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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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It’s the one at my hotel, and it doesn’t look like it’s been used the entire summer long. Which kinda makes sense, this is an airport hotel, after all, and thus, I expect, not a hotbed of competitive traveling beach sports. I still give the hotel points for trying.
ConGregate 12 (the convention I was at this weekend) is now in the books and I had an entirely lovely time. Tomorrow is a long drive home. Hopefully a boring drive. When you’re driving for seven and half hours, you don’t want drama. See you all when I get home.
— JS
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We all hear voices in our brain, but what if they were coming from your other heads?!? Author John Wiswell’s main character is a multi-headed dragon with a lot of contradicting opinions. Though a dragon, you may find his inner turmoil more relatable than you’d expect. Take flight in his Big Idea for The Dragon Has Some Complaints.
JOHN WISWELL:
A dragon is a lot like ADHD.
I’ve always loved dragons. How can you not like dragons? They’re like if someone glued all the cool parts of dinosaurs together and then let them barf fire. Anyone who’s ever been stuck in traffic admires the incendiary nature of dragons.
Most interesting to me are many-headed dragons. They’re referenced in ancient Greek classics, suggesting we’ve always had such things on our minds. Yet in most stories, the many-headed dragon is just a single-minded critter with more mouths that they can use to bite the protagonist. You’re lucky if one head on a dragon’s shoulders gets a personality. Much less all of them.
In one fundamental way, dragons being treated as though they have no intelligence is similar to the experience of those of us with ADHD. We are spoken about like we aren’t human beings, but rather are a cognitive condition with legs, which needs medication in order to be talked about as a person. As though we have no creativity or insight until we sit still. I’ve done this dance since I was a little kid with too many books open at once on my floor. It only got worse once I got a browser and started opening tabs.
Writing a many-headed dragon gave me a great outlet for reflecting on how my brain works. Garrodigh, my dragon, would have several heads with distinctly different opinions about what to do with his wings. He’d at once be a singular “he” and a plural “they,” both true, just circumstantial.
The head growing out of his bottom-most neck, named Bottomhead, is basically a feral animal, focusing on sunbathing and lunch. He’s the sort of creature who would chase a cannonball across the island to bite it.
In the middle, Centerhead is a curmudgeon, focused on all the ways the world has hurt him and puts him in jeopardy, begrudging humanity for injuring him and costing him the power of flight. If he could, he’d blast dragonfire over the entire human world. Fire is a great way to express your feelings.
Upperhead (guess where he grows!) is outright delusional, believing he is actually a human being suffering from some traumatic hallucination. Any day now, he’ll snap out of it and the other heads will be gone, and he’ll return to mowing his lawn and eating too much bread.
They spend the opening chapter fighting in a way that will be familiar to some readers. See, I don’t just talk to myself. I argue with myself. My brain isn’t big enough to house all the contradictory opinions banging around in there. They spill out of me. The habit of talking to myself was great practice for being a writer, since writing is just talking to yourself quietly.
A funny thing happens when you literalize this by having multiple contradictory consciousnesses striving for control of a single body. It helps you see how parts of the same person can clash. You also see how they reconcile, and how you only grow when those parts work together. You don’t grow by silencing yourself. You grow in tandem with yourself, both singular and plural.
Garrodigh has been through a lot. He was once a four-headed dragon, but poor Lefty was blown off by a human’s cannon in the same incident that injured their wings. That trauma still echoes through all three of the surviving heads. Losing a part of himself is part of what’s put the rest of him in such strife. What’s made some parts of him seek vengeance, while other parts just want to understand why the humans keep going to war with each other.
There are enormous questions ahead for him. Can he pull himself together enough to face his injuries and possibly fly again someday? Can he trust anyone again? What place does he have in this world?
They’re the sort of questions you could have conflicting opinions about. By asking them, maybe you’ll see some of yourself in a dragon.
The Dragon Has Some Complaints: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books A Million|Bookshop.org
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It’s very warm here today, but at least there is shade.
I spent the day traveling here in order to be part of the ConGregate science fiction convention this weekend. I will have panels and do other stuff! If you’re in the neighborhood, come on down.
— JS
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Out here in the boonies, many of our neighbors have golf carts that they use for very short trips not on the official roads, like going to visit friends, or hauling their trash cans from their houses at the end of a long driveway to the curb, and then back again. Krissy has always wanted a golf cart, and, now that we have the second garage and thus covered space for such a vehicle, she has one. Here you see her modeling it with her friend Karen.
She is very happy to have a golf cart of her own, and I am very happy she is very happy, because I know how much she paid for it and therefore will not feel too bad the next time I buy a guitar.
— JS
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I like to play pickleball with my mom in the mornings. It’s not an everyday thing, but when we do, I enjoy it. Every time we play, I always notice the ants on the court. It’s really only when I bend down to pick the ball up, but I always see them scurrying away from the bright yellow sphere and the bottom of my sneakers.
I try not to think about how many of them I accidentally step on as I play a match or two. How many do I crush as I return my mother’s serve? Though I try not to linger on the thoughts of killing ants, I pick up the ball so often I’m given no break from the train of thought.
I don’t want to cause harm, I just want to play the game. But by playing, I’m inherently causing suffering. I want to enjoy my activity, but I’m ending the lives of innocent creatures. Well, as innocent as an ant can be, I suppose. The morality of killing ants, or bugs in general, is surely debatable, but I just know that it’s not something I particularly want to be an active part of. And yet I am consistently.
It’s not lost on me that pickleball isn’t the only time this kind of thing happens. When I run through the grass at home with my dog, what am I stepping on without even realizing? She bounds throughout the yard, happy as can be, no thoughts given to what crawls beneath her paws. Why can’t I be as ignorant, and as happy?
I’ve hit fireflies while driving, their smeared glow fading on my windshield. Once something beautiful, twinkling in the tree lines, ended by my hand. Not directly, necessarily, but certainly not indirectly. More directly than not, really, but lacking intention, of course. But does intention matter in these situations? Maybe it does, but the pulverized bug would never know it if it did.
The raccoon’s eyes shine in my headlights as the inevitable bump makes me sick to my stomach. Why did it have to be in the road just then? Why didn’t it move? Why did it have to be so dark out? It’s not fair, but the raccoon does not dwell on the concept of fairness. It suffers and dies. I can only hope the latter comes sooner rather than later.
A sea turtle 2,000 miles away chokes on my plastic straw. It was from my iced latte, the kind I get every day. It’s from a local shop! I’m doing my part to support businesses in my community! They get their beans from a brand that does not believe in such community. The beans have been touched by enslaved hands I will never see. I got coconut flavor!
Today I tried a new recipe. It had blueberries in it. Earlier this week I saw a video on Instagram of immigrant farm workers being detained by ICE. It was a blueberry farm. My cookies turned out amazing. I’ll share the recipe online and tune out the cries of those being persecuted the best I can.
I say all this like it’s revolutionary to realize that your existence inherently causes suffering. That our society is based on suffering. It’s not new, it’s not revolutionary, and I’ve known it for as long as I can remember. We all know it.
Despite the monotony of both the world’s suffering and of my life that benefits from such egregiousness, it still eats at me. Some days more than others. Today is one of those days.
From the ants on the court to the literal slaves and the wage slaves that made my coffee, my day is made all the better by partaking in the suffering of others. It’s a heavy burden to be alive. To live a normal life. A normal life of pickleball and cartons of blueberries. I hate it so but I don’t want to die. I don’t want to give up coffee or berries or pickleball with my mom.
I am just lucky to be the one who benefits and not the one who suffers.
-AMS
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Though the author of The Curve of the World has passed, her story lives on. Her editor, Nisi Shawl, is here to take us through what she believes Vonda N. McIntyre’s Big Idea was. Let’s have a look, and pay our respects in the process.
NISI SHAWL (EDITOR):
We may never truly know what the Big Idea behind Vonda N. McIntyre’s last novel was. Two weeks after she completed a final draft of that novel, The Curve of the World, Vonda died. We can ask ourselves what she was trying to do as many times as we want, but the file drawers full of notes she left behind are empty of the answer to that question.
Vonda wrote change-the-world science fiction. Like her friend, Clarion classmate, and Pacific Northwest neighbor Octavia Butler, she faced life’s challenges head on and with a high-functioning imagination as her tool and weapon, and rigorous research as her resource. Which maybe comes across as a little grim?
But apply all that discipline to speculating about the bull-leaping, bare-breasted matriarchs of long-vanished Minoan civilization and (if you’re Vonda) you get fascinating results: a mind-stretching, 408-page epic. Starting their ocean voyage from the homey Mediterranean waters surrounding the Cretan archipelago, the trade-and-diplomacy-focused crew of the Flying Fish sail halfway around the globe, encountering a sea monster, volcanoes, a mummy king, and slave-driving pirates as the ship makes her way to the North Pacific’s Neah Bay.
Which sounds like your standard adventure tale, right? But what’s so intensely cool about The Curve of the World is how it’s not that. Not standard. Not at all. It’s not a Hero’s Journey-type deal in which our protagonists conquer foreign lands by virtue of their physical might or intellectual superiority or due to some inherent divine right.
Because unlike, for instance, the ostensibly Christian conquistadores claiming ownership of Florida and Mexico and basically half the Western Hemisphere, the Minoans aboard Flying Fish represent a culture based on cooperation, trust, and mutualism. It practiced DEI from the get-go.
My best guess is that this was Vonda’s Big Idea: How would a deeply egalitarian society interact with other sorts of societies? Vonda’s alt-Minoans parlay with bloody-handed Mesoamericans. They trade peacefully with sword-wielding tribes of Amazon warriors. They maintain their fairness, their inclusiveness, their love of interdependence, their core feminist principles, all this in the face of murderous aggression. So that’s what I think it was.
And why should it matter what I think Vonda thought? Well, the way the editorial process for this book went, it matters quite a lot. As author and Aqueduct Press founder L. Timmel Duchamp puts it, I stood “in loco Vondae.”
You see, the manuscript file that gets turned in to a book’s publisher may include the word “final” in its name, but it’s not genuinely final at that point. If you’ve ever had a book you wrote published you know how these things go. The copyeditor has questions about spelling names consistently throughout the text; the managing editor has questions about a character’s locations and travel times. So on and so forth. Aqueduct asked those questions of me.
To me that meant I needed to immerse myself in as much Vonda-ness as I could conjure up. I read and re-read her old and new work. I fondled my eight examples of the beaded sea-creatures she crocheted ceaselessly, gorgeous and glittering creations she generously bestowed upon her family, friends, and fen. And I dallied in memories of meeting her and witnessing firsthand her no-nonsense approach to life, her restaurant recommendations and pronouncements on crows and prowess with video cameras.
Then, faced with page after page of queries about Curve, I did my best to answer as she would have answered and choose as she would have chosen. I did my best to first absorb and then project her voice, and along with everyone else involved, to preserve it.
Maybe if you read The Curve of the World you can tell me whether we got that part right. Is that Vonda talking to you from beyond death? And what about my guess? Is it at all accurate to say that the Big Idea behind this book is how an extremely woke civilization can triumph over violent authoritarians? And is that hope I see really there?
The Curve of the World: Amazon
gwynminim_calibre. I fear that I cannot write anymore. I'm really worried about this. It's reminding me a lot of not being able to write after my sister died, and man, that took me over a decade to be able to do more than a Yuletide story or two. 😬scalziwhatever_feedYesterday, I wanted a canister of nuts as a snack from Kroger, and I bought this Blue Diamond Honey Roasted Almond, Cashew, & Pistachio Mix. I love honey roasted nuts, and cashews and pistachios are two of my favorite nuts, so it sounded like a great mix. It was ten dollars.
When I opened it at home, I looked in the canister and immediately felt like what I was seeing was 80% almonds. I could’ve guessed as much. Everyone knows cashews are pistachios are the real prize here. But then I wondered, was the mix really 80% almonds? It was time to count.
I dumped out the entire canister in a bowl and sorted through all three types of nuts. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this a huge waste of time? Well, it’s not that huge. It only took like five minutes. But… yeah, maybe. Anyways, guess how many there were of each nut?
Cashews came first, and I counted just about 65 cashews. I say just about because there’s always half-pieces or broken chunks. But I can confidently say that it contained roughly 65 cashews. As for the pistachios, there were more than I expected, getting up to 80 pistachios. They’re little, after all. Finally, the moment of truth. How many almonds made up this undoubtedly mostly-almond-mix? 150 almonds. My canister was just over half almonds, with the other two nuts making up around 25% each.
So, basically, there were twice as many almonds as there were the other two nuts. Absolutely fascinating. I was wrong about the mix being 80% almonds, but it’s definitely almondlicious.
I am curious to see if anyone else who gets this mix has a similar result. That’s all I have to say on the matter. Good day.
-AMS
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The world makes up stories and stories make up the world. Author Arvind Ethan David aims to challenge the narrative of some of these stories in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Great Game. Follow along as he tells you about some of the greats, and questions if they’re really all they’re cracked up to be.
ARVIND ETHAN DAVID:
I Broke into Someone Else’s Universe. Here’s What I Found
In The Great Game, my hero, Balvinder Dev Singh, an Indian war veteran and aspiring British barrister, comes head-to-head with Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill and a feral teenager who may or may not be John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke Manor. My intention in the novel was to write an original thriller that was both satisfying in its own right, and perhaps has something interesting to say about empire, colonialism and the canon of British imperial literature.
Except, I knew I was running the risk that it might also look and sound a lot like fanfiction.
In my writing career so far, I’ve spent a lot of time adapting the work of writers whose work I revere. From Douglas Adams to Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, and Neil Gaiman, I’ve been privileged to play in some big, extraordinary universes created by legends. There is nothing like writing in the marginalia of a maestro to force you to raise your game. To write a joke about physics that can stand next to one Douglas Adams wrote, to craft a simile that can hold its own next to Wodehouse, or to describe a dame who Raymond Chandler first described—these are hair-raising, teeth-grinding experiences, and I have the scars from surviving them.
Early in the process of writing the novel, that challenge was made by some who I love and respect — a bestselling author friend and my editor — both of whom suggested that my book might be viewed as less serious or less original because I was borrowing other people’s characters and settings. Basically they said, “folks might think you’re just doing derivative fanfic.”
That was of course not my intention, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but ultimately, I had to do what I had to do. To me, the whole point was to play in this particular canon. Here’s why.
Firstly, the idea that borrowing another’s universe is derivative is, it turns out, a comparatively recent convention, born of modern copyright law and perhaps some post-Romantic notion of the lone original genius. For most of the recorded history of literature, it was not the exception but the norm.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a kind of mash-up of all Greek myth. The Arthurian legends are the result of a constantly reinvented mixtape, spun by successive generations of authors and poets — from Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century to Malory in the fifteenth, to T. H. White and Lev Grossman in our own era — each reinventing the legend through the prism of their times, none of them having invented the universe they so beautifully inhabited.
Shakespeare, of course, made up almost none of his plots or characters, pillaging history, myth, and the work of other writers indiscriminately and without apology or acknowledgement—and we don’t consider him a less original or serious writer because of it.
Indeed, if you step back and think about what a story is, it makes total sense. Stories, in evolutionary terms, are the common currency, the shared atmosphere of culture and civilization. From every myth of creation to the excuse you give yourself for being habitually late, stories are the psyche’s scaffolding with which we navigate existence. So, of course, it makes sense that certain myths, certain stories become pervasive in our culture and, once pervasive, prove more, not less, fertile ground in which new narratives can be planted.
I would argue that imperial adventure fiction—the breadth of writing from Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, via Arthur Conan Doyle to Edgar Rice Burroughs—is one such mythic narrative. It is larger than any single author and larger than any single character, but the characters who inhabit it remain, a century or more since their birth, powerful and potent in our collective imagination: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Mowgli, Kim, Captain Nemo.
The reason is that this body of work shares one animating instinct: to glamorize and justify, explain and contextualize the imperial system—the system that enabled Britain to create and maintain its empire with sword and fire for almost 200 years. Edward Said made this argument best in Orientalism. This is not to suggest that every author or every character was an ardent imperialist, although Kipling certainly was.
Today, whilst the British Empire has come and gone, the notion of empire remains an animating instinct in our global political moment, whether we speak of the American hegemon in decline, China in ascendance, or the dangerous death throes of the Russian bear. That is why these stories remain as potent and resonant as ever.
In The Great Game, I’m having a conversation with this tradition, interrogating the canon and asking the question: can the form of the imperialist adventure mystery hold when inhabited by a brown protagonist, by a colonial subject standing in its center and taking on its titans with his own ferocious rage and questioning intelligence?
For example, I have a scene in which Balvinder confronts Dr. Watson by pointing out that his account of The Sign of the Four displays appalling ignorance about India and Indians—that the orient and orientals in these adventure stories are always treated as the object, as the other, never as the subject and certainly not as the hero. Which doesn’t make them less good stories, just more blinkered ones.
I’m also asking whether I, as a brown author, as a person of color who enters the canon from the outside—who has always loved Sherlock unthinkingly as a child but now finds that loved tainted by the realization that the order that Sherlock seeks to uphold is the order of the Empire — can write a story that both honors the great detective and holds him accountable?
If I contribute to the canon, have I changed what the canon is, introducing a few drops of my own seven percent solution of decolonization into an imperialist mix?
I don’t know, inject it and see.
The Great Game: Amazon|Bookshop|Barnes & Noble
scalziwhatever_feedIf you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you might remember one of my posts from just over five years ago showcasing a brand called Waxing Kara that sold honey, candles, tea, and skincare products. Well, I’m happy to say their brand is doing better than ever, and has actually changed to Bee Inspired. Same great small-batch honey and quality products, just with a new name.
Because of their new name and website, the owner actually emailed me to reconnect and see if I wouldn’t mind replacing the links in my old post with links to their current website. Of course, that was no problem, and if you look at the old post you’ll see every link has been switched over to their new page.
As a thank you for this (very easy) task, I was generously gifted some really amazing products that I am extremely grateful for, and I just wanted to say thank you to Bee Inspired for the kind gift, and tell you all that I still highly recommend this brand, just like I did back then!
One of my favorite things about Bee Inspired is that from the beginning, they’ve done so much good for the pollinators of our world. They plant 40 acres of indigenous wildflowers every year on their 102-acre farm and invest in pollinator habitats to support their local ecosystem, not just for their own bees. This includes their partnership with One Tree Planted to help reforestation efforts in Appalachia.
On top of that, Bee Inspired is partnered with a nonprofit called VisionWorkshops, which teaches at-risk youth photojournalism skills. They also have a scholarship fund at Maryland Institute College of Art, which has helped over thirty students so far.
I think it’s really rad when businesses invest back in their communities and the world at large in so many different ways. If you’d like to read all about their charitable efforts, you can check that out here.
Plus, if you’re interested in planting a pollinator garden in your own yard, they have a blog article over that. I went ahead and gave this a read because I have been wanting to do something like this for a while! I feel extra motivated to now.
With all that being said, let’s take a look at the products I received.
First up, I got two lovely tea blends, the Blue Butterfly and the Midnight Berry:
I can definitely see myself using the butterfly pea flower tea for a special cocktail, as it is highly regarded for its beautiful color. I am actually grateful that both of these are caffeine-free because I’m trying (not that hard, but still) to cut down a bit on caffeine.
Of course, what goes better with tea than a honey lollipop to sweeten it (there’s eight to a bag)?
I feel that these lavender honey lollipops were extra thoughtful, as I mentioned in my first post that the lavender ones were ones that I really wanted to try.
And to match, a lovely jar of lavender honey:
Do you know how good this is gonna be on my charcuterie boards?! Something I find really amazing about this honey is that it’s completely traceable. Spanish lavender honey, derived completely from the nectar of the bees with no lavender flowers added in post. Seasonally dependent and weather dependent, it’s clear to see why this single-origin varietal is considered a Royale.
Switching to self-care, I was gifted their Sea + Tea body scrub and body cream duo:
This stuff smells exactly like a spa, clean and herbaceous. It’s perfect for someone who doesn’t like food-scented body care. Honestly the profile is very unisex.
This scrub means business! I absolutely love a coarse scrub. So many scrubs I’ve tried aren’t rough enough and just feel like they slide right off without exfoliating anything. I was pleasantly surprised to find that once I rinsed off the scrub, I was actually left with a really soft, almost moisturized feel on my skin. But I decided to try the body cream anyways, and I’m happy to report it is creamy and hydrating without being greasy. Also, a little goes a long way.
Finally, I got this tinted lip balm trio, and one untinted:
This is their collection of bold tints, but they have a more natural set, too. I really loved just how soft the untinted lip balm felt. It glided on so nicely and my lips just immediately felt so soft, plus there’s no weird taste like with Chapstick. It is definitely going to become my new purse lip balm.
One of my favorite things about Bee Inspired is their sets and bundles, because they know that their products are perfect for gifting for all sorts of occasions. So much so that they have an entire page dedicated to party favors for when you need to give a lot of people something small (but nice!). I think a lot of care and intention goes into putting together each bundle. Like it’s nice to know there was thought behind each product selected for a certain kit.
As a nice bonus, there’s discounts for bundling some items, like 15% off three candles, three jars of tea, or three bags of honey lollipops, 10% off three jars of honey, 20% off three petite body care sets, you get the idea.
They also have free shipping on orders of $85+. Of course, if online shopping isn’t quite your speed, they have a beautiful retail store in Maryland. Here’s a video tour:
I want to visit so badly! It’s only a 499 mile drive, what do you guys think? Could be a cute weekend getaway to Maryland.
All in all, Bee Inspired is a really amazing brand that is woman-owned, sustainability-focused, cruelty-free, artisanal, and charitable. I am so thankful for the amazing gift they sent me, and I can’t wait to buy more from them in the future.
What flavor of honey would you try? Are you a body scrub enjoyer? Let me know in the comments, be sure to follow Bee Inspired on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
scalziwhatever_feedIf you read this site regularly, then you’ll know in the past year there’s been a marked increase in “AI” spam and scams designed to try to con writers (generally, and in the emails that come here, me specifically) into sending money off to strangers for various marketing services. At this point these emails are so predictable that the vast majority of them are immediately sent to my spam folder, and those that still manage to show up in my email proper are recognizable by their subject lines, and are then manually punted into spam unread. It’s all very predictable and I assure you that no one — no one — has ever been so interested in “marketing” my work as these spam emails have claimed to be in these last several months.
Aside from their predictable subject lines and verbiage, there’s also one other thing that these spam emails have in common: 99.9% come from GMail accounts. Once in a blue moon one will come from yahoo or aol or some other general mail service, but they are a rarity. Almost all of them are GMail. One one hand, congrats to Google, I suppose, for cornering the stand-alone email market so completely that even scammers are impressed with its ease of use. Surely that is some sort of sign of success.
On the other hand, if you are a person who relies on GMail as your primary email, this means that if you are trying to send me mail, you now run a much higher chance of being deposited into my spam folder. So much of the email I get from GMail accounts at this point is spam that an actual Gmail email, from an actual person, is statistically relatively rare. To be fair, if you write that email to me yourself with your own little fingers, your chances of hitting my actual inbox are pretty decent. But if you used GMail’s onboard “AI” to “help” you write that email, you are likely going directly to the spam folder. The GMail spam filter is now trained to recognize “AI” slop sentences, even those written by GMail itself. Yes, there is probably irony there.
And if you are an actual business concern, using a GMail account to try to reach me about something regarding my books? 100% going to the spam folder. Every time. I’m sorry scammers have ruined things for you, but that’s where we are at the moment.
This fact about GMail gives me no joy. I have had a GMail account basically since they’ve been available, and I use the GMail interface as the front end for my john@scalzi.com email account. It’s handy and useful! But at this point it’s been so swamped with scammers, and so much of the email I get from the domain is junk, that every email I get from GMail now is suspect until proven otherwise. I can’t imagine I am the only writer, or person, in this situation these days.
I have long been a proponent of writers and other creators having their own domains, personalized emails and websites (and other people and businesses too), and while I understand getting one’s own domain and email address is not the easiest thing in the world to set up, even now, the growing spamification of GMail is actually a very good reason to do it. For one thing, it’s going to be the difference between tripping my spam filter or getting into my inbox. As noted above, GMail now goes into the spam filter more often than not, and while I try to comb through the spam filter before deleting the whole queue, I will inevitably miss things.
For another thing, an email on a dedicated domain that corresponds to your name/business is going to go a long way to verifying that you are who you say you are, rather than just another spammer — especially now, because lots of spammers are pretending to be writers and other creators or organizations from impostor GMail accounts. I can’t assume anymore that someone contacting me from a GMail account is legitimately who they say they are. I mean, I got GMail just yesterday from “Margaret Atwood,” wanting to tell me how much she loved my book as a prelude to trying to suck money out of my wallet. I would love for the actual Margaret Atwood to tell me she enjoyed my work. I rather doubt she needs my money. And I very much doubt that this GMail account was legit.
All of which is to say: Please get your own domain for your email. Especially if you are a writer or creator, but even more especially if you are an ongoing business concern. Bluntly, your own domain and email are table stakes for businesses. The spam problem isn’t going to get any better, folks. I’ve been online now for 35 years. It’s never once gotten better since I’ve been here.
Also, don’t use “AI” to write your emails. My spam filter will grab your email really fast if you do. Use your own brain and fingers.
Finally, Google, if you’re listening, and I know you are because you scrape this site enough: Fix your damn GMail spam problem. It’s ruining one of your signature products. Not just for you. For all the rest of us, too.
— JS
deird1scalziwhatever_feedWhat now?
South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham Dead: And it must be said, not especially missed by most people on Bluesky and Threads, although I have to admit not going to X to see how the bots there are reacting to his passing. I remember him mostly for not having a spine with regard to Trump, but in that he’s not materially different than nearly any other Republican, inside of Washington or outside of it. As far as I know there has been no cause of death announced; the more responsible speculation I’ve seen suggests a blood clot and/or deep vein thrombosis caused by the extensive travel he’s recently undertaken, most recently to Ukraine. We’ll know eventually, I would assume. He was 71, there are lots of ways for a 71-year-old to suddenly die of mostly natural causes.
His death complicates matters for the GOP in South Carolina, since they have to now hold a special nominating session to replace him on the ballot. I understand Nancy Mace is making noises to get his senate chair, for the interim and/or for as the new candidate. I don’t know what South Carolinians have done to deserve that, but I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, he’s dead and I’m sure someone somewhere is sad. Others are saying “Cool, do McConnell next.” 2026 is year not exactly brimming with tender sympathy for sycophants.
Meta walks back its plan to let people use their “AI” to do non-consensual horrible things with your Instagram pictures: Mind you, this is not how Meta itself would have characterized its plan to let anyone do anything with your photos without telling you. It says it was to “provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way.” This is a mash of words that if it means anything, means the opposite of what Meta was actually doing. The backlash was intense enough that even the sociopaths who are running Meta couldn’t ignore it, which is good, but don’t worry, I’m 100% certain they’ll find another avenue to make sure awful people will be able to use Meta’s “AI” in shameful and defaming ways. A business model is a business model.
Live-Action Moana is a bit of a flop: Which I’m not entirely surprised about? It’s been slightly less than a decade since the original came out, and there was an apparently lackluster but rather financially-successful sequel a couple of years ago, which would have driven viewership back toward the original anyway, so the pent-up desire wasn’t there for it like it apparently was for the “live-action” Lilo and Stitch from last year. I would have waited, but then, I wouldn’t be doing “live action” retreads in the first place, so there’s a reason I’m not a Disney high-up.
Don’t feel too bad for Disney, since the new Spider-Man movie is a couple of weeks away and its first weekend will likely cover any losses Disney will incur from Moana underperforming. Anyway, the Moana marketing juggernaut, where the actual money is for Disney in this franchise at this point, will continue unabated. Even an underperforming “live-action” Moana will do serviceably enough as advertising in this particular endeavor. Disney will be fine. Disney is always fine.
I do love the original, though.
— JS
scalziwhatever_feedThese days, Sam Bisbee is an Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated producer of film and television, but at the turn of the century, he was trying his hand at being a musician, releasing a few alt-rock albums that I thought were pretty good, even if rock and roll stardom eventually eluded him. One of my favorite songs of his from that era is “Miracle Car,” which was a catchy, poppy song with ambiguous lyrics. It feels like a love song, but I don’t think it actually is; you don’t ask your eternal love to “pollute you,” or, at least, I don’t. Nevertheless, a pretty good song! I decided to try to cover it.
Given the relative obscurity of the song (the original version has racked up 1K views in 11 years), it’s entirely possible that this cover of mine will be the first one I’ve essayed that most of you have not heard the original first. It is, of course, absolutely worth checking out, because Sam Bisbee does a better job with his own song, and also, his version is actually a duet. I did not do a duet. It’s just me. Sorry.
Anyway, don’t feel too bad for Sam Bisbee; his Emmy win and Oscar nod suggest his backup plan of working in film and TV has done all right for him. Good on ya, Sam.
— JS
scalziwhatever_feed
How many weeds do you have to whack before the weeds tell you to knock it off? In author Jo Miles new sci-fi novel, there might be more than meets the eye to a stubborn, vegetation filled planet. Grab a machete and hack your way through the Big Idea for The Final Chronicle of Yeneh.
JO MILES:
The Final Chronicle of Yeneh is a science fiction story that’s a love letter to portal fantasies, for all of us cynical grownups who secretly miss that sense of wonder in our lives.
When you were a kid, did you ever go looking for portals to other worlds in your home, in old wardrobes and little-used closets? I did. At a certain age, after tearing through the Narnia series, I searched every corner of my (extremely normal, suburban) house. Spoiler: I didn’t find anything. But that daydream of finding my way into a more magical world never fully left me.
A little older, I fell in love with Star Trek, and started to dream about traveling the stars to discover strange new worlds and new forms of life. I soon learned that visiting other stars wasn’t going to happen during my lifetime, and training to be an astronaut sounded like way too much work, anyway. So I wrote stories instead.
Two separate genres. Two kinds of wondrous new worlds. As a writer, I got intrigued by the parallels between them—but couldn’t ignore the problematic parts that went over my younger self’s head.
Why exactly did the people of Narnia, freed from their evil queen, now need four British school children to rule over them? Were none of them up to the task of forming a government?
And as those new planets got terraformed and colonized, what happened to the life already there, that weird, gloriously alien nature?
I set out to write a book about the problems of terraforming and space colonization, and the possibilities of undoing that harm—rewilding in space. But The Final Chronicle of Yeneh found its heart when I connected those themes to the sense of wonder from portal fantasy.
The main character, Ada, is helping to terraform her family’s new planet and bemoaning the viciously resilient local plant life when a visiting scientist starts asking pesky questions about those “plants.” Could there be more to them than these colonizers think?
Ada doesn’t want to see any problems that might interfere with her family’s new enterprise, but as the scientist pushes her for access to study them, she starts to see inexplicable similarities between the native life on this planet and the beloved portal fantasies that she grew up on, written by her own ancestor (the in-world series called The Chronicles of Yeneh; hence my book’s title). She discovers that her family has committed serious wrongs stretching far back in their history across two planets. As her grandfather pushes toward terraforming the native life out of existence, Ada has some hard decisions to make.
In the process, though, Ada gets the adventure that she dreamed of as a little girl. She gets to explore her own magical new world, full of wonder and delight despite the darkness. And she makes friends, both with new life forms and with the visiting scientist who forces her to see to what’s happening in front of her.
I wanted the native beings, the yeneheh, to be appropriately wondrous, too. I love a truly alien alien, one that the human characters struggle to understand, but the best first contact stories show how we can bridge that gap. We humans don’t have a great track record of recognizing intelligence that operates differently than our own, or even different styles of intelligence within our own species. Terraforming an alien planet that’s “just” full of “plants” could easily mean wiping out an intelligence that we simply don’t recognize yet.
I was conscious, as colonization grew into a bigger and bigger theme, that this story could easily get preachy. Or it could be a real downer. I didn’t want that. Yes, Ada needs to take responsibility and make amends for her family’s wrongdoing, but I stayed focused on making this an ode to the stories I loved as a child—portal fantasies like Narnia, and strange new worlds like Star Trek—while taking on the complications I can see in them as an adult.
Writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh helped me reawaken a sense of wonder, discovery, and empathy that can be in short supply these days, and wrapped it up with a sense of justice. I hope it does the same for you.
The Final Chronicle of Yeneh: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powells|Horned Lark Press
Author’s socials: Website|Newsletter|Bluesky|Instagram
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