I ran into authors John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton out on the BookExpo floor Friday afternoon, a few hours before Scalzi was scheduled to take part in a panel on online communities with fellow Tor author Cory Doctorow (although, we joked, he didn't bring the cape and googles) and their editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, along with political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who has an activism guidebook coming out this fall. Scalzi talked about his experience establishing himself as the "benevolent dictator" of the conversational community that grew up around his blog, which has evolved into a culture that is capable of entertaining itself even when he's not around, like when he's up against a book deadline. Keeping the readers informed of deadlines and other parts of the writing process, he added, had an unexpected effect: "The community is kicking my ass to not blog so they can get the books."

Everybody agreed about the importance of enabling a community/fan culture with "shared common goals," perhaps even "a sense of family," to emerge from the site. If content were king, Doctorow said, you could ask somebody what they'd rather take with them on a deserted island, their record collection or their friends, and the people who chose their records wouldn't be seen as sociopaths. And if you aren't engaging with people who share your affinities, if there's no encouragement to take the enthusiasm generated by your posts and try to make things happen, Moulitsas added, "we become a David Broder, pontificating about bullshit."

Tor clearly had big plans for Scalzi this weekend, getting him out in front of the booksellers with two novels in the immediate pipeline: Zoe's Tale, an offshoot of his Old Man's War trilogy with strong YA-crossover potential, and Agent to the Stars, a trade paperback edition of a "practice novel" he wrote in the late '90s and first published online. They're two very different projects—one's a space opera, the other's a Hollywood comedy with aliens—but reading them back to back on the redeye home from LA*, I realized that one of the qualities I admire most about his fiction is his ability to ground serious moral and philosophical issues in the lives of interesting characters. Some readers might think that his characters talk through their problems a bit much, but I admire his willingness to tackle serious questions even when he uses wisecracking aliens with body odor problems to do it. Not to mention, these are the fourth and fifth novels in a row where he wrote scenes that almost made me cry, the big jerk.

(Note: Anybody who's been reading this blog for any amount of time knows that I'm completely un-neutral on the subject of John Scalzi. As a friend once said, "Disclosure? Whatever. Google me.")

*It's not why I couldn't sleep; it's the productive thing I did when I realized couldn't sleep.