164 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/11/16 Pixels For Nothin’ And Your Scrolls For Free”

1. Bruce Arthurs on January 12, 2016 at 8:50 am said:

   My old bachelor apartment was on the upper story of the west end of an apartment block, with the exterior wall receiving full central-Arizona sunlight and temperature. In summer, heat leakage through that wall made the bedroom very *very* warm, even when the rest of the apartment was cooled by the A/C. . And I found that putting bookcases against that bedroom wall did indeed make a noticeable improvement in the temperature of that room.

   But like Nick Pheas, I had concerns about temperature effects on books shelved along that hot, hot wall. So I tried (but, sadly, did not completely succeed) to see if I could completely cover that wall with copies of Thomas Monteleone’s SEEDS OF CHANGE.

   (Wrinkly old gray-or-silver-haired fans may chuckle over that last line, though I fear that younger fannish generations will scratch their heads and need to have the joke explained to them. Some cultural catch phrases last only as long as the generation that spawns them.)

   Once had this thought of sneaking multiple copies of Seeds of Change into a used bookstore over a period of time, until an entire shelf was filled with them….

2. The word count question reminds me of the old joke:

   Caller: Hello, could I speak to Joyce Carol Oates?
   Secretary: I’m sorry, Ms. Oates is writing a novel right now.
   Caller: All right, I’ll hold.

3. Books are excellent insulation.

   Nora Roberts is a much better writer, by any standard, than the Puppies. Some of that comes down to simple respect for readers, especially readers of genre fiction. She’s not producing Great Art, but she is writing Good Story, with plot, characters, and some thought to the world they live in. Also, a good command of the English language, and a care in how she uses it.

4. (1) Congratulations to Irene Gallo! That’s a great honor.

   (2) The Dr. Who music story is kinda boggling.

   (6) Comet TV should offer a subscription for a streaming service online.

   (8) This Bowie video, and the one by the same guy with Stan and Laurel dancing to “Jean Genie”, filled me with a very deep happiness. They felt right.

5. They appear to want there to be sides, with their valiant indy-published selves on one side and Tor, House of Evil on the other.

   The odd thing about this, of course, is where does Baen come in? You can’t really have both ‘Indy publishing good, big publishing bad’ and ‘Baen good, Tor bad’, but some people seem to want to.

6. @ Matt Y

   I’ll never invest time or money in a Melanie Rawn book again because she never completed the Exiles trilogy.

   I don’t know anything specific about the Melanie Rawn case, but in some cases a series is never completed because the publisher declines to do so. In these days when self-publishing e-books is something like a viable option, I’ve seen a number of authors self-publish the concluding volume(s) of a series that a publisher decided to drop. So before blaming and punishing an author that I otherwise liked, I’d want to make sure it wasn’t a case like that.

   (And apropos of nothing else, I’m having an experience similar to discovering that one is allergic to a favorite pet. Controlled experimentation has determined that the regular crashes of my laptop’s browser — multiple times every hour — can be directly linked to having File 770 open on at least one tab. I’m not savvy enough to know exactly which features of the page are causing it. Fortunately, the same issue is not present in my work computer…)

7. > “But…. books ARE good insulation. Aren’t they?”

   It’s not my fault if I happen to present a convincing argument.

8. @Bruce Arthurs: Amusingly enough, I saw Thomas Monteleone in action just a few weeks ago, in John Shirley’s Facebook feed. Shirley had reposted some funny slam on Donald Trump, and Monteleone showed up to lecture him on how authors should never take controversial political or other stances in social media because they always alienate readers and authors should never do that. Shirley responded that the number of Trump fans who were also fans enough of his to follow him on Facebook but only now feeling put off by his political views was probably zero. Monteleone kept insisting that that didn’t matter, the point was that authors must never alienate readers that way. Eventually it just sort of trickled off.

9. @ David Shallcross

   Any estimates how many words a day Lionel Fanthorpe put out at his peak?

   Perhaps not a fair comparison. Being in full-time employment as a school teacher, Lionel only wrote his fiction at weekends, during which he typically turned out a novel or short-story “anthology*” per weekend, all to pretty well the same word-count because that’s what Badger Books required: a predetermined number of pages, some already reserved for regular adverts.

   (* The “anthology” would usually be filled with stories each by himself under a different pen name, although Badger did have some other writers.)

   Also, of course, Lionel didn’t type them himself: he extemporized them on to dictaphone tapes which a battery of up to 3 audio-typists (his wife, sister and mother if I recall correctly) converted to typescript (hence his often-hurried endings when the word-limit was found to be looming).

   Lionel is cheerfully unabashed about the resulting quality of these works, which despite all this are sometimes surprisingly readable (for a certain value of readable) and amusing. The “blackness” passage in A 1,000 Years On [sic] is a particular favorite of mine: that volume has the additional “advantage” of clearly not having been proofread which, thinking about it now, may have been a spur towards my own eventual, erstwhile publishing career.

10. I don’t know if it matters to him, but if it does, I would imagine the pressure on GRR Martin is enormous. The first three books have great reviews. Books 4 and 5 had a drop off in popularity. The series has engendered enormous amounts of commentary and criticism. Meanwhile, lots and lots of people are paying attention to his output and his deadlines and commenting freely on his writing, his character, his work ethic, etc.

    All while the work is complex with multiple plots running concurrently, and then add in the highly invested fans who he no doubt wants to satisfy.

    There might be a number of ways in which I might like to be GRR Martin, but writing under that kind of microscope is not one of them. As far as I have seen, he has handled himself with grace and goodwill.

11. @Bruce Arthurs, want another copy? I expect I could put my hands on one. Or two. Or three…

    @Michael Walsh, my local used book store wouldn’t take them; they didn’t know how to price them since there was no price printed on the book.

12. Heather Rose Jones –

    So before blaming and punishing an author that I otherwise liked, I’d want to make sure it wasn’t a case like that.

    It wasn’t, though it was also completely understandable. She had a major bout of depression and for personal reasons didn’t want to continue with the series. I don’t blame her for that, life issues are obviously a higher priority.

    I’m not savvy enough to know exactly which features of the page are causing it. Fortunately, the same issue is not present in my work computer…

    That’s strange. Maybe a WordPress Plug-In on your browser that needs to be updated?

13. Andrew M asked:

    The odd thing about this, of course, is where does Baen come in? You can’t really have both ‘Indy publishing good, big publishing bad’ and ‘Baen good, Tor bad’, but some people seem to want to.

    That one’s pretty easy to accomodate: just define Baen as not being a big publisher. Typically the slams are against “the Big Five publishers” or “New York publishers” to make it clear that Baen is among the angels. (Baen’s headquarters is in North Carolina, IIRC.)

14. Hey, don’t bag on Seeds of Change too much- it’s better than mere insulation.

    Back in the 80s, I pulled a copy off my sister’s bookshelf while looking for something to read, only to find the pages had been glued together and a compartment had been carved out of the middle. A quick sniff told me what had been hidden in there; so my sister at least, got a great deal of pleasure out of that novel.

15. (10) [sits down at typewriter]
    With a mighty thunder clap Melisandre uttered a powerful spell that transported everybody to the exact same spot just a little bit to the north of the Wall.
    Just then a figure emerged from the swirling mists, dressed in red and gold armor.
    “Gasp” said the assembled forces of the Lannisters, the Bartheons, the Wildings, the Freys, the many followers of Targaryen, and other people I forgot about.
    “Hi” said the figure “I am the long lost Stark brother. You can call me…Tony.”
    With that Tony Stark flew up into the air and destroyed all the scary ice zombies with with his amazing Iron Man powers. Everybody was so impressed that they decided to give up all this medieval stuff and magic and adopted modern capitalism instead.
    “Hooray!” said everybody except the peasants.

    Then Bran woke up.
    “I had the strangest dream!” he said to his dad who was quite alive and well.
    “Son, why don’t you tell me all about it over breakfast”.
    THE END.

    See? Vasicek is quite right – that took practically no time AT ALL.

16. Congratulations to Irene Gallo.

17. Camestros Felapton –

    See? Vasicek is quite right – that took practically no time AT ALL

    Of all the speculated ending on the internet, this is my favorite one. If I end up not enjoying the real one I now plan on printing this out and gluing it onto the last page.

    Before I return it to the library. MWAHAHAHAHAHA.

18. Decisions on which authors to buy and not to buy are, of course, down to each individual.

    But to not buy any of an author’s subsequent output solely because life intervened to stop or delay a book seems to be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Afterall, if you’re that upset about it, you must have loved their writing. Why deprive yourself of more of it? (Though I can certainly see waiting until a series is complete before starting it.)

    The Steerswoman was published in 1989. That’s twenty-six years ago. The Language of Power, the most recent in that series, was published eleven years ago. And ends kinda cliff-hangery. There are three, possibly four, more books that have yet to see the light.

    Would that I *could* read other books by Rosemary Kirstein. Alas, she is a slow writer and we shall all have to be patient. But I’m not angry at her. I’m not demanding the next book. I’m not indignant that she *owes* me the rest of the series. I bought her trade paperbacks and re-bought them in e-books when those became available knowing it would be a looong wait for book five. I’m hopeful. I spend the intervening years re-reading what I’ve got.

19. [10] Ummm…wow.

    Talk about an outsized response to a reasonably balanced piece. It isn’t humanly possible for every author to have sales that are in GRRM/SKing/etc. range. If a mid-lister (or what used to be a mid-lister) is going to survive by writing, then they have to write at a pace that is sufficient to satisfy their customers.

    (It’s the same principle at work for my friend that owns a hot dog shack, natch.)

    Hell, even John Scalzi talks about having to discipline himself to create unobstructed writing time.

    Although it is interesting to note that several books in the SOFAI series have taken 5 years to produce. And we are just now approaching the 5 year point on the current pending installment, FWIW.

    Regards,
    Dann

20. (8) BOWIE TRIBUTE 2

    Oh yeah, this is fun.

    Regarding measuring virtue by word count — It strikes me as as strange as an artist measuring their artistic worth by number of square inches painted per day.

    No doubt Thomas Kinkaide outdid Leonardo da Vinci — a notoriously slow perfectionist — in area of painted surface put out per day. That does not make Kinkaide a better artist than Leonardo, and it certainly does not make him a superior person.

21. I suppose it’s worth pointing out, as a NaNoWriMo veteran, that there are people who quite legitimately “win” it on the first day – that is, they write an original 50,000+ word novel on November 1st, and not infrequently keep it up for the whole of the month.

    (I’ve even read one of the resulting novels… there was a lot wrong with it, but it was a workable story. Given that the only really reliable definition of a novel is “a prose fiction of some length that has something wrong with it”, this certainly qualified.)

    My own personal best for a one-day sprint is about 10k words, and how people can keep up five times that speed for the full month boggles my mind… but some people do, and they are clearly among the greatest writers of all time, and mere dilettantes like Shakespeare and Edgar Wallace should obviously bow down before them.

22. @Dann: The basic problem with Vasicek’s post is the implicit assumption that there is any correlation between quantity, quality, and significance. You can put all of James Tiptree Jr’s output in one omnibus or two typically-sized volumes. But what would be present between those two or four covers matters more to the history (and the future) of sf than everything all the Puppies leaders together will ever make. More than the combined output of a lot of my favorite writers, too, as far as that goes.

    Then there are the writers who aren’t responsible for such major tectonic action in the field’s history but have nonetheless created small collection of genius, like Cordwainer Smith and Howard Waldrop.

    And, of course, there are the many folks with large bodies of work built up over time without slagging off everyone else as scum, trying to sabotage their awards, and without calling even one rival a Christ-hating crusader for Sodom or less fully human than themselves. And also without settling in to mock any writer much better than themselves, more popular than themselves, and who’s been trying to build bridges to re/connect them with parts of fandom they alienated themselves from.

23. Also writing is much more than word count. I recall J. K. Rowling saying shortly after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out that if she’d had more time to deliver it, it would probably have been at least 100 pages shorter.

24. Dann

    GRRM writes slowly. But he writes exceeding fine.

    Well, actually his stuff is rather emphatically not to my taste, but arguing his success (sales does equal success, right?) into failure is a pretty impossible task, and one that would have been easy enough for Vasicek to avoid.

25. I will confess, part of the reason I stick to short stories is that I don’t have any promises to keep. It means I don’t get to book five of a seven book series and suddenly panic because people have spent literally years trying to guess the ending and they’ll hate me if it’s not what they want. That thought freaks me out a ton.

    Plus, I’ll admit, there’s a certain addictive rush to being able to put “THE END” down on paper every five or six hours or so of writing. 🙂

26. Vasicek seems to be assuming that for GRRM writing another Game of Thrones novel is what gives him the biggest return on investment. If that’s not true, then it’s admirable that GRRM is actually trying to finish the series anyway, even if it’s taking him a lot longer than he and his fans would like. For Corriea, I assume that writing novels does give him the biggest return on investment, so it’s clearly what he should be concentrating on.

27. (10) I think that’s a good point made above that, you know, GRRM isn’t only writing the next Game of Thrones novel. I was pretty sure that the cited article couldn’t have been that absurd not to acknowledge that. So I went back and read it:

    (Though to be fair to myself, I tend to have multiple irons in the fire at any given time, so a straight start date to publication date calculation doesn’t tell the whole story—and it probably doesn’t tell the whole story with George R.R. Martin as well. But still, even if those figures were twice as high, they would still be absurdly low for a working writer.)

    Huh. So an offhand parenthetical about maybe having “multiple irons in the fire” but still being absurdly low. The rest of the article makes it sound like all Martin must do is write Game of Thrones novels and go to conventions, and that’s it. I guess it was that absurd after all.

    I wonder what Martin has been up to while writing the GoT series… hey, I bet Wikipedia might have a list! Let’s see, at a glance, during that time he has…

    – written 5 novellas
    – written 5 other books including a reference book, and 2 other novels
    – written 5 television episodes including creating and developing the pilot for a TV series
    – edited 14 (!!) Wild Cards volumes, plus written plenty of those stories
    – edited another 8 anthologies
    – been an actively involved producer on some TV show or something
    – run his own movie theater

    Geez, what an absurdly low creative output! Yeah, I can understand why he should be ashamed of himself. He is obviously doing nothing but writing the next GoT book and going to conventions. *rolls eyes*

28. I read once somewhere that GRRM was unhappy that fans had figured out some of the planned plot twists (a downside of giving fans so much time to pour over the books and analyze them word-for-word). I can see that contributing to a delay for various reasons – lack of motivation to write something already predicted, rewriting to take things in a different direction, or to give anticipated scenes something fresh/unexpected.

    I was also burned by the Exiles trilogy. It’s entirely Rawn’s right to write (or not write) whatever books she chooses, but I can’t help wanting at least a small release of info on how she intended to resolve certain plot points (*cough* parentage *cough*). If a series is abandoned, as opposed to slowly continuing, I don’t see why notes couldn’t be shared.

29. “In the middle of 2015 the Comet TV network came into existence. It specializes in showing old sf TV episodes, and selected movies. Among its offerings is my childhood favorite – Men Into Space, which was on the air for one season in 1959.”

    As it happens, Nicki and I watched an episode of Men Into Space last night that we had DVR-ed from the Comet network. The show was also one of my favorites back then (I was all of nine years old). And you know what? It’s still pretty good (albeit more than a bit dated). Sets inspired by the great illustrator Chesley Bonestell were used, and some of the scripts were written by actual science fiction writers.

    I’m still a fan!

30. @Viverrine
    I read once somewhere that GRRM was unhappy that fans had figured out some of the planned plot twists

    I think that the most logical explanation is that GRRM is now more than wealthy enough to be able to indulge in his other interests while maintaining whatever output of work on the final book that he feels is appropriate. Writers like Vasicek and Correia need to grind out as much work as they can because they don’t sell anywhere near as many books as Martin. Whether it takes one year or five years, Martin will make millions off of the next book he releases in the series. Vasicek and Correia combined won’t make anywhere near that off of all the books they release in the same time period.

    It just becomes a silly argument that ends up turning itself back on itself. As much as they want to try and make it the same as churning out widgets or filing forms, work like fiction isn’t something where if you just plug in the hours, quality automatically comes out. I’ve rather write half as many books that sell twice as well, personally.

31. ULTRAGOTHA -.

    Why deprive yourself of more of it?

    Her other books didn’t sound as appealing to me as they were more urban fantasy/romance oriented. Don’t really feel deprived though, the amount of awesome stuff I want to read outpaces the time I have to read it.

    The author doesn’t owe me an ending, but I also don’t owe the author attention to their work, just was pointing out that cuts both ways.

    And 11 years? Pffft. It’s been 19 for me. At least she’s apparently working on the book now*, so I’m hoping her personal issues have resolved even if I may never get plot resolution.

    (*as of a news update several years ago)

32. Viverrine on January 12, 2016 at 11:25 am said:

    I was also burned by the Exiles trilogy. It’s entirely Rawn’s right to write (or not write) whatever books she chooses, but I can’t help wanting at least a small release of info on how she intended to resolve certain plot points (*cough* parentage *cough*). If a series is abandoned, as opposed to slowly continuing, I don’t see why notes couldn’t be shared.

    There’s an interview out there from 2014 that says she does plan now to finish the series when her other series is complete.

33. Heck, I’m still upset that we didn’t get the completed version of The Mezentian Gate; although at least Eddison left notes for the missing sections.

    I’m also mildly upset that even if I still had cable, I wouldn’t currently be able to get Comet TV. Maybe I’ll just rewatch my Disney Treasures Tomorrowland set (not to be confused with the movie Tomorrowland).

34. Today’s read — The Shadow Throne, by Django Wexler.

    The characters return from foreign wars to find a revolution brewing at home. This series is so enjoyable to read. Likable characters and a good story. It’s also well-written and fast paced, so this one went by much more quickly than its size would have had me believe.

    Even more than the first book, it benefits from making the Soooooper-Genius character mostly operate in the background, with all events seen from the point of view of others. Also gets a boost from deliberately invoking the events of the historical French Revolution, giving the sense that no matter how much events are being manipulated behind the scene, they could very well spin out of control.

    If I have any objections, it may be that the book is attempting to tread a narrow path between yay-the-princess-is-awesome fantasy and a more republican (in the European sense of the word) ethos, which sometimes stretched my credulity. But I’m still giving the series a big thumbs up, and I’m looking forward to reading the next one whenever I get to it.

    (This book also puts the series onto my “good lesbian romance SFF list”, most likely in the “It Happens In The Sequels” category to spare myself the task of figuring out whether it counts as a Minor Romantic Element or a Major Romantic Element.)

35. Bruce A: Vasicek seems to be assuming that for GRRM writing another Game of Thrones novel is what gives him the biggest return on investment. If that’s not true, then it’s admirable that GRRM is actually trying to finish the series anyway, even if it’s taking him a lot longer than he and his fans would like.

    At this point, I think “return on investment” is a moot point with GRRM. He’s got more money than he likely knows what to do with, and it will keep rolling in by the dumptruckloads for years.

    I would guess that at this point, apart from fulfilling any outstanding contractual obligations he may have, GRRM is at the “what gives me the most satisfaction” stage of his life. As Ken Marable pointed out above, the list of GRRM’s “irons in the fire” is lengthy. He’s a bit of an SFF Renaissance Man and seems to prefer ranging widely.

    Frankly, I’ve been through the first 4 books twice and the 5th once, and at this point, I’m pretty much over ASoIaF. If more books come out, I’ll probably read them, but I won’t be crying if they don’t.

    I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if after decades of writing the book series and doing the TV series, and having it take over his life with a life of its own, GRRM is kind of “over it” as well.

36. Bruce Arthurs: Thomas Monteleone’s SEEDS OF CHANGE…

    Interestingly, there’s a review over on GoodReads with a shout-out to File770‘s piece on this bit of fannish lore. Is that yours?

37. I am too enraged by Dickens’ failure to end Edwin Drood to be concerned with more recent unfinished works.

    (Yes, Dickens died but Verne didn’t let death stop him from publishing new books almost a century after his death)

38. Man, the particular kind of cheerleading for self-publishing I see among Puppies (and some others) is one of the things that gives me pause about going with a tiny press for my debut novel. I’d like to be able to have it out this calendar year, which would never happen through traditional publishing even if everything went smashingly well (starting with the part about, you know, getting a traditional publisher to buy the thing). But I’d also like at least a dim hope of having it taken seriously, and a lot of what I see from the indie cheerleaders… well, isn’t serious.

39. Re: Nora Roberts — her books are entertaining, and I’ve read many of them. But I WISH in her books with witches she’d stop calling tumbled stones “tumbling stones.”

    Tumbled stones are called that because someone has taken gemstone rough, placed it in a machine called a “tumbler” with various grades of grit, to produce a polished pebble.

    Every time I encounter the misuse of the above term I get the mental image of polished pebbles rising from their containers and executing varied acrobatics across the shelves of the witch’s store…

40. @Watts – Don’t let Puppies, or over enthusiastic cheerleaders–or doomsayers!–turn you off a decision. Self-pub is a big world. I’ve self-published without regret, and trade published without regret (and once or twice with mild regret!) and hit a few points in between.

    The important thing is to be clear on what you want most to accomplish with a book, and then figure out what’s most likely to get you there.

41. Dex said:

    It just becomes a silly argument that ends up turning itself back on itself. As much as they want to try and make it the same as churning out widgets or filing forms, work like fiction isn’t something where if you just plug in the hours, quality automatically comes out. I’ve rather write half as many books that sell twice as well, personally.

    In fairness, the frequent counter-argument that prolific writers must be somehow less talented, because they put out too much material to have possibly given each sentence the appropriate amount of tender loving care, is equally silly. I don’t think it’s a question of “write half as many books that sell twice as well”, I think it’s a question of “sit your butt down on the chair, write every chance you get, be ruthlessly self-critical but don’t get lost in self-doubt, work on each piece as much as it needs to be worked on and then let it out into the world.”

    You’re right in that if you plug in the hours, quality doesn’t automatically come out. But if you don’t plug in the hours, quality never comes out. The reason this is a silly piece is more because GRRM works hard and has worked hard for decades, than because the slower you write the better your prose. 🙂

42. I find I have very little brain for commenting at the moment, but I do seem to have the right sort of brain for writing up Amazon UK ebook sales (sometimes it’s the other way around):

    Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
    Hugo-eligible. A supermarket wants to build a major branch on the border of the sleepy hamlet of Lychford. The problem is that Lychford lies on the boundary of two worlds, and the destruction of that border will open wide the gateway to malevolent beings.

    Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear
    Hugo-eligible. In a steam-powered 19th century old west, Karen is a young woman making the best of her orphaned state by working in Madame Damnable’s high-quality bordello. Trouble starts one night when a badly injured girl arrives begging sanctuary, followed by the man who holds her indenture, and who has a machine that can control people’s minds and actions. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a murdered body is dumped in their rubbish heap…

    The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
    Pre-apocalyptic United States. People everywhere are walking off the job – but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week – except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

    Shadow Sight, by E.J. Stevens
    Ivy and her best friend Jinx might not be raking in the dough, but their psychic detective agency pays the bills – most of the time. Their only worry is the boredom of a slow day and the occasional crazy client – until a demon walks through their door.

    Sterling, by Dannika Dark
    Zoë Merrick, lived an ordinary life until, she was brutally attacked. She narrowly escapes death, rescued by Adam Razor, but something is different. Zoë is unable to control an unexplainable energy coursing through her body.

    Small discounts:

    Kushiel’s Dart: Kushiel’s Legacy, by Jacqueline Carey

    The Traitor (also known as The Traitor Baru Cormorant), by Seth Dickinson
    Hugo-eligible.

    The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu
    Hugo-eligible.

    —

    (1) Gallo Wins
    Good for her! I think she does an excellent job.

    —

    There are quite a few fanfiction writers, both prolific and not, that I would rate considerably higher than most of the 2015 Puppy nominees.

    GRRM is a very talented writer whose books do nothing for me. They are very good, just not for me. I would rather an author, once past the journeyman stage where writing lots and lots is often necessary to hone their craft, took their time (finances willing) and produced the best book they could than just churned out as many words as they could manage. I like reading good books.

    —

    @Anna Feruglio Dal Dan

    Ok, this is silly. Many things could be said of the prequels, but slagging of the costumes is the very last thing I would concentrate on. The costumes are wonderful. Visual invention was not something the prequels lacked.

    Yup. The costumes were the best bit!

43. Meredith: Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell: Hugo-eligible

    Just a note: yes, this is eligible, in the Novella category.

44. @JJ

    Yup. 🙂

45. According to Burn Notice books are useful for more than insulation:

    Michael Westen: [narration] There are a couple of ways to make a car bullet resistant. $60,000 dollars worth of titanium siding will do the job. Or you can pick up a couple extra copies of the Yellow Pages from your local phone company. Most non-armor-piercing bullets will only penetrate a phone book to the depth of an inch or two. Behind a layer of steal, it’s more like a 1/4 of an inch.

    Filers may wish to use copies of Seeds of Change from Hampus’s drift store instead…

    As for finishing fallow series I was pleasantly surprised when Timothy Zahn finished the Blackcollar series 20 odd years since I read the first one. On the other hand Stross seems unlikely to finish the Eschaton series having plotted himself into a corner.

46. On the other hand Stross seems unlikely to finish the Eschaton series having plotted himself into a corner.

    He’s said he can’t finish it. (Maybe it requires violating causality.)

47. I am too enraged by Dickens’ failure to end Edwin Drood to be concerned with more recent unfinished works.

    I think it was a genius move for a mystery. Everyone got to solve it in the way they saw best.

    Plus that whole musical with multiple endings put to a vote of the audience before the finale thing.

48. @JJ: while I originally wrote return on investment in the traditional financial sense, in GRRM’s case it’s probably his time that’s important to him now.

    Since there are a lot of people bringing up their unfinished series peeves, I’ll throw out David Gerrold’s War Against the Chtorr, where he not only revised the original novels (maybe just restoring deleted material), but the last published novel included a cliffhanger first chapter from the next, never released, book. The first of the series was originally published in 1983, and we’ve been waiting to find out how Jim and Lizard survive the first chapter of book 5 for almost 13 years now.

49. Yes, I’ve read Witches of Lychford and thought it was superior, though I unfortunately didn’t write down last September why I thought that, so now I’m hazy. It’s been discussed more than once in these threads, though.

50. @Bruce

    The basic problem with Vasicek’s post is the implicit assumption that there is any correlation between quantity, quality, and significance.

    I read it as more of a commentary about regular writing schedules/routines and an observation about the implicit relationship between readers and authors. I didn’t take it as suggesting that Larry Correia is a great author because he publishes a ton of books. I took it that Larry Correia publishes a ton of books because he works at the craft of writing in a certain manner.

    @ Cat

    …but arguing his success (sales does equal success, right?) into failure is a pretty impossible task, and one that would have been easy enough for Vasicek to avoid.

    Sales are indeed one reasonable measure of success. I didn’t read Joe as arguing that success is a failure. I did see him talking about the implicit relationships between readers and authors.

    ——-

    In general, I found that the article didn’t say anything new. Writing as a creative process can be hard if you can’t find the right approach to the subject matter. (My writing is primarily technical, but the concept translates reasonably well, IMHO.) At the same time, writing involves skills….or craft….that are refined via practice and repetition.

    GRRM is taking a long time with the latest installment. Nothing new. He’s experiencing some sort of writer’s block. Nothing new. He also has other interests (optional and mandatory) in his life that may be getting in the way. Nothing new. He might be a little faster if he set aside some of those optional interests.

    He’s a big boy. From GRRM’s blog, it is clear that he is disappointed in himself. I can’t see a lot in Joe’s article that would cause GRRM any significant heartache.

    Maybe it would be better to wish that Joe had GRRM’s success so that he could then have the experience of juggling the larger demands that such success can impose?

    Regards,
    Dann

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