Well, this is not a bad way to start the new year: A positive review of The Kaiju Preservation Society in Library Journal, the last of the four major publishing trade magazines to report in on the … | Continue reading
On December 12th, I went to my friend’s ugly sweater party at her house in Columbus. After a few hours of socializing and dancing (badly), I ended up starting my trek home at around 2:30am. I… | Continue reading
2021: Not a great year! Its major claim to fame is that it wasn’t as bad as 2020, which I expect and bluntly fucking hope will go down as a real bottom-scraper in the annals of the 21st centu… | Continue reading
Krissy’s family has a tradition of making menudo for the New Year, which aside from Krissy’s family’s Mexican roots, is probably because menudo is also a traditional hangover cure… | Continue reading
One was a big hit! The other was from a video game! And, uhhh, don’t really have that much in common sonically. Welcome to me. If you have a song or two from 2021 that spoke to you (and actua… | Continue reading
Hello, everyone! It is I, the junior Scalzi, returning to bring you a few of my favorite pieces I wrote this year. Since I haven’t been writing for the past couple months, I have a smaller se… | Continue reading
This was an interesting year for the Whatever, in my opinion. It was a pretty good year for Athena Scalzi content in the eight months she was blogging regularly, and a very good year for Big Idea f… | Continue reading
I liked it a lot, which is not surprising as it combines two of my favorite things — astronomy and satire — into one movie, and then also gives me an excellent cast and a pretty good sc… | Continue reading
Fortunately, it’s a good one. Mind you, I don’t post the bad ones. Also, who are we kidding, I’ll probably take more pictures of her before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.… | Continue reading
And I look skeptical! Of what? Well, what have you got? We’re now in that week between Christmas and New Year, in which days, hours and even minutes mostly lose meaning, so maybe I’m sk… | Continue reading
Big question first: Is The Matrix Resurrections the first sequel to The Matrix that is actually essential to the story of this universe? The answer to this is: one, there was already an essential M… | Continue reading
2021 was an interesting year for me in terms of writing here; it was a year with a lot of round number anniversaries, plus the ongoing COVID pandemic, plus, you know, creeping authoritarianism. The… | Continue reading
And honestly, it’s just about perfect. — JS | Continue reading
Back when Athena was very young, we didn’t tell her when her birthday was; she would know when her mother and I would suddenly burst into her room one morning, bearing a cake and singing R… | Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, partly because I’ve been strangely busy at the end of the year, partly because physical book deliveries have slowed down a bit, a… | Continue reading
This afternoon I made a comment on someone else’s tweet about oatmeal raisin, and chocolate chip, cookies: This immediately sparked a (fortunately merry) war about the relative values of thes… | Continue reading
These are two separate things! But they happened at around the same time (i.e., as I was on a plane home from Worldcon), so they’re being put into the same post. First: Dispatcher optioned fo… | Continue reading
Yes, I wore this to the Hugos. No, I am not ashamed. Quite the opposite, in fact. — JS | Continue reading
Please enjoy this lovely hotel lobby tree, full of festive yuletide goodness. Things are progressing nerdily here at the convention, and today I had a signing and I moderated a panel on book series… | Continue reading
We’re in town for the first December Worldcon ever (I almost said first winter Worldcon, but then I remembered the Southern Hemisphere is a whole thing), and the current temperature outside i… | Continue reading
It has some not-insubstantial spoilers so I’m going to avoid pointing directly to it for now, but it’s pretty darn positive, and this is a key observation: “Despite the absurdity … | Continue reading
Since we purchased the church last week, I’ve noticed that one feature of the building that people seem really interested in is the stained glass. People want to know if we’re going to … | Continue reading
Language is aural, and in the case of sign language, visual — but are these the only ways a true language could exist? Maybe not! In Spidertouch, author Alex Thomson posits another way, and h… | Continue reading
I’ve had a long and vaguely irritating day, and figure you might have, too, so, here, please enjoy Charlie and Sugar lounging about together. And before you note that Sugar doesn’t look… | Continue reading
To the above tweet I’ll add that, because early on I wanted to know more about the amazing woman who I hoped to marry, I went ahead and read several of Rice’s books, specifically from h… | Continue reading
What does it take to make a famously bad movie? Katherine Coldiron, who here writes a book-length monograph on one of the most famous bad films of all time, Plan 9 From Outer Space, suggests that i… | Continue reading
Well, here is some welcome news this evening: The Kaiju Preservation Society gets its second starred review from the publishing trades, this time from Publishers Weekly, which says it is “equ… | Continue reading
I got two nice views of Mt. Rainier last week, the first as I was coming in on the plane, and the second as I got off the train at the airport to catch a flight home. In both cases, there was a coo… | Continue reading
In creating The Upper World, author Femi Fadugba decided he needed more than the usual levels of inspiration — he needed collaboration. And that collaboration was to come in a most unusual wa… | Continue reading
After I announced that Krissy and I had purchased a church, many of you had, well, questions. Today I am going to answer some of those questions, and also add some further observations about being … | Continue reading
In today’s Big Idea, authors and filmmakers Don Handfield and Joshua J. Malkin reveal a simple and possibly universal truth: No matter who you are, or what you do, or how you do it, thereR… | Continue reading
From Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings: Here’s the album page, if you want to check it out. | Continue reading
Lies and trust, trust and lies… two sides of the same coin, right? As M.A. Carrick explains in this Big Idea for The Liar’s Knot, it can actually be far more complicated than that. M.A.… | Continue reading
And to help us along with this, I am calling on your friend and mine, Whatever’s favorite recurring gimmick, the Fictional Interlocutor! For the record, I’m not comfortable being called… | Continue reading
The corner there is of the convention center in town, this weekend housing the Emerald City Comic Con. For me, at least, it’s going pretty well so far — people have been lovely, everyon… | Continue reading
For the last four days, the Whatever Gift Guide 2021 has been about helping you find the perfect gifts for friends and loved ones. But today I’d like to remind folks that the season is also about h… | Continue reading
Author Janice L. Newman is thinking about love, what it means, and how it manifests… and not in the ways we always expect. In the Big Idea for her collection At First Contact, Newman explains… | Continue reading
For the first three days of the Whatever Gift Guide 2021, I’ve let authors and creators tell you about their work. Today is different: Today is Fan Favorites day, in which fans, admirers and satisf… | Continue reading
Location, location, location: Often where an author is can inform the stories that they eventually choose to tell. Location mattered for Shannon Fay for her novel Innate Magic… and not just b… | Continue reading
The Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2021 continues, and today we move away from books and focus on other gifts and crafts — which you can take to mean just about any other sort of thing a creative pers… | Continue reading
Today is Day Two of the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2021, and today the focus is on Non-Traditionally Published Books: Self-published works, electronically-exclusive books, books from micro presses… | Continue reading
How to get readers to accept the impossible — or, at least, the wildly implausible? Author Ian Douglas has a technique for that, and in this Big Idea for Solar Warden: Alien Hostiles, he̵… | Continue reading
Welcome to the first day of the Whatever Shopping Guide 2021 — Our way of helping you folks learn about cool creative gifts for the holidays, straight from the folks who have created them. Tod… | Continue reading
Authors often see themselves in their work. But sometimes, it takes a while for that to happen. This is a thing Jeremy Szal discovered while writing Blindspace. Here he is to delve further into tha… | Continue reading
Every year as the holiday season begins I run a gift guide for the holidays, and over the years it’s been quite successful: Lots of people have found out about excellent books and crafts and c… | Continue reading
Here’s the spread at the Scalzi Compound today: Turkey, ham, two types of cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potato soufflé, green bean casserole, sage stuffing, deviled eggs, dinner rol… | Continue reading
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the United States, and while I think a lot of people these days see that holiday mostly as a turkey-spangled speedbump in front of the unstoppable juggernaut that i… | Continue reading
And that someone might have been me. Here’s one of the pictures I made fiddling with it (DxO Filmpack 6, in case you’re curious). Spice has never looked so moody! Or monochromatic! R… | Continue reading