BTT: Authors Talking

Do you read any author’s blogs? If so, are you looking for information on their next project? On the author personally? Something else?

I read a handful of authors’ blogs, but usually the fact that they’re authors is only incidental to the fact that they are interesting, funny people who write well. Authors have the same chances as anyone at staying in my feed reader — but, like anyone else, if they bore or annoy me too often, I unsubscribe.

Does this happen, even though authors are supposed to be these shiny interesting people? Of course it does. There was a particular author whose blog I stopped reading recently, for example — I loved his book, but his blog was stupendously dull and didn’t allow comments. Gone! (And no, I will not tell you who that was).

That being said, here are some author blogs I enjoy very much:

Whatever (John Scalzi): You’re going to see this as a bit of a theme in this post, but John Scalzi is an author who posts about a heck of a lot more than books and writing and such. I like that; I think that sometimes book bloggers can be a little too topical, if you know what I mean, and what better way to break it up than by creating the Canonical Bacon Page or attempting to predict the next big internet meme? I was reading Scalzi’s blog long before I read any of his books, but I can tell you now that he is also a very good novelist.

WWdN(In Exile) (Wil Wheaton): Wil Wheaton is another dude whose blog I was reading long before I knew that he was an author or any of that. Wil blogs about lots of geeky, geeky things. I’ve read Just a Geek and it is very good indeed — and that didn’t surprise me in the least.

Emy’s Blog (Elizabeth Emerson Hancock): Okay, I would be lying if I told you that I’ve been reading this blog for a longer time than since this morning. Trish highlighted it in her BTT post, and so I went and read the post she linked to, and then I read a few more things, and then I thought “Hey, this lady is funny and smart! I should subscribe!”. And then I did. Maybe you should too.

Religion. Money. Politics. Sex. (Moriah Jovan): I started reading Moriah Jovan’s blog because somebody, somewhere, linked to her post about the perfect bookstore. And I thought that was genius, genius I tell you, and when I grow up and have a big bucket full of money, I will steal her idea and live happily ever after.

What is Stephen Harper Reading? (Yann Martel): Some of you might be wondering who Stephen Harper is, exactly? He’s the Prime Minister of Canada, and every Monday for as long as he is in power, Yann Martel sends him a book to read, with an accompanying cover letter that is always lucid and thoughtful and makes me wish that Martel was sending books to me instead of to Parliament Hill.

evany’s extended cake mix (Evany Thomas): Like, well, most of the authors on my list, Evany Thomas has published a book but talks about way more than that; she’s a diarist primarily, and her life seems interesting and relatively kooky. I haven’t read her book — The Secret Language of Sleep — because I think it’s probably more or less baloney, and anyway, I sleep alone. But if it’s like her blog, it’s probably still very good.

Should authors blog? Sure, if they want. Should they blog about more than ZOWIE  I WROTE A BOOK? Absolutely, unequivocably, yes. And that’s probably going to be more interesting, anyway.