17 Comments on “Oh, Hi”

1. You’re sounding disturbingly like GRRM.

2. We make our characters, whole planet-loads of characters, suffer, know that they will die, and die. All for fun and profit.

3. Go, Scalzi, go! Do even more terrible things to even nicer characters!

4. Have I ever mentioned how much I *hate* waiting?

5. That’s the best reason to be a writer – the ability to legally cause suffering. Oh, yes, the ability to cause joy, too. But you can do that without being a writer.

6. Better that you do horrible things to nice fictional people than make them happen to nice non-fictional people is what I say.

7. Gilligan’s Island reference from ‘Galaxy Quest’?

8. Aaaand now I’ve got the title “On Being Poor (Fictional) People” stuck in my head.

   DAMMIT, SCALZI! Are you happy now??
   Oh, okay then.

9. The phrase my globetrotting kids use is “NDIAD”, short for Not-Dead-In-A-Ditch. That’s what you get when you raise bright kids and take ’em to cons from birth (yeah, I’m proud of them), emails that just say, “NDIAD – In Xingping”, then you have to go Google where the heck Xingping is.

10. I would love to be writing, but I’m at a hotel at approximately the corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave in Hollywood, in day 2 of a 4 day computer science conference, currently listening to an excellent paper on offloading Java app code in realtime from your phone to a remote computer server.

    THE GOOD BITS ARE FLYING, FLYING I TELL YOU.

11. The Forge of God – Page 251
    by Greg Bear, 2001, 480 pages

    “He shook hands as Sand introduced Jonathan V. Post, an acquaintance of Kemp’s, dark and Levantine with a gray-shot curly beard…”

    I’m in there, under my own name, because Earth is destroyed in 2 ways there — one antineutronium, one nanoassemblers. Larry Niven et al came up with 1/2 of the antineutronium trick (they had mere
    neutronium, Greg Bear told me the partial solution by Noven, and said: “I want to destroy the world completely in a new way, and people on Earth can see it coming for a few weeks, and can’t do anything about it, so I can really make them suffer.”

    I plotted the antimatter/matter and spiralling trajectory); and I suggested the nanotech to make sure the Earth unzipped correctly.

    “Great,” said Greg Bear. “Do you want to be mentioned in the acknowledgements, or be in as a character?”

    Not juts me,” I said, “since Earth is destroyed in 2 ways there.” Hence my wife, Dr. Christine M. Carmichael is described, under her name in the novel, too…

    I was not completely happy about the “gray-shot curly beard” as mine was jet black at the time.

    “Just wait,” said Greg Bear, wisely.

    The son, Andrew, of me and Dr. Carmichael appears appears as “Andrew Cheetah” — who loves to count — in the sequel. Indeed he does — and earned his double B.S. in Math and Computer Science by the age of eighteen, having started full-time at university at age thirteen.

    Truth is stranger than fiction. What fun to be in both!

12. Heh. I once told a friend that the reason I loved writing was that I could kill of an entire planet’s worth of people horribly, and still toddle off to lunch thinking of myself as a nice person.

13. But are you practicing your evil laugh? Bad Horse had to practice his whinny, make sure you get your evil laugh down pat! Remember, no monologging while the hero(s) lives – once dead, then you can explain your evil plan…

14. @ TransDutch

    That’s the best reason to be a writer – the ability to legally cause suffering.

    If you become a programmer, you can legally cause suffering to non-fictional people :-P

    Bwahaha…bwahahahaha!!!

    @ MomDude

    The phrase my globetrotting kids use is “NDIAD”, short for Not-Dead-In-A-Ditch.

    Keep ‘em guessing, I always say. That’s why I always send “NDIADBSMAP”, short for “Not dead in a ditch, but so many other possibilities.” Nah, not really, but I do think spousal and parental units have become spoiled by instant communications. I miss the good ol’ days when you were always forthright in their minds, their fertile imaginations encouraging them not to take you for granted.

    then you have to go Google where the heck Xingping is.

    At the intersection of ping and pong?

15. So, dude, did you meet your deadline? How’d it go? Something we’ll be able to read before too long? Teasers are waaaay cool.

16. YOU”RE THE MITT ROMNEY OF AUTHORS!

17. (I was kidding of course. Please don’t mallet me.)