Thrifting A “Gift Closet”
Posted on August 7, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 14 Comments
Sometimes I see a video of someone doing something and immediately think, why didn’t I think of that sooner? One such thing is the idea of a “gift closet,” which is a collection of items you have that are meant specifically for gifting to other people on such occasions as: bringing a hostess gift to a friend’s house, setting a gift on your guest room’s bed for your visiting friends/family to be surprised with, a gift for your kid’s teacher on Teacher Appreciation day, nice moments like these where you don’t need anything jaw-dropping or expensive, just nice, thoughtful gifts.
I saw this idea on Instagram from @mar_thrifts, and knew I wanted to do the exact same thing in my own home. Gift giving is my love language, both for giving and receiving, so of course a gift closet makes perfect sense to have!
Look at this adorable hostess gift. (I usually embed videos from Instagram into my post directly, but this specific creator seems to not allow embedding, so apologies for the extra step of actually clicking on the link.)
Like I said, nothing wild, just some bubbles and some flowers in a cute basket. ADORBS!
I love the idea of giving gifts for no reason other than to brighten someone’s day. Getting an unexpected gift, even something small, can really make someone feel so appreciated and considered.
I am also very into the idea of most of the gift closet items being thrifted or something bought on heavy discount. Not everything has to cost you an arm and a leg! Of course, there are times that warrant more expensive gifts, like a couples massage for newlyweds, bottle service for your bestie’s 25th birthday in Vegas, you know how it goes.
But for the everyday moments, you don’t have to do something so drastic to make someone feel special.
This is an especially good time to start up something like a gift closet because I have so many friends in my life right now that are getting married, moving into their own places, starting new jobs, having kids, etc. A lot of moments to be celebrated!
Of course, my gift closet won’t be fully stocked right out the gate. I plan to slowly and thoughtfully curate and thrift items that I think are nice and worthwhile, not just buy a bunch of stuff to fill the closet right away.
Today, I started by thrifting some baskets. I liked her idea of putting some gifts in baskets rather than in gift bags. So cute and summery!
One of my goals in the past year or two has been to be more intentional, and one of the ways I like to be intentional is in my gift giving (as gift giving love language people tend to be), so this is such a nice idea to help me work towards my goal of being more thoughtful in my purchases and gift giving.
Funny enough, I also think this will help me with my desire to buy a bunch of stuff just because I like buying things and having things. Now I can buy stuff and not horde it for myself, and it will actually go to people who could use it and not let it collect dust.
What do you think of this idea? Is it so totally cute? What kind of gifts do you like to give, or like to receive? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity
Posted on August 6, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 49 Comments
So, you’re a person who has decided to embark on a creative journey of self-expression — to make art, in other words. First off, this is awesome! The universe needs more people making art, whether that art is writing, painting, music or any other form that humans are capable of creating. You have the drive, now all you need is to find an instrument. Will it be a guitar? A pen? A paint brush? A camera? Yarn for fiber art? What will you choose to take those first steps into a larger creative world?
What? You say you’re just going to type prompts into a generative “AI” interface? After all, with a single sentence, generative “AI” can plop out something that seems passably like human-created music, or writing, or illustration, or whatever. It’s super-easy to use and results, at least at first glance, look… pretty good! It seems like an effective way to jump into a creative life, no?
Well… there are lots of counter-arguments creative people might make to this (not the least of which is that prompting a generative “AI” makes one an artist exactly as much as pushing a button on an automated hotel pancake maker makes one a chef), but let me attempt a metaphor that I think works pretty well:
Remember Guitar Hero? It was a really cool rhythm video game where a player, armed with a special guitar-shaped button controller, would pick a song, and then press the buttons, singly or in combination, in time to visual cues on a screen. You got points for hitting buttons at the correct time, and for doing that lots of times in a row. It was fun and at higher levels you could absolutely give your fingers a workout — let’s face it, if you could get through the entire of “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert level, you were a friggin’ god.
What you weren’t was a guitar player.
That’s because nothing about Guitar Hero taught you how to play guitar — what it taught you was how to use the guitar-shaped controller for the game. Was it a skill pressing the buttons at the right time? Yes! But it was a non-transferrable skill that had no application for the actual musical instrument. The game’s gameplay mechanic doesn’t map to the mechanics of a guitar in any meaningful sense; it doesn’t teach you scales or chords or how to put them together in new and unexpected ways to create something original. All you could do with Guitar Hero was use the controller in the way the game-makers wanted you to, in time with the songs they chose, to accrue points and achievements that they specified.
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
Being a Guitar Hero player did not — and does not! — equal being a guitar player.
So, let’s come back to “AI,” which in this case is “generative ‘AI,'” the sort which powers most consumer-facing “AI” like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Grok. Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” has a vast database of artist’s work to draw from (but unlike Guitar Hero, whose makers licensed that work and compensated the musicians and songwriters, most generative “AI” training data is pirated and uncompensated). Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” is programmed by its makers; its outputs are to a greater or lesser extent shaped by those makers through algorithms and weights, which is why Anthropic’s Claude “AI” has a different “personality” than say, “Grok,” and why “AI” text and images have a particular tone and texture which is easy enough to clock when you see enough of it. Like Guitar Hero, “AI” is fun to play with and the results, again, at least superficially, can be pretty cool. A well-tuned prompt can create some initially impressive results.
But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed. Every result is self-contained within the domain of a program whose owners have their own goals and agenda, and to whom nearly every benefit accrues. Material generated by “AI” can’t be owned by the prompter if it is purely generated by the “AI,” and even partial “AI” generation in a work raises legal concerns regarding rights and ownership. In a very real sense “AI” can’t even be directly controlled — prompting is an interface with the underlying weights and algorithms of the “AI,” chosen and directed by others. The more granular the prompting, the more the underlying “AI” can use its weights and algorithms to fulfill the request, but at the end of the day, you still get what you get. If it’s not exactly what you wanted you have to hope another prompt will get it closer. You keep pressing the button on the automated pancake maker, hoping it will make exactly the pancake you want.
Prompting, like playing with the Guitar Hero controller, doesn’t teach you how to do anything else. Prompting doesn’t give one the eventual skill to sit at a keyboard and write a short story or a novel. It doesn’t give one the ability to play a musical instrument. It doesn’t let you pick up a pen and create a drawing. The skill required for all of those — not to mention the life experience to create meaning with them — lives somewhere else. When you’re using “AI,” you can’t get there from here. You have to start again from zero. The time you spent in “AI” doesn’t count for this, except in the very limited sense of showing you what you don’t want.
Just like being good at Guitar Hero does not make one a guitar player, being able to prompt doesn’t easily make one a creator. At best, it tells what is essentially a statistical engine what you want it to output based on the vast database of other people’s work that it is drawing from. Nothing it cobbles together gives you the experience of creation; the only benefit of that crank of the “AI” flywheel is to the company that owns the “AI.” The image or music or video or text is not from you, it’s just something you asked for. You’re not the creator. You are, perhaps, the creator’s manager.
And, look, for some people that’s enough! There is a reason why legions of Facebookers flood their feeds with images and video of “AI” cats (and why, rather less adorably, legions of bots flood those same feeds with fake images of people their prompters want you to hate). Lots of people don’t want to be “creative” in any meaningful sense of the world, they just want those images of cats having coffee or whatever. Not everyone who played Guitar Hero wanted to actually play guitar, either. That’s fine (well, for Guitar Hero. “AI” has resource and rights issues to deal with no matter how it’s used. But I trust we all understand where I’m going here).
But if you want to create, it helps to create. You can’t just prompt your way into it. You have to do it. You have to learn and work and build skills and ability. You have to be bad at it before you can be good at it. Your creativity has to be inherent and portable, something you carry with you wherever you go, not contingent on a service provided by billionaires who have their finger on the scale of how that service does its thing.
Because, among any other thing, who is to say how long any of these “AI” are going to be around? The last installment of Guitar Hero came out more than a decade ago. The online version of the game shut down in 2020. Everyone who ever had mad skills on Guitar Hero has had those skills out to pasture for a while now. Now, apparently there’s going to be an updated version of the Guitar Hero concept later this year, which is cool and I hope is as much fun as the previous version. We’ll see how long it lasts. Meanwhile, as long as their fingers and shoulders hold out, everyone who ever learned guitar still has those skills and the ability to use them.
So, keep that in mind as your start your journey of self-expression. You have a whole bunch of paths you can go down here. Some will be harder and take more time than others. But those are the ones that are more likely to get you to where you want to go, to develop the skills and abilities to let you say what you want to say, how you want to say it, without having to rely on anyone or anything else, to make it happen. Your choice! Pick well.
— JS
The Big Idea: Shami Stovall
Posted on August 6, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 1 Comment
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and in author Shami Stovall’s case, her desire to get back at those who have wronged her ended up being just what she needed to write a John Wick-esque revenge story. Sharpen your skills and your blades, and follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, One-Fifth Dragon.
SHAMI STOVALL:
If there’s one story that’s a universal constant throughout history and every culture known to man, it’s the tale of sweet, sweet revenge.Â
Almost everyone has one for their personal life. The idea of telling one’s boss to go toss themselves out a window when one quits dramatically, or daydreaming about one’s abusive ex getting hit by a bus while they’re in the middle of a date with someone else…
But the majority of people never act on those feelings (thank goodness) because society would devolve into utter chaos. So, we bottle those feelings away, and some of us (who are insane) become writers and then use all that pent-up frustration to write a fictional tale of ninjas killing everyone who ever did them wrong.
Which brings me to the point of this essay: I may or may not be insane, and I love a good revenge tale.
When I first envisioned One-Fifth Dragon, I pictured John Wick. Once a mob assassin, John Wick settles down with his dog, content to live a quiet life, until randos show up to steal his car and kill his dog.
Then John Wick goes all John Wick on their asses and murders everyone with what I like to call “competence porn.â€
The heart of competence porn comes from the escapist fantasy that, if we’re pushed, we’ll utilize our expert skill to get revenge. In John Wick’s case, his expert skill is killing.Â
I love this escapism, because it could be anything really.
Maybe you’re an expert at taxes, so your fantasy is to get revenge on someone who has wronged you by making sure they get in trouble with the IRS for the rest of their lives. Or perhaps you’re a house cleaner, and you imagine stuffing someone’s vents full of shrimp so their house stinks forever and they have no idea where it’s coming from.
I like to think, if I were wronged, that I’d be able to get wicked cool revenge. Unfortunately, I’m the type of person who would die immediately in any sort of disaster, or conflict, or even if the electricity went out for more than a day, not going to lie.
So my revenge has to be purely the theater of the mind. I once wrote someone into a book because I hated them, and then I had them humiliated in the book, and that was cathartic, but not quite as fun as writing a full-blown revenge tale.
That hunger for clean, competent, no-ambiguity revenge is exactly what I wanted to live inside when I started One-Fifth Dragon…
Wraith, the main character, is the killing expert type, but he’s lived his whole life improving his skill for his found family. He thought he would live and die with them, so when it turns out (le gasp!) they’re the ones who murdered his biological family, he has to John Wick some people to balance the scales.
I wanted to live out the fantasy of being strong and capable… and totally righteous in my quest for revenge. I didn’t want ambiguity. I wanted competence porn. I wanted cool fights, even cooler magic, and someone finding a new found family along the way.
I actually love the found family trope. It’s one of my all-time favorites, so having Wraith’s found family be his betrayers was a fun spin on the trope I don’t usually see.
But while writing, I couldn’t help but gravitate toward the trope again. There’s a character in the book (Kai) who wasn’t in my original outline. I added him because Wraith was too stoic and too withdrawn. Wraith needed someone else to pull him out of his shell, and in the process, Kai became a brother to him.
Or maybe even something more!
Overall, One-Fifth Dragon is the kind of escapist fantasy I wanted to experience. It’s the kind of cathartic read where you can root for the main character, delight in all the revenge, and fantasize about all the people who have wronged you in your life.
It’s meant to be fun more than anything else. After all, the news is already depressing, and what if I could take revenge on all the evils in the world? That’s the kind of fantasy I live in.
One-Fifth Dragon:Â Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
The Big Idea: Griffin Barber
Posted on August 5, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 3 Comments
They say writing can be a good outlet for grief, but feelings might get complicated when the person you’re grieving was supposed to co-author the book you’re writing. Despite author Griffin Barber’s deep, personal loss of his mentor and friend Eric Flint, he managed to complete 1637: Pilgrim’s Passage in a way that would make them both proud.
GRIFFIN BARBER:
This book was a hard one to write THE END on. Not because I had to do all the research that any good alternate history requires, but because I wrote it without Eric Flint’s steadying hand and reassuring presence. Sure, I’d written novels without Eric before, but those of been in my own worlds or in worlds with other co-creators along for the ride — the whole ride. This was something different. I had to deal with the process and process my grief at losing my friend and mentor.
Eric and I worked out the outline for 1637: Pilgrim’s Passage shortly after 1636: The Peacock Throne came out in 2021. We didn’t have a contract, though, and Eric was very busy, so it sat while we both worked on other projects. Indeed, we even started working on another novel in the 1632 universe, one which would lay the groundwork for destroying the transatlantic slave trade in the New Timeline.
The best laid plans, as they say…
Eric passed away and I couldn’t wrap my head around working in his universe without him for a good long while. Still, I worked on Pilgrim’s Passage off and on. More off than on.Â
Time passed, and, as it will, began to heal all wounds…Â
The novels ahead of Pilgrim’s Passage in the queue were published and my deadline started to loom. Still, I wasn’t as close to being done as I should have been when my turn-in date approached. My publisher was more than cool, she was very supportive.
A deadline is a deadline, though, so I set to work with a will.
Thankfully the book — the words — started to flow. Indeed, things accelerated, each successive chapter coming faster and easier than the one previous. I started closing in on those last two words. As I did so, I started to feel better. Not just about the book, but about the future. About Eric’s possible reaction to my work without him.
I know that what I did with his favorite character of all those that I’ve written for the universe would have surprised him. I can just hear him say, in that voice made gruff by decades of shop smoke and hard-nosed labor negotiations (and perhaps a few cigarettes), “Dammit, Griff! Why did you do that?â€
I digress. Our Big Idea was simple: where does a princess go, what does she do, when her every moment is scheduled and constrained by the requirements of a patriarchal society and controlling siblings? What does she do when she’s transgressed against those unreasonable and unasked for standards of behavior? What would a young woman—or anyone—do for something to call her own?
The end of 1637: The Peacock Throne raises those questions and presents the beginnings of a hoped-for answer: Jahanara Begum leaves the court of her brother’s empire and go on Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy land required of all Muslims who are able. Jahanara gets out from under the eyes of the court and her brother, leaves the conflict between her brothers to her brothers. In the process, the young princess leaves behind everything that is familiar and nearly everyone who purports to love her in order to protect both her lover and her secret. Several members of the USE Mission, those she has come to rely on for advice and friendship, make the the first leg of their journey with her before returning to Europe.
Pilgrim’s Passage reveals the ongoing consequences of Jahanara Begum’s actions; for her, the USE Mission, and for the wider world. An imperial princess abroad attracts attention, whether she wants it or not, whether it is proper or not to allow bloody power politics to interfere with the sanctity of a holy enterprise such as Hajj. Through it all, Jahanara Begum and her USE allies seek to chart a course that will carry them safely through the Pilgrim’s Passage. In the process, Jahanara Begum learns some hard lessons and moves to change some things she thought foundational to her existence. Such change is not without cost, however. Still, Jahanara dives head-first into her own fate, becoming her own agent for the change she feels necessary.
There are events around Jahanara Begum and her entourage in this book that I know Eric looked forward to reading as we worked together to finalize that early outline. I am sorry that he will never discover the final draft of this book that was so painful and yet necessary for me to write.
Can you tell Eric was more than my mentor, that he was also a friend? Can you tell I miss him quite a bit?
Because I do.
Beyond his storytelling, his sense of history, generosity, and humor, Eric was exceptional in his work ethic, in his politics, in his ability to find the value in everyone. Early on in Eric’s career he collaborated with some great authors. Subsequent to that experience, Eric made great efforts to pay that experience and privilege forward. Hundreds, literally hundreds, of other authors are the beneficiaries of Eric’s vision: a rising tide that raises all boats.Â
Each story that continues to be published in his universe will, I hope, continue that process of paying it forward, of producing opportunities for those who might not otherwise have had them.Â
This book, and my career, are a direct result of Eric’s efforts.
We hope you enjoy.
1637: Pilgrim’s Passage:Â Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Saja Wants You To Think About What You Did
Posted on August 5, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 21 Comments
Did you think you’d get away with it? Did you think he wouldn’t find out? Saja always finds out. And now you’ll just have to live with him knowing.
In other news, we’re coming right up on the one-year anniversary of Saja’s official adoption. He was clearly alive before then, so being more than one year old now, he’s officially no longer a kitten, he’s just now a teen cat. Trust me, he has the attitude to match.
I’ll probably note his anniversary when it happens, but in the meantime: Enjoy Saja judging you. As he would.
— JS
The Big Idea: Virginia Shaffer
Posted on August 4, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 9 Comments
Oysters: you either love them or hate them. Author and oyster-aficionado Virginia Shaffer has spent years turning her passion for oysters into a comprehensive look at the world behind the shell. Grab a lemon wedge and dive into the briny depths of the oyster community in Oyster Society: Adventures with the Shellfishly Motivated.
VIRGINIA SHAFFER:
“This is madness,†I said, holding an oyster with a half-frozen winter glove. “My hands. They aren’t moving anymore!â€
It was January in Wellfleet, Massachusetts’ coastal forearm. Mayo Beach was devoid of any human activity that time of year, give or take a few loose oyster cages in the water. I steadied my feet in cheap rainboots while an oyster farmer plucked more bivalves from a bag. Together, we pierced hinges with knives, squinting in pain.
My first time on an oyster farm was dangerous. Not because of the frostbite, risk of hypothermia, or my lurking in seawater with a stranger. It was dangerous because it was the beginning of an acute obsession that led to my life’s greatest plot twist. Something innately primitive happened to me on that beach. I was given instructions on how to split open an ocean rock with a knife. After a bit of grappling, the most perfect, raw, fleshy protein appeared between two shells. I ate the oyster, and christ! I wanted to beat my chest. For the first time in my life, I had slayed a live animal and consumed it with my own two hands.
I am sure I presented less feral on the day, but that sensory experience lingered with me long after my visit. A simple oyster curiosity began to reawaken a childlike wonder, a version of me hung from trees, ran through murky marshland, and collected sea snails for sport. Unfortunately, that version of me had been forced into submission, trading much of the natural world for corporate bureaucracy, “key performance indicators,†and sterile office spaces.
Was a winter visit to meet an oyster farmer all I needed? Not quite. I had to go deeper, launching a five-year writing project exploring the most sundry, evocative coastal food on the planet. The work led to the most extraordinary human stories behind oysters, who discussed big ideas about food scapes, restoring reef systems, and culinary movements at the raw bar. But ultimately, I was naive to think that I wouldn’t change in the process, or such powerful opportunists wouldn’t recruit. Oyster-obsessives were showing me a pathway out.Â
Oyster Society is a book about oysters for people who love culinary adventures and niche food cults, but it is also a book about self-reclamation. It’s the questioning, the yearning, the self-discovery, the behind-the-scenes therapy sessions, and that pinnacle moment when you’re the captain faced with two directions at sea, and you can only pick one.
Beyond its changemaking characters and coastal backdrops, Oyster Society proves the power of human agency. It’s the hope that one small “eureka†moment on a beach, eating an oyster in the wrong season, might have you running back to everything you once were—the version of you set aside, so you could assimilate to this world. An oyster adventure was my catalyst for the “great unraveling.†What will be yours?
—-
Oyster Society:Â Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
The Shattering Peace a Dragon Award Finalist + 2026 Hugo Voting Reminder
Posted on August 3, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
Here’s some nice news to start the week: The Shattering Peace is a finalist for the Dragon Award this year, in the category of Science Fiction Novel. Also in the category:
The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman
Slow Gods by Claire North
God’s Junk Drawer by Peter Clines
That’s a very excellent peer group to be in this year! Also, I have lots of friends and colleagues in the other categories as well, which makes me happy. It’s lovely when lovely people get recognized for their work. The entire ballot is here, if you would like to see it.
Also, if you would like to vote for the Dragon Awards this year, well, you can: It’s free and open to anyone. Follow that link above and then click on “Register to Vote” and it will walk you through the steps to do so. If you want to vote for The Shattering Peace, awesome, but if there’s another finalist in the category you’d like to vote for, that’s awesome too.
On a similar topic, we’re down to the last few days of voting for this year’s Hugo Awards, where the Old Man’s War series (of which The Shattering Peace is a part) is finalist in the category of Best Series. If you’re a member of Los Angeles Worldcon, you are eligible to vote in the Hugos. If you’ve not already done so, now is an excellent time to get it done. Here’s a link to the informational page on how to vote for the Hugos. The nice thing about the Hugos is that they are a ranked-choice ballot, so no matter who the finalist is, you can genuinely say “I voted for you.” Which is nice when you think about it.
In any event: Thrilled that my books are finalists this year. If you feel like voting for either the Dragon or the Hugo, that would be lovely (even if it isn’t for my stuff). The more votes, the better.
— JS
New Cover Song: “Ode to Somewhere”
Posted on August 1, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
This cover song has an interesting story to it, which is that it’s a song from a video game called “Deathloop.” In the video game, the singer is supposed to have been a huge star but has lately gone kind of venal around the edges, and also there’s a whole time loop thing going on which necessitates the player character needing to kill the singer (and several other people) for, you know, reasons. It all makes sense in the context of the game, and the game itself is a hell of a lot of fun. I absolutely recommend it.
The in-game singer may be a jerk, but this song (written and performed by Erich Tabla with Jeff Cummings on vocals) is really good, and in fact was one of my favorite songs of its year, with a real 60s torch-song feel to it. My version is a little more electronic-y and revved up on the drums, because apparently I do that. Nevertheless I think it’s not bad, and I hope you like it.
Also, since it’s possible you may not have ever heard this song unless you played the game, if you’re curious as to how the original sounds, here it is:
— JS
Another Reason Not to Use “AI” For Your Writing
Posted on July 31, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 54 Comments
Back in February I did a long post about “AI” and why I wouldn’t use it for my own writing, and one of the reasons I gave was “the fact that ‘AI’-generated text is not copyrightable and I don’t want any issues of ownership clouding my work.” Well guess what? A hot and buzzy debut novel has been pulled from publishing and film/TV consideration over concerns that “AI” was used to make it. Here is one of the relevant bits from the article:
“Basically, questions were raised over whether the author used AI as a tool in the writing of the book. The problem: publishers and movie companies may not be able to register copyright and come away with a clear title chain if there are certain AI elements in the mix. That’s because AI-aided copy is an amalgamation of many other copyrighted works.
“From what I’m hearing, this will be an important teaching moment for writers with aspirations to become serious bankable authors. The lesson: stay the hell away from AI.”
Am I feeling smug about having called this six months out? Yes, a little, but mostly not. I don’t deserve credit for noting this would be an issue because it was already a clear legal point: “AI”-generated work is not copyrightable, so if you have any “AI”-generated work in your material you open the door to legal issues. But also, the concern here is slightly different: The issue appears not to be that “AI” material isn’t copyrightable, the issue is that “AI” is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders.
Now, from a practical point of view this could be a stretch to prove unless the “AI” farts out entire paragraphs of prose unaltered from its training material (which, to be clear, it can do and has done), and those end up in the finished book. But if you’re a lawyer for a publisher or a film/TV production house, even the hint of possible legal entanglement is enough to raise the shields. It’s already in contracts for both film/TV and for publishing houses that the author attests their work is wholly original, so, again, any hint that anything is other than that brings things to a screeching halt. As we have seen.
This is a situation that is now always on the table for writers, particularly newer writers with no track record and nothing available for publishers and producers to judge their work against. How do newer writers fight against an allegation of using “AI” to write their work? Publishers and producers are now trying to vet new work with “‘AI’ checkers,” but the problem with those is that they are also “AI,” and they are unreliable as fuck, so we’re back to where we started. It’s a bad situation. Not great for any writer these days! But again, especially so for newer writers without a backlog of pre-“AI” material at their disposal that can, at least, show the writer was already writing without assistance for years.
And in fact, as I note above in the attached Bluesky post, I think that for the reasonably near future, it’s possible that older works — ones written prior to, say, November 2022, when ChatGPT made its public debut — will become more desirable for film/TV optioning and adaptation, because they were clearly written without “AI” assistance, and there is a clear chain of title when it comes to copyright. Why bother with new stuff you can’t be confident about? Or, if you are going to bother with new stuff, you’re going to go to the new stuff from the writers who have lots of old stuff (i.e., could obviously write without “AI” assistance). If they have a long-standing and public “No-‘AI'” stance, so much the better. Which is great for writers like, uhhhhhh, me, and don’t think I haven’t already suggested so to my film/TV reps. But, again, it’s not great for newer writers.
Which is unfair. It’s not fair that newer writers will have to prove (to a larger extent than more established writers) that they can actually write, and that what they’ve written is actually their own work, not the result of a prompt. It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write — I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google — are frantically stuffing “AI” tools into the programs writers rely on. No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to “help me write” in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to “help me write” in Google Docs. The very fact these “AI”s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These “AI” tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier.
I don’t think at this point in time anyone is ever going to accuse me of using “AI” to write anything; I’ve been loud about it long enough, and have a long enough publishing history, that it’s clear that I don’t and won’t. But how will a newer (or lesser-known and less publicly loud) writer prove their writing is their own? Will they have to use versioning to show progression of the manuscript? Email chapters to their editors as they go along? Revert to typewriters and handwritten drafts? At some point it’s entirely possible that publishers (or the publishers’ lawyers) will require writers to “show their work” with regard to the novels they submit — be able to present concrete evidence that everything they write came out of their brain, and not a prompt.
In any event, the Deadline article is correct: If you’re a writer who hopes to get your work into film and TV, or grab one of those big publishing deals, stay the hell away from “AI.” Don’t incorporate it into your writing process; every part of the process needs to be demonstrably free of any “AI” input because “AI” training data is full of other people’s copyrights. It didn’t have to be this way — “AI” companies could have just as easily trained their LLMs on public domain or licensed material instead of grabbing pirated works and letting God sort it out — but what they should have done and what they did do are two different things, and we have to live in the now. And in the now, “AI” inputs are inherently untrustable, from a copyright perspective.
Don’t incorporate “AI” into any part of your publishing process, either: Don’t use “AI” editing, don’t use “AI” art, don’t use “AI” translation, don’t use “AI” anything that calls into dispute whether your work is actually yours. Using “AI” cover art, for example, will immediately call into question what else in the book is “AI.” Every other aspect of the book is implicitly tarred with the same “AI” brush. When I say that I have it in my contracts that I require every aspect of my book production to be done by humans, it’s not just because I want to honor human work and input. It’s also because I’m protecting my own reputation by doing so.
Just… don’t use “AI,” okay? Take comfort in the fact that millennia of writers and authors and storytellers got along just fine without it and you can too. None of them were so special that you can’t do what they did. And this way, if a lucky break comes your way and a publisher or film/tv studio wants to throw literal millions of dollars at you, you will not have given the legal department an easy way to back out… and you will not have a reputation (deserving or otherwise) for not being able to write.
Or a reputation for wasting everybody’s time. That reputation will follow you, for sure.
— JS
My 2026 LAcon/Worldcon Schedule
Posted on July 30, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
Yeah, they got me doing a lot of things this year, plus I’ll be at the Hugos because, you know, up for Best Series and all (hey, remember to vote for the Hugos, okay? You got about another week to do that. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again soon). But the most important thing: I’m DJing a dance! Come dance with us on Friday, y’all. It’s gonna be a great time.
The image above is static but the whole public Worldcon schedule is here, and there it has drop-down information letting you know who is on what panel and what the panel is about and all that good stuff. If you want to find my stuff specifically, just put “Scalzi” into the search field (naturally, this works with other program participants as well). There is… a lot on the schedule this year so I assure you that if you are attending Worldcon you will never not have something to see or do. So come on down!
— JS
New Front Porch Furniture and a Scalzi Compound Outdoor Area Overview
Posted on July 29, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 18 Comments
Hey wanna see our new front porch furniture?
As you’ll know, we recently redid a lot of our outdoor environs here at the Scalzi Compound — the front porch because a wind storm knocked out a substantial part of the railing, which meant redoing it, and as long as we were doing that, redoing the back deck, adding an additional seating area attached to the second garage we also built, and then getting furniture for all of it. The chairs and tables you see here represent the last of the furniture (and thus, general renovating) to come in.
Krissy decided to have the colors match the siding of the house, and I think it looks pretty nice. The furniture itself is from the same manufacturer as the one who made the tables and chairs for the back deck, all made of a high-density material designed to stay outdoors and weather the environment, and featuring a lifetime guarantee, which means it has a reasonably good chance of outliving me at this point. Which is good, this stuff wasn’t cheap. I want it to outlive me.
What are we doing with the furniture that was previously on the porch and deck? Some of it was too weathered to salvage at this point, so it went off to recycling. But the rest went to that third outdoor area I mentioned, the one attached to the new garage:
This new patio has actually become one of my favorite places to hang outdoors. I post up here a lot when Charlie wants to be outside, since it’s usually shaded and cool. Saja likes hanging out here under the loveseat as well. On the other side of that door is Krissy’s new drinks fridge, so I expect she will get a lot of use out of it too.
Krissy was in charge of all the building and renovation that we’ve done around the place recently and I have to admit I was a little bit skeptical of her initial vision, but now it’s all built out I can easily acknowledge she knew what she was doing all along, and I was the one who lacked vision. Not only does it generally look great and is also really functional, but I find that I — the original “why would I go outside, the inside has air conditioning” sun-avoider — am finding excuses to go outside and hang out on the beck, porch and patio. That was a little unexpected, I have to admit. The moral of the story: Never question Krissy.
I’m especially happy, though, that all of this is done and settled and now I have a good idea what the outdoor of my house is going to look like for the next, ohhhh, 30 years or so. It’s nice! We like it! We’ll get good use out of it!
As for Krissy, she has already moved onto the next home improvement project, this one a little less expansive: Repainting the first floor bathroom. And when she’s done with that she has other things planned. Because of course she does. I like that she does, and that I get to benefit from it.
— JS
The Big Idea: Alex Shvartsman
Posted on July 28, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 10 Comments
To mock a classic trope in your own story, one must first unabashedly love that trope. Author Alex Shvartsman is a die-hard sci-fi fan, which gives him the perfect angle to write his own take on things. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Best of All Possible Planets, as we make fun of tropes (lovingly) together.
ALEX SHVARTSMAN:
One day, my son read Candide by Voltaire for school, and wanted to discuss the book with me. I remembered enjoying the novella, but it had been decades ago, and I had never read it in English translation. So I opened Project Gutenberg and dove in. I still liked it, but my main takeaway was this: A loose retelling of Candide (sans a load of 17th Century misogyny) would make for an excellent space opera comedy.
Every writer knows this feeling—sometimes an idea grabs you by the shirttails and won’t let go until you spill it onto the page. The more I thought about Space Candide the clearer the book structure seemed in my head. My characters would travel from planet to planet on a ship O.F. Theseus in search of a MacGuffin, and each of those planets would represent a space opera trope or cliché. Then I would lovingly skewer and deconstruct this cliché in ways most conducive for hilarity to ensue.
The key word is lovingly. I adore space opera, and it was important to me that I poke fun at its tropes as an admiring fan, without coming off as someone disdainful of science fiction. With that in mind, I began making a mental list of tropes and major franchises I wanted to parody, and the list grew fast.
- What is the reason all those ancient alien artifacts are lying around for protagonists to find?
- Robots are supposed to kill all humans, but what if they don’t really want to? It’s just something from their sacred text, decreed by their lord and savior, Clippy.
- What is the Doctor’s true motivation? After thousands of years, shouldn’t all the heroics get old?
- What if the Green Lantern Corps/Lensmen equivalents acted more like today’s cops?
- Just how universal are the universal translator devices?
- Who would win in a battle between an Imperial Star Destroyer and a Federation starship?
Add to that wacky aliens, an opinionated omniscient narrator, lots of misconceptions about Earth’s ancient past (a.k.a. our era), and corgis.
If that sounds a bit like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it should. I consider Guide, along with Futurama, to be both the inspiration and the spiritual godparents of this book.
I wanted to include direct nods to many more books, movies, and TV shows spanning a gamut from the subgenre’s inception with Edmund Hamilton and E.E. “Doc†Smith, to recent works by Ken Liu and Adrian Tchaikovsky. (And yes, a reference to my kind host’s Old Man’s War is in there as well.) There’s an Apologia chapter at the very end listing all the references I could recall myself during the editing process.Â
I quickly discovered that writing straight-up comedy is so much more difficult than writing action-adventure books with humor in them. Comedy works best in the short form, because humor can get repetitive and outstay its welcome. I did my best to resolve this problem by mixing up different kinds of humor; from wordplay to slapstick, pop culture references to puns (I firmly believe that the only good pun is a terrible pun), absurdity to social commentary. Then I structured the book as a coming-of-age road trip, with characters who grow and change as they experience the galaxy around them. It will be up to you, gentle reader, to judge whether I’ve succeeded.
And if you do like it, it will be in part thanks to the brilliant team who made The Best of All Possible Planets the best possible version it could be. With cover art by Ethemos, brilliant interior illustrations by Anna Butova, Adam Cvijanovic, and Zishan Liu, and audiobook narration by Eli Schiff and Lewis Black (yes, that Lewis Black; this is the first time he’s ever participated in creating an audiobook) they greatly enhanced my work. Any flaws or faults, however, are entirely my own.
Finally—and it should go without saying, but in this day and age it has to be said—although robots and AI are some of the characters in this book, no Copyright Infringement Blender was used to create it. I relied solely on my Natural Stupidity instead.
If you need more humor in your life—and these days, I think we all do—follow the corgis!
—-
The Best of All Possible Planets: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
I’m Taking the Weekend Off So Please Enjoy This Picture of Saja in the Meantime
Posted on July 25, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 6 Comments
And look! He’s a mlem going! Truly, a quality cat photo.
Have a great weekend, y’all. See you back here on Monday.
— JS
Final Full Day of the John Scalzi Humble Bundle Benefitting World Central Kitchen
Posted on July 24, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
The Humble Bundle Deal we have going with 22 of my works has been running for three weeks now, and in that time we have raised almost $35,000 for World Central Kitchen — but all good things must come to an end, and the end of this one is at around noon tomorrow. So if you live basically anywhere but the nations in the UK Commonwealth, and you want to get in on this deal: better get a move on, my friend.
Remember also that when you pick up the deal you can go over the “adjust donation” box in the sidebar and give more of your purchase price to World Central Kitchen, so feel free to do that. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine (my slice of this particular pie comes out of the publisher cut). But do know that any amount of this deal that comes to me is going straight into the Scalzi Family Foundation, which funds local organizations, artist and creative grants and other such things. No matter what, a nice chunk of your money is going to work to help folks.
Here’s the link for the bundle. I would love to see this end with over $35k to World Central Kitchen.
— JS
The Big Idea: C. J. Beshara
Posted on July 23, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 1 Comment
If you knew you only had weeks to live, how would that change your attitude towards life and death? What if you had been dead before, and this was your second, but brief, go-around? Author C. J. Beshara examines life and death through the eyes of the titular main character, as well as on a personal level, as they tell you about their newest novel, Lucianus.
C. J. BESHARA:
As I’ve gained more experience with writing novels, I’ve come to realize that every one of my main characters pops into existence to teach me a lesson. Not that I ever notice! Only after the story is done can I look back and see what it was, and Lucianus was no exception.Â
This lesson was commonplace, though no less meaningful for it. Simply, it was about death.
In the several months before Lucianus ever made it to words, I had started thinking about death with increasing frequency. Perhaps it was a natural expression of approaching thirty, of feeling the drug of youth wearing off, and I expect most people have those thoughts from time-to-time. For me however, it was strange to ruminate on it so much. I had felt quite peaceable about death up until that point. It was a natural thing that I had long since accepted, and suddenly I found myself completely unable to accept it any longer, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. It was becoming stressful, and unhealthy.
It was soon after that ideas for Lucianus started tooting their pervasive little trumpets in my brain, and after much resistance, I eventually gave in and started writing. I expected to lose momentum after a few ten thousand words, as was normal for me up until that point, but the words kept coming. They felt good. In just a couple of months I had a finished first draft—messy of course, terrible in some sections, but everything was there. Lucianus, his companion Auran, and their many-layered quest to make things right for themselves had poured onto the page, 100% complete. I was shocked.
The crux of Lucianus lies in the magic cast upon the eponymous main character. Lucianus is a wizard with a bad reputation, known in his time for terrible destruction, and as consequence for his actions he met an untimely end long ago. In this story however, he finds himself suddenly resurrected for one final task. A pleasant surprise, one might think, but there’s a catch—when his task is complete, he’ll just be dead again. Poof, gone, no take-backsies. That bleak fact haunts the narrative as Lucianus sets out on his quest across his former homeland to defeat the big bad, unravelling the secrets of his mysterious traveling companion along the way.
Lucianus knows he will be dead again quite soon, within a matter of weeks, and he can’t change that. The spell he’s under won’t allow him to disobey. Plus he’s already been dead, and he doesn’t remember anything about it, which only makes it worse. To him death remains an unknowable void, the same that many of us can’t help but think about, despite any beliefs we may hold to the contrary.
And thus, the whole story is permeated with his fear.
People act in different ways when confronted with premature death, and Lucianus, like many at first, handles it poorly. Mostly by ignoring it. He spends much time pretending it’s not happening, losing himself in whatever shiny distractions occur along the way, happy to have a second life at his fingertips and overlooking its brevity. He projects a confident, sociable, lighthearted exterior, and it fools even his companion Auran for most of the narrative. But of course, he cannot fool himself. When his final day comes and all else is eroded away, he has not managed to come to terms with anything. He is still shitting bricks.
The story is not about how Lucianus comes to avoid death, but rather how he comes to face it with some sense of dignity and peace. I won’t say exactly the steps he takes to do so—you’ll have to read for yourself to find that out—but in his travels he does come across an important idea that helps him out. You might call it a Big Idea. It’s an old adage about shifting your focus away from the things you can’t control, working instead on the things you can. You might be doomed by some terrible event, something you can’t avoid, but you can still ensure you have all your ducks in a row when you meet it. You can find satisfaction with your part in the matter. In short: no regrets.
By the end, Lucianus does all he can, and in doing so he finds out how to be satisfied.Â
Many months later, sometime in the final editing process for this book, I realized my own issues with unproductively ruminating on death had dropped off. I no longer cared much. It’s not a thing a person can understand, and so I had stopped trying. I knew now that if I entered a sudden decline and dropped dead in a day, two days, or three, I wouldn’t be so upset that I couldn’t enjoy my final moments. I had learned—just as Lucianus himself had learned—how to safely look back on my life up to that point, shrug, and say “good enough!â€Â
I don’t expect everyone to get such depth of meaning from a breezy fantasy adventure novel about D&D-inspired wizards, but all the same, I’m glad for the experience, and doubly glad to share the completed story with all of you.
Now, on to the next lesson.
Lucianus:Â Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
The Astra Award Arrives at the Scalzi Compound
Posted on July 23, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 17 Comments
And what a handsome statuette it is, too.
For those needing a refresher, the Astra is an award given out by the Hollywood Creative Alliance, which mostly has given out awards related to film and television, but this last year decided to branch out into books as well, a decision which I applaud as books are indeed an important creative endeavor as well. When the Moon Hits Your Eye was fortunate enough to win the inaugural award for the Science Fiction Book category when the awards were given out in April.
As the awards were presented online, it took a bit of time for the actual statuette to make it to me, but here is it is, and it’s lovely. And I’m delighted that Moon has an award to its name — it’s a tricky book, with an unusual structure and, of course, a wild premise. But I think it’s a very good book, and I’m happy the Hollywood Creative Alliance agrees with me on this one.
— JS
A Month Of Driving My New Car
Posted on July 22, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 22 Comments
It’s been just about one full month of having my 2026 Honda Civic Sport Touring Hybrid, and I wanted to quickly give some further thoughts and opinions on it.
I just went out and checked how many miles I have on it so far before writing this, and I am quite literally at 1500 miles on the dot. I bought it at 31 miles, so in the past 30 days I’ve put 1469 miles on it. Look at me, abiding by the national average! Hopefully I can keep this rate up, as I’ve been known to double the national average in a year.
Anyways, I am extremely pleased with my car! I really love it, and I’m very thankful that I have a car I truly like. I never thought a full-color touch screen with Apple CarPlay in my dash would make a difference in my day to day life, but honestly there’s a lot of features that have made my life easier. I particularly like having the map up on a bigger screen that isn’t in my lap, and being able to reply to text messages without ever looking at my phone.
I like the lane departure warning and correction (though I know some people hate when the car “fights” them), it lets me know when there’s cars on either side of me when I want to get over a lane, it lets me know if I’m pulling up too close to the sidewalk in a parking spot, basically it just stops me from putting unnecessary dents and scratches into my bumper. I know a lot of these features are standard nowadays, but my older cars certainly didn’t have them. I think it’ll save me a lot of scrapes.
I also love the feel of driving it. I mentioned it in my first post, but it seriously drives like butter. All of my friends that have been passenger so far have remarked how noticeably smooth it is. I really can’t get over the difference because my van was, well, very not smooth. In both my Honda Odysseys, when I would hit 70 on the interstate, they’d start shaking to a detrimental degree. Even when I wasn’t going that fast, there was this perpetual shaking that would rattle my water bottle in my cupholder. Not the case here!
Also, huge shout out to power seat controls. You would think every modern car would have them, but the Honda Civic Sport (the lower trim than mine) does not, which is absolutely wild to me. What’s next, I have to hand crank my windows up and down?
Moving on, to wrap up this glowing review of my new car, I wanted to talk about downsizing.
Everyone in my life, including me, is a little more than surprised at the decision to get a sedan, when for the past decade I’ve had two minivans and an SUV (GMC Terrain). Why would I choose to compromise on space and size when I was so used to driving basically a boat around?
Well, I started to take a good hard look at what I was using that space for.
In high school, being one of the only kids in my friend group to get their license made me a default driver to places and events. Having a minivan ended up being rather convenient to haul me and all my buddies to Waffle House and Cinemark, or just take everyone home from school.
In college, having a minivan made moving in and out of my dorms a much easier and quicker process. I could load up everything in one go. And, of course, being sober in college and having a minivan once again made me the designated driver for just about everything. Picking my friends up from the bars, driving everyone to IHOP at 2am, helping my friends move in and out of their dorms. Minivans sure are convenient.
But, since I’ve been out of college, my minivan has remained rather empty of friends and lacking in spontaneous IHOP trips. Now that I’m actually settled in my home, I don’t find myself moving furniture all that often anymore. Plus, I have been asked more than once if I have children since I drive the soccer mom van.
My minivan slowly became less of a convenience and more of a gas-guzzling home for my hoarding tendencies. Some people leave trash in their cars, but I tended to leave tons of shopping bags in the back, full of items that I had no room for anywhere else. It got to a point that I couldn’t put up the back row of seats because I had so much stuff in my car, it looked like I genuinely lived out of my car.
And in some cases, I could. I had enough stuff that when the occasion called for it, I might just have what I needed in the back! One time, my aunt really needed some serving boards for my cousin’s kid’s birthday party. I said, you’ll never guess what I have in the back of my car. A bag of brand new serving boards from Marshall’s that hadn’t seen the light of day in two months.
Another time, I ended up staying the night at my friend’s house in Columbus without an overnight bag. Luckily, I had a brand new pajama set, new hairbrush, new deodorant, and new pack of socks in a bag in the back. My van was like a magic bag of items that had no end. But, this isn’t actually a good thing. It’s a larger issue of me buying things and having no place for them and storing them long-term somewhere they shouldn’t be stored.
So, knowing myself, and knowing I don’t want kids, and no longer having to haul drunk peers to IHOP, I realized I needed a change. And for one month my car has been free of any clutter, any shopping bags, and any trash. I have a clean, functional car, that I can comfortably fit three other people in, fit my groceries or even a suitcase or two in the trunk, and that’s good enough.
-AMS
Various & Sundry, 7/22/26
Posted on July 22, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 28 Comments
Saja wants to know what’s up! Well, my young cat, let me tell you:
OpenAI says its “AI” hacked another “AI” company, apparently just for funsies: No, really, that’s the gist of it. OpenAI put the “AI” into a sandbox in order to test its capabilities, it escaped from the sandbox and then hacked another company because it thought that was its directives. By now every science fiction writer in the world is all “See, we told you,” but Hugging Face, the hacked company, wants to give the impression this is all in good fun, which is, bluntly, fucking weird.
Anyway, the two takeaways from this is that the humans of OpenAI are officially no longer smart enough to keep a lid on the destructive and malicious nature of their own “AI,” and that some other actor, less inclined to pretend this is all for funsies, is even as we speak almost certainly using “AI” to test defenses of systems they want to sabotage. Remember to store your essential files offline, kids! No, not just your porn.
Mamdani, in his official capacity as NYC Mayor, calls Netanyahu a war criminal: Here, you can see it for yourself, on the official NYC Mayor account on Bluesky:
Now, it’s not news that Mamdani thinks Netanyahu is a war criminal. He’s been saying it for a while now, nor is he the only one of that opinion; just ask the International Criminal Court. The innovation here is that he’s speaking in his capacity as the mayor of New York City, and it would have been largely unthinkable that the sitting holder of that office would say such a thing about the sitting prime minister of Israel at any point in time before this. This isn’t the mayor of, say, Berkeley, or some random hamlet in bluest Vermont. It’s New York City. The world is indeed changing.
What’s also interesting is the proximate cause of this video, in which Mamdani, who had previously floated the idea of arresting Netanyahu if he stepped into NYC (say, to go to the UN), admitted that he doesn’t have the statutory authority to do such a thing. I would imagine that has to do with Netanyahu’s diplomatic immunity, and I imagine Mamdani knew that already before he was told in an official capacity by his legal advisors. Instead, he notes that the federal government has the authority to do it, and urges them to do so, which, of course, he knows very well they will not and have no intention of ever doing.
It’s a clever bit of messaging, allowing himself to get out of a box he put himself into with respect to Netanyahu, while implicitly shading the US government. Mamdani is very good at this messaging thing.
Right-Wing Trolls still spinning out over the Odyssey movie becoming a critical and commercial smash: The latest bit of cope is to allege that the movie studio is buying tickets to make it look like the film is a success when it totally is not, bro. I smiled when I read this because it reminded me of the days when right-wing trolls used to say that Tor Books was buying copies of my novels to make it look like people actually read me when they totally do not, bro. Right-wing trolls don’t know too many tricks, and also, seem to have a really poor grasp on how capitalism works.
The Odyssey, by the way, grossed over $18 million on Monday, which means it’s now up above $140 million domestically, and I imagine it will have a clear lane to stay on top this weekend as well, since nothing of note is being put into theaters this week. Then it’ll be swamped by the new Spider-Man movie, but by that time it will likely be in the black, or close to it, when the global box office is tallied up (and of course, it’ll still play after Spider-Man comes out, it just won’t be the number one movie anymore).
In any event, good luck to the right-wing trolls in coping with a masterpiece in the canon of Western Literature being stolen by the Perfidious Woke. It’s probably gonna win some Oscars too, guys. You should prepare yourselves now.
— JS
The Big Idea: Ali Trotta
Posted on July 21, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi
There is art all around us, and poetry can be found in places you’d never expect. Author Ali Trotta speaks on the true power of poetry in the Big Idea for her newest poetry collection, Offerings for Ordinary Gods.
ALI TROTTA:
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of who gets to their story. (Before the Hamilton of it all, I swear.) Specifically, though, I have always been annoyed at what/who we deem a villain—from the Salem Witch Trials to Medusa. Women have, historically, ended up as the scapegoat, the unearned anti-hero, and a background character when they really should be the main character.
I’ll never forget when, after reading and loving Jane Eyre, I read Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. If you’ve never read it, it focuses on Bertha Rochester before becoming Bertha Rochester. Rhys’ book not only gives her a different name, but an entirely full and rich history. In fact, Rhys was so furious about Bertha simply being the madwoman in the attic, she set out to write her a life. And I loved Wide Sargasso Sea for itself and for its intertextuality—how it existed on its own and in conversation with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.Â
So, I fell down a rabbit hole from which I’ve never fully exited—I live here now! It’s wildly interesting, and I’ve got the good snacks. ahem I digress. In grad school, I took as many classes as I could about women in literature from my favorite professor, who taught me so, so much. In one particular class of hers, I learned about Bridget Bishop and Anne Hutchinson (if you haven’t read the transcript of Hutchinson’s trial, do it. It’s incredible)—early American women who were absolutely brilliant. Women, who despite society and the terrible chokehold of the patriarchy, had power, personalities, and fiercely wise voices. To me, they became new archetypes and foremothers. Wisewomen whose stories I carry with me everywhere I go.
As a poet, I often infuse my writing with re-imaginings, reinventions, references, and revisions. You’ll find fairytales turned on their heads. You’ll find familiar characters speaking their own truths. You’ll find a call to remember your own power and voice—and not to set that down for anyone. I love the duality of human nature—Persephone was the goddess of flowers and the queen of the underworld. No one is ever one thing. Nothing is ever really good or bad—we, as humans, simply love the idea that people and things are clear cut. But art is the intersection between truth and lie, right and wrong, with a thousand emotions and glittering bits of beauty and sadness in between. A poet can write a poem about heartbreak, and another poet can write a different poem about heartbreak. Even if they’re in the same relationship, each piece will be wildly different, because who we are—what we see and don’t see, how we love and how we exist in the world—informs every word that hits the page. But if a poem makes the reader feel something, recognize themselves in the work, or relate to an emotion in the poem, then the poet has done it right. It doesn’t matter what I intend. Once it’s in the readers’ hands, I don’t exist. The poem does.Â
And I have always loved the way in which a person can find themselves in a poem. Art is what we reach for in trying times. Art is what gets us through trying times—whether that’s reading it or writing. I’ve often remarked that a good poem (good, meaning effective—it makes the reader feel something) is an exorcism. An offloading. A spell of sorts—what is a spell if not a prayer? What is a prayer if not hope? And what is hope if not a poem?
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Back Home, 7/20/26
Posted on July 20, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Left North Carolina early in the morning, made it back home to Ohio a little after 2pm, and along the way drove through just about every summer weather pattern short of an actual hurricane or tornado. One does forget how immensely large this country is, and also how lovely it is to boot.
But now I’m home, and Krissy and the pets were happy to have me back. Best of all, no travel planned for a month. I can live with that.
— JS
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