70 Comments on “Mary Robinette Kowal Confesses”

1. Hey, at least we now know we have a redundant backup Scalzi if anything should happen to the original.

2. …But… But… I wanted to continue reading Young Man’s War: First Contact !
   Not fair.

3. Actually, there is only one american SF&F author: MRK. All others are just pen names she makes up when bored….

4. I would not have noticed if uhm the cat’s name was spelled wrong.

5. I don’t buy it for a second . . . the ego quotient on this blog is too big to allow such a thing.

   . . . I’m betting you actually wrote that piece as an April Fool’s joke. Did she let you on her blog, or did you steal her password?

6. I honestly don’t know if MRK is telling the truth, or if the MRK piece is actually Scalzi pretending to be MRK pretending to be Scalzi. The latter seems more likely to me.

7. I’m impressed with the dedication to the “long con” for an April Fool’s joke.

8. No, I am Scalzicus!

9. Plot twist: Rothfuss is BOTH OF THEM!

10. Unlike Disperser, no betting from me but I /did/ just start wondering which is the April 1st trick. Maybe both, And Wil Wheaton is doing it all.

11. I confess that I hate April Fools jokes, so my mind may not be in the right frame for this, but what exactly is the punch line? Mary (maybe John) lays out a lot of “evidence” (aka assertions) that Mary (probably not) has been doing all of John’s blog posts for two weeks. So I’m a fool if I buy the argument that she can impersonate people in long-form writing, and also believe that a pro author/performer has the time to do this kind of thing for no monetary gain?

    Even if, in the unlikely scenario that this isn’t an April Fools joke, I still can’t see the punch-line. “Hahahaha! Mary can impersonate people convincingly in textual format, including me! Suckers!” Eh?

    /grump

12. Well played, sir & madam & sir & whomever, well played.

13. Oh Wow, how original…. a internet based april fools. Well played? No, more like overly played.

14. It’s Scalzis all the way down . . .

15. Well done, well done.

16. How shocking!

17. I, for one, demand a full refund.

18. *squints hard at date*

    I don’t believe you!

    I’ll believe it if you say it again in a week.

19. Hmm. A curious turn of events here. Did she or didn’t she? Did you? And what about the other one–Pat? All very confusing. Too confusing for my harassed mind with a coworker out sick (again, le sigh). I know. How about we take the lot of you outside (any ‘outside’ will do really) and have you SHOT. Okay, I really think bullets and all would be fine, but realize it may seem rather harsh in the civilized world. So, I’ll compromise. Paintball, at 5 FEET. Full auto.

    Oh, and by the way, very witty.

20. In best Spartacus voice: “I AM SCALZI.”

    (Seriously, nobody wrote this yet? You’re slipping, y’all.)

21. Ha, well you had me fooled until I remembered what day it was. Excellent work.

22. I have to admit to being a little disappointed not to see the second novel in the Shadow War of the Night Dragons series.

23. Well, as others have noted, today is April 1st.

24. Sorry, I was too busy being the Walrus. Goo Goo G’Joob.

25. Wait – *I* am the Walrus!

26. I honestly have no idea if this is true or not. On the one hand, Mary could pull this off. On the other, would John let her handle the Reader Requests? My best guess is that they each did some. But I have no idea. Well played, folks. Well played.

27. BATTLE OF THE NETWORK WALRUSES, TONIGHT ON ABC

28. I always felt that John looked entirely too comfortable in and fit too well in MRK’s alleged dress

29. I’m *so* confused.

30. R. Dale Guthrie – don’t feel bad, I’m not sure what’s going on either. 1. “You’ve been reading what you thought were Scalzi’s posts for the last two weeks, not knowing Mary wrote them – you got punked!” Or else 2. “Mary spun a preposterous yarn on her website and you believed it until you noticed it was April 1 – you got punked!” I’m leaning toward the latter. However, if I am not sure what the joke is, maybe I’m just not part of the target audience for the joke.

31. All I know is, someone took my bukkit and I want it back.

32. Well played – count me as another one who can’t tell if MRK = Scalzi for a month is the prank, or MRK *claiming* to have been Scalzi for a month is the prank. Either way, very well done.

    Plus, I want more of that fake (?) novel, “Young Man’s War: First Contact,” whoever wrote it.

33. Got me.

34. Forget it, Jake; it’s Whatever.

35. I think Brandon Sanderson is being both of them.

36. I was expecting the punch line to be that you had had to adopt the identity of one of the 12 Weasels for the two-week period. *shudder* MRK is a better writer than I am.

37. I call Shenanigans!

38. You all realize that what you experience as the “internet” is really an old “Eliza” program that’s gone viral.

39. To quote CaseyL: “Plus, I want more of that fake (?) novel, “Young Man’s War: First Contact,” whoever wrote it.”

    This. I don’t care if it’s a fake book, it would be a great real book, too! Although I have to admit that as soon as I started reading the post on MRK’s blog, I knew that April 1st was involved somehow. It got sprung on me early this morning by an email from ThinkGeek advertising Rosetta Stone for Klingon, with video by Michael Dorn and all. I wish!

40. Wait a second, I thought Scalzi was a sock puppet creation of the Feminazi party from the start. You mean people thought he was *real*?

41. Well, I AM a professional puppeteer.

42. I’m still holding out for “101 Uses for a Spare Goat.” Get busy, you merry pranksters.

43. I am hoping this is just an in-group thing for which I lack context. That, or my sense of humor is comatose and a beer or three after work will restore it. If this is a 4/1 joke, then sorry but lame. If MRK did take over for John in a ‘hah, hah, pulled a fast one on you readers’, than both parties have damaged their credibility.

    Twitter?, yea sure, an excellent venue for puny stuff. Whatever, even with the (very enjoyable) humor, is a forum for a lot of serious discussion. Anyone here now have reservations in participating when there is hint of someone snickering away in the background?

    For me; just feeling fooled.

44. It’s sock puppets all the way down?

    Third base? I dunno.

45. @Sam L. Hines:

    either. 1. “You’ve been reading what you thought were Scalzi’s posts for the last two weeks, not knowing Mary wrote them – you got punked!” Or else 2. “Mary spun a preposterous yarn on her website and you believed it until you noticed it was April 1

    Click on the link to read more of the sample chapter.

    Scalzi & MRK, by confessing to a prank on April 1st, and then confessing that the confession is a prank, you’ve broken the universe. I hope you are happy.

    So who wrote the fake chapter? If it was MRK, then the bit about remembering to add the dialogue tags could be true. Broken… broken, I say.

    Not bad, though I was sort of hoping to hear about another elaborate prank funded by Tor.

46. You’re right, Tokyo. Both parties have irretrievably damaged their credibility and I’ll never believe anything they post on April 1st again.

47. Wait… is the April Fool’s joke the confession or the long con??

48. Ummm….uhhhh….OK April 1st. Let me in on who is really who tomorrow when the universe returns to normal programming.

49. I hate April 1st. This one is worse than usual for several reasons, including I have a cold and I can’t go home. Maybe I would be amused, otherwise.

50. I don’t care who “Scalzi” is, as long as I get my “Shadow War of the Night Dragons” fix at least every April.

51. @ Steven desJardins; Messing with people is messing with people. Sorry, no sense of humor with that. Why such a big deal? Because I have developed a profound respect for John and what he does here. So while, yea, I can read a calendar too, my very first feeling was that someone and somewhere I trust is messing with me. Got it; it’s just a joke, deal with it, man up…

    So why am I feeling red-faced? >shrugs<

52. At least the April Fools joke wasn’t any more Shadow War stuff. As fun as it was, it got ground into the dirt pretty fast.

53. First, I find out my 13 year old son got a girl pregnant. Then, I find out JOHN FRIGGIN SCALZI is not JFS! What’s next, Pat Rothfuss hates stew?

54. Congratulations, sir, my head now officially hurts. When can we expect “Shadow War of the Night Dragons”?

    ;)

55. OMG. I actually fell for that for the better part of an hour.

56. What, no “The Making of the Making of the Shadow War of the Night Dragons Part One: The Dead City: The Musical: The Illustrated Screenplay: The Magazine Article”?

57. Cute, but I’m afraid not up to your usual standard of April Foolery. :-/

58. Okay, maybe I was primed by Facebook to see April Fool’s jokes everywhere. (My own confession is that Whatever is not my first read of the day.)

    I honestly have no idea which bits of the confession post are true and which are not, but I am pretty sure, despite my comment there, that it was written by Mary Robinette Kowal. Though, Shawn, I do like your suggestion that it’s all Wil Wheaton.

    For me, it doesn’t matter. The thing made me laugh. I’m pretty sure that the intention of the whole thing was to make people laugh.

    The only cruel thing about this is the fact that Young Man’s War will not be completed or published. Unless Mary wants to stuff another project into her schedule? ::hopeful look::

59. This is the final proof that the cabal of feminists and liberals are conspiring to ruin the entire internets for all of us real fans of sci-fi…

60. OH CRAP THEY’RE ON TO US

    (flees)

61. Normaly I’d wait for Wil Wheaton to do the audio version, but I don’t know how well he can pull off MRK’s voice.

62. Dear Andy,

    I think it would be more in the vein of:

    “This is the emergency holographic Scalzi. Please state the nature of the blogging emergency…”

    pax / Ctein

63. I’ll get you next time Scalzi!!! (scares cat from desk)

64. April Fools tricks from most Millennials remind me of situational comedies where characters run in and out of doors in a Hotel (ever watch old movies?), or maybe even shell games. Things get so confusing that every possible bet becomes too much a gamble. (I’m not opinionating here; Lent’s only halfway through). Wish I could at least see folks’ eyes to guess sleight of hand, but no this is the Internet.

    Me, my muscles hurt from working a horse. I’m just thinking of Ibuprofen.

65. Theorem: It is possible to raise an irrational number to the power of an irrational number, and get a rational number.

    Proof: sqrt(2), the square root of two, is known to be an irrational number. Consider R = sqrt(2) ^ sqrt(2). If it is rational, the we are done. If it is irrational, consider R ^ sqrt(2) = (sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) = sqrt(2)^2 = 2, which is rational, and we are done.

    Showing the relevance of this theorem to the MRK/JS prank is left as an exercise for the reader.

66. First off a confession, I am not a social media person. No facebook page, no twitter account, etc… I do like blogs. I like the length of the medium long enough to post something interesting, but not a book. Twitter is just short little bursts. Im sure it has value but Im an old fuddy duddy (I turn 40 this year so that means Im officially Middle Age).

    When I first read Mary’s post I thought ‘that explains why John was nicer to me recently, seemed out of character’. Then I noticed she was referring to twitter. So maybe John is just being friendlier.

    BTW, Mary that was a good post. Ill check out your blog more. I have not read your books yet. Im not really into romance. I might check them out some day. You would get my interest more if you had one of your young ladies on the cover chopping the head off a zombie or something to make me feel more manly if I pick it up.

67. You know what makes someone feel manly? Not giving a damn about what people think.

68. How will we EVER know if it’s really you, John? Or should I say, MARY?

69. My first thought was “Seriously?” but then I clocked the date…

70. I always did think “John” and “Mary” sounded like pseudonyms.