Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59632

Like blue eyes, height, or left-handedness, how much of our temper and ill manners can we contribute to our genetics? Author Bernie Jean Schiebeling explores the breakage of inherited anger, and what it’s like to fall victim to the temperament our parents passed unto us in the Big Idea for their newest novel, House, Body, Bird.

BERNIE JEAN SCHIEBELING:

My great-grandfather was not a good man.

Without getting into too many details, he was angry and abusive, so much so that my great-grandmother was able to divorce him in the late 1920s without too much trouble. After the divorce, my great-grandfather left—possibly fled—and then committed a string of burglaries across Kentucky and Tennessee while working as a door-to-door salesman. Many years later, my father met one of his ex-colleagues, who said the man had been incredible at sales. Less so at stealing, since he kept getting caught. “And,” he said, pointing at my dad’s breakfast plate, “I can tell you that you take your scrambled eggs the same way. So much pepper.”

Dad never met my great-grandfather (even Grandpa hardly knew him, since he was just a toddler during the divorce). But they both liked peppery eggs, and so do I.

Other echoes persisted too. Anger sometimes exploded from my grandfather, though less than the previous generation. My dad is calmer than his father, and I am calmer than him. Still, rage sometimes rises in me with the inevitable force of a king tide. I hear the ocean rushing in my ears—

—And I breathe through the impulse. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to continue this tradition that—I hope—none of us wanted. 

Inheritance is never clean. We gather too much over the course of a life, too many objects imbued with too many memories, to ever pass on an uncomplicated story to our descendants. In most cases, this is a gift, the last we give to our loved ones. Sometimes, however, it is a weapon, sharp-edged and dangerous to hold, and we have to figure out how to carry it anyway, or how to put it down in a way that hurts no one else. This is the big idea of House, Body, Bird. 

The idea was larger than I expected. I didn’t mean for this to be a novella; I thought it would be a short story too long to sell to most markets, like most of the work I have in my drafts folder. I was about 15,000 words deep by the time I realized I was writing a book. 

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Stories find their ideal length through their subject matter, and the more I thought about House, Body, Bird’s family and their home-slash-haunted-dollhouse-museum, the more I realized that the sheer amount of stuff in main character Birdie Goodbain’s inheritance—both dollhouses and the history behind those dollhouses—needed to show up on the page. I started including imagery wherever I could: descriptions of dolls, of difficult memories, of how haunted the body becomes from those memories. In the story’s earlier scenes, I wanted to crowd Birdie, make her tuck her elbows in as she navigated the rambling, watchful house.

Of course, this is only the first half of the difficult-inheritance-problem, the “Someone has willed me a weapon” half. I still had to find a good way to explore the second half of “Thanks, I hate it.” Birdie couldn’t stay scared. Thankfully, I had a solution; I just needed to reorganize some clutter.

When I first started writing the would-be short story, I had alternated between two point-of-views for Birdie, third-person limited and first-person. This created emotional whiplash as Birdie went from a meek third-person POV ruminating on the house’s creepiness to a furious first-person POV bashing through the walls with a meat tenderizer. By grouping all the third-person scenes together and following them with the first-person ones, Birdie had much cleaner character development. It’s relevant that the switch in perspective happens once Birdie commits to escaping and seizing her freedom. In that moment, she moves from third-person, where an unseen narrator observes and objectifies her (like a doll!), to first-person, where she narrates her experiences. While imagery had pushed up against the margins in the third-person section, Birdie’s opinions, observations, and memories pepper her own telling of the story. She gets space to breathe. 

In keeping with the novella’s spirit of excess, Birdie’s sections are interspersed with ones from the haunted house’s point of view. Originally, this was useful because it allowed me to reference the previous Goodbain generations with a level of detail that wouldn’t have been possible for Birdie, but the house eventually became the story’s second emotional heart. Although I worried about overwriting throughout the drafting process, a maximalist approach to storytelling was what I needed for House, Body, Bird. 

It’s funny—early on in the story, Birdie’s messed-up dad tells her, “We build, and build, and build.” The Goodbain family built and built and built their house as a way to create a family narrative worth passing on, as an attempt to build livelihoods and lives and love, and I did the same thing. I built and built and built the story to understand how Birdie’s family history loomed over her, and how she could create a new, more loving life in response to it. 

House, Body, Bird: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/oh-look-an-airport/

Strange how I keep ending up at one.

This time, however, not on business. Visiting friends because now that the novel is in I can do that. I’ll be traveling on business very soon, however, first to San Antonio and then to Tucson. The life of an author is strangely itinerant.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/oh-look-an-airport/

https://xkcd.com/3212/

https://xkcd.com/3212/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/the-big-idea-jeff-somers-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59613

Five funerals may seem like a lot, but this number is actually cut down considerably from author Jeff Somers’ original idea of 26 deaths. Put on your best black tie and follow along the Big Idea for his newest choose-your-own-adventure, Five Funerals.

JEFF SOMERS:

WHEN I was 14 years old—chubby, prone to wearing tie-dye t-shirts for no known reason, and gifted with inexplicable levels of confidence—I wrote a novel in just under three months. Nothing’s impossible when you have no job and live on a diet of Cookie Crisp cereal and RC Cola, and the whole writing thing is so fresh and new, you haven’t yet developed a nose for your own bad writing. Writing novels sure is easy, I thought, and for a long time I actually believed that.

35 years later, I was staring up at a poster of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies that I’ve had since college. If you’re unfamiliar with The Gashlycrumb Tinies, it’s a parody of old-fashioned alphabet books depicting how 26 blank-faced, Dickensian children die via gorgeous, intricate drawings and a series of simple rhymed couplets. I’ve been fascinated by it for most of my adult life, and I wondered what those doomed little urchins were like, how the full story of their freakish deaths would actually play out.

In other words, I wanted to write a novel about them. As with most of my thoughts, this seemed pretty brilliant to me (the inexplicable levels of confidence have only inexplicably increased with age), and somewhere in the background there was 14-year-old Jeff whispering yeah, and writing novels is easy!

Five years later, I’d filled a hard drive with trash.

It was a problem of structure: If you do the math, in this story, 26 people have to die in horrible, hilarious, darkly whimsical ways. Is 26 deaths in a single novel a lot? It is! Especially when each death needs to have unique elements and a lot of focus and page-time.

I tried structuring it like a detective novel, with one of the characters trying to figure out why all their old classmates were dying. But this quickly became repetitive—there’s a reason detective characters usually don’t investigate dozens of separate murders. You either wind up with a 1,000,000-word novel or you have to cut some corners.

I tried a draft where the deaths happened in chronological order. But this approach got tedious, because I was introducing characters just to kill them. While this was a lot of fun, it didn’t feel like a novel, like a complete story. The collapse of this draft did give me an idea, however: Short stories.

Anyone who has ever talked writing shop with me, or attended one of my Writer’s Digest workshops, knows that I am an enthusiastic short story writer (and reader), and that I regard short stories as the general cure for all writing woes. Any time I run into any sort of writing challenge, from writer’s block to Oh No I’ve Created an Insurmountable Plot Paradox (Again), my immediate solution is to stop trying to write a novel and start writing short stories about the universe and characters. This almost always works and, even when it doesn’t, I usually end up with some good short stories out of the deal. (As all working writers know, short stories are worth tens of dollars in today’s economy.)

So, I started writing stories about each character’s death, as an exercise. I didn’t worry about narrative cohesion, or pacing, or tying the story into the main novel at all. I just had fun writing 26 stories about people dying in variously hilarious, tragic, and sad ways extrapolated from Gorey’s work.

As I did this, I realized what the problem had been all along: Five Funerals isn’t a story about a bunch of kids who die and maybe deserve it. Well, it is that, but it’s also a story about loss. And memory. And how we hold people we’ve lost touch with in a kind of amber in our memories, unchanging and eternal. It was a story about that moment when you hear that someone you used to know—someone you maybe used to love—has died.

In those moments, we experience something strange: That person who’s been preserved in our head suddenly (and violently) transforms. After years or decades of being young and alive in your memory, they’re abruptly aged up—and gone. It’s a sobering, disorienting experience, and I realized that’s what I wanted Five Funerals to be—a funny, dark, hilarious story that mimicked that sense of the past rushing forward to catch up with the present. 

The short stories I’d been writing evolved into a choose-your-own-story engine, disrupting the reader’s groove and forcing them to reckon with the sudden, unwanted knowledge that this character had died. And since no one experiences time or loss the same way, readers can choose how they experience it here: When a name is flagged with a footnote in the novel, you can choose to flip to the story it’s pointing to—or not. If you do, you might find out how that character died, or discover a bit of funny or heartbreaking backstory.

You can keep following the chain of deaths, or you can return to the story where you left off. Or you can ignore all the footnotes and just read the book straight through, or randomly, or in sections. Just like we all grieve in our own way, you can read Five Funerals in your own way.

The end result, I think, is a book that explores how time slowly strips those yellowing old memories away, replacing them with the harsher truth of death and loss. Even if those losses are sometimes so weird and unexpected that you have to laugh.

Five Funerals: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Apple Books|Kobo|Ruadán Books

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Threads

Additional links: Animated cover on Instagram and on Bluesky.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/the-big-idea-jeff-somers-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59613

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/i-have-just-learned-exciting-things-i-can-tell-none-of-you-about-so-instead-of-sharing-that-news-here-is-a-picture-of-a-cat/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59606

I mean, I feel strongly that you will all be happy with a picture of Saja licking his adorable little lips regardless of context, so this is a low-risk maneuver anyway.

I will tell you all about the exciting things one day, I promise you. Just not today. But look! Kitten!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/i-have-just-learned-exciting-things-i-can-tell-none-of-you-about-so-instead-of-sharing-that-news-here-is-a-picture-of-a-cat/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59606

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/24/the-big-idea-danielle-girard/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59602

Motherhood is a term that has many meanings, and looks a little different for everyone. It is also something that comes with a lot of questions, and though she may not have all the answers, author Danielle Girard explores these ideas in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Pinky Swear.

DANIELLE GIRARD:

Most of my novels have begun with a dramatic, explosive scene—gunfire, explosives, or at the very least, a murder. But the premise that caught me by the throat for my latest novel, Pinky Swear, was quieter and in so many ways, much more terrifying.

Pinky Swear is a story about a woman whose best friend agrees to be her surrogate and then, four days before the baby is due, disappears. It was the emotional immediacy of that hook that made it so compelling to write. Not only is the protagonist confronting her fear of losing a child (and one she’s never met) but also the abandonment of her best friend, and the persistent doubts about whether their decades-long friendship was a fraud.

What I didn’t expect initially was how the story opened up issues of motherhood itself. The most obvious ones are the grief of infertility and the question of what motherhood really means when biology refuses to cooperate. But beneath those is the larger theme of what makes a woman a mother? Is it biology? Pregnancy? Blood? Or is it intention, sacrifice, love, and the willingness to show up no matter the cost?

My father was an OB/GYN and, when I was growing up, babies and pregnancies were everyday dinner conversations—the joys and also the heartaches. Today, we seem to live in a culture that often defines womanhood and motherhood by a body’s ability to conceive, carry, and give birth. Infertility can feel like the unspoken failure at every baby shower, in every passing comment and well-meaning reassurance that doesn’t quite land.

In Pinky Swear, the protagonist has already endured that loss. Her inability to carry a child isn’t just a medical fact; it’s an emotional wound that reshapes how she sees herself and her place in the world. Turning to surrogacy is an act of hope, but also an act of profound vulnerability. She must trust another woman not only with her future child, but with her deepest wish.

In this dynamic, the story, rather unexpectedly to this author, became a conversation between devotion and betrayal, selflessness and selfishness. The pregnancy, like motherhood itself, carries an undeniable power, binding the two women together in ways that are both intimate and irreversible. The surrogate’s disappearance forces both the protagonist and the reader to confront uncomfortable truths: that love can coexist with resentment, that good intentions can sour, and that even lifelong promises—such as pinky swears made in childhood—can break under the weight of adult realities.

Writing this book meant sitting with uncomfortable questions. If you can’t carry your own child, are you somehow less entitled to motherhood? If another woman brings your baby into the world, where does ownership of that child’s love begin and end? And if a child is taken from you at the last possible moment, can you still call yourself a mother?

Pinky Swear asks readers to sit with the ache of unmet expectations and the messy, often painful reality of female relationships. It asks us to reconsider the stories we tell about motherhood, and to expand them beyond biology into something more human, more forgiving, and truer — that being a mother isn’t about carrying a child inside your body, but about the deep, resilient power of love, no matter the cost.

As I hope readers will do when they read Pinky Swear, I found myself asking not just what I hope I would do in such circumstances, but who I would be. Bitter or resilient. Closed off or open-hearted. Defined by loss or transformed by it. When the story ends, I believe the protagonist finds herself exactly where she was meant to be, and I hope readers will agree.

—-

Pinky Swear: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|YouTube 

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/24/the-big-idea-danielle-girard/

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https://xkcd.com/3211/

https://xkcd.com/3211/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/trying-out-a-new-recipe-ash-babers-bolo-gelado-de-brigadeiro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59550

I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Bolo Gelado de Brigadeiro, or any of the words that make up this Brazilian dessert’s name, but when I came across the reel of Ash Baber making it on Instagram, I knew I wanted to give it a whirl.

View this post on Instagram

Determined to try this chocolatey confection for myself, I went over to his website and took a look at the recipe. When you first look at this recipe, it looks very long and decently complicated. There’s three different sections, each with their own list of ingredients. While there are a lot of ingredients, if you look at them individually they’re really not that wild, it’s just that there’s a lot of them. What is wild is that there is butter, eggs, and oil, as well as white sugar, brown sugar, and sweetened condensed milk, so it really ends up feeling like you need a ton of stuff to make one cake.

You have to make the brigadeiro, make the cake, make the milk soak, and put it all together.

So, was it worth the hassle? How long did it really take? And, of course, how many dishes did I make in the process?

Let’s start with the cost of ingredients. Like I said, nothing was too out of the ordinary, so everything was easily attainable from my local Kroger. The only thing I would say I don’t regularly have on hand on this list is buttermilk, and it’s a 50/50 chance on whether or not I have heavy cream on hand. However, I happened to be out of a lot of things I normally have, so I had to buy some stuff for this recipe I generally would’ve just had.

I bought two cans of condensed milk, and I buy the Eagle brand one, so those were $3.49 each. Usually I have at least one can of sweetened condensed milk on hand, but I still would’ve had to buy one anyways since the recipe calls for two. I only bought a pint of the Kroger brand buttermilk, so it was just $1.29. For the Kroger brand heavy cream, I went ahead and bought a quart, so that was $5.99. Normally I have plenty of butter, but I was completely out so I got two 2-stick packs of Vital Farms Unsalted Butter. I also normally have vegetable oil, but I was down to about one tiny splash, so I bought a new 40oz Crisco Vegetable Oil for $4.79.While I did have eggs, the recipe calls for six (which seems like a lot) so I had to buy a new pack, and I bought Pete & Gerry’s Organic Free Range eggs for $6.99, but you could easily cut down on this cost by buying the Kroger brand large white eggs for $1.79. Also, this one is optional, but I bought Simple Truth Chocolate Sprinkles for $2.69.

All of that came out to $28.73. Not horrible but not cheap, either.

After acquiring the ingredients, it was time to make the brigadeiro:

I know this is only the first photo of many, but I forgot to include the actual chocolate in the photo. It was Ghirardelli. And then upon making I came extremely close to forgetting to put in the condensed milk. I was very scatterbrained apparently.

This part, while easy, was definitely time consuming. I felt like it took longer than I expected for the mixture to thicken up, but I also feel like maybe I didn’t make it hot enough at first. I think I was nervous to burn the cream so I tried to keep it pretty medium-low, but it wasn’t really thickening up much until I turned it up a bit. Technically the recipe doesn’t say how long it takes, but it took me about thirty minutes, and I was constantly stirring it, so that was tedious.

After it had thickened up to the point that I can only describe as “probably good enough,” I set it aside to cool a bit before putting some cling wrap over top and putting it in the fridge to chill.

Here’s the layout of ingredients for the cake portion:

Thankfully, this was basically just “throw everything in your stand mixer bowl and whip it together.” I put the cocoa powder and instant espresso powder (I know the recipe calls for instant coffee, but I assume this recipe can only benefit from the substitution) in the bottom of the stand mixer bowl first, then poured the hot water over it and whisked it into a smooth, thick paste:

I tossed everything else on top of it and got to mixin’. Here’s what we were looking like before the addition of the eggs and the buttermilk:

This was pretty damn gloopy, and weirdly grainy.

And after the addition:

The mixture was much more airy and light now, more like a fluffy texture. Almost mousse-like, but not quite at that level of lightness.

I opted to mix the flour in myself rather than with the stand mixer, because the bowl was honestly really full and it was a lot of flour. I didn’t want it to go exploding everywhere in the stand mixer.

When I started mixing the flour in, tiny clumps of flour started appearing all throughout the batter, like they didn’t quite mix in right. Definitely was starting to wish I had sifted the flour. I beat the clumps out best I could and poured it into the cake pan, then put it in the oven for one hour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. There was so much batter in the pan that I was worried not even an hour would cook the cake all the way through, but when I used a knife to test it fresh out of the oven, it came out perfectly clean.

Putting that aside to cool, it was time to make the milk soak, which is just milk, cocoa powder, and sugar.

Once the cake and milk soak were both cooled, it was time to take the brigadeiro out of the fridge and put the whole dang thing together. Here’s the brigadeiro all thickened up:

Gawd dayum was this thicc. Rich and fudgy and oh so chocolatey. It was honestly incredible, but I was sure I was about to bend my spoon trying to mix it around. Handle with caution.

The cake cut in half easily, as it was very tall and made two very nice layers. I put the bottom layer in the cake pan I had baked it in, then poured half the milk soak over it. Scooped half the brigadeiro onto the first layer and smoothed it out over the surface, then slapped the top layer on top and poured the rest of the milk soak over it (I docked the top a bunch with a fork so the milk could go into the holes), and slathered that bad boy in the rest of the brigadeiro. There was so much brigadeiro on top, the cake pan could barely even contain my creation, the fudgy topping starting to spill over the sides.

The instructions say to let this puppy sit in the fridge overnight, and though it was hard not to slice right into it, I managed to let it rest in the fridge.

Once I took it out (it was heavy) and put sprinkles on top, it was glorious:

In the moment, I thought that was plenty of sprinkles, but looking at it now, I totally could’ve put more. It looks a little sparse.

I was eager to cut into it, and here’s the cross section:

My parents and I tried this cake at the same time and oh my gosh. It was probably the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had. I don’t even really like chocolate cake that much, but this one was so moist and rich, dense and fudgy and absolutely decadent. It was the kind you could only take a small slice of, and even then I needed some milk with it. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the fat of ass.

I had four of my friends try this cake and they all said it was incredibly banger, and even “dangerously good.” I was feeling pretty good that this turned out so yummy.

I will say this cake slides around a lot. The layer of brigadeiro in between the top and bottom cake layer make this thing slip and slide all over itself, and you can end up with a very slanted, divided cake if you aren’t careful. Cutting into it is messy, frosting it is messy, divvying it up into Tupperwares to give to other people is messy. But boy is it delicious.

For the dishes portion of this recipe test, this recipe is unique because it isn’t measured with cups and the like. You can measure everything on a digital scale, which made everything so much easier and made me use considerably less dishes. I used one bowl to weigh the brigadeiro ingredients in, one pot to cook the brigadeiro in, a rubber spatula to mix it, and another bowl to put in the fridge after it cooked. For the cake I used my stand mixer bowl, one attachment of the stand mixer, one whisk, a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and one rubber spatula to put it into the cake tin. I guess you can also count the cake tin in that, too. Oh, and a bowl for the eggs because I always crack eggs into a separate bowl first instead of straight into the cake batter. Finally, I used one small pot for the milk soak, a tablespoon, and another rubber spatula.

So, was it all worth it? The large ingredient list, the time that went into it, the dishes, and the cost (roughly, prices will vary for you, obviously).

I think yes! But this is definitely something to make for special occasions, or maybe for something like the holidays, when you need something to feed a lot of people. This cake makes a lot of cake.

I honestly liked making this cake and I’m very happy with the result. The dishes really weren’t so bad, and the praise you’ll get for how good this tastes outweighs the considerable effort of making it.

Have you heard of this dessert before? Do you usually like chocolate cake? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/trying-out-a-new-recipe-ash-babers-bolo-gelado-de-brigadeiro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59550

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/the-big-idea-r-z-nicolet/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59582

Heroes come in many sizes, shapes, colors, and… fabrics? Author R. Z. Nicolet is here to show that your choice in clothing can be more than just stylish, it can be functional, perhaps even magical. Don your finest accessories and check out the Big Idea for her newest novel, The Cloak & Its Wizard.

R. Z. NICOLET:

Have you ever been reading a book or watching a movie when you really wished you had a different character’s perspective on events?  Maybe wondering what the tavernkeeper thinks of the rowdy adventurers or what the aliens think of the bumbling human explorers?

Some of my favorite books are those that literally take an alien viewpoint – like Chanur’s Pride by C. J. Cherryh or any number of recent novels by Adrian Tchaikovsky.  What would it be like to see the world through another set of eyes?  Or none at all?

Years ago, I watched Doctor Strange.  It was fun, but Strange was Iron Man with magic and not that interesting.  I was more intrigued by the other characters, especially the Cloak of Levitation.  What was its story?  What did it want out of existence?  Why did it decide that this random sorcerer was worthy of its attention?  When it gets muddy, does it go in the laundry?

I was in the middle of a very serious fantasy thriller manuscript, but I decided to write one chapter of something lighter.  Just for fun.  I took Doctor Strange, filed the serial numbers off, and out came a scene about the Cloak of Sunset and Starlight deciding that newly minted wizard Veronica Noble needed better outerwear (much to her chagrin) with as much snarky commentary about human foibles as I could pack in.

Just one chapter.

One chapter turned into two, which turned into three.

At this point, I realized I had a serious problem on my hands.

I’m normally an outliner.  I start with plot and then cast my characters in the requisite roles.  This time, I was doing it backwards: the vain and mischievous cloak came first.

The tricky part was turning the amusing sidekick into the lead.  To emphasize the depth of the challenge: the folder on my computer that’s got all my drafts and notes is named “Untitled Cloak Book,” a reference to the video game featuring a notoriously chaotic goose.

Supporting characters have an advantage: they can be flavor instead of substance.  Like Strange’s Cloak of Levitation, they show up as a convenient plot device or a humorous diversion and then fade into the background.  They don’t have to make the hard decisions or save the world.  Quirks don’t linger long enough to become grating.  Character development is optional, as is backstory.

If I wanted to keep the cloak at the center of the narrative, I needed it to be more than just the sidekick.

A part of the solution was to let Noble, the wizard, act as the cloak’s foil.  She’s the serious, dutiful contrast to the cloak’s love of excitement and drama.  Her reluctance to act gives the cloak reason to intervene.

The rest was treating the cloak like any other main character.  When I got to editing, I had to adjust those first few chapters to make sure the stakes were clear – and that it was the cloak dealing with them.  The how is very different from a human character, but many of the deeper why reasons are similar – from wanting an interesting life to protecting its friends.

Perhaps that’s the real Big Idea: however peculiar the perspective, they’re still a person trying to be the hero of their own story.  (And hoping to avoid a trip through the laundry machine.)

The Cloak and Its Wizard: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Kobo

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Mastodon|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/the-big-idea-r-z-nicolet/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59582

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/new-cover-chasing-cars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59567

I promise you that I am doing other things with my time than just making cover songs, but I am making cover songs too. For this one I decided to actually play some of my stringed instruments, so whenever you hear guitar or bass on this track, that’s me fumbling about either on my Little Prince SG, or my Bass VI. I’m not ready to go on tour with either instrument, but it’s good enough (uh, with maybe a smidge of quantizing) for this song. Hope you like it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/23/new-cover-chasing-cars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59567

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/21/new-cover-fall-at-your-feet/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59544

Yes, I’ve been on a bit of a tear recently as far as covers go, but let’s just say I had a bit of a backlog from when I was writing the novel. Now that it’s been cleared off the table I have a little time to do this sort of thing. This is currently how I do my “me” time. It’s this or setting fire to things.

This song is one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands, and I had been meaning to get to it for a bit. Also for this one I had a technical project of trying to nail the vocal balance, which is for me the trickiest part of doing any of this. I think I did pretty decent job sitting it into the mix this time around. It’s fun to still be learning things.

Enjoy!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/21/new-cover-fall-at-your-feet/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59544

https://xkcd.com/3210/

https://xkcd.com/3210/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/20/25-years-in-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59540

February marks an anniversary for us: in this month in 2001, Krissy and Athena and I moved to this house in Bradford, Ohio, so now we have been citizens of this village and state for 25 years. On the 20th anniversary, I wrote a long piece about moving here and what that meant to us, and that’s still largely accurate, so I’m not going to replicate here. I will note that in the last five years, we’ve become even more entrenched here in Bradford, as we went on a bit of a real estate spree, purchasing a church, a campground, and a few other properties, and started a business and foundation here in town as well. We’ve become basically (if not technically precisely) the 21st century equivalent of landed gentry.

It’s possibly fitting that after a quarter century here in rural Ohio, I finally wrote a novel that takes place in it, which will be out, as timing would have it, on election day this year. The town in the novel is fictional but the county is real, as it my own, and it’s been interesting writing something about this place, now — that also, you know, has monsters in it. I certainly hope people around here are going to be okay with that, rather than, say, “you wrote what now about us?” There is a reason I made a fictional town, mind you.

I continue to be a bit of an odd duck for the area, which I don’t see changing, and despite the fact the number of full-time writers in Bradford has doubled thanks to Athena. On the other hand, as I’ve noted before, my output is such that Bradford is the undisputed literary capital of Darke County, and I think that’s something both Bradford and Darke County can be proud of.

Anyway, Ohio, and Darke County, and Bradford, have been good to me in the last quarter century. I hope I have been likewise to them. We’re likely to stay.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/20/25-years-in-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59540

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/the-big-idea-gideon-marcus-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59533

On occasion, you know the ending of your story before you start writing. Most other times, you find the path as you go, each twisting turn appearing before you as you continue on your merry way. The latter seems to be the case for author Gideon Marcus, who says in his Big Idea that he wasn’t always sure how to wrap up his newest novel, Majera.

GIDEON MARCUS:

What’s the big idea with Majera? That’s a hard one, because there are lots of threads: the unstated, obvious, valued diversity of the future, which helps define the setting as the future. That’s a familiar technique—Tom Purdom pioneered it, and Star Trek popularized it. There’s a focus on relationships: found family, love in myriad combinations. There’s the foundation of science, a real universe underpinning everything.

But I guess what I associate with Majera most strongly is conclusion.

Starting an exciting adventure is easy. Finishing stories is hard. George R. R. Martin, Pat Rothfuss. Hideaki Anno all have famously struggled with it. When Kitra and her friends first got catapulted ten light years from home in Kitra, I started them on a journey whose ending I only had the vaguest outline of. I had adventure seeds: the failing colony sleeper ship in Sirena, the insurrection in Hyvilma, and the dead planet in Majera, but the personal journeys of the characters I left up to them.

I know a lot of people don’t write the way I do. I think writers mirror the opposing schools of acting: on one end, the Method of sliding deep into character; on the other, George C. Scott’s completely external creation of an alternate personality. In the Scott school of writing, characters are puppets acting out an intricate dance created by the author. In the Method school of writing, of which I am a member, the characters have independent lives. I know that seems contradictory—how can fictional agglomerations of words achieve sentience?

And yet, they do! I didn’t plan Kitra and Marta’s rekindling of their relationship. Pinky’s jokes come out of the ether. Heck, I didn’t even come up with the solution that saved the ship in Kitra—Fareedh and Pinky did (people often congratulate me on how well I set up that solution from the beginning; news to me! I just write what the characters tell me to…)

All this is to say, I didn’t know how this arc of The Kitra Saga was going to end. But I knew it had to end well, it had to end satisfyingly, for the reader and for the characters. There had to be a reason the Majera crew would stop and take a breather from their string of increasingly exotic adventures. The worldbuilding! All of the little tidbits I’d developed had to be kept consistent: historical, scientific, character-related. There had to be a plausible resolution to the love pentangle that the Majera crew found themselves in, one that was respectful to all the characters and, more importantly, the reader’s sensitivies and credulity.

That’s why this book took longer to put to bed than all the others. It’s not the longest, but it was the hardest. Frankly, I don’t think I could even have written this book five years ago. I needed the life experience to fundamentally grok everyone’s internal workings, from Pinky’s wrestling with being an alien in a human world, to Peter’s coming to grips with his fears, to Kitra’s understanding of her role vis. a vis. her friends, her crew, her partners. In other words, I had to be 51 to authentically write a gaggle of 20-year-olds!

Beyond that, I had to, even in the conclusion, lay seeds for the rest of the saga, for there is a central mystery to the galaxy that has only been hinted at (not to mention a lot more tropes to subvert…)

Conclusions are hard. I think I’ve succeeded. I hope I’ve succeeded. I guess it’s for you to judge!

Majera: Amazon|Amazon (eBook)|Audible|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/the-big-idea-gideon-marcus-2/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/cover-reveal-monsters-of-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59522

Just look at this cover for Monsters of Ohio. Look at it! It is amazing. I am so happy with it. It’s the work of artist Michael Koelsch (whose art has graced my work before, notably the Subterranean Press editions of the Dispatcher sequels Murder by Other Means and Travel by Bullet) , and he’s knocked it out of the park. I am, in a word, delighted.

And what is Monsters of Ohio about? Here’s the current jacket copy for it:

In many ways Richland, Ohio is the same tiny, sleepy rural village it has been for the last 150 years: The same families, the same farms, the same heartland beliefs and traditions that have sustained it for generations. But right now times are especially hard, as social and economic forces inside and outside the community roil the surface of the once-placid town.

Richland, in other words, is primed to explode… just not the way that anyone anywhere could ever have expected. And when things do explode, well, that’s when things start getting really weird.

Mike Boyd left Richland decades back, to find his own way in the world. But when he is called back to his hometown to tie up some loose ends, he finds more going on than he bargained for, and is caught up in a sequence of events that will bring this tiny farm village to the attention of the entire world… and, perhaps, spell its doom.

Ooooooooooh! Doooooom! Perhaaaaaaaps!

If that was too much text for you, here is the two-word version: Cozy Cronenberg.

Yeah, it’s gonna be fun.

When can you get it? November 3rd in North America and November 5 in the UK and most of the rest of the world. But of course you can pre-order this very minute at your favorite bookseller, whether that be your local indie, your nearby bookstore chain, or online retailer of your choice. Why wait! Put your money down! The book’s already written, after all. It’s guaranteed to ship!

Oh, and, for extra fun, here’s the author photo for the novel:

Yup, that pretty much sets the tone.

I hope you like Monsters of Ohio when you get a chance to read it. In November!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/cover-reveal-monsters-of-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59522

https://xkcd.com/3209/

https://xkcd.com/3209/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/18/a-secret-project-is-afoot-at-the-scalzi-compound/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59517

What is it? I can’t tell you! When will you be able to know? I can’t say! But when I can tell you, will I? We’ll see!

What I can tell you is that Athena is working on it with me, she’s been great to work with so far, and my decision to hire her at Scalzi Enterprises was pretty smart. Clearly I know what I’m doing all the time.

Anyway, my kid’s awesome and we’re doing cool stuff. I hope we get to share it with you. Eventually.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/18/a-secret-project-is-afoot-at-the-scalzi-compound/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59517

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/18/rip-scalzi-dsl-line-2004-2026/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59512

As most of you know, I live on a rural road where Internet options are limited. More than 20 years ago, DSL became available where I live, which meant that I could ditch the satellite internet of the early 2000s, which topped out at something like 1.5mbps and rarely achieved that, and which went out entirely if it rained, for a line that had a, for me, blisteringly fast 6mbps speed.

That was the speed it stayed at for most of the next twenty years, until my provider, rather grudgingly, increased the speed to 40mbps — not fast, but certainly faster — and there it stayed. Over time the DSL service stopped being as reliable, rarely actually got up to 40mbps, and, actually started going out when it rained, like the satellite internet of old, but without the excuse of being, you know, in space and blocked by clouds.

A few months back I went ahead and ordered 5G internet service from Verizon, because it was faster and doesn’t have usage caps, which had been a stumbling block for 5G service previously. It’s not top of the line, relative to other services that are available elsewhere — usually 120+mbps, where the church’s service is at 300+mbps, and Athena’s in town Internet is fiber and clocks in at 2gbps — but it’s fast enough for what I use the internet for, and to steam high-definition movies and TV. I held on to the DSL since then to make sure I was happy with the new service, because that seemed a sensible thing to do.

No more. The 5G wireless works flawlessly and has for months, and the time has come. After 20+ years, I have officially cancelled my DSL line. A big day in the technology life of the Scalzi Compound. I thank the DSL for its service, but its watch has now ended. We all most move on, ceaselessly, into the future, where I can download stuff faster.

I’m still keeping my landline, however, to which the DSL was attached. Call me old-fashioned.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/18/rip-scalzi-dsl-line-2004-2026/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59512

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/17/the-big-idea-darby-mcdevitt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59493

The intentions behind one’s actions speaks louder than words ever could. Author Darby McDevitt leads us on a journey through the exploration of intention, desires, and consequences in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Halter. Take the path he has laid out for you, if you so desire.

DARBY MCDEVITT:

Many years ago I worked for a video game company in Seattle that shoveled out products at a rate of four to six games per year. Most of these were middling titles, commissioned by publishers to fill a narrow market gap and slapped together in six to nine months by teams of a dozen or two crunch-weary developers. We worked hard and fast, with passion and determination, but the end results never quite equaled the ambitions we had.

A common joke around the office, told at the end of every draining development cycle, went like this: “Sure, the game isn’t fun, but the design documents are amazing.” The idea of offering consumers our unrealized blueprints in lieu of a polished game was ridiculous, of course, but it came from a place of real desperation. We wanted our players to know that, despite the poor quality of the final product, we really tried.

The novelist Iris Murdoch has a saying that I repeat often as a mantra, always to guard against future disappointment: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” Here again is the notion of a Platonic ideal at war with its hazy shadow. How familiar all this is. Experience tells us that people falling short of their ideals is the natural course of life. We never live up to the best of our intentions.

In my new novel, The Halter, I compare this process of “intension erosion” to the more upbeat phenomenon of Desire Lines – footpaths worn over grassy lawns out of an unconscious need for efficiency. Desire lines appear wherever the original constraints of an intentionally designed geographic space don’t conform with the immediate needs of the men and women walking through it. In video games we use a related term – Min-Maxing – the act of looking for ways to put in a minimum amount of effort for maximum benefit. In both cases, the original, ideal use of a space or system is superseded by a desire for efficiency.

In The Halter, these same principles take hold on a grand scale inside an idealized “surrogate reality” metaverse called The Forum, where artists, scientists, and thinkers from all disciplines are invited to probe the deepest and most difficult aspects of human behavior and society. One Forum designer creates a so-called theater to explore the tricky business of language acquisition by sequestering one-hundred virtual babies together with no adult interaction. Another theater offers visitors a perfect digital copy of themselves as a companion, as a therapeutic approach to self-discovery. A third lets visitors don the guise of any other individual on earth so they may literally fulfill the empathetic idiom of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.”

Noble intentions, arguably – yet in every case, after repeated exposure to actual human users, each theater devolves into something less than the sum of its parts. A prurient playground, or an amusing distraction, or a mindless entertainment. Shortcuts are taken, efficiencies are found, novel-uses imposed. The empathy theater is transformed into a celebrity-fueled bacchanalia; the digital doppelganger becomes a personal punching bag. The baby creche, a zoo. Each and every time, execution falls short of intention. Each theater crumbles, becoming a wreck of its original, perfect idea … and audiences are riveted.

The phenomena described here are common enough that several terms encompass them, each one differentiated for the situation at hand. Desire paths were my first exposure to the concept. The CIA calls it Blowback, when the side effects of a covert operation lead to disastrous results. Unintended Consequences and Knock-On Effects are cozier names, both of which can yield positive or negative results. And a Perverse Incentive is the related idea that the design of a system may be such that it encourages behavior contrary to its intended purpose. Taken together we begin to see the shape of the iceberg that wrecks so many perfect ideas.

I wrote The Halter to explore the highs and lows of these effects, and to shed light from a safe distance on the invisible forces that push and pull constantly at our behavior, often without our knowledge or consent. At one point in the middle of the novel, a collection of idealistic designers, most of whom have given years of their lives to the Forum designing and testing theaters of varying utility, commiserate on what they feel has been a collective failure. Their beloved theaters, they fret, have been co-opted and corrupted by The Forum visitors who have no incentive to behave or play along – they simply show up and engage in the simplest and most efficient way possible. How sad. How crushing. If only these morose designers could share their original design documents….

Their folly, in my view, was to treat their original intentions as merely a point of inspiration and not a goal to be achieved. Their error was to abandon their work in the face of a careless, sleepwalking opposition. The heroic path forward requires vigilance, not surrender, and if an outcome is unexpected, unwarranted, or undesirable, it may be more productive to tweak the inputs than blame the user.

We mustn’t fret that our perfect idea is laying at the bottom of the sea, five fathoms deep. We mustn’t fetishize our design documents – be it a holy book, an artwork, a game, a manifesto, or the U.S. Constitution – because design documents are merely static pleas for unrealized future intentions. They can always be corrupted, upended, misinterpreted. Have faith and patience. The hopeful paths are yet unmade, lying in wait for a thousand shuffling feet to score the way forward.

The Halter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/17/the-big-idea-darby-mcdevitt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59493

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/16/new-cover-but-not-tonight/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59487

I was not expecting to make another cover so soon, so, uh, surprise: A cover of Depeche Mode’s most cheerful song, done as if Erasure decided to crack at it. Why did I do this? Because I was trying to clean up a previous version of this song that I did (it was sonically a little smeary and I hadn’t learned how to edit out when I loudly took in breaths), which necessitated laying down a new vocal track, and once I did that, one thing led to another, and here we are.

I am actually really happy with this one. I did harmonies! Intentionally! Also, I do think it really does sound kinda like Erasure covering Depeche Mode (if such a thing is a possible considering the bands share a Vince Clarke in common). I mean, I don’t sing like Andy Bell, but then, who does, so, fine. Good enough for an afternoon! Enjoy.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/16/new-cover-but-not-tonight/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59487

https://xkcd.com/3208/

https://xkcd.com/3208/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/16/a-lovely-valentines-day-dinner-at-dozo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59439

If you caught my last two posts over Dozo, Dayton’s premier underground sushi dining experience, then you already know how much I love it. What better way to celebrate the day of love than with Dozo’s special Valentine’s Day 7-course omakase style chef’s menu that offers off-menu selections and limited, intimate seating at the bar so you can watch the chefs work their magic? And trust me, it is indeed magic.

Not only was I extremely excited about the curated sushi menu and brand new sake pairing to go alongside it, but Tender Mercy (the bar that houses Dozo) posted their Valentine’s Day cocktail line-up a few days ago, and it looked incredible, as well.

View this post on Instagram

Long story short, I knew my tastebuds were in for a real treat.

I booked the 8:30pm slot on their first day of offering this menu, which was Tuesday. Getting a later start to dinner than usual only made me that much hungrier for what was to come.

I got to Tender Mercy about twenty minutes early, so I just had a seat at their bar and perused the special cocktail menu:

I love this dessert cocktail menu because whatever your poison is, they’ve got it. A gin drink, a vodka cocktail, even tequila and bourbon. And, of course, a mocktail. They all sounded so delicious but also very rich, and I didn’t want to spoil my appetite with something on the heavier side (like that cheesecake foam, YUM) so I actually opted for the Pillow Princess and asked the bartender to put his spirit of choice in it. He said he recommended Hennessey Cognac (I’m pretty sure it was Hennessy Very Special but I’m just guessing from the brief look I got at the bottle).

I can’t say I’ve had Cognac all that much, but the sweet, almost vanilla-like flavor of the Hennessy worked super well in it.

I’m glad I went with the bartender’s recommendation, he’s truly a pro and has never steered me wrong before so I trust his judgement a hundred percent.

After a few minutes, it was time to get seated in Dozo. There were only six of us total at the bar, a group of three on my right and a couple on my left. Our menu was tucked into our envelope shaped napkin and I briefly surveyed what was going to be served.

Truly the most eye-catching dish was the wasabi ice cream. Listen, I trust Dozo, but man, did that sound absolutely bonkers. I held strong in my faith, though.

Per usual, I went with the sake pairing, because when else do I get to try so many different expertly curated sakes? Plus, the chef said he tried each of the sake pairings and highly recommended it.

Up first was a spicy salmon onigiri:

I wasn’t sure how spicy the salmon would actually end up being, so I had my water on standby. After getting through the warm, soft, perfectly seasoned rice, I was met with a generously portioned salmon filling that wasn’t at all too spicy! This onigiri was hands down the best one I’ve ever had, though I will admit my experience is rather limited in that department. Of course, it’s not everyday I have an onigiri, but this one definitely takes the cake.

For the sake pairing I was served Amabuki’s “I Love Sushi” Junmai. Obviously, this is a fantastic name for a sake. It says all you need to know about it right in the name, plain and simple. Jokes aside, this was a perfectly fine sake. With a dry, crisp flavor, it didn’t really stand out to me much but paired well with the umami flavor of the onigiri.

Off to a great start (I expected no less), the second course was looking mighty fine:

From left to right, we have hamachi (yellowtail), hirame (flounder), and skipjack tuna. The hamachi’s wasabi sauce packed a ton of great wasabi flavor without painfully clearing my sinuses. It had just the right amount of strength, a very balanced piece. The flounder was exceptionally tender with a melt-in-your-mouth texture. The skipjack has always been a tried and true classic in my previous Dozo experiences, and today’s serving of it was no different. All around a total winner of a course, with tender, umami packed pieces.

To accompany this course, I was served Takatenjin “Soul of the Sensei,” which is a Junmai Daiginjo. This sake is made with Yamadanishiki, which is considered to be the king of sake rice. “Soul of the Sensei” was created as a tribute to revered sake brewer Hase Toji. Much like the first sake we were served, it was crisp with a slight dryness, pairing well with the fresh fish and savory flavors. It had just a touch of melon.

Up next was this smaller course with a piece of chu toro and a piece of smoked hotate:

Both pieces looked stunning and fresh. The chef explained that chu toro is the fatty belly meat of the tuna, which is a more prized and delicious cut, a real treat. Indeed, it was very buttery and had a rich mouthfeel. I didn’t know what hotate was, but it turns out it’s a scallop, and I think they mentioned something about hotate scallops come from a specific region in Japan, but I might be misremembering. Anyways, I love scallops, but I’ve definitely never had one that’s been smoked before. It was fun to watch the chef smoke all of the pieces before dishing them out.

Oh my goodness this piece was incredible. It had a luscious texture and complex, beautifully smokiness that didn’t detract from the flavor of the scallop. It was a masterfully smoked piece of high quality, fresh scallop. Remarkable piece! Great course all around.

Instead of sake for this course, we were served a shot of Suntory Whiskey. but I have no idea which type specifically. Maybe the Toki? But also very well could’ve been the Hibiki Harmony because the shot was definitely a dark, ambery color. I wish I had a palate for whiskey, especially premium Japanese whiskey that the kitchen so generously gifted upon each guest, but truthfully it was a tough couple of sips for me. Like fire in my throat, that shit put some damn hair on my chest. Super grateful for the lovely whiskey, but sheesh it definitely burned. The chefs actually took the shot with us, how fun!

Fear not, there was some lovely mushroom and yuzu ramen on the way to ease the pain:

This ramen is actually vegetarian, made with umami-packed mushrooms and bright yuzu citrus. The green onions and drops of chili oil drizzled on top added a fantastic balance of flavors for a well-rounded, hearty, warm bowl of delicious ramen that was good to the last drop. I wish they had ramen more often, it was so great to sip on some warm broth while it was below freezing outside. I absolutely loved the stoneware bowl it was served in, I would love to have something like that in my own kitchen.

For the sake, this one was truly special. Hana Makgeolli “MAQ8 Silkysonic.” Look how CUTE these cans are! These adorable single-serve cans contain a fun, slightly bubbly, just-a-touch-sweet sake that was a great addition to the night’s line-up. It’s a bit lower alcohol content than some other sakes at 8%, making it so you can enjoy more than one can of this bubbly goodness if you so desired.

I was definitely pretty full by this point, but I powered on for this next course consisting of some torched sake, unagi, and suzuki.

It was a little confusing with the first piece of fish in this lineup being called sake, since I assumed sake was just the drink we all know and love, but sake is actually also salmon. It was fun to watch the chefs use a blowtorch to torch the salmon, as any course involving fire is a great course. The salmon had a sauce on top that I hate to say I can’t remember what exactly it was. I know, I had one job! I should’ve taken better notes, but there was so much going on between being served the sake and explained the specifics of that plus the chefs explaining the whole course, plus the couple next to me conversing with me (we had lovely conversations). It was a lot, okay! Sauce aside, the salmon was excellent and beautifully torched.

For the unagi, I actually love eel, so I knew this piece was about to be bomb. With the sweet, thick glaze on top and fresh slice of jalapeno, this piece was loaded with deliciousness. I was worried the jalapeno slice would bring too much heat to the dish for me, but it was perfect and not hot at all, just had great flavor.

The final piece, suzuki, is Japanese sea bass. There is a small pickled red onion sliver on top, it is not a worm, to be clear. Apparently the Japanese sea bass is known by different names depending on how mature the fish is, suzuki being the most grown stage of the fish. This piece was very simply dressed and the tender fish spoke for itself.

The sake for this course was Tentaka’s “Hawk in the Heavens” Tokubetsu Junmai. Much like with the food of this course, I should have taken better notes, because I don’t remember this sake at all. I don’t remember what it tasted like, my thoughts on it, nothing. I didn’t even remember the name until I looked at the menu again. I am so sorry, it is truly only because it was the sixth course and I had just taken a shot and was busy talking! Forgive me and we shall move on.

For our last savory course, it was two pieces of the chef’s choice:

The chefs said in honor of it being Valentine’s Day, they wanted to give us a bit more of a lux piece, and opted for wagyu and torched toro. Sending off the savory courses with wagyu was truly a delight, it really provided the turf in “surf and turf.” Every time I’ve had wagyu from Dozo it’s been so tender and rich, the fat just melting in my mouth. It’s also a fun novelty since I don’t really have wagyu anywhere else.

Finally, it was time for dessert. I couldn’t wait to try the wasabi ice cream:

I would’ve never imagined that wasabi ice cream could be even remotely edible, let alone enjoyable, but oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. How was this so good?! The creaminess contrasting with the crunchy wasabi peas, the perfect amount of sweetness mixing with the distinct flavor of the wasabi, LORD! It was incredibly, bizarrely delicious. The wasabi didn’t have that sinus-clearing bite to it, yet retained its unmistakable palate. What a treat.

For the final sake, I was served Kiuchi Brewery’s “Awashizuki” Sparkling Sake. I was particularly excited for this one because I love sparkling sakes, they are undoubtedly my favorite category of sake. Anything with bubbles is just better! I will say that the Awashizuki seemed to be much more lowkey on the bubbles than some other sparkling sakes I’ve had before. The bubbles were a bit more sparse and toned down, but it was still lightly carbonated enough that you could tell it wasn’t still. It was sweeter and more refreshing than the others in the evening’s lineup, which makes sense since it was the dessert course pairing. I really liked this one!

All in all, I had yet another fantastic experience at Dozo, and I absolutely loved their Valentine’s Day lineup. The limited seating at the bar made it feel all the more exclusive and special, and every course was totally delish. I got to try lots of new sakes and have really nice chats with the people next to me, and really just had a great evening all around.

The ticket for this event was $95, after an added 18% gratuity and taxes, it was more like $125. The sake pairing was $50 and I also tipped the waitress that was pouring the pairings and telling me about them. It was definitely a bit of a splurge event but hey, it was for V-Day! Gotta treat yourself. And I’m so glad I did!

Which piece of fish looks the most enticing to you? Or perhaps the ramen is more your speed? Have you tried any of the sakes from the lineup? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/16/a-lovely-valentines-day-dinner-at-dozo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59439

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/15/new-cover-song-these-days/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59465

I moved my home music studio up from the basement to Athena’s old bedroom in the last couple of weeks, so now it’s time to put it to use, and for my first bit of music in the new space, I decided to record an old tune: “These Days” by Jackson Browne, first released in 1973.

Having said that, this arrangement is rather more like the 1990 cover version by 10,000 Maniacs, which was the first version of the song I ever heard. I originally tried singing it in the key that Natalie Merchant sang it in, and — surprise! — I was having a rough time of it. Then I dropped it from G to C and suddenly it was in my range.

I’m not pretending my singing voice is a patch on either Ms. Merchant or Mr. Browne, but then, that’s not why I make these covers. Enjoy.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/15/new-cover-song-these-days/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59465

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/14/10-thoughts-on-ai-february-2026-edition/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59456

Because it feels like a good time to do it, some current thoughts on “AI” and where it, we and I are about the thing, midway through February 2026. These are thoughts in no particular order. Some of them I’ve noted before, but will note again here mostly for convenience. Here we go:

1. I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that “AI”-generated text is not copyrightable and I don’t want any issues of ownership clouding my work, and the simple fact that my book contracts oblige me to write everything in those books by myself, without farming it out to either ghostwriters or “AI.” But mostly, it’s because I write better than “AI” can or ever will, and I can do it with far less energy draw. I don’t need to destroy a watershed to write a novel. I can write a novel with Coke Zero and snacks. Using “AI” in my writing would create more work for me, not less, and I really have lived my life with the idea of doing the least amount of work possible.

If you’re reading a John Scalzi book, it all came out of my brain, plain and simple. Better for you! Easier for me!

2. I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist. Sure, someone can now prompt a novel-length work out of “AI” faster than I or any other human can write a book, and yes, people are doing just that, pumping into Kindle Unlimited and other such places a vast substrate of “AI” text slop generated faster than anyone could read it. Nearly all of it will sit there, unread, until the heat death of the universe.

Now, you might say that’s because why would anyone read something that no one actually took any effort to write, and that will be maybe about 5% of the reason. The other 95% of the reason, however, will be discoverability. Are the people pumping out the wide sea of “AI” text slop planning to make the spend for anyone to find that work? What are their marketing plans other than “toss it out, see who locates it by chance”? And if there is a marketing budget, if you can generate dozens or hundreds of “AI” text slop tomes in a year, how do you choose which to highlight? And will the purveyors of such text slop acknowledge that the work they’re promoting was written by no one?

(Answer: No. No they won’t).

I am not worried about being replaced as a novelist because I already exist as a successful author, and my publishers are contractually obliged to market my novels every time they come out. This will be the case for a while, since I have a long damn contract. Readers will know when my new books are out, and they will be able to find them in bookstores, be they physical or virtual. This is a huge advantage over any “AI” text slop that might be churned out. And while I don’t want to overstate the amount of publicity/marketing traditional publishers will do for their debut or remaining mid-list authors, they will do at least some, and that visibility is an advantage that “AI” text slop won’t have. Even indie authors, who must rely on themselves instead of a publicity department to get the word out about their work, have something “AI” text slop will never have: They actually fucking care about their own work, and want other people to see it.

I do understand it’s more than mildly depressing to think that a major market difference between “AI” text slop and stuff actual people wrote is marketing, but: Welcome to capitalism! It’s not the only difference, obviously. But it is a big one. And one that is likely to persist, because:

3. People in general are burning out on “AI.” Not just in creative stuff: Microsoft recently finally admitted that no one likes its attempt to shove its “AI” Copilot into absolutely everything, whether it needs to be there or not, and is making adjustments to its businesses to reflect that. “AI” as a consumer-facing entity rarely does what it does, better than the programs and apps it is replacing (see: Google’s Gemini replacing Google Assistant), and sucks up far more energy and resources. Is your electric bill higher recently? Has the cost of a computer gone up because suddenly memory prices have doubled (or more)? You have “AI” to thank for that. It’s the solution to a problem that not only did no one actually have, but wasn’t a problem in the first place. There are other issues with “AI” larger than this — mostly that it’s a tool to capture capital at the expense of labor — but I’m going to leave those aside for now to focus on the public exhaustion and dissatisfaction with “AI” as a product category.

In this sort of environment, human-generated work has a competitive advantage, because people see it as more authentic and real (which it is, to the extent that “authentic” and “real” mean “a product of an actual human brain”), and more likely to have the ability to surprise and engage the people who encounter it. I don’t want to oversell this — humans are still as capable of creating lazy, uninspired junk as they ever were, and some people really do think of their entertainment as bulk purchases. Those vaguely sad people will be happy that “AI” gives them more, even if it’s of lesser quality. But I do think in general when people are given a choice, that they will generally prefer to give their time and money to the output of an actual human making an effort, than to the product of a belching drain on the planet’s resources whose use primarily benefits people who are already billionaires dozens of times over. Call me optimistic.

Certainly that’s the case with me:

4. I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work. I’ve noted before that I have it as a contractual point that my book covers, translations and copyediting have to be done by humans. This is again both a practical issue (re: copyrights, quality of work, etc) and a moral one, but also, look, I like that my work pays other humans, and I want that to continue. Also, in my personal life, I’m going to pay artists for stuff. When I buy art, I’m going to buy from people who created it, not generated it out of a prompt. I’m not going to knowingly post or promote anything that is not human-created. Just as I wish to be supported by others, I am going to support other artists. There is no downside to not promoting/paying for “AI” generated work, since there was no one who created it. There is an upside to promoting and paying humans. They need to eat and pay rent.

“But what if they use AI?” In the case of the people working on my own stuff, it’s understood that the final product, the stuff that goes into my book, is the result of their own efforts. As for everything else, well, I assume most artists are pretty much like me: using “AI” for their primary line of creativity is just introducing more work, not less. Also I’m going to trust other creators; if they tell me they’re not using “AI” in their finished work then I’m going to believe them in the absence of a compelling reason not to. I don’t particularly have the time or interest in being the “AI” police. Anyway, if they’re misrepresenting their work product, that eventually gets found out. Ask a plagiarist about that.

With all that said:

5. “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form. This is not an “‘AI’ Is Inevitable and Will Take Over the World” statement, since as noted above people are getting sick of it being aggressively shoved at them, and also there are indications that a) “this is the worst it will ever be” is not true of AI, as people actively note that recent versions of ChatGPT were worse to use than earlier versions, b) investors are getting to the point of wanting to see an actual return on their investments, which is the cue for the economic bubble around AI to pop. This going to be just great for the economy. “AI,” as the current economic and cultural phenomenon, is likely to be heading for a fall.

Once all that drama is done and we’ve sorted through the damage, the backend of “AI” and its various capabilities will still be around, either relabeled or as is, just demoted from being the center of the tech universe and people making such a big deal about it, scaled down and hopefully more efficient. I understand that the “AI will probably persist” position is not a popular one in the creative circles in which I exist, and that people hope it vaporizes entirely, like NFTs and blockchains. I do have to admit I wouldn’t mind being wrong about this. But as a matter of capital investment and corporate integration, NFTs, etc are a blip compared to what’s been invested in “AI” overall, and how deep its use has sunk into modern capitalism (more on that in a bit).

Another reason I think “AI” is likely to stick around in some form:

6. “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies. The version that the creative class gets (rightly) worked up about is generative “AI,” the most well-known versions of which were trained on vast databases of work, much of which was and is copyrighted and not compensated for. This is, however, only one subset of a larger group of computational systems which are also called “AI,” because it’s a sexy term that even non-nerds have heard of before, and far less confusing than, say, “neural networks” or such. Not all “AI” is as ethically compromised as large-scale generative “AI,” and a lot of it existed and was being used non-controversially before generative “AI” blew up as the wide-scale rights disaster it turned out to be.

It’s possible that “AI” as a term is going to be forever tainted as a moral hazard, disliked by the public and seen as a promotions drag by marketing departments. If and when that happens, a lot of things currently hustled under the “AI” umbrella will be quietly removed from it, either returning to previous, non-controversial labels or given new labels entirely. Lots of “AI” will still be around, just no one will call it that, and outside of obvious generative “AI” that presents rights issues, fewer people will care.

On the matter of generative “AI,” here’s a thought:

7. There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect. Generative “AI” could easily have been trained solely on material in the public domain and/or on appropriately-licensed Creative Commons material, and an opt-in licensing gateway to acquire and pay for copyrighted work used in training, built and used jointly by the companies needing training data, could have happened. This was all a solvable problem! But OpenAI, Anthropic, et al decided to train first, ask forgiveness later, on the idea that would be cheaper simply to do it first and to litigate later. I’m not entirely sure this will turn out to be true, but it is possible that at this late stage, some of the companies will go under before any settlements can be achieved, which will have the same effect.

There are companies who have chosen to train their generative models with compensation; I know of music software companies that make a point of showing how artists they worked were both paid for creating samples and other material, and get paid royalties when work generated from those samples, etc is made by people using the software. I think that’s fine! As long as everyone involved is happy with the arrangement, no harm, and no foul. But absent of that sort of clear and unambiguous declaration of provenance and compensation regarding training data, one has to assume that any generative “AI” has used stolen work. It’s so widely pervasive at this point that this has to be a foundational assumption.

And here is a complication:

8. The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows. One, because they already were prior to “AI” being the widely-used rubric, and two, because these companies need to justify their investments somehow. Some of these systems and processes aren’t tainted by the issues of “generative AI” but many of them are, including some that weren’t previously. When I erase a blotch in an image with Photoshop, the process may or may not use Generative AI and when it does, it may or may not use Adobe’s Firefly model (which Adobe maintains, questionably, is trained only on material it has licensed).

Well, don’t use Photoshop, I hear you say. Which, okay, but I have some bad news for you: Nearly every photoediting suite at this point incorporates “AI” at some point in its workflow, so it’s six of one and half dozen of the other. And while I am a mere amateur when it comes to photos, lots of professional photographers use Adobe products in their workflow, either because they’ve been using it for years and don’t want to train on new software (which, again, probably has “AI” in its workflow), or they’re required to use it by their clients because it’s the “industry standard.” A program being the “industry standard” is one reason I use Microsoft Word, and now that program is riddled with “AI.” At a certain point, if you are using 21st century computer-based tools, you are using “AI” of some sort, whether you want to or not. Some of it you can turn off or opt out of. Some of it you can’t.

(Let’s not even talk about my Google Pixel Phone, which is now so entirely festooned with “AI” that it’s probably best to think of it as an “AI” computer with a phone app, than the other way around.)

This is why earlier in this piece, I talk about the “final product” being “AI”-free — because it’s almost impossible at this point to avoid “AI” in computer-based tools, even if one wants to. Also, given the fact that “AI” is a marketing rather than a technical term, what the definition of “AI” is, and what is an acceptable level of use, will change from one person to another. Is Word’s spellcheck “AI”? Is Photoshop’s Spot Healing brush tool? Is Logic Pro’s session drummer? At what point does a creative tool become inimical to creation?

(On a much larger industrial scale, this will be an extremely interesting question when it comes to animation, CGI and VFX. “AI” is already here in video games with DLSS, which upscales and adds frames to games; if similar tech isn’t already being used for inbetweening in animation, it’s probably not going to be long until it is.)

Again, I’m not interested in being, nor have the time to be, the “AI” police. I choose to focus on the final product and the human element in that, because that is honestly the only part of the process that I, and most people, can see. I’m certainly not going to penalize a creative person because Adobe or Microsoft or whomever incorporated “AI” into a tool they need to use in order to do their work. I would be living in a glass house if I threw that particular stone.

9. It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.” Do I use “AI” in my text? No. Do I think it makes sense to have an understanding of where “AI” is at, to know how the companies who make it create a business case for it, and to keep tabs on how it’s actually being used in the real word? Yes. So I check out latest iterations of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Copilot, etc (I typically steer clear of Grok if only because I’m not on the former Twitter anymore) and the various services and capabilities they offer.

The landscape of “AI” is still changing rapidly, and if you’re still at the “lol ‘AI’ can’t draw hands” level of thinking about the tech, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage, particularly if you’re a creative person. Know your enemy, or at least, know the tools your enemies are making. Again, I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist. But it doesn’t have to be at that level of ability to wreak profound and even damaging changes to creative fields. We see that already.

One final, possibly heretical thought:

10. Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it. I know at least a couple of people who were recently hired for work, who were told they needed to be fluent in computer systems that had “AI” as part of their workflow. Did they want or need to use those systems to do the actual job they were hired for? Almost certainly not! Did that matter? Nope! Was it okay that their need to eat and pay rent outweighed their ethical annoyance/revulsion with “AI” and the fact it was adding more work, not less, onto their plate? I mean (waves at the world), you tell me. Personally speaking, I’m not the one to tell a friend that they and their kid and cat should live in a Toyota parked at a Wal-Mart rather than accept a corporate directive made by a mid-level manager with more jargon in their brain than good sense. I may be a softie.

Be that as it may, to the extent you can avoid “AI,” do so, especially if you have a creative job, where it’s almost always just going to get in your way. Your fans, the ones that exist and the ones you have yet to make, will appreciate that what they get from you is from you. That’s what people mostly want from art: Entertainment and connection. You will always be able to do that better than “AI.” There is no statistical model that can create what is uniquely you.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/14/10-thoughts-on-ai-february-2026-edition/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59456

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/13/a-friday-mlem-for-you/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59452

Saja is turning into a handsome devil. Smudge is unimpressed nevertheless.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/13/a-friday-mlem-for-you/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59452

https://xkcd.com/3207/

https://xkcd.com/3207/