You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
Isn’t that a fab title? Too long, but funny enough to deserve its length. #12 in my 2007 book challenge was You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi.
My husband G. Grod started reading Scalzi’s blog, The Whatever, a while back, and frequently shares entries with me. Scalzi is funny (Chapter 4: Science Fiction, or, Don’t Skip This Chapter, You Damned Writing Snobs), smart, and not shy about sharing how he manages to make a decent living as a writer. (Hint: it’s not book tours and Oprah, though he is coming to a city near you very soon to promote his new novel, The Last Colony.) Scalzi is a pragmatist, not a romantic. He writes for hire, and for fun. He picked the topic of his novel, Old Man’s War, by going to the bookstore and studying which sci-fi books sold well. He lives in what I grew up calling BFE Ohio, where the cost of living is low, the politics swing right, and culture isn’t entirely absent, though I would argue that fine dining pretty much is. (Scalzi also claims that central-ish Ohio is a great place to raise a kid. He’s entitled to that opinion. I was a kid raised in Ohio. I left at 19 with a drinking problem and a decided lack of worldliness. Both of those got better once I was out of Ohio.)
YNFA is a collection of his blog entries. Check out the archives at The Whatever. If you like what you read, you’ll like YNFA. Why buy it if the individual entries are available for free? One, you’ll contribute to the decent living that one writer makes. If you’re a writer aspiring to make money and be published, that’s gotta help to slough some karma. Two, the edition, by Subterranean Press, is very nice. It’s cloth bound with good typefaces. My quibbles? Page 271 has a typeface goof, and there are a sprinkling of errors throughout the text that a more careful editing should have caught.
Heartening, humbling, and fun to read.
P.S. YNFA sold out of its initial print run! If you’re interested, feedback to Subterranean Press might encourage a second printing.