It’s been clear for some time that my Facebook presence was getting progressively unmanagable, so I’ve gone ahead and done something that I should have done a while ago, which was to convert my personal account there into a public page. That means everyone who was friend requesting me can now just click on the “like” button and get access, which is a nice way to get around Facebook’s arbitrary and obnoxious 5k “friend” limit.

So if you’ve been waiting for me to friend you on Facebook, wait no longer! Just go over and “like” me and together we will happily traipse through the Facebook flower beds. Or something.

Updates from the Scalzi Compound.

* For those of you who wondered whether I hit my deadline last Friday: I did not. BUT — as my deadline was Friday afternoon and the editor wasn’t going to do anything with what I sent in until today at the earliest, I finished up on Saturday and as a practical matter it was all the same. If you’re going to blow I deadline, I submit to you that’s the way to do it. The good news is that it’s done.

What is it? Some additional material I’m adding to the next Tor book. It’s not new stuff in the novel, which has been done for some time, but it’s a substantial amount of supplementary material which I think readers will enjoy quite a bit. It’s hard to describe without describing the novel itself, which I’m still not going to do yet. Sorry. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but some of the fun will be in the reveal.

Since the supplementary material has been finished more or less on time, the book is right on schedule and I believe (don’t hold me to this) it’ll be out in June of next year. So if you were wondering when the next major fiction piece from me was going to be in stores, now you know.

* However, the new Tor book probably won’t be the only new book I’ll have out next year; I’m also likely to have a non-fiction release as well. That one’s still in the mid-to-late formative stages, so no real details yet; I’ll have more when things are little further developed.

* Also, as I noted in my FilmCritic.com column last week, the option for the OMW movie has been picked up again, and there’s currently working the script, so everything on that is going just peachy as well.

* Now that the latest deadline is past, the plan for the immediate future (i.e., the rest of July) is: Shoot zombies. As all right-thinking people should.

I suppose I could have told you myself. But I think it sounds better coming from him.

See you all on Monday.

I did learn “Every Day I Write the Book” on ukulele today. After I turned my work, of course.

A doubleheader for deadline day!

Now, don’t bother me. I’m WORKING.

Then click here.

NOTE: The fan art, while very cool, also portrays a violent scene in the book, involving messy things happening to someone’s head. Be ready for the splatter.

The artist is Kat Harpin, and you can visit her Web site here.

This is also a fine time to link back to my policy on fan creations in my universes (which is, basically, have fun, you crazy kids).

Or, in language that is slightly more related to English, I’ve got my new glasses, with bifocal lenses. Here they are. I went with progressive lenses and the glasses are rimless. I think they look fairly decent.

My first few hours of bifocals review: They’re doing what they’re supposed to, which is to keep text from being all fuzzy when I look at it close up. I’m aware of the change in focus when I look in various parts of the lenses, but so far it hasn’t been anything that’s too disruptive. It’s not making me fall over my own feet, which is what I’m hoping for here. So in all, this little bit of aging has passed along in a fairly painless manner.

And some flowers, too. Because both are nice. Unless you have allergies to one or both. In which case, you’re probably already sneezing. Sorry about that.

Back to the word mines for me.

What those of you in time zones West of here have to look forward to:

Note: Actual sunset may vary by location. Not responsible for rainouts.

There. Totally de-kewpiefied. I feel much better now.

In this week’s FilmCritic.com column, I discuss all three! And in that order, even! Go check it out. Because every time someone links to my column from here, a sparkly unicorn gets its wings. It’s true. And when you comment there, a rainbow flies out of its backside!

The end is coming! Stock up on beans and pillows!

When the hair goes up in a kewpie doll point, it’s time to haul out the trimmer. It’s not a good look on a 42-year-old man.

E-mail from folks asking if I have anything to say about the report that Michelle Bachmann suffers from migraines so painful she needs medication for them. Sure, I have something to say: Migraines really suck, and if Ms. Bachmann does indeed suffer from them, I’m sorry for her that she does. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.

As for whether they should somehow keep her from the presidency: I don’t think so. I think her apparent general ignorance and horrible political stances should keep her from the presidency. Her migraines aren’t even on my radar. That’s pretty much where I am on that.

Because THEY COULD BE ANYONE.

The folks at Mini, apparently in an attempt to make me feel like the sum I dropped for our new car has opened up new and aspirational lifestyle vistas for me and my family, sent us the small pile of Mini-related swag you see here. It includes a Mini bag, a blank journal to record all my travel, a pen, a card holder, a Mini-centered lifestyle magazine, and a happy face antenna ball.

It’s all very cute and the pen is actually useful (the antenna ball, alas, does not actually fit onto the antenna), but it doesn’t really convince me to descend any further into the Mini lifestyle. I mean, I do already like my car an embarrassing amount. But there’s only so many hours in the day, no matter how many nice, nubbly pens Mini tosses my way. I’m already well sunk into the writing geek lifestyle. I don’t want to have to change my wardrobe.

This is not terribly unexpected but still not good news:

There will be no storybook ending for Borders. The 40-year old book seller could start liquidating its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday.

The chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to liquidate its stores after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business… Liquidation sales could start as soon as Friday if the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York approves the move at a scheduled hearing on Thursday. The company is expected to go out of business by the end of September.

It’s not good news for the obvious reason: One less place for authors to sell books — well, 399 fewer places, as that is the number of remaining Borders stores at the moment. Our jobs just got that much harder. There are other less obvious reasons as well, but the obvious one is bad enough.

I’ve got a project with a hard deadline of Friday, which means I don’t have a lot of time to play here this week. But I hate leaving you with nothing to do, so all this week, while I’m slaving away in the word mines, I’ll post up a couple of silly polls during the day to keep you busy. And here’s your first one:

Feel free to expound upon your answer in the comments.

I’ve noted before that comparing one author’s process and career with another’s is a situation fraught with difficulty (and often, some stupidity), so take the following with a grain of salt. That said, for everyone who ever bitched about George Martin taking so damn long to write A Dance With Dragons, allow me to make the following observation:

George Martin’s previous novel, A Feast for Crows, came out in 2005, the same year as my novel Old Man’s War. Since OMW, I have written The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, Fuzzy Nation, and my upcoming 2012 novel (Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream were written prior to 2005). Martin’s written A Dance With Dragons. So I get credited with being reasonably prolific whilst Martin gets slammed by the more poorly socialized members of his fan base for slacking about.

The Ghost Brigades is about 95,000 words. So is The Last Colony. Zoe’s Tale is about 90,000. Fuzzy Nation and the 2012 novel are about 80,000. Add all those up, and I’ve written roughly 440,000 words worth of novels since 2005. A Dance With Dragons, so I am told, clocks in at 416,000 words. So, in terms of total novel words written for publication since 2005 (and omitting excised material), there’s a 5.5% difference between the amount that I have written for novels and what Martin has. If we’re talking about the actual words published, written since 2005, there’s a 13.5% difference — in Martin’s favor, because my 2012 novel won’t be published until, well, 2012.

Shorter version: During those years the unsocialized were snarling at Martin for being lazy or procrastinating or indolent or whatever, he wrote about as many words for novels as I had. By this superficial but easy-to-quantify metric, on the novel front he was as productive as I was, and most people seem to agree that I’ve been pretty productive these last six years. I just spread my words around five novels while he poured all of his into one.

Yes, but — some of you are about to say. To which I say, yes but what? Martin should have been releasing the story in smaller chunks? Well, and if he did, how much crap would he have gotten for milking his fanbase and releasing books that weren’t sufficiently complete as stories in themselves? The publisher should have sat on him to write faster? To what end? So he could have sold more books? Look, I’m a New York Times bestselling author and I sell perfectly well, thanks for asking, and by the end of its first week of sales, it’s entirely likely A Dance With Dragons will sell more hardcover copies in the US than I have sold of all my novels, in every printed format, since Old Man’s War came out in 2005. How many more books can one human reasonably be expected to sell? Waiting six years and releasing a novel large enough to herniate a small human works just fine for Martin. His publisher would be foolish to mess with that. And so on. Any “yes, but –” argument one can make can be refuted on entirely practical terms.

In the end it comes to this: Why did it take six years for A Dance With Dragons to come out? Because that’s how long it took. Martin wasn’t being lazy, any more than I or any other author lucky enough to be regularly published these days has been. One hopes that those who are already primed to bitch at Martin about why The Winds of Winter isn’t instantly on their shelves will keep this in mind. Martin’s writing as much as anyone. He’s just writing big.