Monthly Archives: May 2008

Rough Guide to the Universe 2nd Edition is Out!

I’m absolutely delighted to say that today is the day that my astronomy book, The Rough Guide to the Universe, comes out in a second, updated edition. In it you’ll find the latest on Pluto, Saturn, Mars and other astronomical entities about whom we’ve learned more since the first edition of the book hit stores […]

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An Amusing Bit of Unnecessary Encouragement

Royalty check yesterday afternoon, for Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, from Tor/Macmillan (I handled that deal myself; all the other novels are handled through my agent, who in fact e-mailed me today with news of other royalties to be sent my way. It’s been a nice weekend). In the royalty package, a note, […]

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The Subtle Difference Between Professional and Psychotic Hosebag

La Gringa with a sample letter from someone who apparently doesn’t want an agent as much as he thinks he does. Folks, this is simple. As far as writers go, the difference between a professional and a psychotic hosebag is not that psychotic hosebags take rejection personally and professionals don’t. The difference is that even […]

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Some Editing Will Be in Order

I need to send the updated manuscript for Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded to Subterranean in the next couple of weeks in order to make our September release date, which means integrating new material into the original manuscript, which I compiled in early 2006, which covered Whatever during the years 1998 through 2005. That […]

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Making Light’s Out

Those of you who are fans of Making Light, the blog from Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden and friends, might note that you’ve been having trouble reaching it today. That’s because it imploded, and they’re in the process of trying to reconstruct it. Patrick has the details at his LiveJournal, and a temporary home for […]

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Your Dream Life

My friend Meeka has a general question for you dreamers out there in Whateverland: In conversations with friends, it seems some dream in a manner similar to me, in which dreams have their own logic, which is not necessarily correlated with reality, while others have dreams that are very pragmatic and tied to reality.  Also, […]

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Business Note Re: Anthologies

I’m getting a fair number of invitations to write for short story anthologies these days, which is very gratifying to the ego. But I’ve plotted out my writing obligations for the next year (actually 15 months) and what I’ve discovered is that I actually have absolutely no more bandwidth. If I try to jam any […]

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John Scalzis Everywhere!

Look! It’s John Scalzi, interviewing some lady on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. When was I in Sarasota, you ask? Answer: I never was. So how could John Scalzi be interviewing someone on the beach there? Because not everyone named John Scalzi is me: As it happens, I’ll in Florida in a couple of weeks, […]

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Why YA

Cory Doctorow takes a moment to remind folks going into the bookstore to get his book Little Brother that they need to go into the Young Adult section, not the science fiction section, and then talks about the YA section of the bookstore being something of an undiscovered country, where cool things happen because no […]

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Spinning Away

Ooh, look. I found “Spinning Away” by Eno/Cale on YouTube: Video: odd. Song: good. There’s a cover version of this, by the mid-90s party band Sugar Ray, but this version is to that, as Shakespeare might say, as Hyperion to a satyr. I give Sugar Ray credit for good taste, but otherwise, yeeech. My strongest […]

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A Historic Moment, Of A Sort

More people disapprove of George Bush today than disapproved of Richard Nixon when he resigned from the presidency: A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president. “No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN […]

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MRK’s Site Down

I figure there’s a fair amount of overlap between the people who read Whatever and those who read Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, so I’m passing along this note from her, regarding her site: Around noon today, someone decided that it would be fun to hack my website.  They’ve installed some code that is taking down […]

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Whateveresque Registration Open Until 10pm

For those of you wanting to join in with the fun over at Whateveresque, the Whatever reader forum, registration is now open through 10 pm Eastern time. Hurry, hurry, like quick little bunnies. As always, help an administrator out in approving your membership request by choosing a member name that is recognizably NOT a spambot […]

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