Monthly Archives: August 2008

That’s Dragon*Con For You

How is my Dragon*Con going? Oh, well, you know. Pretty standard stuff. Well, except for that incident last night involving bacon-flavored jellybeans, a conga line and a room filled with sweaty gay men. But I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. I will say this, though: Man, are my knees sore. (Walks off, […]

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In Decatur

Just finished my panel with Cherie Priest, Tobias Buckell and Kevin J. Anderson. It went pretty well, I thought; now I’m waiting for my taxi to my hotel, which is apparently not near a damn thing. I forsee lots of taxi rides in my immediate future. How’s your Saturday?

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Talking About Writing, 8/29/08

Hey there — I’m in Lexington. Writing in a coffee shop. Don’t worry, I’m not fooling anyone. On the subject of writing, I did an interview with the site Eat, Sleep, Publish, talking about the state of publishing and whether writers will continue to make a living in the future (short answer: Sure hope so). […]

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Obama Speechifying

Per my earlier discussion of avoiding the conventions, I didn’t watch Obama give the speech last night, but I did read it (it didn’t take the 40 minutes speaking it required), and I thought it was very good. On the GOP character attacks, it seems like he did a bit of a rope-a-dope strategy, taking […]

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Final Notice on Appearances

Tonight: Lexington Joseph-Beth bookstore. 7pm. Me. Tobias Buckell. Paul Melko. Frivolity will be had. Also, book signings. Tomorrow: Decatur Book Festival. Sunday: Dragon*Con reading and signing. Information on Decatur and Dragon*Con here. Monday: Totally sleeping in. Hope to see you at one or the other of these.

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Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 2

My pal Dave Wechsler — who used to be the Rough Guides publicist who had to deal with me, the poor bastard — is also a member of the very groovy band Piñataland, which specializes in a type of music which, for lack of a better term, I would call “alternate history Americana”: Instrumentation that […]

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Books v. Blogs, Atlanta Style

Just in time for Dragon*Con and the Decatur Book Festival, Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s alternative weekly, has done a long meditation on the subject of books and blogs and how the two interact with each other, and the article features pithy quotes from Cherie Priest, Rich Tommaso and me. And yes, Bacon Cat is referenced, because […]

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Recurring “Nightmare”

Thursday means my movie column at AMC, and this week, on the occasion of yet another home video release of the film, I look at why Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is more popular now than it was when it was released fifteen years ago. I also tell the story of why every emo […]

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Politics Blah Blah

To answer the person in e-mail who asked if I planned to say much about the Democratic convention: No, not really. As I believe I have mentioned before, right about now, politics makes me feel positively stabby, and I think it’s best for all concerned that I just avoid it all when possible. In fact, […]

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The Book Haul 8/27/08

Yesterday’s Book Haul covered the various hardcovers that had made it into the Scalzi Compound over the last couple of weeks; today we’ve got some of the various paperbacks. Ready? Here we go: * Wanderlust, Ann Aguirre: The second of Aguirre’s Jax books, in which the main character is has the special ability to navigate […]

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(Momentary) King of the Kindle

This is nice: It won’t last — Stephenie Meyer fans, outraged that their leader was deposed even momentarily, will no doubt purchase Kindles for the sole purpose of buying electronic copies of The Host, thus putting her back on top. Also, I expect to be visited by a teenage vampire death squad any second now. […]

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Scalzi/Buckell in ’08!

Here Toby and I are announcing our intention to run for president and vice-president of these great United States, on a platform centered on, oh, let’s say, jellybeans for all, and the immediate invasion of the nearest Best Buy for all the gadgets we could possibly want. That Toby is not constitutionally able to serve […]

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Book Haul 8/26/08

I’ve been traveling so much this month that I’ve had books come in and stack up, so instead of the usual one of these posts I do every couple of weeks or so, I’ll be doing three of them: One today, one tomorrow and one Thursday, at which point I’m sure I’ll have even more […]

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Me Me Me (and the Cat)

Some stuff relating to me: * First, here’s a shot of the recent Ann Arbor appearance of me, Tobias Buckell and Paul Melko, talking about science fiction today. We’re up there in the front. I think it went very well — Toby and Paul are smart, funny people to talk science fiction with, and the […]

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The Big Idea: Lauren McLaughlin

Every teenage girl has “that time of month,” as it is so euphemistically referred to, but in Cycler, the totally inventive and fun debut novel from Lauren McLaughlin, Jill McTeague discovers that during her time, her body goes through entirely different changes than most girls — specifically, four days a month, she becomes Jack, right […]

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Free Fiction: The Secret History of The Last Colony

Interestingly enough, given the last post here, I have a new bit of fiction online for you: An excised chapter of an early version of The Last Colony. As I explain in the introduction to the chapter, it’s no longer a “canonical” part of the OMW universe, because it’s from an iteration of the story […]

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On Writing For “Free”

The science fiction tube of the Internet is having another one of those spasms about “free writing on the Internet” and whether giving away writing actually helps or hurts one’s career: Here’s one of the latest, in which I play a prominent role as an example. And while I understand I am fated to continue […]

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