reminds us, “Those who suggest that the ‘dark ages’ were a time of violence and superstition would do well to remember the appalling cruelties of our own time, truly without parallel in past ages.” Look at the last century and see if you can disagree with this point.

As for technological advances, there was a lot of them about, actually, but in a manner we don’t much think about. The development of the heavy plow, for example, was literally cutting-edge technology in the 7th Century; sure, it doesn’t look like much next to your shiny new iPhone, but on the other hand your shiny new iPhone can’t break up the heavy soils of Northern Europe and lead to massive advances in the ability of the people there to feed themselves. If you’ve got any ancestors from above the Danube, you might be glad one of them thought up the heavy plow. Add in the horse collar, which arrived in Europe in the 11th century or so, and suddenly those same farmers could plow the same fields in half the time. No, they couldn’t play Angry Birds. But back in the day, they had real angry birds. Stealing grain. So there.

Be that as it may, the question remains: What would the John Scalzi of, oh, let’s say, 1011, be doing with his time?

To begin, if he was my current age of 41, there’s an excellent chance he would already be dead. Infant and child mortality killed off a large number of folks who would never see the other side of a fifth birthday; add to that the general less-than-advanced state of medicine of the eleventh century AD, and there’s a good chance that either disease or injury would have claimed me by now. And even if it had, I would still be old at 41; it seems unlikely I’d have many of my teeth still, my various injuries and years of almost certain hard physical labor would have taken its toll on my body, and so basically I’d probably be hunched, creaky and gumming my food.

And what would my job be? Easy: Peasant farmer.

Which, I know, Charles, suggests he doesn’t see me as. Thing is, in 1011, pretty much everyone was a farmer. Yes, there were other jobs, and other social strata, but if we’re looking at actual statistics, guess what? Odds are, you’re probably a peasant farmer. And certainly in my case it seems to be likely. Look at my last name: Scalzi. In Italian, it means “barefoot.” Tell me that doesn’t just scream “hardy peasant stock.” So, yes, if I’m in the eleventh century, and still alive at my advanced age, then I’m almost certainly a farmer. And I probably think it sucks, but then, it’s not like I have all sorts of options.

That said, there’s a small possibility that at an early age someone saw some small spark of intelligence in me, in which case there’s a chance that might eventually find my way into a religious order, which given who I am today might seem somewhat ironic and amusing, but in the eleventh century might strike me as a pretty good deal, all things considered. If I joined an order that followed the Benedictine Rule, I would have some access to reading and the intelligence of the time, and would be in a community of like-minded individuals, and in any event knowing me I would prefer that life to looking at the ass end of an ox for most of my days.

In either case I probably wouldn’t have become me — that is, the witty, snarky writerly type you all know and appear to tolerate. But we’re talking the eleventh century here. It was not a quality era for snark. I do imagine that in my village or order I would be known for my quirky sense of humor, but I also suspect that’s about as far as it would go.I suppose there’s some very small chance that I could be something along the lines of a wandering entertainer, going from court to court with my tales, perhaps with musical accompaniment. But I don’t exactly see that as a good life, in 1011.

But let’s suppose that in my 11th century character creation mode I rolled all natural 20s and ended up having the option of being anything I wanted to be. What then? Well, my first option would be not to be born for another 958 years (or so), because I like me some air conditioning and Internet and human rights and modern medicine. Barring that I would go for, oh, I don’t know, a royal court historian somewhere; a gig that keeps me out of having to take an arrow in the thigh (or alternately, running someone through with a pike) in a war, or watching an ox’s ass while it pulls a plow, or in fact very many of the really stinky and inconvenient aspects of life in the 11th century. What about being a prince or a knight? Yeah, no. Lots of wars. Lots of death. Lots of being away from family for years while you fight for a boggy chunk of land. Pass, thank you. Court historian will suit me just fine.

But in point of fact, what I’m rather more likely to be is a peasant farmer, and also, at age 41, stone cold dead. I’ll stick with the 21st century.

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It’s not too late to ask questions for Reader Request Week — post your questions at this link.

But then they remembered that vaporizing me would still not give them opposable thumbs. Score one for the primates! And yes, I then fed them. Because I am not stupid.

I’m having problems today both sending and receiving e-mail — it’s a problem with my site host, it seems — so if you get mail bounced back or otherwise have mail-related difficulties involving me, that would be why. I’m on it and will try to get it cleared up as soon as possible. Thanks.

Update: Fixed.

Todd Stull asks:

At what point could you foresee ending the Whatever? When you become fabulously rich and (more) famous? When John Cusack rolls up in an airplane on your lawn and bits of the planet are splitting off? Only from your cold dead hands? (Disclaimer: None of these questions are to be taken as if I want any of this to happen.)

The simplest answer to this is that I’ll stop writing here when I become bored with it. This has happened before in the past, and when it has, I have taken time off, anywhere from a week to a month (last year I took off six weeks but that was due to travel and catching up on other projects). Usually taking a little bit of time off solves the problem, but if it ever gets to the point where it doesn’t, and updating Whatever becomes a genuine chore, then it’s likely I would stop.

What I think is more likely, however, is that I wouldn’t stop, in the sense I declare an ending point, chop everything off, take up my bat and ball and go home. It’s rather more likely I would just stop updating regularly. The site would still stand, previous entries would be accessible and everything would be preserved; there’s no sense in taking everything down, and the cost to maintain the site is minimal. It’s just that I would update rarely if at all. I would probably turn off the comments to keep the site from eventually collapsing under the weight of spammage, but that’s it.

I don’t see this happening in a general sense because after coming on a dozen and a half years of writing here I haven’t gotten permanently bored with it yet, and in that dozen and a half years I’ve gone from being just some dude writing on his Web site to being a writer of some reasonable note; which is to say I’ve managed to fit Whatever into my working life so far. If I become more famous, or at least, more busy, and have larger constraints on my time I can see cutting back a bit and updating when time and circumstance allow (see Neil Gaiman’s blog as an example of this). But I really don’t see simply walking away from the site, or just closing it up and leaving a hole on the Internet where it used to be. That seems unnecessary.

An interesting question would be whether Whatever could ever eventually change. If it came to the point where I was so busy (or so uninterested) that I couldn’t reliably update the site, I might consider taking on permanent co-bloggers, or expanding the Big Idea pieces to more days of the week, or something else that would keep the site interesting and worth visiting but wouldn’t need me to be the focus of the site day in and day out. This is an interesting option and one I’ve considered for the long term.

But then again, “long term” seems like a funny way to think of a blog, even one that’s been around for a dozen years, which makes it positively Jurassic in Internet Years. For now, I don’t have any plans for Whatever except to keep doing what I’ve been doing with it — writing about whatever I want, whenever I feel like it. That still interests me.

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It’s not too late to ask questions for Reader Request Week — post your questions at this link.

It’s uncanny, is what it is. That is, until you get the frontal view:

Which is less “bear” and more “Do you mind? I’m napping here.” Fair enough, Lopsided Cat. Fair enough.

Alphager asks:

As far as I understand from your lent-related post, you are an atheist/agnostic and encourage your daughter to take an interest in religions in general and the christian faiths in particular.
Can you explain how that came to be and by which principles (e.g. will you go to church with her? Are you open about your beliefs?) you teach her about religion?

I ask because me and my girlfriend are on the verge of marriage and have been talking a lot about religion and atheism; I’m an atheist and she is the daughter of a protestant pastor. She fears that the question of religious education (or lack thereof) of our (as of yet potential) children could be a major source of conflict.

Well, the reason I encourage her to learn about religion, and Christian faiths in particular, is because the large majority of people on this planet follow a religion of some sort, and here in the United States, the large majority of those who are religious are Christians of one sort or another. I’m an agnostic of the non-wishy-washy sort (i.e., I don’t believe in a god nor believe one is required to explain the universe, but I acknowledge I can’t prove one doesn’t or never did exist) and always have been for as long as I can remember thinking about these things. I don’t see being an agnostic meaning one has to be willfully ignorant about religion, nor do I see my role as an agnostic parent being one where I shield my daughter from the reality that she lives in a religious society.

Where my daughter is on her own journey of discovery regarding faith is not for me to discuss publicly, but I can say that I believe more information is almost always better. So when she wants to know about a particular religion or explore some aspect of faith, I encourage her to do so; when she comes to me with questions about religion, I either answer her questions (being that I know a fair amount about most major religions) or help her find answers. Athena is well aware that I am an agnostic, and what that means, and we’ve explored that aspect of faith (or lack thereof) as well. I won’t tell you what questions she asks about religion, faith, agnosticism and all of that, but I will tell you that she asks good questions, and for my part I answer them as truthfully and as fairly as I can.

There are a number of people who have come to agnosticism or atheism because of conflicts with or disillusionment about religion, and in particular a religion they were born into and grew up in, and others who are agnostic or atheist who feel that religion and the religious impulse must be challenged wherever they find it. For these reasons among others I think people assume those people who aren’t religious are naturally antagonistic, to a greater or lesser degree, to those who are. But speaking personally, I don’t feel that sort of antagonism; I don’t look at those who believe as defective or damaged or somehow lacking. Faith can be a comfort and a place of strength and an impetus for justice in this world, and I’m not sure why in those cases I, as a person without faith, would need to piss all over that.

There are those, of course, who believe their faith (and here in the US, their Christian faith primarily) excuses being bigoted, or cruel, or ignorant, or petty or pitiless, or who use their faith (or the faith of others) to do terrible things and/or to impose their worldly will on others. In my experience, this is less about the teachings of Christ than it is about people being bigoted, cruel, ignorant assholes and then saying Jesus told them to be that way. Well, no, he didn’t. These folks are simply looking for an external excuse for their own bad behavior. It’s the spiritual equivalent of the dude who goes out on Saturday night, acts like a jackass, gets into a fight or two and wakes up the next morning in a ditch without his pants and then blames it on the Pabst Blue Ribbon. It ain’t the beer that’s the problem, it’s the man behind the can. Likewise, Jesus and his unambiguous message of love and charity toward even the least of us is not responsible for the lout who wraps himself in a cross and preaches a message neatly opposite to Jesus’ own. I don’t have any problems opposing these people, and letting them know just what bad Christians I think they are. I’ve don’t have any problems pointing out these people to my child, either.

But again, that’s not about me as an agnostic opposing those who have faith. It’s me as a person who knows the message of Christ pointing out a hypocrite, and me as a person with my own moral, social and political standards countering one whose standards differ. As it happens, I know a reasonable number of people of faith who feel the same way I do, and have many of the same moral, social and political standards as I have. Do I fear them? Discount them? Think them defective? No; I say “I’m glad to know you.” We believe many of the same things; that some of their belief comes from the teachings of Jesus, or from Allah by way of Muhammad, or from Buddha, to name just three examples, does not trouble me. Whatever steps we took to get there, we’re walking the same path.

As an agnostic, I’m not afraid of my child learning about faith and how it’s practiced. I think it’s necessary, and I think it’s valuable. I’m also not afraid that my child might adopt a faith as her own; she may indeed. If I have done my job as a parent, she will have done so from a position of knowledge, and of understanding everything that comes with adhering to a practice of faith — and with the ability to ignore or act against those who would try to use that faith as a lever to get her to do things counter to its teachings.

Likewise, I don’t think any agnostic or atheist has much to fear in teaching their children about religion, if they answer their kids’ questions truthfully, openly and in the spirit of giving their kids as much information as they can so their children can make their own decisions — which they will anyway, unless you’ve raised a drone, which is something I think most of us would rather not do. Raising your children to know they can ask things, they will get answers and that they can question any belief, religious or otherwise, raises the chance that whatever path they choose regarding faith — including the path that espouses no faith at all — they are on the correct path for them. As a parent, I think that’s what you want.

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It’s not too late to ask questions for Reader Request Week — post your questions at this link.

But I could have gotten through the whole day without having a nuclear energy facility blow up. Maybe that’s just me.

I don’t have a whole lot to add to that. This isn’t an issue of human error or negligence from what I can see; it’s the aftereffect of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. You can plan for it — which the Japanese did, which is why at this point there are still fewer than a thousand dead in a country of 100 million — but no matter how you plan, you don’t know if the planning will rise to the moment when it happens. Here’s one of the limits of planning, apparently.

Because, seriously. Not a good day for the planet. Hope this helps to take the edge off.

This blog is called “Whatever” for a reason: It’s about whatever I feel like writing about. But one week a year, I make the blog about whatever you want to talk about: The Reader Request Week. For 2011, that week starts next Monday — which means it’s time for you to ask me whatever questions you really want me to write about here on the site. You get answers for things you want to know what I think about, I get to think about things I wouldn’t necessarily have thought up on my own, everybody wins! And it’s nice when that happens.

What topics can you request? Why, any topic you like. And in fact I like it very much when the topics are not from my usual stable of things I talk about. Make your request serious, or make it silly, or make it risque, or making it searching — it’s up to you. I don’t pick every request, but I try to give each week a nice spread of topics. So, really: go nuts.

That said, two things for you to consider:

1. Quality over quantity: Better to craft a single interesting topic request about something you’d like to know, than to post a bunch of half-assed topic requests, shotgun-blast style. It’s not a contest or a race, after all — and more to the point I almost always gravitate to the interesting, well thought-out topic requests.

2. On writing: I get asked about writing a lot in a general sense, so during Reader Request Weeks I’m less interested in questions about writing than questions on other topics. So, one, writing questions are less likely to be considered as topic than other things, and two, the writing requests I’m likely to consider are ones that are new and interesting to me, not the basic “writing 101″ questions, or even the more advanced “writing 301″ questions.

How to suggest topics? The easiest way is to drop them into the comment thread here; alternately you can e-mail them to me. Don’t drop them into my Twitter feed, please; it’s active enough that they’ll end up scrolling off into oblivion. Likewise, I vastly prefer requests in this comment thread than over at Facebook, since it makes it easier for me to check just one place (and one e-mail address).

Also, to help you choose topics that have not already been recently addressed, here are the Reader Request Week Topics for the last five years:

From 2006:

Reader Request #1: SF Novels and Films
Reader Request #2: 10 Childhood Nuggets
Reader Request #3: Writers and Technology
Reader Request #4: The Nintendo Revolution
Reader Request #5: A Political Judiciary
Reader Request #6: Paranoid Parents
Reader Request #7: Writing About Writing

From 2007:

Reader Request #1: Justifying My Life
Reader Request #2: Coffee, or Lack Thereof
Reader Request #3: BaconCat Fame
Reader Request #4: The Inevitable Blackness That Will Engulf Us All
Reader Request #5: Out of Poverty
Reader Request #6: Short Bits
Reader Request #7: Short Bits II: Electric Boogaloo

From 2008:

Reader Request #1: Homeschooling
Reader Request #2: Technological Gifts
Reader Request #3: Sex and Video Games
Reader Request #4: Where I Am Now
Reader Request #5: Professional Jealousy
Reader Request #6: Author Relations
Reader Request #7: Fame or Lack Thereof
Reader Request #8: Politics and the Olympics
Reader Request #9: Polygamy
Reader Request #10: Meeting Authors (and Me)
Reader Request #11 Athena and Whatever
Reader Request #12: Soldiers and Support
Reader Request #13: Diminishing Returns
Reader Request #14: Quick Hits, Volume I
Reader Request #15: Quick Hits, Volume II

From 2009:

Reader Request #1: SF YA These Days
Reader Request #2: OMW and Zoe’s Tale (and Angst and Pain)
Reader Request #3: Space!
Reader Request #4: Procreation
Reader Request #5: Having Been Poor
Reader Request #6: 80s Pop Music
Reader Request #7: Writing and Babies
Reader Request #8: Twitter
Reader Request #9: Can I Be Bought?
Reader Request #10: Writing Short Bits
Reader Request #11: Wrapping Up

From 2010:

Reader Request #1: Christianity and Me
Reader Request #2: Rewriting the Constitution
Reader Request #3: How I Think
Reader Request #4: Quitting Writing
Reader Request #5: Rural Ohio, Revisited
Reader Request #6: Depression
Reader Request #7: Writery Bits
Reader Request #8: Short Bits

So get your requests in, and I’ll start writing them up next Monday!

We were talking to Athena today about Lent, and what it means in a religious sense that during Lent people give things up, and how, if you’re serious about Lent, you don’t give up something you won’t miss, you give up something you’ll miss a lot. This concept intrigued our daughter, who announced that she wished to give up something for Lent. I suggested she give up the Internet. She said, “I’ll give up the Internet, if you give up Coke Zero.”

I told her fine, I would. And then we shook on it.

So, effective at midnight, I’m off Coke Zero (and in a general sense, sodas) all the way through Easter. As I’m not religious, I’m hesitant to say I’m actually giving Coke Zero up for Lent, so as not to offend those who are in fact performing Lenten self-denial (hence the asterisk). I’m doing it largely to support my daughter as she experiments with what it means to give up something you really like. But inasmuch as we’re doing this until Easter, all you folks giving up something for Lent, we totally feel you.

Anyway, wish me luck on this. Also, as a warning: The next couple of days I will be going through some gnarly caffeine withdrawal symptoms. SO DON’T PISS ME OFF I WILL SET YOU ON FIRE. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Tons of e-mails recently from people who want to know what I think about Amanda Hocking or [insert some other self-published e-book author here] and the fact they’re selling lots of self-published ebooks via the Kindle and so on. Answer: See what Jim Hines has to say about it here, since I would say pretty much the same thing so closely to the manner in which he said it that he would be totally justified in accusing me of plagiarism.

More personally as it relates to me, considering that I made thousands of dollars off a self-published ebook a dozen years ago now — back in the days when people had to physically mail me actual dollars (uphill! in the snow! Both ways!) — when said novel was only available on my personal Web site, I’m not particularly surprised that some folks are making more money now they can tie into large commerce sites which handle both payment and fulfillment. It’s excellent for Ms. Hocking and anyone else who’s doing well with it. Good for them. But as Jim notes, we need to be careful not to confuse the statistical anomalies with everyone else, and it is a lot of work. It’s the “lot of work” part, among others, that keeps me working with publishing houses; I like being able to focus on the writing, not the everything else.

Over at the FilmCritic.com site this week, and in honor of the upcoming Battle: Los Angeles film, I take a look at previous cinematic alien invasions and grade them in terms of style and effectiveness. Because, you know. Why not. Come see the grades and then leave your own comments in the thread over there.

Except that I find the song strange and compelling. Enjoy.

From this album.