1) Homemade pop rocks. via Matt Ruff.
2) 20 Sad Etsy Boyfriends. Also: Sad Dancing Hipster is Sad and Dancing.
3) I’m so tired of this sort of thing that seeing it now just makes me tired. Author demands respect for sf/f from literary lovers.
4) PW’s map of North American chain booksellers.
5) “Nonsense, I did not shave your wife.” via @matociquala
6) 127 Hours, starring Wile E. Coyote. Video.
7) So you need a typeface… Flowcharty goodness.
Happy Irish Day.
Ah, the joys of parenting a child with sleep issues.
Without getting into too much detail without his permission, as I mentioned before the time change hit him very hard. Yesterday he couldn’t get up until noon and last night I couldn’t get him to sleep until after 3:30 am. If it were my sleep schedule that went out of control, I’d set my alarm, get up super-early, be tired all day and go to be slightly early. Fixed!
For him, we may be forced to let him stay up all night one night so he can turn himself around that way.
On top of that, we’re squabbling over his assigned reading. I’ve given him a book that’s a second-world medieval-ish fantasy and he’s treating it like a plate of bitter carrots (“It has castles. I don’t like castle books.”)
Aside from the stress of having a fantasy writer’s child refuse to read traditional fantasy [1] there’s also the idea that he doesn’t believe that I, as his homeschooling parent, have the right to assign reading to him (book-length reading, at least). This… doesn’t work for me, as you might expect. If he’s griping about books written for popular readers of the modern era (with fantasy elements, which he loves) how’s he going to respond to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
Obediently, if I have anything to say about the matter. Of course, it’ll help if he’s well-rested and has been fed healthy food that he likes. We’ll see.
Finally, I got my royalty statement for the middle part of 2010 and… well, those numbers could be better.
[1] IT READS THE HOBBIT BEFORE BEDTIME. IT DOES THIS WHENEVER IT’S TOLD
While I wait for this endless software update to install, let me post a quick rant: My family and I checked out the major ereaders yesterday and there was one thing the Nook really had going against it: you can’t search by author’s name.
WTF, Barnes & Noble? When I typed my own name into the search field, I got endless returns of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels before I reached my own. Does that make any sense? What if I bought and read an author’s book, then went to buy the next one–shouldn’t that author’s name be a link I can click on to take me to the rest of their work?
Apparently, B&N doesn’t think so. That would sell too many books.
Christ.
The family is heading out to the Apple store and Barnes & Noble so my technophobic wife can test drive some ereaders. She won’t like them, I already know it, but what the hell, right? I get to check them out, too. What I really suspect will happen is that my son will fall in love the the iPad and want one for himself, and that’ll get him off my damn computer every day.
Frankly, we’re more likely to come home with a bag of books than a gadget.
(And yeah, I though the iPad 2 was going to drop yesterday, not tomorrow. My wife doesn’t care about size, cameras or gyroscopes, though–she plans to be disappointed by it no matter what.)
Update: My son tells us that we will also be visiting The Gap so he can buy some new Tshirts.
Me: “All right, son. If you want to, we’ll take a look. Is this about a girl? It’s totally cool if it is.”
Son: “No. I just don’t want to look ramshackle.”
Me: “God dammit! If you’re going to be a member of this family, you’re going to look ramshackle!”
Followed by much laughing. Considering the glasses frames he chose (kinda fancy), the shoes he likes and the pants he asks his mom to make, it’s pretty clear that he’s going to be a dress-up person. It’s like Alex Keaton being born to hippie parents.
1) Cognitive Scientist records 90K hours of his own child’s language development, then graphs it. Soon to come to a TED Talk near you.
2) Andrew Wheeler’s syllabus for his non-existent sf course. I think it would be better served to address some of what happened in the 19th century, even if it was just an overview in the first week.
3) The Muppet Alignment Chart.
4) I wish every review of a reality TV show was this good.
5) Organizing a bookshelf: Video. There are so many simple ideas that work magic as stop-motion. Thank you, computer revolution.
6) A nearly-incomprehensible map of science fiction.
7) The internet is full of wonderful things: Carl Sagan’s Old Spice commercial as an animated gif.
Bonus 8th thing! Soylent Green isn’t the only thing made of people! Now “castles” are, too! Video.
If you haven’t seen an in-store book printing machine in action, you’re in “luck.” I ordered a book from the Espresso Book Machine at the UW Bookstore in Seattle and took a really mediocre video of the process. Watch it here.
Handy with a camera, ain’t I?
The whole thing took about seven minutes, so I don’t think we’re at the place yet where book stores stocked their shelves with cover flats readers can carry to the register/print station. Not without 20 more machines running full time. And that doesn’t include the 15 minutes it needed to warm up the glue before the process could even start.
Also, there had to be a store employee operating the machines terminal for almost the whole time; I’ve done my best to edit her out, per her request.
Honestly, the most difficult part of the whole thing was taking my laptop out of the store to find a wifi signal, searching the specialized web site for the book I wanted to buy, and copying down the info I needed to take back into the store. Plus, the books were kinda spendy.
It’s early days yet.
I shot this over a year ago (Procrastinate? Me?) but ask questions if you have them. I’ll answer as best I can.
Check out this blog post by a guy who just got his first book deal. There’s so much in there that he did right that any aspiring author could revisit it several times over the months and learn something new from it.
1) A smart way to promote science education. Also.
2) At no point does this stop being awesome: Sheen Family Circus.
3) Frank Herbert writes a children’s book: Goodnight Dune
4) Baby laughs at ripping paper. Video. Watching this is good for your soul.
6) Please do not submit my name here.
7) Those amazing personal stories you hear on radio call-in shows? They might be actors reading a script.
Here’s the thing: I like John Scalzi. I’ve never met the guy, but he comes across very well don’t you think? He seems smart and reasonable and I’m pretty sure the wife and child he loves are actually real people that he’s genuinely nice to.
What’s more, I’m grateful to him. The Big Idea essays he let me post on his blog were invaluable. Quite a few people who contacted me after they read my books said they’d discovered them through his site.
So, he’s a nicer guy than I am, he works harder, and he does more good for all of humanity than I do. These are things I believe to be true.
But is Old Man’s War the best sf/f novel of the decade? Um, no. It’s a good book, absolutely. It’s a fun and accessible book, with terrific characters. But the best?
I know, I know. It’s a Tor.com poll and, while I don’t for a second believe the Tor.com folks stuffed the ballet for one of their own, there’s almost certainly an extra helping of Tor readers there.
But come on.
(For the record, CoF got 2 votes, which is 3 more than I expected. Thank you, two crazy voters. Me, I voted for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.)
It was unexpected, but unavoidable. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it within pre-established parameters, and I think I just about have it handled.
It’s funny, though. I used tear my hair out over this stuff, but today it looks to me like a pleasant little puzzle (more fun than the Minecraft obstacle course my son designed for me, at least) and I know it’ll be stronger for being fixed.
Anyway, I put up a couple of posts over the weekend. I suspect you guys saw my joke post about Pat Rothfuss (I’m just trying to help the guy get his name out there), but I’m surprised no one wanted to talk about the super-low pricing on ebook backlist titles–prices set by a publisher, not an author who’ve had their rights reverted.
I think it’s potentially a great thing for midlist authors and may cement price windowing as a professional publishing business model. It could also hit very hard against indie authors who have been hoovering up all the ultra-low priced impulse-buy ebook sales.
If you are writing a series, would you ask your publisher to release an ebook of book one for $0.99 to help promote book four?
