Something to Look Forward To
Posted on February 20, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
Because I know you’re always looking for reasons not to throw yourself off a bridge, consider this as something to get you through the weekend: Next week, I’ll be posting not one, not two, but three Big Idea pieces. Yes! Three times the joy! At least which one of which I intended to post this week, but then Bad Flight Karma and other things happened.Yeah, I suck.
Mind you, this is one of the reasons we’re doing BigIdeaAuthors.com — the site will have its own, far more responsible editor, who will make sure everything goes up on schedule and not just when I get around to it. That’s right, I’m outsourcing professionalism! And you should all be glad.
Incidentally, I’ll be having more details about BIA soon, so those of you on your chair for that, be ready! It’s coming. Not today, though. Today I’m, well, kind of flaky. It happens from time to time.
Very cool. I personally asked Steven Kent and Lee Stephen to submit Big Idea pieces.
Hopefully they did it and can get posted sometime soon.
Might as well live.
Head and Shoulders should clear up the flakiness. Just lather, rinse, repeat. :)
I’ve had one minor concern about the BigIdeaAuthors.com site, which I generally think is a wholly made-of-awesome idea: will you still be noting new B.I. author interviews here on the Whatever? I think the appeal and success of B.I. is that, well, the Whatever has, what, 40K readers? So there’s swell exposure for a writer, right there. That’s the value. Shifting the feature to its own site, which arguably may not garner as many daily readers as the Whatever right out of the gate, may devalue having a B.I. feature, at least until the readership climbs.
Just a thought, is all.
At the beginning I will be very active in advertising the new site here, and we have other promotional plans in process. I think we’ll get good numbers early for the site, and that it will build its own audience in reasonable time.
What does one say to a self-appointed literary panderer? Your snide transparency is stunning, yet clearly you’re the last one to get it. One cannot help but marvel that you believe you’re qualified to publish opinions on anything, much less as a source of authority. Possibly you regard “Everyone’s Doing It” as a legitimate rationale — or perhaps you’ve accepted your own lack of distinction as “normal.”
Whatever your reasons, your nauseating stream of “cool” remarks degrades only yourself. Who knows — maybe one day you’ll learn the true definition of the word “Whatever.” I wish you well.
Huh? What was that about? (#6)
Sorry number A Visitor I don’t get it either. Care to elucidate about what you’re on about? Maybe not.
Oops, I meant Sorry A Visitor @ #6…
Does, A Visitor, = hit and run posting?
That almost made me decide not to post something snarky. Almost.
I do like the Big Idea posts and have read a lot of them but something went through my brain while trying not to think too much about work. The Big Idea suddenly had this Hollywood feel to me. I had to explore the possible relationship in my mind.
One BIG Idea. AKA high concept.
A bomb in a bus.
Die Hard but on an aircraft carrier.
Die Hard but on a Alcatraz.
Alien on a space ship.
Snakes on a plane.
Snake in L.A.
Still I do like the articles. Turning a big idea into a novel takes more exploration of that idea than for a movie.
Ethelred
Oh, noes! Bland insults from an anonymous source! I swoon! I die!
Actually, truth be told, I named Scalzi Literary Panderer, in subsection six, clause sixteen, paragraph three, sentence four of the operating and ND Agreements he signed with Subterranean Press for BIA. (For those who have the document, this follows closely on the detox from Coke Zero section, which I’ll note, Scalzi has yet to complete.)
I’m disturbed this leaked out. We hadn’t planned the revelation until the site had been live for at least six days.
Bill