What’s Up, John?

So, immediately before I posted this, I wrote a blog post and then put up a brand-new Sad Puppies Review Books installment by our old friend Mr. John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired). Both of these things happened because the first thing I saw this morning when I got on Twitter was an excerpt from a blog post by one of the Sad Puppy standard-bearers, Ms. Sarah Hoyt. I found I had things to say about it, hence the blog post. When I was finished, I found I had more to say, hence the book review.

The paragraph about Nazi and Soviet collaborators in the review is taken verbatim from Hoyt’s post, minus the bit that’s about the turtle. I say this because my experience last year was that the parts of the reviews that were taken directly from the mouths of pups, as it were, were the parts most often singled out for being unfair and too over the top to be believed.

I don’t at this time have any intention of resuming the SPRB column as a regular thing. At the time I first did it, it arose quite organically from the ideas bouncing around in my head and the things I was seeing. At the point where I found myself seeking out material and chasing down ideas, I retired it. There will be more reviews if and only if I keep seeing things that spark them. It’s not enough for a Puppy to say something wrong or terrible. It’s also got to make it into my orbit, and it has to spark an association with one of the many children’s book shelved in the library of my mind. If I have to start casting around for a book to make the comparison, it’s just not a very good comparison, nor a very good joke.

So the plan regarding SPRB is there is no plan.

Other plans are… evolving and in flux. There was some bad news on the international front today and tremendously good news on the family front. I’ll probably blog more about what I’m doing later. Right now, my head’s a jumble.