He's a nice guy, though!

Man, there's so much to admire about James Patterson. He's ambitious and hard-working and, as this example proves, extremely generous... but he's still a straight-up terrible writer. (His habit of writing super-short chapters that constantly end on a usually-pointless cliffhanger annoys the hell out of me.) But his many virtues are still undeniable, and they're nothing to sneeze out.