Family Friendly Journal

Posted by John Scalzi

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The foliage looks impressive even from far away.

Reminder that tomorrow I will be at the Green Mountain Book Festival, talking about, and then signing, books! Come see me and other very fabulous writers talk about books and writing and stuff. It’ll be fun, promise.

— JS

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/16/the-big-idea-jennifer-estep-8/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57783

Much like an oak tree from an acorn, author Jennifer Estep had one small scene that ended up turning into the fifth book in her Galactic Bonds series. Come along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Only Rogue Actions, and let her set the scene that started the whole book.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

Sometimes in writing, a random image, thought, or phrase can spark a story, a book, or even an entire world.

I’ve had this happen a couple of times in my writing career, most recently with Only Rogue Actions, book #5 in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series. 

As I was writing Only Cold Depths, the previous book in the series, one image kept popping into my mind over and over again—a woman in a long, flowing white gown running through cold, thick white fog, desperately searching for something (or someone). 

Why this particular image? I have no idea. It just appeared to me one day and then kept coming back. Maybe it was my writerly subconscious at work, already thinking ahead to the next book. Maybe I drove through the fog one morning, and the trip got warped and stuck in my mind. Maybe I just thought it was a cool image. Or maybe I had just eaten too much sugar that day. 

But somewhere along the way, I started really thinking about the image and asking myself all the usual writing/story questions:

• Who is this woman?
• Why is she stuck in the fog?
• What obstacles are in her way?
• Who is she trying to find?
• Is she running toward something/someone?
• Is she running away from something/someone?
• Or what if she is doing both?

This one image kept playing on a loop in my mind like a ghost wavering in and out of view, but I couldn’t figure out a way to incorporate it into my current book. When I started writing Only Rogue Actions, I thought why not take this one striking image and build my whole book around it? It seemed like the only way to banish this potential story ghost once and for all. 

I ditched the long, flowing gown, stuck my heroine Vesper Quill in the middle of a dangerous training course, and made the thick white fog a literal obstacle that she must navigate through. And just like that, the fog cleared (so to speak), and the rest of the story came into focus. Soon, I was writing scenes of Vesper running through the fog and doing all sorts of things (which I won’t spoil here). 

Not only did I use the fog as an obstacle for Vesper to overcome, but it also gave the story a dim, murky, menacing atmosphere that was oddly similar to a horror movie. So I decided to really embrace the fog and add a few jumpscares into the story. Bonus!

And perhaps best of all, I finally banished this image from my mind . . . although I’m sure a new ghost will arise to take its place and (hopefully) spark another story. 

Authors—Have you ever had an image, thought, or phrase spark a story?

Readers—What are some images that have stayed with you from books, movies, and TV shows?

Only Rogue Actions: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Facebook

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/16/a-year-of-blogging/

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October 1st of 2024 was my official start date to my oh-so-exciting career as a writer, and I thought we could take this opportunity to revisit some of my favorite pieces over this past year.

I have carefully curated a list of ten pieces for you to examine, if you so choose. In no particular order, these are just ten posts that I think showcase my year of writing the best.

1. Celebrating Maialata With Plates & Pages
2. A Night & Day Of Eatin’ Good In San Francisco
3. Scalzi Reads Scalzi: Lock In
4. From Straight Edge to Sloshed
5. A Birthday Bonanza In Columbus
6. Why Licensed Music Works So Well In “Megamind”
7. Close To Home: Grist
8. Throwing A Dinner Party Using “Third Culture Cooking” By Zaynab Issa
9. Brunching It Up At Alcove by MadTree Brewing
10. Unwinding At Panacea Luxury Spa In Columbus

It’s probably pretty obvious based on my selection, but my favorite type of writing to do is food writing, whether it’s restaurant reviews or writing about my experiences with cooking for friends. And spa experiences, apparently.

Let me know if you have any favorites out of this list, or if another piece from this year is one I should’ve put on this list.

Moving forward, what would y’all like to see more of? Movie reviews? Cat pictures? Monday Music recommendations? Let me know, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/16/a-year-of-blogging/

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/15/the-big-idea-caitlin-starling-5/

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Stick out your tongue and say “ahh!” for author Caitlin Starling’s newest gothic novel, The Graceview Patient. Follow along in her Big Idea as she recounts all of her real-life experiences in the wild world of hospitals that led to the inspiration and creation of this medically based horror story.

CAITLIN STARLING:

I feel like I’ve written a variation on this essay several times already, for various purposes and varied audiences. At first, I felt a little embarrassed–for my past works I’ve had a wide spread of topics to write about–but then I realized that this focusing effect really proves there is one Big Idea behind The Graceview Patient:

how stressful, complicated, and terrifying being a patient is.

My own hospitalization was almost routine. I had a kid. I very dramatically had a kid, but even without the drama, I would have been treated to at least a day or two inpatient, and that might have been enough to plant the seed that would become The Graceview Patient. It is a credit to my care team that the drama was manageable; I came out of a thirty-six hour induced labor (iv penicillin sucks, by the way), an urgent c-section with a surprise failed epidural, lots of meds being slammed into my veins very quickly, and some light hemorrhaging, and some strange blood pressure wonkiness feeling pretty okay with what had gone down.

This, I suspect, is not the norm.

And why should it be? Being reminded of the fallibility and idiosyncrasies of your body, being confronted with your mortality, having to cede control and even awareness, occasionally, of your physical self–it sucks. If anybody claims it doesn’t, I have questions. I do not like the missing time I still have between when the midazolam really hit me post-delivery and coming back to a very unreliably shaky body in the recovery room, even though I’m also very glad I was not aware of a lot of went down in the interim. It’s a funny story in hindsight, but it wasn’t great watching the IV tech try to get better access for a blood transfusion and fail because my veins decided to collapse every time she got near. Getting that blood transfusion (eventually) was great for experiential research, and the weird red phone we had to lift off the hook so that the door out of the NICU would slowly open is a fantastic sensory detail, but, on the whole, I wish we could’ve skipped both.

And that’s a lot of what being a patient is, right? Things we wish we could skip over. I was raised accompanying my mother to clinics and visiting her during hospital stays. She had AIDS, and it was the 90s, and she got to try a lot of experimental regimens. Some worked. Some didn’t. Some royally sucked the whole way through. Maybe having a front seat to all of that is part of why I’ve had this fascination with medicine my whole life, or why I feel oddly comforted being inside a hospital even when the specific experiences I have aren’t the best.

At any rate, I think we can safely say that I am drawn to writing about the body. About the medical. I’ve written Victorian surgeons (The Death of Jane Lawrence) and ill-advised enucleations (Last to Leave the Room) and logistically reasonable but capitalistically horrifying bowel surgeries (The Luminous Dead). Now, for The Graceview Patient, I decided to go all in.

It was time to write a hospital book. A gothic, in particular. The hospital as haunted house, as living setting, as mystery and threat and enticement.

And I immediately was hit by a problem. I did not want to make the doctors and nurses and techs and hospital staff evil. That’s often the way it goes: the sinister nurse, the sadistic doctor. Both bother me a great deal. We already have a lot of tension here in the US when it comes to medicine. It seems like, after a brief wave of treating healthcare workers like heroes (note: the definition and practice of that treatment deserves some discussion too, but perhaps not here), we overcorrected all the way towards disdain and distrust. I did not want to add to that.

I did add a potentially sinister pharmaceutical rep (my conscience allows that much), but even with Adam in play, I probably didn’t entirely succeed. I think, to write a hospital horror novel that avoided those tropes entirely, it would need to be from the perspective of the hospital staff themselves. Writing a book about a patient immediately creates an adversarial set up. Meg, our protagonist, has entrusted her care to people who come and go on shift, who have more insight into her body than she does at many points, that can administer medications that influence her perception of the world. And in a horror novel, the whole point is to delve into that adversity. To explicate on the terror and dread and risk of it all.

To reveal exactly how I solved this dilemma is, frustratingly, too far into spoiler territory for a release week essay. But I can say, at minimum: Meg’s care team are, first and foremost, trying to do their jobs. Meg will admit to you in the first chapter that she is unreliable. Oh, she’s trying her best. She is desperate to sort of fact from fiction, reality from hallucination. But she is, to put it bluntly, Going Through It. Even outside the realm of horror fiction, being a patient is extremely difficult. ICU delirium is a real thing. It’s easy to get disoriented, to grow frightened or angry or withdrawn. A good care team takes steps to ameliorate the problem, but there’s a limit. Hospitals are designed to help before they’re designed to be comfortable. The lights will stay on. The noise will continue. No, you can’t sleep through the night. Yes, it will eventually take its toll.

Something might be haunting Meg. Something might be haunting the entire hospital. There may be a grand conspiracy against her. Or…

Or maybe not. Maybe she’s just suffering. Maybe she’s confused. Maybe, in that confusion, she’s perpetrated horrible things herself. Care is difficult. Healing is not linear. And trust is fragile.

The Graceview Patient: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-a-Million|Powell’s|Midslumber Media|Macmillan

Author socials:  Website|Bluesky|Instagram

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/15/housekeeping-note-10-15-25/

It’s a simple one: if you queried about a Big Idea slot for November and haven’t heard back yet, don’t panic, those will be addressed next week. I’m traveling again and punting a number of things until I’m back home. As one does.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/15/housekeeping-note-10-15-25/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/14/the-big-idea-madeleine-e-robins/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57763

Eras in the past had a focus on manners — a word that in itself was a code for something more controlling. For her novel The Doxies Penalty, author Madeleine E. Robins revisits a past era to look what maneuvers behind the manners, a thing much more interesting and possibly more sinister.

MADELEINE E. ROBINS:

One of the tasks adolescents face is trying to parse the rules of the world they live in — and the potential penalties. Not the say-thank-you or don’t-kill-people rules, but the subtler rules that may not be spoken but that can bring your life to a standstill if you run afoul of them. As a kid I knew they were out there, but figuring out what they were? How seriously to take them? What the penalties were? That’s a lot for a person already dealing with algebra and puberty.

So I suppose it makes sense that when I was thirteen and discovered Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels I fell hard. So many weird rules (a young lady at a party mustn’t dance more than twice with the same man! a woman who drives down St James’s St. is clearly a whore!) that made little or no sense to me. It wasn’t until I went from Heyer to Jane Austen that I began to understand. Many of the rules were there to “protect” women—which is to say, to control them. Flouting the rules could have life or death consequences. These odd, frivolous rules meant survival.

It’s all there in Austen: a damaged reputation could ruin a woman’s chances at marriage. And marriage was not just the presumed goal of every nice young woman, but an economic necessity. Mrs. Bennett obsesses over her daughters’ marital prospects because the alternative is a life of genteel poverty. Marianne Dashwood skates on the edge of ruining her reputation by making her feelings for John Willoughby so public. Both Lydia Bennett and Maria Bertram teeter over into disgrace and are only saved from being handed from man to man by the intercession of family and friends; others (Colonel Brandon’s first love, for instance) are not so lucky.

These unspoken rules, and the weight of their consequences, fascinated me. I began study the Regency: the rules and manners, but also the politics, the wars, the Romantic movement, the rising tide of technology. It’s an astonishingly rich period; the more I learned, the more I wanted to play in that sandbox. At the time I started writing, alt-history and mixed genre books were not a thing. To play in that period I did what was expected of me (I followed the rules!) and wrote Regency romances, with the manners and the clothes and the rom-com happy ending. But by the time I finished the fifth of my romances I was done with happy endings. I switched to writing SF.

But I wasn’t done with the Regency.

I conceived of Point of Honour, my first Sarah Tolerance mystery, as a “Regency-noir:” a Dashiell Hammett story with an Austen voice. I wanted to wander the mean streets that Jane Austen didn’t mention and most modern Regency romances ignored. The streets where the rules were broken, and where punishment for breaking them was inevitable.

In noir, the protagonist is “morally compromised”(in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is not a good guy—he’s just better than most of the people around him). But compromised can mean more than one thing. In the 19^th century the word attached to any woman with a damaged reputation, a woman who had had—or was suspected of having had—sex outside of marriage. Or just dancing too often with the same man. Compromised, ruined, soiled, fallen, different terms for the same thing. Sarah Tolerance, Fallen Woman and Agent of Inquiry, has a sometimes uncomfortably solid moral compass, but by the rules of her society she is ruined: unfit for marriage or respectable employment.

How did that happen? At sixteen she fell in love with her brother’s fencing teacher and they eloped. Years later when her lover died, she faced the world with almost no options: the respectable jobs open to genteel women (companion, teacher, governess, seamstress) are closed to her. A fallen woman can be one man’s mistress, or prostitute herself to all comers. Neither fate appeals to Miss Tolerance

So she does an end-run around the consequence of her ruin: she invents the role of agent of inquiry, using her knowledge of genteel society, her facility with a sword, and her considerable wit, to do the jobs private detectives do: find people, answer questions, solve mysteries. She is out on those mean Regency streets, tracing straying husbands and acting as a go-between in sordid transactions, and all the while operating in a sort of liminal space in her society. She sees the way the rules of her world keep even the most virtuous women vulnerable. In 1812 a married woman’s money and property belonged to her husband, she didn’t even have a say in how her children were reared, unless her husband permitted it. Single women had it slightly better, but any money or property they had was likely to be administered by a man (who could do whatever he liked—and have her tossed into a madhouse if she complained). And women outside the pale of respectable society? They had only as much freedom as the system allowed—which meant that the poor and ruined were constantly in danger.

The Doxies Penalty is the fourth book in the Sarah Tolerance series. In the first three, Miss Tolerance has dealt with murderers, spies, criminals and courtesans. By now she has settled into her role as agent of inquiry and sometime protector of the vulnerable. Then an elderly woman comes to her with a problem: she’s been swindled out of the meager savings which she hoped to retire on. And because this particular old woman is Fallen, she has even less recourse than any other victim: no one to fight for her, no family to fall back on. Miss Tolerance takes the case seeking the swindler and discovers that her client isn’t the only one—that he has left a trail of victims, all of them elderly, Fallen, and defenseless. Soon, many of them are dead.

By the rules of their society these women don’t matter. They made their choices, they broke the rules, and now they have had the bad manners to survive to old age. Poverty and death are the expected consequence of a moral lapse.  When a rule-breaker dies, the Law shrugs. Society shrugs.

Miss Tolerance will not. Even if she has to break the rules.

The Doxies Penalty: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/13/the-big-idea-catherine-asaro-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57743

The motto for the Olympics translates to “Faster, Higher, Stronger” — but in Gold Dust, author Catherine Asaro takes athletic competition to heights even the greatest of Olympians might not have ever dreamed of.

CATHERINE ASARO:

With Gold Dust, I wanted to explore sports in the future, track and field especially. My interest in the subject has a long history. In my youth, ballet was my forte; I never considered myself an athlete. But for some reason in my teens, I decided to go run around a grass field in a nearby park. For the life of me, I can’t remember what possessed me to do it, but I got up at some absurd hour, like 6 in the morning, and out I went. After a few laps, I thought, “I feel tired.” Then I thought, “Might as well keep going.” (ah, to have the blithe durability of a sixteen-year-old again). After a while, I thought, “Hmmm. I don’t feel tired anymore.” I kept it up for about forty minutes. Then I went home, showered, and set off to school.

With that auspicious beginning, I decided to run every morning. I’ve no idea why; no one told me to, and I didn’t come from a sports-oriented family. But I loved to run. Back then, girls had fewer options in sports, and it never occurred to me that I could join a track team. Eventually my interest shifted more to ballet. Years later, in graduate school, I started running again, getting up every morning at some god-awful hour, 5 or 6 am. Eventually I stopped, and concentrated on dance instead, because I am very much not a morning person.

However, as a result, I’ve always enjoyed track and field, and as a science fiction writer, it felt natural to extrapolate it into the future. So Gold Dust came into being.

In the main plot, three interstellar civilizations vie for honors in the Olympics. Instead of countries competing, teams come from worlds or space habitats. More populous worlds dominate the Games. In contrast, the team from Raylicon, a dying world with failed terraforming, has one of the worst records anywhere. They draw only from the City of Cries, a wealthy city true, but still just a few million people.

Except.

The people of the Undercity live in ancient ruins below the Cries desert. In their culture, crushing poverty exists alongside great beauty. When your survival depends on how well you fight and how fast you can run, you can produce incredible athletes. The wealthy elite in Cries despise the Undercity, and the people in the Undercity keep to themselves, protecting the fragile beauty of their culture from outside interference.

Then Mason, the coach for the Raylicon Olympic track and field team, discovers the spectacular Undercity runners. When he convinces them to join his team, they encounter his above city athletes. They don’t trust anyone from Cries, and the people of Cries barely consider them human—but now they must all learn to work together.

As I wrote, I wondered if futuristic human enhancement would ruin the Olympics. I decided to have sports divide into two types, leagues that allowed augmented athletes and leagues that didn’t. Meets for enhanced athletes would probably become contests over who could create the most advanced cybernaut. In contrast, Gold Dust involves “natural-body” sports. Athletes not only have to take drug tests, they must also prove they haven’t had genetic modifications, cybernetic augmentation, or other enhancements. Sure, sports training and medicine improves, but those changes involve more basic additions, such a nanomeds that circulate in their blood to help maintain health. And those would be closely monitored.

I also assumed the current trends of women closing the gap with men in many sports would continue. Unlike in the paucity of my youth, women’s sports is huge now. Even in 1989, Ann Transon won the 24-Hour National Championship ultramarathon against all competitors, male and female alike. In the book, I extrapolated that trend to the limit where men and women could fairly compete together.

Another factor would also come into play for star-spanning civilizations. Differences will exist among human-habitable worlds. If you train on a low gravity world and then compete on one with even a slightly heavier gravity, what does that do to your performance? Nuances of atmosphere, length of day, and subtle differences like the hue of the sky or how much dust floats in the air will affect the athletes. That all wove into the plot.

Another aspect of running that struck me was the path to healing it can offer. Six years ago, I was grieving the loss of my husband. I also found out, not long after he passed, that I had cancer. Fortunately, we caught it early and the doctor got it all. But with so much happening, I stopped exercising, no longer dancing or even walking much.

So I started to run again.

This time, I’ve kept at it, mixing outdoor running with inside treadmill work, weights, and rowing—in the evening instead of the morning. It helped inspire my writing Gold Dust. I penned the first draft during the summer Olympics. What struck me as I watched the Games was how the Olympics isn’t just competition, it also represents a dream, using sports to bring the peoples of humanity together in peace. It can help heal a person—or an entire world. I like to believe we will carry that tradition into the future no matter how complex our civilizations become.

Gold Dust: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Web site|Bluesky|Facebook|Patreon

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