(1) Nicole Dieker at The Billfold says “Joss Whedon Made More Money With ‘Dr. Horrible’ Than ‘The Avengers,’ Unbelievably”.
Okay. Let’s compare two scenarios.
1) You decide to write, direct, and produce a 45-minute web musical. You fund the musical’s production out of your own pocket. It is free to watch online.
2) Marvel hires you to write and direct a summer blockbuster that becomes the third highest grossing film of all time.
Which one should make you more money? As Vulture reports, it’s not the one you think:
Joss Whedon shared an eye-opening fact during Saturday night’s reunion of the “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” team: He’s made more money from his independently financed 2008 Internet musical than he did from writing and directing Marvel’s first blockbuster “Avengers” movie.
(2) Nancy Kress, skillfully interviewed by Raymond Bolton —
Many of your works delve into areas that require great technical expertise, for example genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Yet, as far as I can tell, before your writing exploded, you transitioned from being an educator to working in advertising. What do you read to develop the knowledge base required for your books?
I wish I had a scientific education! Had I known when I was young that I would turn into an SF writer, I would have chosen differently. Instead, I hold a Masters in English. To write about genetic engineering, I research on-line, attend lectures, and pester actual scientists with questions. My best friend is a doctor; she goes over my work to check that I have not said anything egregiously moronic.
A career such as yours has many turning points, some striven for, others that blind-side the recipient for better or for worse. Would you care to provide two or three of the more pivotal moments?
The first turning point for me came with the writing of the novella “Beggars in Spain,” which won both the Hugo and the Nebula and which would never have been written without a jolt from writer Bruce Sterling. At a critique workshop we both attended, he pointed out that my story was weak because the society I’d created had no believable economic underpinnings. He said this colorfully and at length. After licking my wounds for a few weeks, I thought, “Damn it, he’s right!” In the next thing I wrote, “Beggars in Spain,” I seriously tried to address economic issues: Who controls the resources? What finances are behind what ventures? Why? With what success? My story about people not needing to sleep, which I’d actually been trying to compose for years, finally came alive.
(3) He grew up to be the leading fantasy cover artist – here is some of his earliest work. Frank Frazetta’s Adventures of the Snowman reviewed by Steven Paul Leiva for New York Journal of Books.
Frazetta is probably the most widely known—and revered—illustrator of science fiction and fantasy subjects, having gained much fame and a large following for his paperback book covers, putting the image into the imaginative worlds of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Conan the Barbarian, among others. Several generations of young minds looking for escape into fantastic realms of adventure where landscapes were often dark and danger-filled, men were perfect specimens of well-muscled heroes, and women were beyond beautiful as their “attributes” were beyond belief, will never regret having made the trip. But earlier in his career Frazetta worked in comics and comic books, even ghosting for Al Capp on his Lil’ Abner strip.
And at the age of 12 1/2, stuck in his bedroom on a snowy day, and inspired by a snowman in his backyard being battered by a winter wind, Frazetta created the Snow Man. This wasn’t a gentle character associated with winter wonderlands and Christmas, but rather a righteous fighter against the evil Axis, which America and its allies were fighting in the Second World War. A few years later, at the still young age of 15, Frazetta created at least two Snow Man comic stories, one of which was published in Tally-Ho Comics, and the other that makes up this current book.
(4) Larry Correia pulls back the curtain on another corner of the writing business in “Ask Correia #17: Velocity, Releases, Rankings, and Remainders”.
So if you turn over constantly, stores tend to like you, and will order more. The more shelf space they give you, the more new people are likely to see your stuff. Success breeds success.
Here is an example. A bookstore orders 3 copies of your first novel. If all of them sell in the first week, then the bookstore is probably going to reorder 3 more. Then when your second novel comes out, they’ll look at their prior sales, and instead of ordering 3, they’ll order 6. Do this for decades, and it is why new James Patterson or Dean Koontz novels are delivered to your local book stores on pallets.
But if those 3 copies of your first novel sat on the shelf for months before selling, then the store probably didn’t bother to restock when it finally does sell. They may or may not order 3 copies of your second, but either way they’re not super excited about you.
I’ve been inside about 300 book stores since I started my professional writing career in 2009. I can usually tell how well I’m doing at any particular store even before I talk to any of the employees, just by going by where my books are and seeing how much space they give me on their shelves. A couple of books means that I don’t do well at that store. Five or six books tells me I’m okay. Eight or ten tells me I’m kicking ass in that town. If the books are faced out, that means I’ve got somebody on staff who is a fan (and that is incredibly important).
(5) Steven Murphy commences a kind of nonlethal Death Match with “Them’s Fightin’ Words: Harry Potter V. Ender Wiggin” at ScienceFiction.com
The following is the first of a new series pitting the merits and abilities of similar characters against each other. We open with a disclosure of the personal bias of the author then outline some ground rules and end with an example of how a fight between the two might unfold.
Personal Bias: The popularity of JK Rowling’s series has cemented Harry Potter as the go-to magical youth. He is the modern personification of the fantasy genre. The perfect contrast to Potter would then be the boy who personifies science fiction, Ender Wiggin of Orson Scott Card’s novel ‘Ender’s Game‘. The two characters have a great deal in common–both are children with the fate of their kind resting on their shoulders. I prefer ‘Ender’s Game’ over any single Harry Potter book, but I can’t argue that the Potter series as a whole succeeds on a level that the Ender series of books does not.
Ground Rules: The Goblet of Fire follows Harry into a series of trials that place him in a mindset that parallels Ender’s nicely. For my purposes the version of Harry with the skills and experience gained from this book and those previous will be used. The Ender used will be the one post ‘Ender’s Game’ and before ‘Speaker for the Dead’. This will allow the two characters to be roughly the same age. Ender will not have the assistance of his friend and database intelligence, Jane. The surroundings will compliment Ender in that the arena is the Battle School’s gravity free training room complete with the immobile obstacles called “astroids” for cover. Ender will have a blaster and Harry will have his wand. They enter the arena at opposite gates, neither with a clear view of the opposing gate.
(6) Tom Knighton reviews Chuck Gannon’s Raising Caine:
Like the first in the series, this one starts out somewhat slow. The action tends to be minimal and sporadic, but for good reason. However, the writing is good enough that it will get you through to the moments where the action picks up. Further, none of the other stuff is filler. Almost all feels vital to the story (and I can’t think of anything that comes up that isn’t important later on).
When the story does pick up, it becomes something very special indeed. That’s just Gannon’s gift, however. The previous book, Trial by Fire contained more of the action I prefer just be necessity, and that book was definitely on my list of “special” books.
While I don’t think Raising Caine was quite up to that level, that’s not a slight on this book. The only books I’ve read recently that were on that level included Seveneves and A Long Time Until Now. Both of those are on my Hugo list, and Raising Caine is a contender for one of those slots as well.
(7) The Nerf Nuke fires 80 darts in all directions.
(8) Tom Galloway, past contestant and inveterate Jeopardy! watcher, saw this on the October 12 show —
Heh. Today’s Jeopardy! round was a themed board on Game of Thrones, with categories Winter Is Coming, A Song of “Ice” and “Fire”, You Know Nothing, The North Remembers, Always Pay Your Debts, and wrapping up with Game Of Thrones, of course the only category actually about the work (specifically the tv series).
(9) Sometimes there’s a reason this news is hard to find — “’Lizard men abducted me to the moon for sex,’ woman claims”.
A former U.S. air force radar operator was abducted to the moon by lizard men for nightly sex – and was also forced to stack boxes.
What our reptilian overlords want with these sinister boxes can only be guessed at.
Niara Terela Isley is just one of several witnesses quoted by Alien UFO Sightings in an expose of the U.S. military’s secret moon bases – where reptiles rule, and humans are passed around like sex toys.
(10) James Schardt delivers “A Response to Charles Gannon” at Otherwhere Gazette.
At one point, Mr. Gannon used the term “The Evil Other”. I’m not sure he has grasped the full significance of this label.
Would you talk to a Homophobic Neo-Nazi that tried to hijack a literary award?
How about a racist who married a minority wife and had a child with her to hide his racism? These have actually happened! We know, it was talked about in such serious publications as Salon, Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and Slate. They had to get their information somewhere. Someone sent this information to them and they should have done due diligence. Otherwise they might not have as much credibility as people thought.
Now, those two characters, above, don’t even sound plausible in comic books. But these are not just insults that have been thrown at the Puppies. This is what many of the Science Fiction Establishment actually BELIEVE. With these beliefs, almost any action becomes allowable. What tactic should be disallowed when fighting Evil? Are you going to let a prestigious award go to a Nazi? Someone might think it validated his ideas, then you have more Nazis. Would you pay for a hundred more people to vote to prevent that? Would you tone back your rhetoric for any reason? You certainly wouldn’t apologize for calling them Nazis. That’s what they are. Good grief, we’re talking about Fascists, here! It cost 60 million lives to defeat them last time! Vox Day is sadly mistaken. Social Justice Warriors don’t always lie. When you are fighting for Good, there is no reason to lie. Social Justice Warriors tell the truth as they see it.
Of course, the problem is, the Puppies are not Nazis. Even Theodore Beale, the infamous Vox Day, doesn’t quite reach that level (probably). In the face of this, the Puppies can’t back down. Not won’t, CAN’T! They know. They tried. This is the biggest problem with telling the Puppies to moderate their responses.
(11) Someone was not pleased to see the topic heat up again —
OH SWEET JESUS PEOPLE ARE STILL WHINING ABOUT THE HUGOS JUST FUCKING LET IT GO ALREADY YOU PATHETIC TWITS
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 13, 2015
(12) John Scalzi did, however, enjoy explaining his now-famous Nerdcon somersault in the first comment on “My Thoughts on Nerdcon:Stories”.
(13) “A Harry Potter Where Hermione Doesn’t Do Anyone’s Homework For Them” by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
“Okay, write that down,” Hermione said to Ron, pushing his essay and a sheet covered in her own writing back to Ron, “and then copy out this conclusion that I’ve written for you.”
“Hermione, you are honestly the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,” said Ron weakly, “and if I’m ever rude to you again –” He broke off suddenly. “This just says DO YOUR OWN GODDAMN WORK in fourteen languages.”
“Fifteen,” said Hermione. “One of them’s invisible.”
(14) Kimberly Potts’ “The Big Bang Theory Recap: What the Filk Is Happening” sets up the next video.
Thankfully, just as so many episodes of Will & Grace were Karen-and-Jack-ed away from the main characters, “The 2003 Approximation” is stolen, or rather saved, by Howard and Raj. In a far more entertaining half of the episode, we’re introduced to the joys of Filk. What, you may ask, is Filk? It’s a genre of music that puts a science-fiction/fantasy spin on folk, and yes, it is a real thing. It’s also the reason that, for at least the next week, many of us will be trying to get the chorus of “Hammer and Whip: The Untold Story of Thor vs. Indiana Jones” out of our heads.
(15) Jurassic World gets the Honest Trailer treatment.
Spoilers.
Also not very funny.
On second thought, was there some reason I included this link?
(16) Because it’s a good lead-in to Bryce Dallas Howard’s defense of her Jurassic World character’s shoe preferences?
Her insistence on wearing high-heels throughout the movie, including a memorable scene that sees her outrunning a T-Rex in stilettos, was dismissed as “lazy filmmaking” by Vulture and called “one tiny but maddening detail” that set up the film to “fail” by The Dissolve.
The actress herself disagrees. She explained to Yahoo why her character’s footwear choice is totally “logical” for the movie, seemingly putting the conversation to bed once and for all.
Watch our exclusive interview with Bryce Dallas Howard for the DVD and Blu-ray release of ‘Jurassic World’ on 19 October above.
“[Claire] is ill-equipped to be in the jungle. This person does not belong in the jungle,” reasons Bryce.
“And then when she ends up in the jungle it’s how does this person adapt to being in the jungle?”
“From a logical standpoint I don’t think she would take off her heels,” she adds.
“I don’t think she would choose to be barefoot. I don’t think she would run faster barefoot in the jungle with vines and stones.”
[Thanks to Nick Mamatas, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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First times fifth!
Scalzi’s move looked more like a cartwheelsault to me.
I might be first. Let me just chime in with another link to the latest comics bracket round.
Look at the people waiting to be…
Wait for it.
So, in the construction of his response, metaphorically speaking, James trusted a fart. Bad move, James.
Clicky.
As an objective, practical fact, ghost migraines are not the worst. Real migraines are much worse. The ghost version is unpleasant enough, though.
Next Prime to fifth!
#10 – urgh. Well, I guess I’ll just keep my Nazi, Marxist, Christ hating sodomite (among other names) views to myself then.
The people who think there has never been someone with racist views who was in a relationship with a minority person are probably the same deluded fools who think there has never been a misogynist married to a woman.
Torgersen is married to a black woman. He’s also expressed racist views. This is not the contradiction that the Puppies seem to think it is.
Oh FFS, someone’s still bashing on about how Tor supposedly sent press releases to a bunch of major online infotainment websites. Do none of these people understand how the infotainment websites actually work?
Do none of these people understand how the infotainment websites actually work?
Understanding reality is a constant struggle for the Puppies.
@JJ
Given the preponderance of redpillers gmergaters, and other assorted fellow travellers within the puppy iterations, does it really surprise you that they have no clue on how entertainment reporting works?
On #10:
Is there a parallel universe where The Daily Beast is seen as a serious publication on the same order as The Guardian or Salon? Or am I just out of the loop about these new-fangled “Internets”?
And it’s over the Sierras into Placerville for the last night of the road trip. One new state added to my list: Wyoming.
Dawn Incognito: Is there a parallel universe where The Daily Beast is seen as a serious publication on the same order as The Guardian or Salon? Or am I just out of the loop about these new-fangled “Internets”?
Your mistake here is expecting a Puppy to be able to distinguish between legitimate and spurious sources of information — given that, by their very definition, a Puppy is someone willing to believe in and support spurious sources of information.
Ender is definitely the winner in a straight up battle. It was kind of jarring to see this post and realize how much the two kids have in common, the isolation with just a few friends, the battle training outside of class, the trusted adult who turns out to be concealing a major fact. The style of the books is just so different I never considered comparing them before.
(The nerf nuke is an April Fools joke)
Which doesn’t mean it won’t be real someday, Think Geek has a proven track record of turning April Fools jokes into actual products. I believe the first was the 8-bit tie from 2007, but the most impressive was the iPad arcade from 2010 (no longer for sale)
I have a deep and abiding love for Think Geek’s joke products because the first year they did them they advertised a Value America Golf Shirt. I worked for Value America the year before. Biggest dotcom flameout ever.
https://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/looflirpa/2001.shtml
Re: #10
The SP4 crowd are kind of damned if they do, damned if they don’t, it would seem. They have said a great deal that they want to boast participation. But when participation rises and new people vote, the Puppies get flattened. But when the Puppies get flattened, those new people who you get to participate are dismissed as pawns of the Conspiracy. And the beat goes on…
Puppies still like to pretend that Arthur Chu said Brad married his wife in order to have a shield, rather than Brad married his wife, then happened to use her as a shield. Doesn’t say much for basic literacy.
[ticky]
Now, now, The Daily Beast and The Guardian are both written in English and both have websites — of course they’re equivalent!
“I can’t be anti-X, I have X friends!” has been regarded as both untrue and a lame excuse for decades, but since Puppies don’t know history, that’s kind of unsurprising.
::clickety click::
Gannon’s Fire with Fire currently free.
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Caine-Riordan-Book-ebook/dp/B00BVBRMDK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444800815&sr=1-1&keywords=chuck+gannon
Just saying.
We know, it was talked about in such serious publications as Salon, Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and Slate. They had to get their information somewhere. Someone sent this information to them and they should have done due diligence.
Because, darn it, how else could any news service have found such difficult and obscure information.
Seriously.
Painful, just painful.
Lauowolf: Gannon’s Fire with Fire currently free.
It’s always free (in pretty much every e-book format), but good to point it out anyway. It’s an interesting MilSF / Hard SF adventure with a lot more depth and intelligence than most in that genre. It and its successor share one really unlikeable plot point, but other than that, I still think it’s well worth reading.
BtW, there’s an actual reason why the Pups are convinced that all those articles were a co-ordinated hit piece, with interested parties feeding heavily slanted information to partisan media outlets.
Because that’s pretty much what Larry Correia did with a couple of people from Breitbart.com:
I don’t think describing The Daily Beast as a major web site is really that wackadoodle. Former Vanity Fair/New Yorker editor Tina Brown ran it for years, and it’s had some pretty serious heavyweights writing for it. I haven’t really read it since Brown left, but I know it’s still got readership in the millions — its web site traffic is, as far as I can determine, pretty close to Entertainment Weekly and well ahead of Salon.
True, and it’s not just Think Geek doing it. Wireless chargers are now actually a thing, if the ads I’m seeing for inductive iphone chargers are to be trusted. But the real question is – can you buy an E-Z Bake Oven drive for your desktop computer yet?
@Nicole
That second link was needlessly cruel of you. I actually spent a few minutes trying to figure out how the drive would affect the cooling on my rig.
@snowcrash That’s easy, mount it to a nvidia video card*. Instead of adding heat you’ll be using excess heat.
*I’ve often wondered if I could hook a geforce to the radiators and use it to heat the apartment. Mine tends to run a might warm.
We’re not disputing that Entertainment Weekly maybe gets more hits to its website than The Guardian — we’re saying one of them is a respected source of serious news and one isn’t.
@snowcrash: Of course. Puppies always accuse regular people of doing what they do themselves. Kinda proves Breitbart isn’t a real news site — they heard a rumor and asked the guy who started it all (there’s impartiality!), while the other organizations, I dunno… did reporting? Or at least their own Googling?
Of course, Entertainment Weekly does do some journalism now and again, too. It’s not super-deep, but they do it. Their article on a family-owned drive-in theater was well-written and beautifully-photographed. And I bet even they did their own Googling about Puppies (IIRC, they had to update the post, having gotten some stuff wrong, which means they weren’t regurgiating anyone’s ideas verbatim).
But maybe they’re ALL IN ON IT! Why, all the news sources I looked at yesterday mentioned that a Russian missile shot down that plane, and baseball is kind of upset with the dude for breaking the other dude’s leg. PRESS RELEASES EVERYWHERE!
It’s definitely worth checking out. There were a couple of “Oh, come on” moments for me but generally it’s much smarter than the typical SF adventure story.
Haven’t been here for awhile — new job overlapping old job — but I got to see Nancy Kress read and autograph tonight (along with Brenda Cooper). I love the UW Bookstore.
(1) Not too surprising really – the owners of a media property are closer to the money than the guys they hire in to work for them, and Whedon was the former for Dr Horrible and the latter on Avengers. Add to that the value of a low-budget production becoming a runaway hit, and Whedon probably did very nicely thank you out of Dr Horrible.
The puppies have sure managed to get a lot of mileage out of that Gallo quote <_<
I got a bit bored of it and I didn’t finish it 🙁 – I could see the appeal, like a Bond movie in space, but I hated the main character.
I found the laugh track on that filk song [HAHAHAHA] quite jarring [RAUCOUS LAUGHTER] unless I missed a pun in archaeologist [HAHAHAHA]
‘Fraid I’ve never been a J! contestant. I do suspect I hold the record for number of times passing their tryout test without getting on the show; if I’m not at the top (and they don’t actually keep track of it), I’m definitely near it.
I feared that the Puppies would never shut up about the Hugo, giving us a “permanent campaign” even in the off-season. Things did seem to quiet down, post award, or maybe I was just better at not paying attention.
Sadly, I was right. Kind of like the permanent “running for office” campaigns in American politics, its “good politics” for Puppies to continually harp on the perfidy of their opponents.
Permanent campaign? More like permanent revolution, amirite
Fair point. And in a universe where velociraptors are wrangled via interpretive dance, sure why not?
Frankly, Scalzi’s response at number 11 seems to be the only sensible one, at this stage. I can only hope that things continue as they’re going now, and the Puppies continue to purge and excommunicate their few remaining supporters for ideological incorrectness, until they go the way of the Kilkenny Cats.
Anyway, I’d much rather talk about something sensible, like the lizard men on the moon. What’s in those boxes, does anyone know?
Permanent campaign? More like permanent revolution, amirite
Da, Comrade Hypnosoviet.
It is a sad fact of reality that sometimes puppies throw up and then try to eat it. They can do this over and over if not stopped, the poor little dummies.
I am sorry to see the Puppy supporters, months later, still pressing the exact same threadbare arguments with the exact same feeble shreds of invented evidence. Don’t they have anything fresh or believable?
Puppies think they’re going to get a victory. I don’t think they know what that victory is going to be, but by God, they’re going to keep on until they win. Something. Anything.
I started thinking about how lizardman sex would work, I mean do they have a cloaca, a hemipenis, a double hemepenes…? Then I decided that I might be overthinking this.
Someone, it might have been Alexandra Erin, said of Gamergate that it reached a point when most of their issues were about how other people reacted to Gamergate itself. The Puppies seem to have reached that tail-swallowing stage too.
All right, my copy of Ancillary Mercy is finally here!
(Along with a whole big bunch of other books. The other 2015 SFF arrivals today are Half A War, Railhead, Kitty Saves the World, Magisterium: The Copper Gauntlet, and The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Been a while since I’ve read any I’d consider for a potential Hugo nomination, let’s see how this batch does. More still coming, of course …)
“by God, they’re going to keep on until they win.”
There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere…
I was carried away by File 770 and made to tick boxes.
Let’s really talk this through. I’d break the heel off the shoe if I needed the sole for foot protection. I think. Of course my judgment would probably go out the window if a dinosaur were pursuing me, so maybe it’s not so far-fetched. Good on her for sticking to her, uh, pumps.