Search Results: shut up and listen

The Big Idea: TJ Klune

Posted on March 17, 2020 13 Comments

In the writing of The House in the Cerulean Sea, author TJ Klune looked a little history north of our border — and current events right here in the US — to inform his world of magic, and bureaucrats who seemingly trudge through it. TJ KLUNE: When an author gets an idea in their head—one […]

The Big Idea: Linden A. Lewis

Posted on August 6, 2020 4 Comments

Today on the Big Idea we have The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis — a novel about a hero with no name and no voice, and the power of three words that, in this world at least, were (and are) not said enough. (Content Warning: discussion of sexual assault) LINDEN A. LEWIS: I read a lot […]

The Big Idea: A.J. Hartley

Posted on April 9, 2020 1 Comment

A book doesn’t have to have a single big idea — it can have ideas of all sizes, combined to make something new. A.J. Hartley had a few ideas for his “Steeplejack” series, of which Firebrand is the second, and today, he’s here to explain them, and what he’s done to make realize these ideas […]

Advice to Myself (and Others) About The Great Pause

Posted on March 23, 2020 42 Comments

Dear creative folks (and the people who love and/or buy their work): Like many of you, I am looking at our current situation — which it seems were are moving toward calling The Great Pause — and wondering what this means, both in the long and short terms, for our careers and livelihoods. This is […]

The Big Idea: Jack McDevitt

Posted on April 23, 2018 7 Comments

In today’s Big Idea, Nebula Award-winning author Jack McDevitt looks at the concept of alien invasions and how they might not be what we expect — and how our interaction with alien civilizations might be different than we might imagine — and how it all fits in with his latest novel, The Long Sunset. JACK […]

The Big Idea: A. J. Hartley

Posted on June 6, 2017 6 Comments

In today’s Big Idea for Firebrand, author A. J. Hartley explains that when it comes to worldbuilding, like Ringo in the Beatles, he gets by with a little help from his friends. A. J. HARTLEY: The core of the Steeplejack series, the idea at its heart, came out of the collision of two smaller ideas […]

Reader Request Week 2017 #10: Short Bits

Posted on April 16, 2017 23 Comments

Happy Easter! Let’s close out Reader Request Week by running through a bunch of questions I didn’t otherwise get to, shall we? Tracy Benton: If you were falsely accused of a minor crime that would ruin your life, what would you do? (By ruin your life, I mean cause you to lose the trust and respect […]

Shut Up and Listen

Posted on September 6, 2011 506 Comments

In the comment thread for “The Sort of Crap I Don’t Get” there’s a very excellent, long comment about being a straight white guy that I encourage you to read in full, because it really is that good. It includes a relevant point I am going to excerpt, and comment on right now. It reads: […]

Whatever Best of 2011

Posted on December 23, 2011 13 Comments

Well, if you were going to sleep through a year, 2011 was a really good one to do it in. And if you did, here are the twenty Whatever entries that I think best encapsulated the year around here. Presented in alphabetical rather than chronological order, they are: And Now, For No Particular Reason, A […]

What I Did With My Winter Vacation

Posted on February 18, 2013 53 Comments

I and my wife went on a cruise. Specifically, we went on the JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 cruise, which is the cruise that musician Jonathan Coulton heads, ably assisted by fellow musicians Paul & Storm and a coterie of fellow performers, aides and volunteers. This year the cruise was a seven-day excursion to the Bahamas, […]

An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping

Posted on August 9, 2012 680 Comments

The last couple of months have been a really interesting time for geekdom, as its had its face rubbed in the fact that there are a lot of creepy assbags among its number, and that geekdom is not always the most welcoming of places for women. Along that line, this e-mail from a con-going guy […]

Dave and Liz and Chicago Save the World: A Short Story

Posted on September 20, 2012 79 Comments

As part of my duties as Toastmaster of Chicon 7, I wrote a short story for the convention, one, as a freebie and thank you to the membership, for paying their money and coming to the con, and two, as a way to boost up to the membership, most of whom were from somewhere else, […]

Not Being Able to Scrape By With $200k Is Usually Your Own Fault

Posted on February 17, 2012 446 Comments

Gawker, that great engine of social egalitarianism, points us to an article in Toronto Life about the Canadian 1% and how they try to get by in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. The implication is that even with $196,000, which is the income line for the 1% in that far northern country (and that’s Canadian dollars, […]

Boskone 2007 Recap

Posted on February 19, 2007 32 Comments

The object that Athena is regarding with such protean terror is not Donald Trump’s hairpiece but a tribble, which I bought at Boskone, the guest of honor this year at which was David Gerrold, who wrote the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” from which these little fuzzy things were born. David Gerrold, incidentally, […]

Fans: What Do We Owe Them?

Posted on January 13, 2007 81 Comments

Hal Duncan has some thoughts on the recent Laurell K. Hamilton asstardery, and it turns out he’s not entirely unsympathetic to Hamilton’s reaction to fans who buy her books and then seek her out to say how much they suck (yet still want their book signed): Now, in the LKH rant, she talks about readers […]

Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades e-Books: The (Semi) Official Announcement, Plus a Long Writing Screed

Posted on February 26, 2006 46 Comments

I’m getting tons of e-mail asking me about this so let me tell you what I know: 1. Yes, Tor will be putting out official electronic book versions of Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. 2. The release dates for the e-Book versions of OMW and TGB are “very soon now (probably in March)” […]

John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice

Posted on December 17, 2004 76 Comments

People wrote me: “Hey, as long as you’re reposting old crap, why don’t you repost your “Utterly Useless Writing Advice”? Well, okay. I’ve made some minor changes to get certain personal facts up to date, but otherwise it’s the same cranky bit of advice it was when I wrote it in 2001. I do have […]

Even More Long-Winded (But Practical) Writing Advice

Posted on March 19, 2004 20 Comments

For various reasons which I will not go into at the moment because I don’t feel like it, I have the urge to provide wholly unsolicited but practical advice to writers. So here it is. Why should you as a writer listen to my advice? No reason except that I published two books last year, […]

%d bloggers like this: