Monthly Archives: May 2017

One Week Break

Hey there, folks — I’m going to take off until next Tuesday on account of work and travel. Yes, travel, again, to BookCon in New York, and also to the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. I’ll be on one coast one day and the other the next. And they say the age of the […]

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Athena’s Graduation, in Pictures

Yup, she did it, and here is the photographic proof — a photo set with her (and Hunter, her boyfriend) before, during and after the graduation ceremony. Enjoy it as if you were there your very own self! (And for those wondering, it was a fine ceremony, and very quick, since Athena had a graduating […]

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The Poverty “State of Mind”

Ben Carson, our HUD Secretary of somewhat dubious expertise, recently burbled on about how he thinks that “poverty, to a large extent, is a state of mind,” a statement which earned him some well-justified push-back and which prompted several people, knowing of my general thoughts about poverty, to wonder if I had any thoughts on […]

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The Big Idea: Dan Moren

Travel expands the mind — or so they say. What would Dan Moren, author of The Caledonian Gambit, have to say about that particular truism? As it happens, he has a story on the topic, one that has bearing on the story he tells in his novel. DAN MOREN: In January 2001, during my junior […]

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Taking a News Break

The last couple of weeks have been genuinely and literally amazing as far as news goes — so much happened every day, of such importance to the nation, that it’s been hard to keep up or to process it all, or (and this is important) to get into a frame of mind to do a […]

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Cory and I Talk at Goodreads

Because when we were on tour together, we went to Goodreads and talked! Here’s the interview. (Interestingly but not entirely surprisingly, what they didn’t put in this interview transcript was the question where we were asked to offer our opinions on Amazon, which is the parent company of Goodreads. My answer to that was, basically, […]

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The Big Idea: Alan Smale

Creating alternate histories are no small matter, especially when your series of books features a different version of the Roman Empire landing in North America. Now in Eagle and Empire, the third book of his Clash of Eagles series, Alan Smale talks about the challenges of writing different past — and making more history as […]

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My Trump Quandary

I’m not writing about Trump and his party pals as much as one suspects I might here, and honestly, here’s the reason for it: Everything is happening so damn fast these days. Hard as it may be to believe, if I’m going to write something more than a snarky tweet, I want to be able […]

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My Boring Shoes

Behold the Sketchers Men’s Diameter Slip-on, size 8.5, which just arrived here at the Scalzi Compound. This is the third pair of these that I’ve gotten, the first having been purchased more or less on a whim three years ago at Sears, back when you could still go into Sears without being crushingly depressed at […]

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The Big Idea: James Kakalios

Physics happens — today and every day. But how much do you think about the physics of your ordinary day? James Kakalios thinks about it a lot, and after this Big Idea piece for his latest book The Physics of Everyday Things, you might think about it more often, too. JAMES KAKALIOS: My motivation to […]

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The Big Idea: Megan Whalen Turner

Sometimes the Big Ideas for books have their origin in other books, and how those books inspire us when we write our own. For her new book Thick as Thieves, Megan Whalen Turner reaches back to a favorite author and how that writer’s big idea laid the groundwork for hers. MEGAN WHALEN TURNER: Back in […]

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Robots vs. Fairies: I’m In This

Saga Press today announced a new anthology called Robots vs. Fairies, in which, as you might expect, there are stories about robots, and stories about fairies, and perhaps a few with robots and fairies. The anthology includes a story by me, entitled “Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Human Era for the First […]

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