Whatever

An Appropriate Cover: “With Or Without You”

Posted on May 10, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      13 Comments

Fun fact: Bono, the lead singer of U2, has the same birthday as me: Today, May 10. So I thought it might be fun to essay one of his band’s more famous songs. It’s not going to replace the original, to be sure, but I enjoyed putting it together. Additionally, a thing I learned today: Singing like Bono is hard. But I understand even he has problems with it sometimes. I can sympathize. Happy birthday to us both, and enjoy.

— JS

54

Posted on May 10, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      50 Comments

Well, I’m no longer in my “early fifties,” I’m smack dab in the middle of them, and of middle age. And you know what? So far, at least, my fifties have been terrific. I’m very definitely in the part of my life where I am comfortable with who I am and what I’ve done with my life, professionally and personally. I’m very definitely a known quantity. If you like me or my work, you can reasonably be assure that you will continue to do so for a while yet. If you don’t, well, it’s not going to get better for you anytime soon.

I’m also at the point where I pass the “Bus Test,” which is “If you were hit by a bus today, would you feel like the life you lived had value?” And I do: I’m nowhere near perfect, of course, and to essay my many flaws would take up much of the day. For all that, I think overall I’ve been a good husband, father and friend, I’ve done work to make my communities, nation and world better, and I’ve worked on myself to be a mostly decent human. Plus, lots of books and other work in other media, which will likely live past me for some indeterminate amount of time. It’s been a good life, and I’m glad I’ve gotten enough life to gain the wisdom to recognize this fact.

(To be clear, not planning on being hit by a bus any time soon — indeed, living where I do, I would have to go well out of my way to be hit by one. I have lots of future plans, which require me remaining alive for at least a while longer. That is the plan, and to the best of my ability, I am sticking to it.)

I don’t love everything about being in my 50s. Most of that is physical — a twinge in my knee, my back getting sore from how I was sleeping, the steadfast refusal of my body to stop being pear-shaped, and so on — but some of it is existential, like driving down the road earlier this week, enjoy the lovely spring weather and having some part of my brain casually wonder, wow, how many more springs are you going to get? Shut up, brain, let me focus on the moment. Realistically speaking I have lots of springs left, and I plan to enjoy them all.

But overall? Again, life is good. I like, on my birthday, reflecting that it is so. I will continue to do the work of being trying to be a better person each day, and writing good work, and being a kind and useful friend and spouse and parent. And soon enough I’ll be 55.

— JS

(Photos above by Athena, by the way.)

Cover Reveal: Starter Villain

Posted on May 8, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      35 Comments

Tor Books has a history of giving my novels some pretty terrific covers, and, hey, guess what? They’ve done it again! Please enjoy the cover of Starter Villain, featuring, as it does, a tremendous executive-level cat. And, yes, cats are integral to the plot of the novel. How? You’ll have to read the book to find out. Let me just say, however, that if you’re a fan of cats, you will not be disappointed.

Let us take a moment now to give proper attention to the artist behind this cover, the Chesley Award-winning Tristan Elwell. Elwell has done book covers for publishers from A(von) to at least T(or Books), as well other illustration work for newspapers, magazines, game companies and advertising firms. He did a truly spectacular job here creating the sort of hagiographic oil painting you would find in a Fortune 500 boardroom, with a cat, and I could not be happier with it.

As a reminder, Starter Villain will be out in the world on September 19, 2023 in the US/Canada and 21 September 2023 in the UK (where it will have a different but equally fabulous cover). You can pre-order the book now at your favorite bookseller (including your local bookstore, trust me, they will be very happy to take your pre-order). Options for ordering signed copies are being considered and will be announced if and when they are finalized. Otherwise, and as always, any questions you have about various iterations of the book and its availability are answered in my new book FAQ.

I’m very excited about this book and there are lots of interesting things going on with it behind the scenes. I can’t wait to share this book with you all. In the meantime: Hey, look! A cover!

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #10: Short Bits, Part Two

Posted on May 7, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

More short answers to pressing questions! Let’s get right to it:

Theorboast: I would love to see you rate some unusual musical instruments for suitability in your band. Theorbo? Theremin? Hurdy-gurdy? Duduk and tar?

As it happens I do own a theremin, and also some other vaguely unusual musical instruments such as an Omnichord, a MandoTenor and a Banjolele. As a practical matter, however, I end up doing most of my stuff via a Digital Audio Workstation and a MIDI keyboard, with occasional guitar and bass.

Bradley: What are your thoughts on serialised webnovels as a genre, both for the reader and the writer?

I mean, that’s how I first presented Old Man’s War here, 21(!!) years ago. In general I think it’s a perfectly fine idea, although as a general practical issue, I would suggest writers actually have the thing done before serializing it; that way the output is not threatened by, you know, life taking a week or a month out of your schedule for non-writery things.

Carl: I assume you support the WGA strike. Are you a member? Any thoughts on the strike or how it will effect any pending film or television adaptations of your work?

I’m not a member; I don’t have enough points yet. If and when I can become a member, I will do so. As for the strike, I am a supporter of it, which should be no surprise as, aside from anything else, I am the former president of a writers organization where one of our chief concerns was adequate compensation for writers. The strike does affect at least some of the projects I have in development, which is, of course, fine. When the studios and networks want to get them back underway, there’s an easy way to do it: Treat the writers fairly.

Hugo: I’ve noticed that compared to authors of previous eras, bestselling authors these days don’t tend to write a lot of short fiction – whereas (for example) the Big 3 of the mid-20th Century SF had multiple short story collections. There is the odd author who has a lot of short stories, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule. Why do you think this is?

The short answer is that short stories don’t pay enough for someone to make a living, or a substantial part of their living, off of them, which is a thing that used to be possible. I myself tend to write short stories either for my own amusement or for a very specific strategic purpose, since the money usually isn’t there. The slightly longer answer is that some of the writing energy that used to go into short stories now goes into things like graphic novels or video games, which pay a reasonable amount for the effort.

BostonDan: Let’s admit that the output of ChatGPT currently resembles that of a clever but very lazy, plagiarizing high school student. Do you expect to be astonished by the 2030 version? Could you ever consider such a program to be “intelligent”?

I think AI is going to get very good at simulating and iterating what already exists — it’s already pretty good at that — but I don’t think it’s going to be by itself very good at original thought that will appeal to humans, because its intelligence, however one wishes to define it, is not human and never will be, even if it is trained on human intelligence. I’m curious what AI creativity would be, left to its own devices.

Icarus: I think you said that you still have a landline. What does your phone bill look like with taxes and such? how much does a phone call cost you if you do it from a landline these days?

We keep the landline these days basically because it’s bundled with our home internet access and it’s cheaper to get both than the internet alone. Don’t ask me why, that’s just how they do it. I haven’t made a phone call from it for years, and if someone calls it they get voicemail. Most humans we wish to speak to know to call us at our cell numbers these days, so what messages are left are usually political robocalls or people trying to scam us. I don’t generally respond to those.

Matt S: Where do you lean on the “nature vs nurture” spectrum for how parents raise kids? How much of a child’s successes and failures are accredible to the parents, their environment, and themselves?

I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” answer to that, and each child and each situation is different. Also, it’s never “nature versus nurture” anyway. “Nature” is what’s in your genes; “nurture” is what’s in your environment. They are complementary, not in opposition.

Justin Bowles: If IP wasn’t an issue, what book or series would you write from another writers work?

None; I’m really not interested in playing in other people’s universes. I did it once, with Fuzzy Nation, because I had a specific curiosity about what it would be like to write a “golden age” story with a more modern sensibility, and the particular story I used was in the public domain. Otherwise, I’m fine thinking up my own stuff.

Mechtroid: As a parent, what point did you decide “One kid is enough for us, thanks”?

We didn’t, biology did. Which is to say after Athena, Krissy miscarried and it was determined that the cause of that would make more kids unlikely. Adoption would have been an option, but we never really explored that and anyway, life was busy enough.

Logophage: What are your (current) thoughts on liking problematic things, and/or learning that things you like are problematic? 

Pretty much what they were before. I think it’s okay to acknowledge that art/artists you value aren’t perfect and that time may reveal their flaws; I think it’s okay to recognize that you don’t have to defend the problematic aspects of art/artists that have value to you; I think it’s okay to set aside the art/artists whose problematic aspects are now too great for you to ignore, even if they once had value to you. I have a whole bunch of art and artists that I am done with — I took value from them before but at this point I am content to put them aside. It helps, mind you, that there is so much other art from other artists that I can explore. I’m not at a loss for good art from interesting people.

That wraps us up for another year! Thank you, folks, for asking such interesting questions yet again. Let’s do this again, say, in roughly a year?

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #9: Short Bits, Part One

Posted on May 6, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      10 Comments

And now, short answers to some of the questions that I otherwise did not get to this year:

Karen A. Wyle: What does it mean to retire from self-employment? Is there any purpose in declaring, to oneself or others, that one is Retired?

If you stop working for a living, and don’t plan to start doing it again, then you get to consider yourself retired, regardless of whether you work for yourself or someone else. I have older friends who are writers who have largely stopped writing for income, because they no longer have to, and either don’t want to anymore or feel that they’ve said everything they need to say for public consumption. I can’t imagine that, but then I’m not anywhere near retirement age. Check in with me in fifteen years.

Hope: I really, truly need Krissy to tell me her hair secrets. Her hair is always amazing.

Krissy’s secret is Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner, not washing her hair every day, and extremely good hair genetics. Many people have remarked at how great Krissy’s hair looks as it goes gray, and I think a lot of that is (again) good genes, but also attitude; Krissy is 53 now and has had gray hairs since her 20s and is perfectly fine with the idea that at this point gray is going to happen. I didn’t get a vote in that decision of hers, but personally speaking I like Krissy’s hair without dyes in it.

Brian Skinn: How many accountants, lawyers, portfolio managers, real estate agents, etc. did you work with before settling in for the long haul with the ones you have now? How hard was it? How long did it take? Words of advice? Pitfalls to watch out for?

You know, I’ve been lucky* in all of these in that by and large my first choices for these things have been the right choices for me. I put that asterisk in there because one reason that my first choices in these folks have worked is that I generally had a very clear idea of what I wanted and needed from them before I went out and got them, so there was no confusion on either side about what working together would entail. So that would be my advice: Really know what you want and need.

Dorrington Williams: Could you talk a bit about your plans for your music? Any plans to do more than dabble?

At this point, no, because a) I’m not that good at it, b) the path to making real money in music is long and requires actual commitment in time and effort, and you know, I already have a real job. Beyond that, a while back I came to the realization that I don’t need make every interest a massive profit center. My music is out to streamers and if I make money off of it, cool. But my interest in it is for my own self, first, and everyone else second, and I’m enjoying the level of commitment that I’m at right now.

David Scott Moyer: I’d like to hear your thoughts on independent publishing. Not necessarily Amazon in particular, but they are obviously the giant elephant in the room. They provide a way for authors to skip the gauntlet of agents and publishers and get their work out into the world. 

I mean, you’re looking at independent publishing right now: This site is has been up and running for a quarter century, and every once in a while I take things from it and put them into book form. So naturally I’m fine with it as a concept. That said, while it offers freedom, the road out of obscurity for those who self/indie-publish is generally even longer and harder than the road out of it for people who are traditionally published, and the same power laws in terms of exposure and income apply to both: A few people are up at top, most everyone else is scraping by at best. In both cases it helps to be lucky.

Demetrios X: Now that you have a few mysteries under your belt, how do you think your career arc might have gone if the coin toss had fallen the other way, and you’d set out to write a mystery? Also, what sort of mystery would you have set out to write? 

I think I would have eventually found my way to publication if I had started in crime/mystery/thriller, although whether I would have been as successful there as in SF/F is an open question. I suspect not, since my debut book in SF/F had the luck of being in the right place at the right time, and you can’t time luck like that. What would have been drastically different is many other aspects of my life, since so many of my current friendships have come out of the science fiction community. As for what kind of books I would have written: Like the books I write now, without aliens and robots.

PHM: Would like to get your perspective on how screwed we (as Democrats or non- Rs) are with Joe Biden running again? Actually like him (or rather like NOT having a fascist in office) but very concerned about 2024.

I don’t think we’re screwed at all, and I suspect Biden will win a second term. As with his 2020 campaign, he’s not someone anyone is hugely excited about, but he’s competent and not a hot mess, and the likely alternative, in 2024 as it was in 2020, is a criminal fascist. Give then choice between “boring but competent” and “criminal fascist,” I think people will vote as they did in 2020. So, yeah, we’ll be fine (knocks on all the wood).

George McKinney: I’d like to read your thoughts on how useful ( if at all ) it would be for there to be a sane centre-right political party in the US, and if it could be successful.

Our government was (probably not intentionally) set up to privilege a two-party system, and it does the right (or what passes for a left here in the US) no good to dilute their political power by splitting it into two parties. So no, it would not be successful, if the terms of success are “electable,” and therefore it’s not going to get done. Personally, I would love it if there was a split! Then what passes for the left would have an easier time of it! But “making John Scalzi happy” is definitely not the definition of success in this case.

More short bits tomorrow —

— JS

I and Michi Trota Talk About Writing and Life and Stuff

Posted on May 6, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      1 Comment

And specifically about The Kaiju Preservation Society, at the American Writers Festival last year. It’s an hour long! We cover a lot of ground! Enjoy!

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #8: The British Head of State

Posted on May 5, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      39 Comments

Just in time for tomorrow’s coronation, this question from Miles B:

I’m British, and I’m curious what you (Americans in general, but obviously you in particular) make of the way we determine our head of state?

For those of you who might be unclear about this, the head of state of the United Kingdom is the reigning monarch, who as of this moment is Charles III. The monarch’s political responsibilities as the head of state are real but at this point (and for a while now, really) rather circumscribed; rare is it when the UK’s monarch has directly inserted themselves into the political machinery of that nation. Their duties are more ceremonial and, dare we say it, promotional; the monarchy is a boost for tourism in the UK and (mostly white) people (not formerly or at least recently part of the British Empire) see it as a quaint and mostly harmless thing for the UK to have. Awww, look, you have a King! That’s fun!

My own opinion about the UK monarchy is: Well, I wouldn’t have one, and from a democratic point of view the general idea of royalty and nobility is absolute nonsense, and I certainly wouldn’t choose my head of state on the basis of heredity; ask the Hapsburgs why. It’s just as easy to elect some largely harmless older person to be your head of state and be genially colorful but otherwise unobtrusive; lots of other European countries seem to do that just fine without promising that person’s oldest kid that they’ve got the gig when mom or dad kicks off.

But it’s not my country and not my business, and if the UK wants to keep trundling on with this sort of nonsense, and it seems clear that they do, and equally seems likely they will do through the current Prince George of Wales at the very least, then far be it from me to keep them from doing it. Go ahead and waste millions of pounds carting a 74-year-old man around in a buggy and then piling him in a church with a bunch of old robes and headgear featuring jewels pilfered from other countries, and then carting him back to his palace if it makes you feel good. You do you, UK. It’s your thing. You’ll probably be doing it again soonish in any event.

I can’t say how most Americans feel about this whole thing, but if I had to guess, I’d say we mostly consider the British monarchy as entertainment, and have done for years now. Every generation we get a new set of royals to enjoy, complete with their scandals and nonsense, and it’s mostly benign and pointless fun. Before there’s a rush to the comments, let me note that the Royal Family is not, in fact, just benign and pointless in the UK and elsewhere; they’re billionaires sucking down revenues from some of the choicest plots of land on the planet (for starters) and the family has a history of bad political and social positions and choices. But that’s not our problem here in the US! Here in the US, they’re kicky fun!

So, yeah. Not how I would do it, but it’s not up me, so you do your bad self, UK. Enjoy your new king, for as long as you have him.

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #7: Money Among the Generations

Posted on May 5, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      53 Comments

David Goldfarb asks:

Something that occurred to me to wonder about, a while ago: as someone who grew up poor, how do you feel about your daughter’s attitude towards money? I’ve seen posts from her where she talks in a fairly casual way about spending what to me (also upper middle class! pretty close to your age!) seem like eye-watering amounts.

I wouldn’t characterize them as eye-watering amounts, personally. Eye-watering to me would be something purchasing a new automobile, deciding after a month you don’t like it anymore, and then buying a new one. That would water my eyes, guaranteed. Athena, on the other hand, buys things like stickers and stuffed animals and monthly food box subscriptions, and while those can add up over time, like anything (please don’t ask me about my guitar purchases and subscriptions to music production stuff), they’re really not in the same league. Also, we’re not upper middle class, we’re rich. We try not to be dicks about that fact! But, you know. In conversations like this, that matters.

As for my daughter’s attitude about money, let me approach that sideways by talking about the movie Crazy Rich Asians. I remember watching that movie and something about it striking me, and that thing was that some of the characters in that movie reminded me, in a very specific way, of the kids I went to high school with. Many of you will recall that I went to private boarding school in Southern California. It was a very good experience for me, and also, as a scholarship student who in his senior year was living in a trailer park when he wasn’t at school, I was also aware that my perspective on money was very different than the perspective a lot of my classmates had. I thought about it a lot; they didn’t think about it at all.

Which was the same as the characters in Crazy Rich Asians. They had their various problems and concerns and issues, and none of them had to do with finances — or if they did, were about the use and daily maintenance of money, not the acquisition and rationing of it, and even then it was not much remarked on (except by Constance Wu’s middle class character, who was the audience’s way into the story). Now, very few of the kids I went to high school with had the same level of wealth as the characters in the movie, and I certainly don’t today, but that attitude about money — it’s there, and will be there, and thus, not something to worry about on a daily basis — was certainly similar. To be very clear, Crazy Rich Asians is a movie and everything in it is heightened for dramatic and comedic effect. But the money vibe in the movie is based in a reality, and I experienced it in high school.

Athena has the same money vibe as those kids I went to school with. Not snobby, not “I have money therefore I am better than you,” which is a vibe when it comes to money, but is a different vibe, which is important to note. Rather, simply, “the money is there and I don’t have to think about it.” Material and financial security was and is a baseline assumption for her. She has absolutely none of my (frankly) PTSD about money and the lack of it at various times in my early life, or about the utter unreliability of the money when we did have it. Even now, I look at what I have and think, well, this could all go away tomorrow, even though intellectually I know that’s not going to be the case. We have enough money now that I could probably never make another dime and yet still feed myself until I roll off this mortal coil. That doesn’t matter. At the core of me, the feeling of financial instability never goes away. Athena doesn’t have that, and never has.

Which feels like a win to me, you know? Look, I’m not going to pretend I was 100% The Best Dad Ever — I am human, watch me fumble even basic things — but getting my child into adulthood without her worrying even once if she was going to have a place to live, or dinner, or shoes, well. I’m going to take that and mark it on my ledger as a plus. I and her mother did that for her, and I feel pretty great about that. I wish every kid could feel that level of security, and we all know that it’s not what every kid gets to feel, and that, in this new gilded age of ours, it’s something fewer kids get to have as we go along.

Athena’s financial privilege was not something she was ignorant of growing up. We don’t live in an enclave of well-off people; we live in rural Ohio, with farmers and blue collar workers. At one point in elementary school her classmates, because kids are blunt this way, flat out asked her if she was rich. She didn’t know, so she asked us. We told her the truth about it, which was, yes, and also, if we ever heard of her using the fact to try to make herself feel she was somehow better than her classmates (or, really, anyone), we would very unhappy, and then she would be very unhappy about that. Athena, so far as I know, took that to heart. She understood that she had essentially lucked into financial security, and that as a child, none of it was due to her. She kept, within the bounds of her age and life experience, a reasonably good grip on the situation.

I think it helped that as soon as she understood the concept that we had money, and that I and Krissy worked for it, we kept her up to date on how that money was made and what use it was being put to. Athena was told early about how much we made, the ins and outs of the publishing business, how taxes work, what we spent and how and why, so that money was not merely an abstract concept to her, nor was how it came and went in the household. I also made sure she understood how much luck was involved with that money — on my side, not Krissy’s — and what my position was relative to most writers and creatives. And I made sure she understood how lucky both of us were to have Krissy in our lives, as she has an eagle-sharp eye both for managing money and making sure we know where every penny of it is.

For all that, if your baseline is financial security and solvency, you approach the world with a different perspective than someone whose baseline is not that. Athena has spent and spends more at her age than I would have at those same ages, goes out to eat more, travels more and otherwise makes financial decisions differently than I would. I don’t generally feel these choices are especially extravagant, especially the ones that she then uses as fodder for writing (hello restaurant, food and travel pieces here at Whatever!). But they are still different choices, and I find those different choices interesting.

There’s another aspect of this understanding about money which is not as obvious to other folks, because it’s nothing something that she or we discuss much, nor will I go into detail about it now, which is that Athena has more than once used her financial privilege to help friends and others, and did so even when younger than she is now. She understood early on that a thing that was a baseline for her wasn’t so for others, and strove to be helpful with what she had. Which makes me immensely proud of her as a parent. She is a good person, and to the extent that I at all helped with that, I am grateful.

Now that Athena is an adult, she is more enmeshed with the family finances, not less; she’s going to be an active part of both Scalzi Enterprises and the Scalzi Family Foundation, not just because she’s going to inherit, but because there are things she can and will contribute to both. What’s going to be interesting to me is if and how participating in the making and formal distribution of family money is going to change her relationship to that money. We’ll find out! And I’m very much looking forward to that.

(Disclosure: As this piece is about Athena, I showed it to her and invited her to make any edits or comments she wanted before it was posted. She made none. It is as I first wrote it.)

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #6: An Update On the Church

Posted on May 4, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      38 Comments

Several folks in the request thread have asked for an update on the church, with some additional information about what it takes to renew and refurb an old building like this into something useable. As it happens, today we got another milestone in its refurbishment under our belts, so it’s a fine time to catch people up.

1. The refurbishment of the church has gone well, but it’s gone slowly. There are reasons for that: one, we have seasons here in Ohio, and not a whole lot of stuff, particularly outside stuff, gets done in winter. We were fortunate in that winter was mild enough that we could get some things tended to — we got the house just north of the church torn down in January and cleared away quickly thereafter — but in general weather still drew things out.

Two, we are at the mercy of contractor schedules. Our contractors have generally been very good and we don’t get the feeling any of them have strung us along, but at the same time they have other jobs and things they need to get to, and the nature of our refurb is such that we have to do a lot of things in a sequence. For example, to put up bookshelves in the balcony, where I will have a library, we need to have the painter done with the walls. For the painter to paint, we have to have the plaster done for the parts of the walls that need patching (a non-trivial amount, as it happens). And before we could get the plastering done, we had to cap a chimney and close up a part of the church exterior that was letting in moisture.

Today, the plastering is done (that’s the milestone). Next comes the painting. Then comes the bookshelves. We’ll probably get all of that done (knocks on my now rather substantial amount of wood) mid-summer. Keep in mind we’ve been having refurbishment of one sort or another going on since early 2022. So, yeah. It’s going well! And also, not quickly.

2. Also, as you might expect, all that refurbishment hasn’t exactly been cheap. A new 50-year roof? Not cheap! Replacing a nearly 80-year-old knob-and-tube electrical system with something that’s not likely to burn the whole place down? Not cheap! Redoing a concrete retaining wall that was on the verge of falling apart and toppling over? Not cheap! Tearing out an old church kitchen and replacing appliances from the 60s with modern counterparts? Not cheap! Pulling out decades-old industrial carpet and refinishing the hardwood floor underneath? Not cheap! Completely redoing the balcony area so that it is structurally sound and not easy to tumble right the hell off of? You guessed it, also not cheap!

In addition to the church proper, we bought two additional buildings: the parsonage associated with the church (purchased so we wouldn’t have to have the church land sliced into two separate lots, which would cause all sorts of headaches as we refurbished), and the house directly north of the church, which we bought for the land underneath and tore down because it was in poor repair. That was more money into the kitty.

And on top of that, hey, you know that inflation thing that’s been going on? It’s hit building materials and contracting costs as well. We’re paying objectively more for all the materials and work than we would have if we had gotten the church prior to the pandemic and every bit of economic upheaval that’s happened since. But we didn’t, it wasn’t for sale yet, so here we are, shelling out more.

Be aware, I am not expecting sympathy! One does not purchase a nearly 90-year-old building with the expectation that everything is hunky dory and will require no investment at all. When we first looked at the place, Krissy, whose job it is to evaluate structures, said that the bones of the building were good but everything else needed work, and she wasn’t wrong about any of that.

Also, as I noted elsewhere this week, we’re doing okay financially, and are able to handle these costs without a substantial amount of pain. Yes, we had to drop some other purchasing choices, but they were ones that we were likely to drop anyway for unrelated reasons. And if there’s a silver lining on all of this, it’s that as the church and all the costs associated with it are in the service of creating office and content development space for our business, pretty much all of these expenses are tax deductible.

But still, whooooo. Not cheap! And we still have some very not cheap things to get through. Remember those bookshelves I mentioned? Well, they ain’t gonna be particleboard slats bought from Walmart; they’re going to be done by the same local cabinetmaker who made my office bookshelves. They’re going to be solid and terrific and worth every penny… and a whole lot of pennies it will be.

3. The refurbishment is still ongoing but we’re already using the space for its intended purpose. Krissy’s office is set up and she uses it regularly for her various business needs, and to tend to both Scalzi Enterprises (she’s the CEO) and The Scalzi Family Foundation, which has already begun its philanthropic mission. Right now, I camp out in Krissy’s office when I’m there, but my own office (which will be in the alcove that you can see center right in the above photo) will be set up soon as well. On a day-to-day basis, the church will be our business space.

With that said, and as I have noted before, it would be a shame for a building with so much history in the community to be closed off from the community all the time. So there are plans, through the Scalzi Family Foundation, for community-focused events. How those will be managed and the practical aspects of using the building for them are still things we are working on, but we’re pretty optimistic about making them happen. And when we’re finally at a point when all the renovations are done and we’ve furnished and decorated the place to our liking, we’re looking forward to having an open house for the folks in town so they can come in and see what we’ve done with the place.

4. On that score, one of the things we’ve been very happy about is the support we’ve gotten from the folks in Bradford for our purchase and renovation of the church. This building was a cornerstone of the community for decades; people went to church here, got married here, said goodbye to loved ones here, had chicken noodle dinners and Christmas pageants here. When it went up for sale, it would have been anyone’s guess who would buy it and for what purpose. So when people found out we had bought the church and the parsonage, as I understand it there was a bit of relief. They knew us because we’ve lived here for two decades, our kid went to school with their kids, and we’ve contributed to the daily life of the town. We’re a known quantity, basically.

On our side it’s been nice to have people check in with us about the progress, and tell us stories of their own relationship with the church, and be supportive of what we’re doing. We get that we’re now stewards of a building with a history that extends beyond our ownership, and we appreciate that so far, at least, people here seem happy about that. We’re looking forward to keeping the building part of the community for a long time to come. Not as a church anymore — excepting that it’s official name is now “The Old Church” — but still a place that is good for our town and valued in our community. I’m looking forward to that.

Once we get the painting and bookshelves and furnishing and everything else done, that is. It’s going well! There’s more to do.

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #5: That Big Damn Contract, Revisited

Posted on May 3, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      29 Comments

Will Glass wants to know:

How’s the Big Damn Contract going? Hard to believe it’s been 8 years.

Not that any of this is our business of course, but since you’ve talked about it a fair amount, your avid readers are curious.

Are you satisfied with the deal you got? From Tor’s perspective are they satisfied with what they are getting? How is the schedule for the 13 books?

I can’t imagine anyone here doesn’t know what Will is talking about, but just to be safe: In May of 2015, I signed a 13-book, $3.4 million dollar contract with Tor. We noted at the time that we expected the contract to last for about a decade; eight years on, it looks like we underestimated the length of time it would take to fulfill that contract. Starter Villain, out in September, will be the sixth book in the contract, after the three Interdependency books, Head On, and The Kaiju Preservation Society. That’s six books in eight years, with one year skipped at the beginning of the contract to help plan a push for The Collapsing Empire, the first book covered by it, and then 2021 skipped because COVID messed with book publishing and Tor thought — correctly! — that Kaiju would have a better chance in early 2022.

Of those five books published so far under the Big Damn Contract, four were New York Times bestsellers and all were bestsellers on other charts, three (Empire, Last Emperox, Kaiju) have been nominated for awards, with Empire winning the Locus and Emperox winning the Dragon, and the Interdependency series as a whole nominated for Best Series at the Hugo Awards. All of them, either individually or as part of a series, have been optioned for film or television. All of them are also sold into multiple languages, including Starter Villain, which isn’t out yet. It’s too early to know how Villain will do, but so far early signs have been encouraging.

Financially, because of all of the above plus backlist sales of previous titles, since 2015, and counting all my sources of income related to publishing, I’ve already earned to this point a multiple of the baseline figure quoted above. Be assured that Tor has done the same, just on the sales of the books in the contract; here at Scalzi HQ we’ve run the numbers. In short, everyone is already ahead on this deal and will continue to be so as we go through the remainder of it.

Which is great! It’s nice when things are working more or less the way they should. It should be noted that none of this comes as much of a surprise to me, because one of the great advantages of this deal is the flexibility it allows us to work with every part of my catalogue to maximize sales and, thus, income for both me and Tor. All of my novels are with one house, which means we never have to worry, for example, if that one novel that pairs really well with a novel that’s coming out is available to us to put on sale to prime the interest pump. It absolutely is, and we have a bunch of options open to us. It’s fantastic to be able to do whatever we need to, in order to stay on the reader radar.

The flexibility also applies to upcoming work. I’ve swapped out titles on the contract (most famously when the book I was working on in 2020 crashed and burned and I switched over to writing Kaiju instead), and we have the ability to move things around on the fly. Kaiju did great, so I wrote another book with that same kind of vibe to ride the wave it created. The contract has three YA books included in it but the YA market has cooled since 2015, so if we decide we want to swap some or all of those with general titles, we can do that. If something that’s been optioned for film/TV goes into production, we can work to have another book in the series ready for when the adaptation hits screens. It’s all baked in.

(And also, Tor has generally been great as a partner. I like the people and we work well together, and they’ve given me the support on both the editorial and marketing fronts that my books have needed to do well. Have they been perfect? No, but neither have I — see the thing up there about blowing up my 2020 novel. But that’s the other thing about having a Big Damn Contract: We both have time to course correct when we have to.)

If I had to do it over again, would I still sign up for the Big Damn Contract? I think so, yes. Eight years on, Tor’s place in the publishing universe is still very solid and possibly better than it was when I signed on; bookstores, both indie and chain, are generally doing better than they were eight years ago, and the wisdom of the deal both for me and Tor is at this point self-evident. There are still people who probably think I could have made more self-publishing and/or bumping up from book-to-book, but a) I know myself well enough to know I don’t want to self-publish unless there is no other option, b) there are no guarantees in publishing and it’s just as likely my advances might go down rather than up. Also, c) at least for me, at some point you say “that’s enough money for now.” I’m at “enough money for now,” and the rest can come in when it comes in, if it comes in at all. There are far more benefits to this contract than just the upfront money.

So, yes! It’s doing great, thanks for asking. And there are more books to come.

— JS

(Have a question for Reader Request Week? Leave in the comment thread at this link.)

I’m the Guest of Honor at the 2023 Budapest International Book Festival

Posted on May 3, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      23 Comments

For those of you who can’t read Hungarian, which admittedly includes me, this is what the article screenshot above says, via Google Translate:

John Scalzi will be the guest of honor at this year’s Book Festival
The Budapest International Book Festival, which is now being held for the 28th time, is a noted event of the international book world, the defining professional and cultural forum of the region. This year’s book meeting will take place between September 28 and October 1 at the Millenár, and we can welcome the Netherlands as the country of honor of the event.

The article also notes that in addition to being the guest of honor at the Budapest International Book Festival, I will also be receiving the Budapest Grand Prix from the mayor of Budapest.

How do I feel about all of this? Hugely honored and delightfully befuddled. Last year’s guest of honor was a Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexandrovna, and some previous guests of honor have included Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jonathan Franzen and Paulo Coelho. That’s a heady group with which to keep company.

I have been to Budapest before, in 2019, to appear at a different book festival, and had just a tremendous time. The people at the book fair were lovely, and the city is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever been to. I’m very much looking forward to returning and seeing friends and book lovers there once again.

Budapest, see you soon!

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #4: My Memory

Posted on May 2, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      27 Comments

Granny Roberta says:

I had a really good question a while back but I forgot to write it down. (Remembering the actual question was never an option.) So how’s YOUR memory holding up?

As far as I can recall, it’s about as good as it ever was, which is to say, not particularly good or bad.

More accurately, it’s kind of like this:

1. Do you need a rough estimate of the domestic box office gross of any film released by a major Hollywood studio since 1991? I have that shit wired, both because I was a professional film critic for several years, and so I had a need for that sort of information, and because my brain has always been incredibly good at noting and retaining facts and trivia, which has come in super handy as a writer, putting together stories on the fly.

2. Do you need to know where I put my wallet fifteen minutes ago? Fuck if I know; I mean, it’s probably in the house somewhere? Because I haven’t left the house in the last fifteen minutes? But after that, yeeeeeaaaah, it’s a blank, I will have to undergo a journey of the soul, and a walkaround for the parts of the house I am likely to have been in, to find it.

3. Did we meet once, eight years ago? I will likely remember your face, and more likely if you are a woman/femme-presenting, because (best guess on my brain here), I’m straight and women’s faces interest me more than men/masculine-presenting faces do. Yes, I know, I’m not rationalizing my brain’s apparent inherent sexism, I’m just telling you what it does. But regardless of gender presentation, I am pretty good at faces — and also, really good at identifying people I already know at a distance from other less-obvious physical traits, like how they walk or gesticulate. This is why I was not particularly flummoxed by masks when we were all wearing them; faces are not the only thing I clue in on. BUT —

4. I’m shit at names and if you are in my signing line and you bring more than one book I will likely forget your name between signing the first book and the second one. That’s because when I’m doing something like signing books, everything is in the short term memory buffer and gets wiped the instant I’m done; look, you try signing for dozens or possibly even hundreds of people at one time and trying to remember them all for any longer than five minutes. I want to be clear that when I’m talking to you in my signing line I am going to try to give you a pleasant and memorable experience for you, because even if I’m seeing a whole bunch of other people, you’ve come to see me, and I want you to know that I appreciate you have. But, yeah, the second you walk away your name is already out of my brain. Sorry. It affects other people in other situations as well, and at this point I just say to people “I know we know each other but my brain is shit at names so please tell me yours again.”

5. So, Krissy had foot surgery a while back and couldn’t drive for six weeks, so for every day of those six weeks I drove her to work, and then a few hours later picked her up and drove her back home. Did it happen? Yes, absolutely. Does Krissy remember it? Of course she does. Do I have any memory of this six weeks of taxi service? Not one bit. It’s as if my brain looked at that whole time period, said, oh, you don’t need that, and then just hit the purge button. There’s a whole bunch of stuff where Krissy will say, hey you remember that? And I will say, no, not in the least, my love. Again: Absolutely certain it happened. Have no memory of it. At all.

6. But it works the other way too! Sometimes Krissy doesn’t remember a particular thing and I have an exact memory of it and can go down that rabbit hole as deeply as you please. Between the two of us, we remember most things to a reasonable approximation.

7. You slighted or insulted me even once? Oh, I’m gonna fucking remember that until I die, my friend, and while I practice a policy of genial amusement at such things, and will not do anything to make your life more difficult or unpleasant, because why become that sort of person, when you fall down some stairs, personally, professionally or literally, I can’t promise I won’t say “oh, no,” in a very small, studiously compassionate voice and then think about making a pie. I’m happy to forgive, actually. Forget? Nah.

8. Do I feel like age has had an impact on my memory? Not really, and while one can never really foretell the future, I don’t really expect it to; I come from a line of people who remained mentally tack-sharp well into their 80s and 90s. Also, it helps that I am relatively active, healthy, and I don’t do recreational drugs or have other habits that are correlative to memory impairment, and have not (to date, crosses fingers) had any number of concussions or contusions that would directly affect my brain function. All things being equal, I expect to be at a fairly standard level of memory function for a while yet.

9. Oh, jeez, I forgot what I was gonna say here.

10. That was a joke. I SWEAR.

— JS

(Have a question for Reader Request Week? Leave in the comment thread at this link.)

Reader Request Week 2023 #3: Our Giant Lawn

Posted on May 2, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      27 Comments

–E asks:

You have this giant lawn. I don’t get the sense you do much more than mow it (or rather, Krissy mows it). What do you use your giant yard for? Throwing balls for the dog, I’m sure, and taking photographs of yourself in dresses, but do you ever picnic in your yard? Did Athena have camp-outs? What does one do with a giant lawn?

We do indeed have a giant lawn. Our acreage is 5.01 acres, and is almost exactly the dimensions of a New York City block, and with the exception of the concrete foundation on which our house rests, the garden areas around the house, the concrete parking area in front of the garage, and the driveway to get from the road to the house, it is all lawn: grass and trees.

What do we do with it? Well, –E hit on one thing lightly, but which I’m happy to address more in detail: Pet activity. As you might imagine, it’s quite useful to have a yard the size of an ample public park for the dog to run around in and do her business on. Also, since we live in rural America, it’s lovely to let her bound about leashlessly without worrying about her leaving the property or endangering herself down by the road. With the exception of the about-once-monthly break for it to visit the neighbor’s horses and roll around in their poop, Charlie (and Daisy and Kodi before her) stays on the property and doesn’t feel constrained. My mother-in-law likewise brings her dogs over to play and poop in our yard as well; the dogs apparently like our yard better than they like the literal park they live next to.

(Since I know some of you will be curious: every couple of weeks I go through the yard and scoop up the poop closest to the house to avoid inconvenient shoe bombs, and otherwise I leave it to decompose on its own. The yard seems to handle it pretty well. )

Another thing we do with it, or at least part of it: Run our septic system through it. We’re out in the country and we’re not on the city water supply, so we get our water from a well; when we’re done using it, it goes into a septic tank and part of our yard — or more accurately the soil and rock underneath it — is the septic system’s leachfield (also known as a drainfield). This works pretty well, and we recently made an upgrade to the system. As this is a necessary part of the rural experience when you’re not on the public water, I’m happy to have it all contained on our property and not crowding into our neighbors’ space with our effluvia. And again, it seems to have no detrimental effect on our lawn, and perhaps does the opposite.

(For the next set of curious: Yes, our well is far away and upstream from our leachfield, and also we filter the water we get out of well. And for those of you living in western states where sucking up water from the ground is an actual long-term ecological issue, allow me to assure you that in rain-soaked Ohio we are not under the same level of water constraints you are.)

The next thing we do, and specifically I do with my large lawn, is look at it and be in it. Which seems like not much! But hear me out. Having a vast expanse of green around you, and visible to you every time you look out a window, is extremely calming and lovely, and for me, very beneficial to my personal mental well-being. And not just my personal mental well-being; we have people come visit the house and sit on the deck or porch and stare out into the yard, and you can actually see the stress leave their body. It’s nice to be in calm and enjoyable surroundings! Add to that the general quiet of rural America and the distance between us and our neighbors, and overall having a large lawn contributes to a chill and pleasant home environment.

Which matters. I do a lot of traveling and I see a large number of people when I do. And it’s great, I enjoy doing it, but when I come back home it’s actually fantastic to have a level of pastoral isolation, because the fact is I’m an introvert and eventually I need to recharge, and a huge patch of green grass is excellent for recharging. On the flip side of this, when COVID-19 struck and everyone was stuck inside for weeks and months, our being able to get outside and actually walk for a significant distance without worrying about bumping into other people and getting infected by them (or vice versa) was really useful to keep from going entirely around the bend.

And finally, and in a general sense, you know the expression “you need to go out and touch grass?” Well, as it happens I have a lot of grass to touch. And it helps!

(And yes, as it happens, we have had picnics and camp-outs and croquet parties in the lawn, and sledded down the hilly part of it when it snows, and other stuff like that. It’s a lawn, we’re Americans, we do American Lawn Things.)

Sure, but do you need five acres of lawn to do any of that? I hear some of you ask. Possibly not, but as it happens, five acres is what this specific house came with, so it’s what we have. I’m sure it seems excessive to some people, and that’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. Five acres of lawn means five acres of an agricultural monoculture, although, ironically, it also represents more diversity than the land had in its recent history, since our plot of land was for decades a field that alternated between corn and soybeans, just like every other agricultural field around here.

I have over the years had any number of people suggest all sorts of alternate uses for the land. I have a standard snarky response to that, which is to invite them to come and do all the things they would like for me to do with the land that’s currently my lawn, with their own time and at their own expense. They don’t take me up on that offer.

But they’re also not entirely wrong, and it’s something Krissy and I talk about. She’s the one who handles most of the day-to-day maintenance of the lawn, either by taking care of it herself or by managing and directing the professionals we have come to do the things she chooses to offload. At some point or another she might decide that she’s done with all of that, in which case we’ll start working with some local experts to rewild some or even most of it, and to do it in a way that a) isn’t just weeds and mess but actual local flora, b) doesn’t antagonize our neighbors by making it look like our house has become That Abandoned Meth Hut On The Hill. We don’t have an HOA or anything like that, but we also understand our neighbors have to live near, and look at, our property. We want to be good neighbors whatever we do. Which means that whatever we do will take planning and effort and won’t be any less work than maintaining a huge damn lawn, just different work.

Until and unless, it will remain a sea of green, which I am not displeased about, and which I enjoy for itself, beyond any other practical use. It’s nice to have, and it’s nice I get to have it. I’ll keep it for at least a little longer.

(Have a question for Reader Request Week? Leave in the comment thread at this link.)

— JS

Reader Request Week 2023 #2: The Future of Social Media

Posted on May 1, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      17 Comments

Stars & Arrow asks:

I’m curious about your thoughts on the future of social media, beyond the current doom-spiral of Twitter and the struggle to figure out a replacement for that.

I keep thinking of all the ways social media has been used in the past, particularly in countries where speech is more limited, and lament the loss of the digital public square that Twitter used to represent for so many. Yet I don’t believe that the fall of Twitter necessarily means the death of that public square.

So what do you think is likely to take on that role? Another social media platform? Or something else altogether?

It’s interesting to be asked that at the moment, because I’ve started playing over at BlueSky, which is currently an invite-only startup-intending-to-be-federated social media site that has the sort of funky energy of the early Twitter, i.e., before it was swamped by bots and fascists. It’s super early days there (like, it’s been around for less than a month), but already there’s a sense of community, with in-jokes, weird lingo and a general queer, feral openness that I’m really digging. It’s fun to play there in a way that it no longer is at most other social media sites.

Will it “replace” Twitter? Probably not. But! Hear me out! I don’t think Twitter particularly needs to be replaced at the moment. First, despite its current extreme mismanagement, Twitter will likely stumble on for a while yet. Second, and more importantly, Twitter was and is a product of its particular time, a moment when “microblogging”, i.e., an easy-to-use, easy-to-scroll alternative to comparatively clunky blog sites and/or earlier social media iterations like MySpace, was the next step in online social evolution. There’s a reason why Facebook and Twitter and Instagram were all massive hits, and consolidated so much of online activity to them.

But they also ate the Internet, along with Reddit and Tik Tok, and as the saying goes, the online world now consists of five big sites, each of which mostly show repurposed bits from the other four. Twitter is now in active decline thanks to the incompetence of its new owner, Facebook and Instagram feel like they’re treading water, Tik-Tok feels like it just crested, and Reddit — well, who knows with Reddit, it’s always been a bit of a chaos engine, for good and ill.

And they all, either intentionally or otherwise, worked to drive out quality elsewhere online, whether it was Facebook convincing creators to abandon their own sites for theirs (and then eventually charging them to access their own audiences) and/or convincing site to “pivot to video” based on fraudulent stats, or Reddit replacing single-interest sites with subreddits, or Twitter essentially replacing blogs for a lot of people. Couple that with Google’s abandonment of its Reader app, which lots and lots of people used to visit individual blogs and sites (no joke, when Reader went away, so did 40% of the direct traffic on Whatever), and we end up where we are today, with an oligopoly of social media sites controlling the majority of the social traffic, and everyone else squabbling over crumbs.

And, I don’t know, what if we didn’t do that anymore? People may or may not like Mastodon, the social media format beloved by a certain stripe of nerds, but one of the things that is absolutely compelling about it to me is the idea of “federation,” where the whole network is distributed rather than being under one company’s purview. It operates under the ActivityPub protocol, which is an open protocol; BlueSky, as I understand it, works on a variant of this. The upshot of it is rather than five companies sucking up all the attention — and any money that comes from it — there can be thousands of independent and/or specialty sites that nevertheless can communicate and share information over an agreed-upon protocol.

I kind of like that. I like the idea, for example, that Scalzi.com could be the place from which I could do everything — long pieces like this one, short bits like on Twitter, closed conversations with friends like I have on my private Facebook account, and so on. Other people could run Discord-like servers, show off Twitch-like streams or present video like TikTok or YouTube, and some or all of it could be distributed to anyone who wants to see it or subscribe. Seems like it would be easier for me, anyway.

(Yes, I know RSS exists. As far as I can see the ActivityPub protocol is more robust than RSS is in its functionality.)

In the meantime, on a personal level, I don’t mind if Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/TikTok have competition for my and anyone else’s attention, and there’s some moderate-to-radical balkanization of social media. I mean, hell, I’m already spread out across several sites, including my own, and I have slightly different uses — and public personas — for each of them. How I’m presenting on, say, Twitter, is not exactly how I present on Mastodon, or on Facebook (either the public or private versions), or on Instagram, or, now, on BlueSky.

As I mention every time I note any of this sort of stuff, none of these personas are false; they are all really me, they’re just really me with certain attributes pushed forward or back. This is more work, mind you, and someone who is not Very Online like me might find it exhausting, which I get, since I find it exhausting sometimes myself. But the value I get out of these individual sites makes it worth it.

Here in 2023, if I had to guess, I’d say I’ll likely be spending less time on Twitter, more time on my private Facebook account, and possibly a lot more time on BlueSky, which, as noted above, is a ton of fun at the moment. And no matter what, I will always be here. It’s home, you know?

— JS

(Have a question for Reader Request Week? Leave in the comment thread at this link.)