Monthly Archives: April 2012

May/June Big Idea Update

For the Big Idea, I’ve now scheduled all of May and all but the last three slots of June. If you queried about May but haven’t heard from me, a) sorry, I thought I got responded to everyone, b) I’m full up. If you have a June book that comes out in the last two […]

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Barnes & Noble & Microsoft

People are asking if I have any thoughts about the just-announced partnership between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft in the eReader market. My major immediate thought about it is: Oh, good, a robustly-funded competitor for Amazon in the eReader market. That makes for three major eReader portals/ecosystems (the other being Apple; there are four if […]

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My New Toy, 4/30/12

It’s called a tenor guitar (specifically this one). Which means that it’s a guitar, but it’s got four strings, and naturally those four strings are the highest ones. It’s also tuned like a ukulele, which means that all the chords I’ve learned on the one transfer to the other, which is in fact very useful. I […]

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And Now, My Penguicon Guest of Honor Bio

As many of you know, this last weekend I was Guest of Honor at Penguicon, the open source and science fiction convention, held this year in Dearborn. I was asked for a bio to put in the convention’s program guide, and at this point you may imagine I am deadly bored of writing bios for […]

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Industrial Toys and Me

So, here’s a bit of secret news that I can now share with you: I’m part of the team at Industrial Toys, a new video game company that’s going to be bringing some jaw-droppingly awesome games into the mobile space. I can’t tell you what precisely I’m working on there at the moment (except to […]

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View From the Hotel Window, Dearborn Edition

It’s not the most interesting view I’ve had outside my hotel window, but the “halo” effect by the reflection of the camera lens by the glass is kind of interesting. And the hotel I’m actually in, the Regency Hyatt Dearborn, is interesting because it is huge, the sort of place you could easily get lost […]

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Redshirts ARC Winner + Other RS News

Yesterday’s Redshirts ARC contest is over. The word I was thinking of was “abundant,” which no one got. However, Dave Danielson did guess “absurd,” and since that word shares the first two letters in common with “abundant,” I hereby declare him the winner. Dave, send me an e-mail from the e-mail address you used to […]

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The Big Idea: Chuck Wendig

One day, an unwelcome and unsavory character started stalking Chuck Wendig. Well, maybe not so much stalking him as Wendig suddenly becoming aware that the dude was there, has always been there, and wasn’t going away. Who was this disturbing entity that Wendig became obsessed with? And how does said entity figure into Blackbirds, Wendig’s […]

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And That’s How We Finally Found Jimmy Hoffa

Okay, so Jimmy Hoffa isn’t probably actually in my back yard. But a lot of landscapers are, doing some heavy duty landscaping with back hoes and tractors and stuff. This is how I know I’m a grown-up: I pay people to ride tractors around my backyard, because I don’t want to do it myself. Shut […]

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Prognosticating the Summer SF Movie Hits & Misses

Contrary to what you may have heard from those Stark people, Summer is coming, and with it a whole stack of science fictiony films, some even not based on comic books! Over at FilmCritic.com, I go through the entire list of summer sf films and place my bets on how successful they will be (or […]

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Redshirts eBook to Be DRM-Free From Day One

By now, you have probably read that Tor Books (along with the other divisions of Tom Doherty Associates) will be releasing all their eBooks DRM-free by July of this year. But some of you have wondered what that means for my upcoming novel Redshirts, which comes out June 5. Will it have DRM on it […]

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Tor/Forge to Go DRM-Free By July: Immediate Thoughts

This is pretty big publishing news: Tom Doherty Associates, an imprint of Macmillan and the publisher of most of my science fiction work, has announced they plan to ditch DRM (Digital Rights Management, i.e., the stuff that keeps you from moving or copying your eBooks) entirely. Here’s the release that’s going out about it. Tom […]

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The Big Idea: Suzanne Johnson

Fantasy novels can and do take place in the real world — and when they do, there’s a special responsibility the writer has to reality just as much as to the fantasy she places within it. So former New Orleans resident Suzanne Johnson learned when it came time to write Royal Street, which takes place […]

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Sunday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

A photo of me waiting in the Green Room of the Bovard Auditorium before the “Nerds Will Inherit the Earth” panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which along with me featured Pamela Ribon (who took this picture), Maureen Johnson and Amber Benson. I’m not gonna lie to you: The panel kicked ass […]

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Saturday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

Saturday was a pretty good day at the LATFoB. The weather was gorgeous and the place was packed with people, and I wandered around looking at the booths and the books. I met Libba Bray for the first time and learned of her butter sculpture of me, talked with Barry Goldblatt about kids and geeks […]

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