Monthly Archives: December 2006

Goodbye 2006

Lopsided Cat says: So long, 2006. You were mighty tasty. Indeed it was, Lopsided Cat. Indeed it was. You now have less than 24 hours left in 2006. There are many ways you could be spending this time. In front of your computer shouldn’t be one of them. Scoot. See you next year.

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A Fun Little Statistic for You

Not counting this entry or anything I write tomorrow, I’ve posted about 300,000 words to the Whatever in 2006, which comes out to about 825 words a day, every day. Add to that what I expect is an additional 200,000 words or so I wrote over at By The Way, and that’s roughly half a […]

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Kim Ng

Check this out: a Newsweek story on Kim Ng, with the subhead: “She knows her baseball and is in line to become the sport’s first female GM.” Right on. She and I lived in the same dormitory at the University of Chicago — at the same time, even. It’s always exciting when people you know […]

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My Favorite Albums of 2006

Because I know you’re wondering: They are Black Holes and Revelations by Muse, and Begin to Hope by Regina Spektor. Why? Well, I’ll tell you, with the help of multimedia aids.* First, Muse, performing their single “Starlight”: I like this album because it pretty perfectly fills a long-absent slot in my list of musical needs, […]

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Books to Spend Your Gift Cards On

All this talk about marketing and publicist guidelines and so on reminds me that there’s a stack of books on my desk that I’ve been meaning to chat about for a while but which I’ve neglected to because I’ve been all about me recently. Well, enough about me, let’s talk about some of these books […]

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And Now, On an Entirely Self-Serving Note

Hey, now that I think about it, why wasn’t I tagged by Microsoft for their nifty “here’s a laptop with some Vista on it” promotion? I totally have a higher Technorati ranking than most of these dudes! I get 25,000 visitors a day! I’ve got a punchy, engaging prose style! Clearly, there was an error […]

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World Domination via Blog Marketing: Don’t Hold Your Breath

Dean Esmay (who has a new book out, incidentally — congratulations, Dean!) pointed to my Publicist Guidelines yesterday as part of a larger column about a recent Microsoft blogger publicity attempt, in which Microsoft and its PR company Edelman shipped off bitchin’ new laptops with Windows Vista on them to a selected number of bloggers […]

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Professional Rejection

A question in e-mail: I’d be curious to find out what the rate of rejection to acceptance is among your professional writers. Would it be different for you from your commercial work, or the same? This is actually two questions: What is the rejection rate among professional writers, and how does the rejection rate for […]

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Android’s Dream Accolade

The literary site Bookgasm declares The Android’s Dream one of the five best science fiction books of 2006: Straight, fun sci-fi adventures are hard to come by these days, and Scalzi has done an awesome job with this one, with great characters, plotting and dialogue wrapped up by a plot that always stays 10 steps […]

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My 2007 Literary Output: A Review

What will you see from me in 2007, and what won’t you see from me in 2007, but I will be working on, nonetheless? Here’s what I know I’m doing, so far: Stuff coming out in 2007 that I have dates for: 1. Old Man’s War (mass market paperback edition), January 2007: Those of you […]

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Rembrandt, Up Close

The Dayton Art Institute is hosting a traveling exhibit from the Rijksmuseum, featuring a number of famous works from Rembrandt as well as other Dutch masters and Rembrandt apprentices, including Jan Steen, Adriaen van der Werff, Nicholaes Maes and Gerard Dou. Apparently the Rijksmuseum doesn’t let its work travel all that much, but right now […]

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Gerald Ford

My first memory of Gerald Ford was one of annoyance; this jerk was on my TV when my TV show was supposed to be on! And he was on all my TV stations! Logic tells me that I should be equally annoyed with Jimmy Carter, who would have been his debate partner and thus equally […]

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All Caught Up (I Think)

I just went through my e-mail for the last two weeks and caught up (I think) with all the straggling bits of correspondence. And I’m pretty sure before that I was all caught up. Be that as it may, if you sent me an e-mail in December for which you were expecting a response, and […]

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Starship Troopers, The Movie: A Review

The NYT Times piece on me and my books has tangentially re-ignited the “was Heinlein a fascist” thing yet again (the latest entrant: Brad DeLong), and the additional discussion of whether the question of whether the reputation of Starship Troopers the book has been damaged by Paul Verhoeven’s movie of the same name. So I […]

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2006 Author Interview Archive

In 2006 I began interviewing authors over at my AOL site By The Way, and I have to say I was thrilled at how well the interviews have turned out. For those of you who missed these interviews the first time around, here’s a chance to catch up. If you are an author and want […]

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