Unabashed

I woke up last night with a great story idea in my head. I wrote it down on the note pad I keep by my bed for exactly those types of moments. Then I went back to sleep, confident that I had secured the nugget that would lead to a great story. When I woke up this morning, I picked up the pad and read:

“10,000 YEARS OF SPOTTED TROLLS…”

Now where am I supposed to go with that??? I can’t remember the dream; I can’t even remember the thought process that put brought the idea to mind. I just woke up, wrote something (barely legible) down, and went back to sleep. 

What makes this even weirder is that the day before yesterday Walter Jon Williams did a Big Idea write-up on Whatever about his new book, Implied Spaces. In that BI post, he notes that he once woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down “UFOs ARE REALLY MADE OF BREAD,” and awakened the next morning just as oblivious as I was today. Did he somehow plant a subliminal suggestion in my mind to make me wake up and write something incomprehensible on my note pad, which otherwise has given me some pretty good ideas? He must have. There is absolutely no other plausible explanation for it. My mind has been invaded by WJW. So now I’m headed out to find his new book so I can buy it, and then I’ve got to stop by a tattoo parlor and have WJW scripted onto my newly-naked skull skin.

Photo: Troll sculpture by Kim Graham

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: spotted, troll, trolls, Walter Jon Williams, Whatever

John Scalzi and Subterranean Press has released Scalzi’s novella The Sagan Diaries (12,500 words) on the internet as a free read and/or download.

The Sagan Diaries falls in between Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, and is highly recommended.

They’re also releasing a 500-copy limited edition of You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop into a Coffeeshop, a book on writing from Scalzi, a full-time writer since 1991. It’s $35, but it comes signed and touted as a very attractive book. (I bought one of them :-)

If you don’t know who John Scalzi is, here’s the bio quip from the Subterranean website:

John Scalzi is author of Old Man’s War (which Publishers Weekly described as a “virtuoso debut” in a starred review) and other novels, as well as the author of the bestselling “Book of the Dumb” series of humor books. He’s also the proprietor of The Whatever, one of the most-visited personal Web sites on the Web. A full-time writer since 1991, Scalzi currently resides in rural America with his family and big fat Internet pipe to keep him busy. Visit him at www.scalzi.com.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Coffeeshop, Diaries, John Scalzi, novella, Sagan, Subterranean, Whatever