As with much of North America, around here it’s been single digits (Fahrenheit) and below for several days, which means the cats are spending almost all of their time indoors. As the days have ground on they’ve started getting crankier with each other, and so we have more-than-usual moments like this, where they tussle with each other, I suspect more out of boredom than anything else. Which is fun for the rest of us — look! Small predators fighting each other is adorable! — but I suspect increasingly less fun for them. The good news is the temperatures are going up above freezing in the next few days, so they can get away from each other again in the great outdoors.

I posted a small video of the Scamperbeats tussling on Twitter earlier in the day with the caption “Cue Star Trek fight music,” and I’m happy to say someone obliged:

We are all doing what we can to keep ourselves amused in the winter cold.

I wrote this tweet the other day about a minor dustup in the science fiction community:

Which led an obnoxious twit to blather, more or less, “Yeah, well, I think you’re an obnoxious twit, Scalzi! What if I want you banned from a convention?!?” I think the argument here (such as it is) is that I would recoil in horror at the idea that a science fiction convention might decide to disinvite me, of all people, to their soiree.

But inasmuch as science fiction conventions are almost always private entities with control over who they allow in and who they don’t, in fact, I find it entirely unobjectionable that one might wish to seek to keep me from attending, for whatever reason. So I suppose if someone wished to register a complaint about my attendance, they should take it up with the convention committee. If the convention committee was convinced (and presuming I was planning to attend at all), they would let me know I was not welcome. Seems pretty simple.

And if a convention decided I was not welcome at their event, how would I take it? I mean, I would hope they’d tell me before I made flight arrangements and my hotel rooms were non-refundable, but otherwise, meh, it’d be fine. Generally I prefer not be in places I’m not wanted, and if the convention committee was telling me to go away, that’s a pretty good, non-subtle hint. Which means my weekend is now free! Which is excellent, I usually have things to do on a weekend, even if those things are “watch six hours of How It’s Made in a row and then take a nap.” Which these days is a pretty great weekend, I have to tell you.

(Mind you, I would be curious to know what the material objection to my presence would be; I don’t really have a reputation for being, say, a grasping creep who has designs to harass people and then pretend like I’m the injured party, for example, or for being a difficult attendee in a general sense. But I’m sure someone could come up with something. Whether it would have merit would, of course, be up to the convention itself to decide.)

But certainly, if you have a problem with me attending a convention, let the convention committee know. I have absolutely no doubt they will give the complaint the consideration it deserves.

A new year, a new stack of books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. Which of these works would you like to be one of your first reads of 2018? Tell us in the comments!

This last October I went to my 30th reunion at my high school, and had a very lovely time of it; I did a reading for my former classmates and others, hung around with old friends and generally enjoyed the company of people I had known for decades now. My school asked me to write up a piece about the experience for our alumni magazine (and yes, I went to a high school of the sort that has alumni magazines). So I did, writing about why this 30th reunion was my favorite of all the reunions I’ve been to. If you’re curious about it, the piece is here.

Also, I took lots of photos of the reunion weekend, including members of the Class of ’87, other folks, and general scenery around the school. Follow each of those links to take a look.

Reading a TV script based on something you wrote and thinking, “that’s a bit of all right, that is.”

Can’t tell you more at the moment, I’m afraid. But I think you’re going to enjoy it one day.

Enjoy your Thursday!

Another year, another quick post to let you know what work I have for you to consider for awards and such. Ready? Here we go:

Best Novel:

The Collapsing Empire (3/21/17; Tor Books; Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor)

Best Related Work/Non-fiction/Collection:

Don’t Live For Your Obituary: Advice, Commentary and Personal Observations on Writing, 2008-2017 (12/31/17; Subterranean Press)

“The Dispatcher” was published in print in 2017, but first appeared in audio in 2016, which generally counts as first publication. It’s definitely ineligible for the Hugo and the Nebula and the Locus (which it was a finalist for last year in any event).

And that’s what on tap this go around.

Well, here’s a nice way to start the new year: The mass market paperback version of The Collapsing Empire is out today in the US and Canada, available at your local indie and chain bookstores as well as through your favorite online retailers. If you’ve got gift cards or certificates to burn, this is a very fine way to do it! And remember that the sequel, to be called The Widening Gyre, is coming out in October (presuming I finish writing it in time, which I will), so you won’t have that long to wait for it.

Also! Remember that my non-fiction collection Don’t Live For Your Obituary is out now, too! Ten years of observations and commentary on the writing life, all in one conveniently collated book. Just $5 in its ebook form.

Thank you for indulging today’s self-advertisements. As you were.

I’m so glad you asked! Yes, I have a few. In no particular order, these are the things I’m going to try doing here in 2018.

1. Better diet and exercise. I’m up above 190 pounds, which is not great on my particular frame, and a good general description for me in 2017 was tired. Also I ate a lot of junk in 2017, and not just in burritos, for those of you who were about to make that crack. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with eating junk if it makes you happy, but I think I should probably eat less of it this year, since I’m not happy with the results of eating so much of it.

So: I’m going to eat less junk, take in fewer calories in general, and exercise not so much to lose weight but to get up my energy levels. We have a treadmill in the basement. That seems like a good place to start. Which brings us to my next resolution:

2. No computer before exercise. Which I started today; I walked two miles on the treadmill before I came up here to type this. The idea here is, honestly, once I park myself in front of the computer I’m pretty much here for the day. So before I get here, maybe I should go take a walk or something. I brought my tablet down and watched part of a movie while I walked. It was not horrifyingly onerous. I think I can do this on a daily basis.

(Before someone suggests a treadmill standing desk: Dudes, I already have a treadmill and a desk. I don’t need to mate them into an unholy union. Don’t spend my money for me, please.)

Speaking of “No [x] before [y]”:

3. No social media or news before noon. I think my major fall down of 2017 was that I let the world intrude on what is my prime creative time, which is the period of time between when I wake up and when I have lunch. Now, 2017 was a historically bad year, but honestly in retrospect there was nothing so very awful that I couldn’t have waited until after noon to find out about it (or that I could have done anything useful about until then). And the thing is, news and social media helped punt me out of my creative space — I’d get worked up and angry (and depressed), and that’s not conducive to building out the lives and adventures of fake people in my head, which is how I make my living.

“No internet before noon” is not new for me — it’s been a cornerstone of my getting work done for a while. What was new, to be blunt about it, was my willingness to ignore my own established process. A new year is a fine time and place to re-establish that old rule and stick to it.

4. More time reading books. I read a historically low number of books in 2017, which was a real problem, since, you know, I like books, and a lot of my friends write them and are good at writing them. So I’m going to make an effort to put more books into my eyeballs. Lord knows I have enough books in the house. This should not be a hugely difficult thing for me. Also, in general:

5. Less time on the computer — or perhaps more accurately, less time on the computer staring glassily into Twitter and Facebook as a default. I love the feeder bar aspect of social media, I really do, but perhaps I love it a smidge too much, and there are other things I could be doing with my time that I actually like doing. I bought myself a raft of music production software in 2017; 2018 might be the time to start learning how to use it. Or maybe get better playing guitar. Or doing more photography. Or just spending more time with Krissy, you know, my wife, who is fabulous and really cool and interesting.

As much as I love social media, for 2018 I think I’m going to approach it with the question “Isn’t there something else you could be doing?” in my mind. I’m not getting any younger, and I do suspect that when I’m on my deathbed, I won’t be wishing I spent more time on Twitter (“Lol, totally dying right now #ReincarnationBetterHappen #ComeBackAsAPangolin”).

Basically, these resolutions boil down to: Get organized, move around, don’t spend all day in front of the computer and when you are there, have a purpose. That seems reasonable for 2018.

The last sunset of 2017, accessorized with a light pillar (made from sunlight reflecting off ice crystals in the air). Not a bad way to see out the year.

Catch you on the other side, folks.

Let’s end 2017 on a high note, shall we: Don’t Live For Your Obituary, my collection of essays about the writing life, is now out, and available both in (increasingly hard to find so hurry if you want it) signed, limited edition hardcover, and (not at all difficult to find!) eBook. The hardcover, as it is a signed, limited edition, will run you about $40. The eBook is about $5.

For those of you who don’t know, the book is a compilation of writing-related essays I’ve created between 2008 and 2017, most of which were originally published here on Whatever. I’ve arranged the book into five overlapping chapters of roughly twenty essays each:

• Golden Nuggets of Writerly Wisdom, or, This Is Where I Offer Up Some Writing Advice, Take It or Don’t;
• The Fine Art of Putting Your Books and Yourself Out There Without Wanting to Drink Acid, or, Let’s Talk Publishing and Online Presence;
• This is the Section Where Scalzi Snarks on People More Famous Than He Is, So Get Your Popcorn, or, Thoughts on Writers and Other Notables;
• Don’t Type Angry, Well, Okay, Fine, Go Right Ahead, or Writing Controversies and Other Such Nonsense;
• Jeez, Scalzi, Does it Always Have to Be About You? Why Yes, Yes it Does, or, Notes From My Career

We’re covering a lot of ground here, basically. It’s not a guide to writing, precisely (although there is writing advice in the book). It’s more about what it’s like to be living the writing life over the last decade or so. Is it useful? Publishers Weekly thought so; its review said “[Scalzi] writes accessibly and so commonsensically that this book should appeal to writers in all disciplines, and even to SF readers who have no ambitions to write themselves.”

Where can you get the book? Subterranean Press has the hardcover on their site if you’d like to buy directly from the publisher, but it’s also available (ebook, hardcover or both) at these fine institutions:

Amazon|Barnes & Noble|iBooks|Indiebound|Kobo|Powell’s

And you can try special ordering the hardcover from your local bookstore, too.

Not in the US? The ebook is available on Amazon worldwide, at the very least — I just checked the Canadian, German, Japanese and Indian Amazon stores and it’s there in each.

(Also, how awesome is that cover? It’s from Nate Taylor.)

I’m excited to have this book out in the world and I hope you enjoy it, and find it useful. Onward to 2018!

In 2010 our dog Kodi died. Krissy was pretty wrecked about it, and decided that it would be a while before we got a new dog. That lasted a couple of months, until she was somehow cruising a pet adoption site and saw the picture of a two-year-old half labrador, half mastiff named “Daisy.” She immediately fell in love with the pup and decided that she would be ours. I did not argue. Daisy came into our lives on October 16, 2010.

The thing about rescue dogs is that they come with their own set of baggage. Daisy’s baggage was that she hadn’t known permanence. In her two or so years of life she had been shuttled between several homes, and in some of them she hadn’t been treated very well. She had been bred when she was very young (not a great thing for a dog) and then basically abandoned after the puppies were born and presumably then sold. Her other homes also proved temporary, for various reasons.

As result of many homes in a short life, and also simply I suspect her own nature as a dog, Daisy was almost neurotically cuddly. This was particularly the case with Krissy, sticking close to her whenever she was home, and making sure that no other creature in the house got more pets and love than she did. She wouldn’t stop you from petting that cat; she’d just butt her head up against your other arm and make sure you knew that you were free to pet her too, if you wanted to, no pressure. I have a higher than average number of pictures of Krissy petting two animals at once. Now you know why.

Aside from the need for cuddles in any and every circumstance, Daisy turned out to be a very good fit for the Scalzi household. She was generally low-maintenance and friendly, and she got along with everyone, and everyone reciprocated, which pleased Daisy to no end. Our previous dog Kodi was an Akita, and people who were unfamiliar with her were wary of her because she looked like she was parting you out for snacks. No one ever felt that way about Daisy. The worst Daisy would ever do to anyone was shed on them.

And because she had once been a mother, I think, her behavior toward the cats in the Scalzi household was exceedingly gentle and maternal, particularly toward the Scamperbeasts, who arrived as young kittens. Daisy fell in love with them almost immediately and the feeling was mutual. It was not in the least unusual to find Sugar or Spice cuddled up next to her and both animals napping away contentedly. It was a family of pets, within the larger family of us.

Daisy was a large dog — she had the facial features of a lab but the size of a mastiff — and the thing about large dogs is that they don’t stay with you as long as some other breeds of dog might. Daisy was with us seven years, until she died in the early hours of this morning. In the last couple of weeks her appetite had lessened, and she was listless and had a fever; we took her to the vet, who put her antibiotics. These worked, until they didn’t. Yesterday in a few surprisingly short hours it became clear that whatever the underlying problem was that caused the fever, it had become life-threatening. In the early morning we started the journey to an emergency vet clinic. She passed along the way.

It’s sad when your dog dies, because she is part of your family, someone you love and someone who loves you. I grieve for Daisy, and I will miss her, and I will miss her gentleness and her lovely spirit. She was a good dog. But I’m also glad, and even thankful, that for seven years this dog who had previously never known permanence in her life had a home, had a family and had love, and could give it back in equal measure. She made our home, our family and our love complete with her presence.

She had permanence with us. She had it, every day of her life with us. She has it still.

Here it is, the final stack of new books and ARCs for 2017. See anything here you’d like to take into the new year with you? Tell us in the comments!

Sure, 2017 was an unmitigated shitshow in a general sense here in the US and in lots of other parts of the world — but how was it for me? Well, in fact, it was pretty good. In no particular order:

1. The Collapsing Empire came out to great reviews and sales, hit a bunch of bestseller lists and was snapped up for TV by Working Title pretty much when it hit bookstores, so all that was pretty great. I did a five-week tour for the book, which was exhausting but also a lot of fun.

2. The Dispatcher won an Audie Award in the “Original Work” category and debuted in print and has done very well there, so that was also pretty great.

3. Don’t Live For Your Obituary officially comes out in two (2!) days, and has been getting very good reviews and the signed limited hardcover edition has sold briskly, so that’s also pretty nifty (don’t worry, I’ll remind you about it again in two days).

4. Old Man’s War was optioned by Netflix to be made into a feature film, which pleases me immensely. It also came out in a very cool new small-format hardcover edition, which I think looks awesome and which I recommend for everyone.

5. I wrote Head On, which took longer than I would have liked to get done but still (barely) got in to make production dates for its April 17 release, so, yay!

6. My kid graduated from high school, and got into and is now attending college, which I think is pretty great.

7. Was a finalist for a few awards that other people won, which is fine, you don’t win them all.

8. Met and became friends with one of my all-time favorite musicians, which still fills me with squee. And met the Librarian of Congress at the National Book Festival, which was also pretty cool.

9. Remained married to a tremendous human and have gotten to be friends with other tremendous humans. Which is tremendous.

10. I was not consumed by wild animals nor by fire.

So, in all, 2017 was not bad on a personal level. I would have vastly preferred to have my good year along with a general good year for the country, mind you. But that wasn’t up to me, generally speaking (and if it was, I wish someone would have told me earlier because there were so many changes I would have made).

What’s on the schedule for 2018? Well:

1. On the 9th of January, my short story “Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Era of Humans for the First Time,” will be published in the Robots vs. Fairies anthology.

2. Head On publishes on April 17, and I’ll be doing a tour to support it. Not five weeks this time; a rather shorter one. Dates and places to be determined.

3. The sequel to The Collapsing Empire, entitled The Widening Gyre, is currently scheduled for release on October 16, although that might shift a bit. I start writing that, uuuhhhh, monday. No tour or events scheduled for it yet, although I imagine there will be some.

4. I’ll also be working on a non-fiction book, tentatively scheduled for the third quarter of the year. More details on that soonish.

5. Also somewhere in there I’ll be writing a novella, the release date for which is as yet undetermined.

6. Depending on how quickly the Old Man’s War and Collapsing Empire film/TV projects advance, I’ll be taking part in those (I’m an executive producer on both projects).

7. Certain things which were in process in 2017 but not made public will likely become public in 2018. You’ll know them when they arrive.

8. I’m Co-Guest of Honor of the Bubonicon science fiction convention with Mary Robinette Kowal, this August in New Mexico. I’m also planning to attend Confusion in Detroit in January, the Los Angeles Festival of Books in April, and the Worldcon in San Jose in August (and JoCo Cruise in February!), plus other events, I’m sure. I’ll update my appearances tab when they come in.

9. Uuuuhhh, I think I’m forgetting something but I can’t remember what it is and honestly what’s listed above is kinda enough, you know?

10. And then somewhere in there I need to sleep and spend time with family and friends and eat and enjoy recreational activities and post here and on social media and maybe even actually do some diet and exercise because middle-age is a thing for me now and I’ll be 49 in May holy cow I’m oldish.

So, in sum: 2017 was a busy year! 2018 will be a busy year too! It beats the alternative.

First, here’s tonight’s:

And a few others from 2017:

Good job, sky! A quality year for sunsets to be sure.

It was an interesting year on Whatever, in terms of visitorship. As I noted in early July, visitorship to Whatever — as in people actually clicking through to the front page of the site — has undergone a collapse this year. I speculated as to why at the link, so if you’re interested in that, check it out there, but the relevant bit now is that I estimated in July I would end up with about 4 million visits to the site in 2017. As of right this minute (6:18 am, 12/28/17), Whatever’s visitorship for the year is: 4,110,902. Right in line with my expectations (also, to be pedantically clear, “visits” here means page views, not unique vistors).

Am I worried? Well, no. One, four million visits in a year to a personal site is still nothing to sneeze at. Two, many of the people who would have visited the site directly are now having the content being served to them via other means, including 28,500 who follow me on WordPress, 12K or so on Feedly, and so on. The reach of the site’s content still appears to be chugging along nicely — how people get it seems to be changing considerably, here in these late days of 2017.

The drop in direct visitors to the site also means that the most visited pieces on the site were not new pieces, but archived posts; only one of the top ten most visited pieces from 2017 was from this year: “2017, Word Counts and Writing Process.” This is very unusual. Usually the top ten is roughly half new stuff, half archives.

With that said, here are the top ten pieces written in 2017:

• 2017, Word Counts and Writing Process
• A Fortnight of Trump
• The Moral Shambles That is Our President
• A Q&A For the Post-Weinstein Era
• The New Year and the Bend of the Arc
• My Personal Feminism, 2017
• Withdrawing From the Dragon Awards
• Spoiler-Free Observations on The Last Jedi
• And Now, The Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For: My Review of Coke Zero Sugar
• So, Healthcare, 7/28/17

I will note that there is a very high correlation between the most visited pieces on the site this year and my linking to it on other social media, most notably Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are also consistently the top non-search-related sites (by far) for referrals to my site. This strongly suggests something I’ve long suspected, which is that Twitter and Facebook have at this point largely consumed and digested the former blogosphere, enough so that at this point, I wonder if I should even call Whatever a “blog” anymore. The name is beginning to get a fusty smell to it. There’s irony here, as I for many years resisted calling Whatever a “blog” at all. I would be okay with simply calling it my “site.”

(I still strongly believe creative people should keep their own sites as a way of controlling their own content, and to have a place online that’s not directly predicated on someone else mining it just to sell things to you and everyone else. But no need to get into that in detail right now.)

Speaking of Twitter, while Whatever is and will always be my home, Twitter is currently where I have the largest reach. I have 133,760 followers, up 22,431 from this time last year, and my tweets there garnered 268.9 million impressions, which is up rather substantially from last year’s 177.5 million (I tweeted 17,059 times, some two thousand fewer tweets than last year). I will miss it when it is gone and sold for parts, which at the rate it is going should be sometime in 2018. My Facebook fan page is also up, to 20.5k (from 18k), so that’s nice too. But really, for me, Twitter is where it’s at, social media-wise.

My goals for 2018? For Twitter, it’s mostly to keep doing what I’m doing over there; it seems to be working for me just fine. For Whatever, my plan here is to post maybe a little more. I posted 452 entries here this year, but a lot of them were Big Idea and “New Books” posts, which while popular and informative, aren’t really precisely from me. Personal pieces were fewer this year, I think mostly because I was in a bit of a writing funk (part of being in a general funk, of which I will speak more in a later post). Being in a bit of a writing funk wasn’t a good thing for me in general. Writing more usually improves my mood. So maybe writing more here will be a thing I do. I like Whatever having more whatever. We’ll see.

It’s a wall-mounted heater for our garage.

Exciting!

Well, okay, not exciting. But it means that no matter the weather (and right now it’s a blistering four degrees Fahrenheit outside), the garage is always above freezing; we run the heater so the overall garage temperature is between 40 and 50 degrees. This means that our cars are not unspeakably cold when we get in them, and that liquids we store in the garage will not burst their cans when their insides freeze (which is a thing that’s happened before).

It also means that our cats, who persist in going outside in insensibly cold weather, will not actually be in danger of freezing to death before we let them back into the house, so long as they remember to come into the garage. To aid in this learning curve we’ve been letting them out via the garage (there’s a human-sized garage door to the outside world with a cat flap; the inside door does not have one, because we have raccoon neighbors).

I could say we bought it for the practical reasons, but in fact we got it because of the cats. This is where my brain goes. I regret nothing.

The heater necessitated upgrading our electrical system a bit — it draws a fair amount of power so we put that wall on its own circuit, which means expanding our circuit board. This was something we needed to do anyway (we use a lot of electronics in this house, as it happens), so this was a good time to do it.

And how do we feel about our Christmas gift to ourselves? Very happy, in fact. It’s nice to not have the garage be hideously cold for four months of a year. It’s not a sexy gift, sure. But at this age, practical gifts that make one’s house nicer to live in are pretty great. And the cats like it, so there’s that.

Get any practical gifts this year? Share with the crowd in the comments.

I took a lot of photos this year, including pictures of friends at various events I was at. Here are some of the best of those.

Hope you’re having a wonderful day. 

Well, this was a year, wasn’t it. I’m not going to be terribly disappointed to see it go. Nevertheless, I got some decent writing out of it here on Whatever. Below, in alphabetical order, you’ll find the pieces I find of special note in 2017. Be aware that I tried to keep the pieces kvetching about our current horrible president to a minimum; I want you to be able to get through the pieces without feeling like you want to walk into the sea. Nevertheless these pieces reflect the general “ugh” of the year, because, well. 2017 and all that. You know. You were there.

• 2017, Word Counts and Writing Process
• The Brain Eater
• Can You Tell My Earnings From My Amazon Sales? Spoiler: Nope, Not at All
• Diversity, Appropriation, Canada (and Me)
• Genius and Master
• Getting Lucky With College Costs
• Hamilton, and Thoughts on the Uncanny Valley of Musicals
• Harry Potter and the Initially Dismissive But Ultimately Appreciative Fan
• Harvey Weinstein and Other Abusers
• The Moral Shambles That is Our President
• My Personal Feminism, 2017
• The New Year and the Bend of the Arc
• On That GOP Health Care Bill, and Tax Breaks
• On the Matter of Empathy For Horrible People
• The Poverty “State of Mind”
• Punching Nazis
• A Q&A For the Post-Weinstein Era
• Utopias
• The View From the Top of Amazon’s Heap
• Wonder Woman: A Smash, Possibly in Different Ways Than You Think

And just so everything in this wrapup is not Very Serious Pieces, here’s me and Chuck Wendig and Neil Gaiman and Mikey Neumann and my kid being silly on Twitter. You’re welcome.

I had cause to do an ego search on my name yesterday and noticed that when I did, Google popped up a couple of new features on the right-hand column, saying that I could post updates and suggest edits to searches on my name. I haven’t seen news or posts about this new functionality anywhere. I was curious, so I went through Google’s verification process and then posted an update, which I highlighted in the photo above.

So apparently now, when anyone Googles me, among every other thing they will see, they will see an update actually from me, which is I think a very interesting thing. I have not suggested an edit to my search results, although I am interested to know what that might entail. On one hand, if people are trying to manipulate Google search results to spread lies about one, I could see it coming in handy. On the other hand, if one is trying to get Google to suppress inconvenient truths about one’s self, this could be a problem. We’ll see how it eventually functions, I suppose.

To be clear I certainly don’t mind Google allowing me to have a little space on my search results. On first blush it seems like a neat idea (and it’s appropriately off to the side, rather than in the actual search results). My update pops up on “Scalzi” and “John Scalzi” but not on related searches like “Old Man’s War” or “Whatever,” so it also appears reasonably tightly targeted.

During the verification process, it was noted that this is a sort of beta/trial run program, so I don’t know if it will be available right now to everyone notable enough to have a right-hand column when someone searches on them (my best guess as to why I’m in the trial program: I have a secured Gmail account and a Pixel 2 phone, which means I’m pretty deep into the Google ecosystem, and also I’m verified on Twitter, which adds an additional layer of being able to confirm I am who I say I am). If I were an author/creator/person of some notability, I would go check and see if you’ve gotten an invite.