"You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself"

We had a deal, Kyle — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:56:18 -0800

Fantasy writer George R. R. Martin responds to fans impatient for the latest installment of his series A Song of Fire and Ice: "Okay, I've got the message. " Additional commentary by MeFi's own jscalzi and cstross is illuminating on the business and art of writing, particularly the challenges of maintaining quality and consistency across multi-volume arcs. John Scalzi, Pissy Fans: [T]hese same fans would say “Yeah, the series used to be good, but then he started phoning it in around book five.” You know, if I’m going to annoy a fan, I’d prefer to annoy a fan by not writing a book that sucks, than by writing one that does. Charlie Stross, The art of being late: Parallelism is hard for human minds to grasp. When you're telling a multi-viewpoint story, what you are doing in effect is equivalent to writing a whole bunch of short novels in parallel — one per viewpoint. And we are not good at doing this sort of thing. Humans generally don't multi-task well; we lose efficiency rapidly as we pay the price for switching context. An earlier Stross post touches on some similar issues: Why are SF and fantasy novels the length they are?

Bacon Cat in the New York Times

COD — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:15:15 -0800

Bacon Cat in the New York Times With the presidential race heating up and the financial bailout package passing Congress on Friday, the New York Times thought this was the perfect time for a hard hitting look at straight, single men who own cats. So of course they wanted input from author John Scalzi, who by virtue of the fact that he is married, is not single. He does own Bacon Cat though.

MetaFilter posts tagged with scalzi

"You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself"

Bacon Cat in the New York Times