Inkican

The Internet has mixed feelings about John Scalzi. Personally, I’m a fan. Guy writes good sci-fi and remains down-to-earth despite his level of success. Not only that, he’s always up to talk to regular people and has a fair amount of integrity:

I need to re-think my goals as an author. I think what I want is to be as secure and comfortable with the truth as @Scalzi.

— InkICan (@InkICan) June 28, 2017

After trading tweets with him for a while, I decided to ask him a question that very few other people would be in a position to answer. As I’m getting started as an author, I’m running into a number of challenges I did not expect. How do I navigate this unknown territory?

Even established authors find audience engagement to be somewhat daunting, but Scalzi seems to have found his own personal comfort zone between writing and talking to people so that more people buy his stories. How does it work? I decided to ask the man himself and see what he said. I was pleasantly surprised by the 140-character insights that followed.

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Oh God, really??

I guess the Harvey Dent was right: You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Some people are maniacs online. I read how angry fans are trashing George RR Martin’s release schedule, and it left me spitting with anger. Then I sat on this blog post for over a month. Life is too short to get into petty squabbles, I said. Now I’m reading this … ‘Game of Thrones has lost its way.’

You people (I’m speaking to the fans that can’t enjoy a show or a book without turning into armchair pundits) need your head examined. I’ve met GRRM and he’s a sweet guy. He doesn’t deserve this.

Here’s the thing: We’re all trying to make it as authors here. Is this is all we have to look forward to if we’re lucky enough to achieve his level of success? We’re conditioned to spend our lives trying to tap into the id of our readers, understand them and write stories they love. George R.R. Martin did that. Now you’re turning on him? Are you crazy??

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Just found out that my Comic-Con submission for the 2018 Souvenir Book wasn’t accepted. Stings a little, but onto the next … always. Meanwhile, you might get a kick out of it. They asked for articles on Batman: The Animated Series. I loved that show as a kid and I still do. Ended up writing an 1100-word love letter to the Dark Knight. Hope you enjoy it:

Dark Deco and Neo-Noir for Kids – Batman: The Animated Series at Twenty-Five

Lights down, TV sound up. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Batman: The Animated Series was on. Time stopped during those thirty minutes. After years of Hanna-Barbera animation and toy shows like G.I. Joe and the Transformers here was an honestly *good* TV show coming at us every weekday afternoon.

Batman: The Animated Series was launched in the fall of 1992 and ran until I graduated high school. Other cartoon series’ were exciting – you can’t help but celebrate the fourth-wall breaks that happened in TMNT – but B:TAS was different. It was special. I watched every one of the eighty-five episodes like my life depended on it. The Dark Knight had been rebooted in a unique way. New characters like Harley Quinn took their place among classic villains and the famous film actors who provided their voices. Neo-noir ‘dark deco’ art blended without seam with the slightly futuristic technology that Batman used in fighting crime.

It’s not surprising that we still talk about Batman: The Animated Series two-and-a-half decades later. As teens and  tweens, we not only loved the show, we crossed the threshold into a strange new world. Here was a new series to fall in love with, and we did. We quoted it to each other; we plumbed the depths of the DC comic canon to which we had been exposed. We watched afternoon programming raise its bar, as Batman: TAS redefined what a kid’s cartoon show was supposed to be.

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