mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement » Writing

Elmore Leonard

mythago — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:10:51 +0000

He writes some pretty good mysteries, sure, but the man is the Ernest Hemingway of Westerns.

Where is my remedial garret?

mythago — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:20:52 +0000

Scalzi’s thread about what you need to give up to write (spoiler: screwing around watching TV and stuff all the time) got invaded by someone who is either a total emokid or a troll indistinguishable from one, blathering about how one must Suffer in order to create Art.

Naturally we all made like he was a piñata, but in retrospect, perhaps I was too hasty. I woke up at about 2 a.m. today to discover that I have totally jacked my neck and my left arm from the shoulder to the elbow*, so with the help of a lot of ibuprofen I can manage to do things that don’t require me to raise my arms or carry anything over a couple of pounds in my left hand. In other words, I’m in fine shape to sit propped up in bed with a laptop and type. This means I am actually getting a little writing done, when the painkillers are working.

So, suffering = Art. When do I get my six-figure advance?

*No, I have no idea how I did this. No, it didn’t keep the kitten from purring directly into my ear like a buzzsaw and demanding to be petted. At two in the morning.

Book Peeve

mythago — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:19:33 +0000

I have an aversion to books that are part of a trilogy or other mult-ology. I’m better with series books, like the Discworld novels or the Old Man’s War novels, where each book is complete by itself, and reading the previous books is helpful but not strictly necessary.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.

Scalz-Tastic!

mythago — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:52:00 +0000

If you missed the reading by John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal at Borderlands Books last night, well, I hope you were off saving the world or at an all-star orgy or something equally top drawer, because otherwise your evening, by comparison, was as lame as lame can be.

John Scalzi is even funnier in person, if you can imagine such a thing. He is also extremely gracious and did not attempt to stuff me into a microwave or drop me down an elevator shaft, as SF authors are occasionally rumored to do to those they find annoying.
Mary Robinette Kowal is not only an amazing writer, but she forever changed the way the audience members think about tortillas. And chess magazines.
I was, in fact, the only one wearing suit. (Not on purpose. I had to drive over directly from a deposition in Oakland.)
It is far, far better to park elsewhere and BART over than to try and find a parking space in the Mission.
Steven K— got the best author book signature ever; how often does an author write “WTF?” in your book?
The reading of “Alternate History Results” is up on YouTube.