How John Scalzi Meets His Deadlines

By Hillary | January 8, 2016 |

This week, bestselling author John Scalzi blogged about how he’s going to meet his 2016 deadlines: “For me, the major problem is not writer’s block or plot issues or anything structural involving the novel; I generally don’t have problems with those once I start, and with this new novel, thankfully, I didn’t have any real…

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The Problem With Daily Word Counts

By Hillary | July 13, 2015 |

This list of the daily word counts of famous authors has been making the rounds. The top producers, by far, are the late thriller writer Michael “Jurassic Park” Crichton and the late British historical novelist R. F. Delderfield, who both apparently wrote 10,000 words a day. Then we’ve got one 6,000-word-a-day chap (thriller writer John Creasy), a…

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Exclusive! John Scalzi’s Time Management and Career Tips

By Hillary | June 1, 2015 |

Last week, the publishing world was abuzz with the news that bestselling science fiction author John Scalzi signed a movie-star-like $3.4 million publishing deal for 10 books. Scalzi is someone I admire enormously, not just for his writing and career success, but because he’s a genuinely nice guy, both offline (I’ve seen him at science fiction conventions)…

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John Scalzi on Why You Should Never Let Your Reviewers Get You Down

By Hillary | January 27, 2014 |

The Inimitable One offers a list of one-star reviews of books that later went on to win science fiction’s celebrated Hugo award. My favorite is this review of Scalzi’s own novel Red Shirts, which actually uses the word “onanistic”: This is an onanistic shallow and very disappointing book. Little or no character development. What should…

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