I just read this article on Tor.com over at SFDiplomat. For those of you not “in the know”, Tor has launched a kind of social networking site for fandom, which features articles and short fiction written by their authors.

I think it’s a wonderful idea. A sci-fi publisher has taken their website from a boring, static webpage and turned it into something dynamic that might draw people to the site. This is something along the lines of what Baen’s been doing for quite some time with their magazine Baen’s Universe and their free fiction archive. It’s Web 2.0, and I think it’ll help to boost Tor’s profile.

Jonathan McCalmont disagrees, and while I won’t rehash his arguments here, basically he comments on “over-exposed” authors like John Scalzi blogging on the site. First off, is John Scalzi under any obligation whatsoever to not try and promote himself like any other author simply because his blog is immensly popular? I mean, seriously, is McCalmont arguing that Scalzi should just say, “hey, look, I’m popular enough, I don’t need to self-promote?” Really, Jonathan? Really?

In any case, read the comments section where Scalzi responds. The man is a bulldog, and a very well spoken bulldog at that. It’s worth the read.

Tags: john scalzi, Johnathan McCalmont, Tor.com

I haven’t read the book OR seen the movie, but here I am exercising my God given right to laugh while it is being mocked in this post.

Has anyone actually seen this movie? I’m 33 years old, white, heterosexual, male, and happily married. Is there anything in this movie for me?

Tags: Twilight

As a Canadian writer, I feel compelled to talk about the political problems we’re experiencing up here.

First of all, Stephane Dion is my boy. I’ve been impressed with him ever since his letters to Bourassa protesting Quebec separatism. Quite frankly, his well thought-out, cogent arguments again separatism made Bourassa and his cronies look like dundering idiots.

I’m not sure that anyone can deny that he’s one of the brightest politicians to hit the hill in quite some time. However, the public doesn’t generally care how smart you are if your accent is so thick that it’s difficult to get your point across. And that, I think has been the main issue that has dogged Mr. Dion in his tenure as leader of the Liberal part. Anglophones, especially in the West, just don’t understand him. I still like Mr. Dion, but I feel like he’s unelectable because of this.

Which makes this end run around democracy extremely unpalatable for me. Mr. Dion wants to form a grand coalition between every political party in parliament except for the Conservatives, who are now in power. This includes the Bloc Quebecois, who are both a party whose sole goal is dividing the country, and also the very same people Mr. Dion argued so hard to squash early in his career.

What has triggered this coalition? Mr. Harper’s brisk method of governance probably played a big part. Every vote in parliament was a “confidence issue”, which meant triggering a national election if the Conservative motion was defeated. He also rammed legislation through without little or no consulation with the other parties. In effect, he was a bully. However, it’s difficult not to see some sour grapes on the part of Mr. Dion. Since he vowed to step down from the leadership of the Liberal party in May, he would be only the second leader of that party in history not to go on to lead the country.

He claims that Harper is not responding strongly enough to the economic crisis. It seems to me that he’s playing on the fact that many Canadians believe that what happens in the States also happens here. There’s a tide of negativity in the media, but in reality the Canadian banking system is currently the strongest and best positioned in the G20. We’re not even in recession yet. In fact, our national debt is actually going down, not up.

Now the Liberals have had a rough time of it. They’re dividing the vote on the political left with the NDP, while the Conservatives have the right pretty much to themselves. However, while the Bloc is in parliament chewing up 50 seats, the odds of a majority government happening any time soon are slim. We need to figure out how to work a minority government because they’re here to stay. This kind of squabbling is poison to our democracy and feels like ignoring the will of the people who voted the Conservatives into power.

I’m disappointed in Mr. Dion, and embarassed as a Canadian.

How are you guys feeling about it?

Tags: politics

A tad harsh, don’t you think, Jordan?

I, too, was disturbed by Ed’s cry out.  Not, apparently, in the manner in which you ere, however; I felt saddened by it, and scared, too, for I’m just beginning to travel this road of publication and I honestly want my anthology to do well, for the sake of the author’s within it and for the sake of the genre to boot.  Even for the sake of the reading public.

I did not plan to purchase Ed’s anthology simply because I’m not interested in reading it.  Yet I feel for him and, due to his post, I have considered buying a copy.  This I would do in support, a show of solidarity.  I still doubt I’d read it, but I have several things I could do with the book – I donate to the local Veteran’s Hospital and I hold contests on my blog, for two ideas.

I agree with you that this is unnerving and uninspiring – but I don’t join with you in condemning him.

I was going to blog about this again, so Jason’s comment was the perfect excuse.

There is one cardinal rule of writing, and indeed publishing, and it is this: “Money should flow towards the writer”. This is true even in television and movie writing. Scam artists often unmask themselves because they violate that rule (they charge reading/editing fees).

The only place where this rule doesn’t apply is Vanity Publishing (or many of the “self-publishing houses” like Authorhouse, which itself is only a thinly disguised vanity publisher). When a publisher asks authors to purchase books, in effect they are violating this rule, and what does that make them? Yes, it makes them a vanity publisher. Personally, I want my writing to get published because it touches or moves people, not just because I want to see my words in print. If the only people that are buying my books are doing so because they eventually want to get published themselves, then my efforts at writing a compelling story amount to nothing more than mental masturbation.

A publisher’s job is to connect people who want to read amazing fiction with people who write compelling stories. A publisher who calls on authors to support markets simply so they can remain afloat is a publisher who isn’t doing their job, and we need to shout it from the rooftops.