On Asking Allyn Questions

I’ve been thinking about this; I’ve seen people do it on LiveJournal.

I am opening the floor to questions from the audience. I am, indeed.

So what do you want to know? If you want to know how I take my coffee, here’s your chance.

If your question is too personal, potentially libelous, or borderline illegal I’ll let you know, but don’t let the possibility keep you from asking!

Ask away, audience members! What do you want to know about Allyn Gibson? Now’s your chance. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

30 thoughts on “On Asking Allyn Questions

  1. Ron, no, I’m not planning on moving to Habari.

    A couple of reasons.

    First, my host wouldn’t support it. Habari requires PHP 5. My server is on PHP 4.1. Not going to work.

    Second, I really like WordPress. Yes, I’ve had my hiccups–the upgrade to WP2.1 was a frustrating slog–but overall I’ve been very pleased with it. I’ve learned enough PHP and CSS to tinker with it–write some plug-ins, hack some stylesheets. It does what I need it to do with not a lot of fuss.

    Third, I haven’t really liked the Habari sites I’ve seen thus far. A caveat–it’s early days yet, the software’s still in its infancy, so obviously it’s unfair to judge the software based on what people have cobbled together in these early days. But if the standard for Habari is going to be K2… well, I find Kubrick bland, and to me K2 is bland-squared. Show me some character, people!

    I’m honestly not following Habari, so I don’t know what it will do that WordPress won’t. Yet even if it does do something that WordPress won’t, I think the competition of having another cutting-edge blogging platform out there can only make WordPress better. And if Habari gives me a reason to switch then I’ll do that. But I need a reason.

    I was late coming to the WordPress Widgets party. Similar circumstance to moving to Habari–new software, the new big thing, a new way of working with your blog. I remember when they were introduced and my reaction was, “Why do I want that?” But now? I use widgets here, and I find them to be a very simple way of customizing the sidebar, so much so that I wonder why I didn’t adopt them immediately on my backend. The prospect of recoding a plug-in to work as a widget seemed daunting, but now that I’ve done it it’s really quite easy to do. The one issue with widgets is that CSS styling for them can be a pain in the ass; there’s a widget I like that simply does not work well at all with my stylesheet, and I’d rather go without the widget than go with a different look to the page just to have another item in the sidebar. The difference between a WordPress widget and Habari, of course, is that a WordPress widget isn’t your whole blog, while moving to Habari means learning a whole new platform and new ways of doing old things.

    Sorry, that was more useless geekery knowledge than most anyone ever wanted. 😉

    Ron, back to your question. No, I’m not moving over to Habari any time in the foreseeable future. I’m sticking with WordPress until I have a reason to change, if that reason ever comes.

  2. I read your story in Constellations, and I really liked it. Where did it come from? Why did you write it?

  3. Nick, though I find the Marlovian theory the most interesting and the most probable for an alternative authorship to Shakespeare’s plays, none of non-Stratfordian theories pass any sort of evidentiary smell-test. I hold to the orthodox view, that William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon was the author of the Shakespearean canon.

    (I wonder if this question has anything to do with my post at Outpost Gallifrey wondering idly if “The Shakespeare Code” would deal with the authorship question in any sort of way…. :/)

  4. Kaylee, that’s a big question. Two big questions, actually. 😉

    Have you looked at Jeff Ayers’ Voyages of Imagination? There’s like five pages on “Make-Believe.” The essay there actually might answer your questions better.

    Where did “Make-Believe” come from? You know, I’ve asked myself that for a year and a half now, and I honestly don’t know. I saw an opportunity to tell a story that stepped outside of the Star Trek box, but why it took the form it did? I don’t know. Maybe sometimes you get hit with an idea, and you know it’s so… right that you can’t see it any other way. I know it’s a vague answer, and I’m sorry. :/

    Why did I write “Make-Believe”? There’s so many ways to interpret that. The simple answer, though, is the truest one. I wanted to write a story for the 40th-anniversary Trek anthology. I’ve been a Star Trek fan for a long time, and how could I not want to be a part of the book celebrating forty years of Star Trek? I got in touch with the editor, I pitched some ideas, we got the process rolling, all because I wanted to be a part of that book. That’s the simple answer.

    If you want to ask follow-ups, feel free. I’m not sure if I answered the questions you asked as you meant them.

  5. To think, when I made this post I thought people would ask how my I took my coffee or what I liked to read. But I said if readers had a question to ask, and this is about as deep as they come…

    The silence, Wil. The silence frightens me. The dark, the void, they frighten me.

    Look at what I wrote about Torchwood the other day, about how the characters were all obsessed with finding ways of fighting the inherent loneliness of human existence. That’s why I responded so well to the series, because I got where the characters were coming from, why they were fighting, and what they were looking for from existence. They were fighting against the silence.

    I’ve always been a bit of a nihilist, that in the end we’re nothing and there is nothing. The way we fight that is by making connections. It’s when we lose our connections that the silence encroaches on us, and that’s a very scary thing.

    The silence.

  6. Kent, are you asking my opinion on John Fogerty and Creedance Clearwater Revival?

    I like John Fogerty. I like Creedance. I don’t really give them a lot of thought. I’ve got the Fogerty retrospective CD released about a year ago, the one that covers all of his career, but I haven’t listened to it more than once or twice. I like hearing Fogerty and Creedance on the radio.

    So, yeah. Definitely positive. :banana:

  7. I was going to ask, Aimee, how you knew I had stuffed animals, but I see that in a question meme from a few days ago I said I own stuffed animals but don’t sleep with them… 😉

    I have a World War I Flying Ace Snoopy. That one’s pretty nice.

    I also have a lot of Pooh beanies. Some Classic Pooh Beanies (because, really, E.H. Shepard got it right way back when, and Disney’s Pooh is a little bit of a bastardization). A lot of Disney Pooh Beanies. Some are holiday themed–Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Fourth of July, that sort of thing. There are some sets–Pooh and the gang as the Beatles circa 1964. Pooh and the gang as the Three Musketeers. Things like that. I have a lot of those.

    I also have some Grateful Dead beanies. And I have a Beatles beanie.

  8. Gregory, do I give off lit-geek pretentions? 🙂

    I like both, but I’m a little more of a Hemingway guy. Yet, I don’t think Hemingway wrote anything as remarkable as The Great Gatsby, not even A Farewell to Arms.

    Taking the body of work, Hemingway has more heft and more range. Take an individual work and stack it up, one against the other, and Fitzgerald comes across strong.

    It’s a subjective, I know. I just think Ernest Hemingway’s more my “guy” than F. Scott Fitzgerald is. I do like them both, though.

  9. Strangers from the Sky, by Margaret Wander Bonanno. Tells the secret history of the first contact between humanity and the Vulcans. It’s a deep novel, and I discover new things in it every time.

  10. Bobbie, at the moment:

    A short story, due in twelve days, for an anthology due out in about a year.

    Some magazine work, possibly.

    I have five short stories sitting on various and sundry desks at the moment. No, scratch that. It’s four. Not five. Four. A rejection came earlier this week.

    I have a proposal sitting on someone else’s desk for something that would be kick-ass to write.

    After the short story due in a week I’m going to start research for an historical mystery. The universe has been telling me that‘s the project to work on next. The great thing about this? It’s a concept I’m absolutely certain has never been done before, and it would be perfect series fodder. I can “see” short stories and novels with the characters and the milieu. I’m really excited about this.

    Then there are some back-of-the-mind novel ideas that are percolating. I’ve talked about one with a few people with reactions ranging from, “Wow, no one‘s done that before” to “You have got to be kidding me.” The Beatles alt-history idea I mentioned here on the blog recently isn’t that idea. I would like to write that one, but I think it would almost impossible to publish for a number of reasons. I need to think about it.

    The world will hear more from Allyn Gibson, that‘s for certain. 😉

  11. Well, Alex, I actually don’t watch much television. Boston Legal is the only thing on television I build my week around. House I catch when I’m in the right mood. (I love the character interactions, but the show is so formulaic at times it’s downright painful.) The rest of the week? If I’ve got nothing else to do…. 😐

    Not a big television watcher, obviously.

  12. Absolutely, Tom!

    I’m trying to remember when I set WordPress to auto-close the comment forms. I think it’s six months. So, you’ve got until mid-October to ask anything you want! 🙂

    I should check that, though. Maybe three months would be a better auto-close date. I’ll think on it. I’d certainly ask before July, though. Who knows? I could do another one of these threads come July!

  13. It is the Chicago Cubs logo!

    I love the Cubs. So I learned disappointment and heartbreak at an early age.

    I created a favicon file to resemble the Chicago Cubs logo. I like it. 🙂

  14. Hmm.

    Ron Livingston of Office Space. Yeah, he’s got more hair than I do, but I think he could do me justice on the silver screen.

    (Of course, I’m not sure that I’ve done anything worthy of immortalization on film… :/)

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