The Old Man’s War series gets a bit winded, but good ideas; Lock In is a solid sci-fi whodunit; Redshirts is worthy of “required reading” status. And his blog is good stuff, unless you hate any writerly navel-gazing. And we all owe him a debt for standing at the gates of the whole Shitty Puppies/Vox Day uprising. Plenty of good charity work and side jobs (including consulting on Stargate:Universe, and surviving the presidency of SWFA).
But damn! How could he – and Tor – have been so clueless about not making noise that The Collapsing Empire (the most-recent tour book) was the first part of a trilogy! FFS, $26 for a cliff-hangered, not-satisfying-in-itself mess of snappy dialog that makes readers wait over a year for the next installment (which will maybe, actually, advance the story)? I get that Tor has to come up with $3.4M to give him over the coming years, but keeping the multi-part nature of this series out of sight* has put me off in a big way. Expected better – much better – from the guy whose Being Poor essay won him so many accolades. (C’mon John, it’s not like your fan base is made out of $26 bills.) I try to buy new release hardcovers in support of work or authors I enjoy, but Scalzi just got his last nickel out of me.
* If you follow the trade, you would have perhaps gotten the message on Empire. But the hardcover edition itself makes no mention of the series’ structure. Maybe Tor needed to recoup some cash due to the book being late?
(To salvage a vestige of topicality, I completely applaud John’s example of Cory to illustrate his 5th thing – “Many authors are also working while they tour.” Holy shit, Cory works harder than a Canadian collier’s pit pony when he’s on tour. The last time I saw him flogging a book, there was the tour itself…and blogging for BB, and prepping a Humble Bundle, and working on some EFF dox, and being a long-distance dad for Posey, and doing a bit of his own writing. Whew!)
