John Scalzi - The Mallet of Loving Correction

The Mallet of Loving Correction

Selected Writings from Whatever,

20082012

John Scalzi

Subterranean Press 2013

The Mallet of Loving Correction Copyright 2013 by John Scalzi. All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright 2013 by Nate Taylor. All rights reserved.

Print version interior design Copyright 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-580-2

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Kate Baker, friend and occasional wielder of the Mallet. Thank you for being both.

This book is also dedicated to those who comment on Whatever. May you never be malleted, but if you are, may you take your correction in the loving manner with which it is offered.

Authors Introduction

Oh, look, here we are again.

First, explanations and context, for the one or two of you who need it. This book is a collection of entries from my blog, Whatever, covering the timeframe from June 2008 through November 2012 (it would have gone through to December 2012, but I slacked off that month and didnt write anything on the blog that month I thought worthy of inclusion). This timeframe covers two presidential elections, several generations of electronics, the rise of Twitter and Facebook, multiple waves of Internet craziness, the advance of same-sex marriage as a civil right, and, personally speaking, the publication of several books, the winning of a few awards for writing (including a Hugo for this books predecessor, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded) and my tenure as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Its been a busy few years all around.

All the entries here were originally published on my blog, whichI am very happy to sayhas a large and vibrantly argumentative collection of commenters. All of these entries had comments attached to them once they were published; some had hundreds of comments as the regular visitors argued back and forth with each other. This was particularly the case with the political posts, as you might imagine, but any topic is fair game for an argument. One of the things I am happy about is that, unlike all too many sites, the comments on my site are usually worth reading. This is an artifact of Whatever building a retinue of smart, engaged readers over the decade and a half its been around. Im delighted they show up; Im equally delighted that they stick around.

Its also an artifact of me having a comment moderation policy, in which I keep the conversation on topic, warn people when they are being rude to other commenters or employing cheap rhetorical tricks, and expunge the comments that are obnoxious, lazy or trollish. At some point during the last several years, I began calling the latter malleting, and created a metaphorical instrument for the purpose: The Mallet of Loving Correction. It is this mallet from which this collection takes its title.

(And yes, now I have in my possession a physical Mallet of Loving Correction, given to me as a gift. It is very large and has on its head a quote from me, which reads I dont love you any less for being so WRONG on the Internet. Yeah, that about sums it up.)

This book is scheduled for release on September 13, 2013the fifteenth anniversary of the debut of Whatever. Its strange for me to think that I have been writing Whatever for as long as I have. Even now, more than a decade into the 21st Century, blogs dont have a sterling reputation for being serious writing (a fact I suspect is at least partially related to the word blog itself, which sounds more like a fungal infection than a repository for prose), and I imagine there might still be people who wonder why I bother writing it, especially when I could be writing other things, like more novels and books, or other sorts of pay copy.

One answer is, well, I do those things anywaywriting the blog doesnt hurt that. A second answer is that writing on Whatever lets me write what I want, when I want, how I want, which is the sort of freedom of expression that I value as a person. A third answer is that the blog reaches tens of thousands of people a day, hundreds of thousands a month and millions in the course of a year. Thats an audience any writer would love to have, and I have it. I think Ill keep it for a while longer, thanks.

Theres one more reason. In a very real sense, Whatever is my lifes work; its fifteen years (so far) of me thinking about whats going on in my life and in my world. I have no illusions that when I roll off from this rock future generations will note or care about my existence, save possibly for a few academics scrounging for a thesis subject or some descendants curious about that writer in their family timeline. But it matters to me to note my time and my place in it. In this regard Whatever has an audience of one. This is me, remembering inreal time.

I hope you enjoy this particular set of memories.

John Scalzi

December 27, 2012

A Note on the Organization of This Book

The Mallet of Loving Correction covers four and a half years of writing but is not arranged chronologically, because one, thats boring, and two, there are times where I would write on one general subject for a few weeks, and having one piece after another on the same subject is also boring.

So, instead, this book is arranged (mostly) alphabetically, by title of entry. I say mostly because there are a few entries that Ive moved out of alphabetical sequence because I wanted to. I trust this will not make your OCD explode.

Although the book is not arranged chronologically, every entry does have its publication date prominently noted, sofor exampleyoull be able to tell whether Im talking about the 2008 US presidential election, or the 2012 US presidential election.

Some entries are slightly edited from the version that appeared on Whatever to reflect the fact that theyre being presented in a book, not on a Web site. So hyperlinks have been removed and some text changed to give the context that the hyperlinks used to provide. Aside from that and copyediting, however, the content of the entries is unchanged, so you will see me being wildly incorrect on several matters of speculation and opinion, and possibly also on a few matters of actual fact. Thats writing in the moment for you. Wheee!

JS

10 Things to Remember About Authors

Feb

2009

Because it appears someone needs to say these things out loud, some thoughts, for the consideration of readers, about authors, particularly novelists. Warning: This is long.

1. Authors arent machines: Which is to say, we do not reliably and through a purely mechanical process extrude Novel-Length Textual Product with Extra Added Plot and Character Flavors on a predictable schedule. Like all things that live, we do our thing imprecisely. Sometimes the novels come out regularly and uniformly; sometimes they dont. Sometimes the novels conform to our own expectations of what they should be; sometimes they come out malformed and need to be fixed before they can be sent out into the world. Sometimes they just dont work at all and have to be tossed. Sometimes production is easy, sometimes its not.

Certainly many authors strive for predictable process, which is why so many of them block out a regular amount of time every day, and try to bang out a regular number of words a day. But working at a regular pace and time and with a regular amount of output does not mean that any individual novel will thereby come out on a predictable schedule. Some of those 500 or 1,000 daily words will be unusable; some of those will be spent rewriting other words; some of those words will be so great that it takes the novel in a new direction that the author has to follow to see where it leads, to the exclusion of finishing the novel on a schedule. Predictable process in this case does not necessarily lead to predictable output.