Dudes are fine. And I for one thank Matt Dinniman as my Time of Iron books are being sold as readalikes and I am getting very nice emails from dudes! ‘I don’t see why everyone hates your main girl I think she has great tits and a great sense of humour’ one said memorably. Thank you sir I agree.
John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 19h agoThat said the #1 book on the NYT print/ebook list (and the USA Today list) this is week is from a dude, and the great publishing phenomenon of the last year is Matt Dinniman, who occupies multiple slots on multiple NYT lists, and let's not forget Andy Weir setting up camp either. Dudes are fine.
![THE RAFT-BUILDERS
[by Lord Dunsany]
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:utdci2ewhpqzfl6uukt4kdkc/bafkreifikhyonuxtvq335lsvoml4gbqzng6yxvposhuz6a7i7rae5nz3zy)