The Big Idea: Delilah S. Dawson

Sep. 23rd, 2025 01:17 am
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

Writing a book is like riding a bike: once you’ve got it down, you never have to learn how to do it again, right? Such may not be the case. In her Big Idea, author Delilah S. Dawson delves into the writing process and learning curves she faced, even after numerous novels. Follow along to see what challenges and changes came with creating her newest book, Thor & Loki: Epic Tales From Marvel Mythology.

DELILAH S. DAWSON:

The Big Idea: Sometimes Your Process Changes, and That’s Okay

I’ve written over forty books and had thirty-two of them—the good ones—published, so you’d think that I know how to write a book.

As it turns out, you would be wrong.

At least partially.

Because the thing about writing books is that just because you know how to write one book does not mean you know how to write another. Books are like fingerprints in that each one is wholly individual, unique in all the world. Books are unlike fingerprints in that they cannot be easily compared to koala bears. 

Except—

Well, koala bears are notoriously single-minded and stubborn, and writers can be like that, too. Hopefully, I will convince you otherwise.

When I write a novel, I write the story straight through from the first page to the last page. I don’t jump around chapters, reread extensively, or edit as I go. I think of it like carrying hot laundry from the dryer to the bed: you wrap it in your arms and run, and if you drop a sock, you leave it behind because we all know that one hasty squat can topple the entire basket. I do multiple revisions, lest you think I am publishing the equivalent of inside-out, cat-hair covered socks, but that initial run from page one to THE END is the skeleton on which the meat of my story rests.

This method worked for thirty-one books, and then suddenly, it didn’t.

When I was invited to write Thor and Loki: Epic Tales from Marvel Mythology, I quickly realized that my Hot Laundry Process could not serve me. Instead of weaving a story from my own brain and heart, creating a new world out of the threads crafted from my creative spinnerets, I was tasked with taking an existing mythology and retelling it for a modern audience through the well-known voices of Marvel’s Thor and Loki. The Norse myths spring from an oral tradition, and there is no one, total, mutually accepted, complete source to study. Not only that, but there is no one specific Thor or Loki. Like the myths that bore them, these two ancient gods have been depicted in multiple movies, TV shows, and comics, and each individual fan has a favorite Thor or Loki, a platonic ideal of the character that they hold in their heart.

Thus, my task was to take two well-known, beloved characters that have existed simultaneously as gods and goofs for the past twelve hundred or more years, distill them into a fine mead, and then syphon that golden sauce through the sieve of collective comic memory and Icelandic poetry.

Can’t believe I’m saying this, but it might be easier to do laundry.

I don’t generally suffer from Writer’s Block, not only because I have deadlines and a mortgage, but also because I trust in my process. And yet you must believe me when I tell you that I came to a standstill on this project and began to dread it. When I invent a world, I become its god, and every decision I make solidifies the character and story. In that realm, I am always correct, and reality conforms to my whims. But in the realm of Thor, Loki, and their shared mythology, I had to instead become the bard.

In the Norse tradition, the bard is the keeper of story and memory, a vaunted figure; Odin is considered the god of poetry, and one of the myths that has lasted through the centuries tells the tale of the first bard and the mead of poetry. The bard’s job is not to spin tales from the ether, but rather to pass down the stories from one generation to the next, to remember them in a time with no written record. Each bard carried the myths and told them in a unique fashion, reminding the tavern’s occupants how to live and worship while entertaining them.

Once I realized that my job was to take up the bard’s tankard, suddenly the book actually began to flow. Instead of telling my own story, I broke the project down into chapters, and each day, my task was to look at a particular myth from several different sources and spin my own version. Or, more accurately, to channel the voices of Loki and Thor as they each compete to woo the Avengers to their side using all the bard’s techniques of enchantment and, well, propaganda. Adding in a few famous Thor and Loki tales from the Marvel comics was even more of a challenge. From The First Avenger in 1963 to Thor, Frog of Thunder and the more recent Loki for President, it was a delight to create my own poetry from famous stories never before told in prose.

For the first time, my chapters jumped around. I wasn’t carrying laundry from point A to point B; I was putting a puzzle together. Unlike all my other books, the Norse myths don’t have a specific chronology. Although there is a very distinct beginning, which involves a very large cow licking a giant, and a very distinct ending, known as Ragnarok, what happens in between is fluid. As Loki tells the Avengers, the myths exist to entertain and teach, not help you draw up an accurate timeline. Part of the bard’s art is selecting just the right story to tell. 

Now, this is not the first time I’ve had to completely change my process. Writing my first novella, also known as ‘a book that is only 40% of a book’, had quite the learning curve, and I did such a bad job writing my first comic that I burst out crying at a hotel buffet during a Santa Claus convention. I’ve been writing professionally since 2012, and I’ve learned to always trust my process, and when that process stops working, to find a new process. There is no one way to write a book. A writer’s process may change over decades, years, projects, or chapters. Whatever gets the book done? That’s your process.

If you don’t have a process yet, I highly recommend the book Story Genius by Lisa Cron, which teaches you to outline by marrying character arc to plot using the third rail of emotion. And if you already have a process, maybe don’t cling to it too tightly. Don’t be that koala that will only eat eucalyptus if it’s on the branch. Writing is about fluidity and play and experimentation. As Charles De Mar says in Better Off Dead: Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.


Thor & Loki: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

Think of the Children

Sep. 23rd, 2025 11:00 am
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Posted by Patrick Kearney

I need help figuring out how to tell my kids I am non-monogamous. I’ve been non-monogamous for over five years and have been married for nearly fifteen years. My husband and I have three kids together, the oldest of which is now 14. My husband and I have not been sexually active for nearly eight … Read More »

The post Think of the Children appeared first on Dan Savage.

Boy on the Inside?

Sep. 23rd, 2025 11:00 am
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Posted by Nancy Hartunian

A gay man is lucky to be in a throuple relationship. But he worries that he’s having too much sex, and thinking about sex so much that it’s distracting him at work. Is he a sex addict? What can he do to cool his fevered libido? A strong, confident woman likes casual hook-ups. Her friends … Read More »

The post Boy on the Inside? appeared first on Dan Savage.

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

If my last post over Zaynab Issa’s cookbook didn’t entice you to buy it, this one might just change your mind. After cooking a few things from, and loving, Third Culture Cooking, I decided I simply must have a dinner party using nothing but recipes from Issa’s book.

It probably would’ve been easier to make something I had already made before, but I decided to do entirely new recipes for the party and just have faith that they would turn out well.

I’m happy to report that everything turned out so much better than I could have even hoped for, and my dinner party was a total success! So let’s talk about what I made, what it cost me, how long it took, and how everything tasted.

I spent probably over an hour initially going through the book deciding on everything I wanted to make. I finally decided on Spiced Chickpea Soup, Calabrian Chili Chicken with Caper Raita, Coconutty Corn, Shawarma Spiced Carrots, Chocolate Cake with Chai Buttercream, Ginger Lime Spritz, and Slightly Salty Mango Lassi.

First thing first was to place a big ol’ Kroger pick up order, because searching up everything I needed on their website and adding it to my cart was way easier than wandering all over the actual store with a broken-wheel-cart and spending time searching the shelves and missing what was right in front of my face.

I would say, roughly, I spent $200 on ingredients. A big part of this was that I already had every single spice I needed on hand, like turmeric, coriander, cumin, and cardamom, so that certainly saved me a large chunk of change. Another factor was that there was very little meat I needed to buy, and the meat was just chicken thighs, which are pretty cheap. I wasn’t cooking nice cuts of steaks or salmon, so my protein cost was very low. So much of what I needed to buy was produce.

Besides produce, I had to buy things like coconut milk, whole milk plain yogurt, feta, labneh, just the kind of stuff I don’t normally have on hand. In fact, this was my first time buying labneh, and I was surprised I even found it. My local Kroger had literally one brand, and like, two tubs of it. So I got lucky.

The hardest thing to find, no joke, was the Calabrian chilis. I had to go to Meijer for them, and even then they only had one type. I was supposed to buy Calabrian chili paste for the recipe, but they only had whole Calabrian chilis, so I just made do.

So, with everything bought, it was time to get cooking. I cooked, nonstop, for seven hours. Here’s how I tackled everything.

Starting at 9am, I made the yogurt and Calabrian chili marinade for the chicken thighs, and put them in the fridge to marinate while I cooked everything else. Secondly, I made the soup, because I knew that could just be reheated on the stove top easily when it came time to serve. Next, I mixed up the cake batter and baked the two cakes so they’d have plenty of time to cool before applying the frosting. Following that, I prepped the carrots to be roasted and also mixed up the herb salad that’s meant to go on top when served.

While the carrots roasted, I prepped the sweet potatoes to bake at the same time as the chicken, and made up the caper raita and quick-pickled cucumbers that accompany it. In the chicken went after the carrots came out, and while the chicken was baking I made the corn on the stove top. Finally, I made the syrup for the ginger lime spritz, and while that was cooling I whipped up the chai cream for the buttercream, and made the frosting.

My guests arrived at 4pm, which is exactly when the chicken came out, the soup was reheated, the spritz had been mixed up, and everything was ready to serve all at once.

While everything was definitely a lot to make, let’s talk about how difficult each dish was individually.

The chicken and sweet potatoes were honestly very low effort, despite being the main dish. The chicken can marinate anywhere from 15 minutes to overnight, so even if you’re in a rush to get it in the oven you’ll be all right. It helps that the chicken thighs bake right on top of the cut up sweet potatoes, so it’s sort of like a sheet-pan dinner. The quick-pickled cucumbers are literally so easy, you just slice up some mini seedless cucumbers nice and thin and put them in a bowl with lemon juice and salt. The caper raita is pretty simple too, you just mix the capers with the feta, yogurt, and some more cucumber and you’ve got yourself a delicious, creamy accompaniment to the chicken.

For the soup, you just cut up some onion, carrot, and garlic and cook it for a little bit until it’s ready to have the spices, chickpeas, and chicken broth added. Then you blend it up with an immersion blender and it’s ready to go! Doesn’t get much easier than that! (Not counting the fact that my eyes hurt so bad from cutting the onion I had to walk away for a solid ten minutes while tears streamed out of my eyes.)

The carrots were a breeze, you just mix a ton of spices into olive oil, cut the carrots in half lengthwise, cover them in the oil and roast ’em up. The herb salad that went on top of the carrots was also simple but time consuming from the produce you have to cut up for it. Red onion, dates, jalapenos, and herbs mixed with lemon juice and olive oil. The jalapenos were definitely the biggest pain, since removing the seeds is a task that requires patience. Also my fingertips burned for so long after handling the jalapenos.

The cake seriously could not have been easier, it’s just completely standard flour, cocoa powder, sugar, eggs, etc., mix it on up in a stand mixer, pour into cake pans and bake. Now, the chai cream on the other hand quickly became a true labor of love. While making the cream itself wasn’t too much trouble (just adding a bunch of spices and vanilla to heavy cream and heating it up), the real challenge came when it was time to strain it through a fine mesh sieve. The loose black tea and fresh grated ginger proved to be a huge obstacle to getting the liquid through the straining process. It took so much time to get as much cream as I could through the fine mesh. It really was an exercise in patience.

But, after I had the cream separated from the solids, the buttercream was also very easy. Just three sticks of butter, six cups of powdered sugar, and all the chai cream to make the absolute most delicious frosting I’ve ever tasted.

The corn was another easy dish, mostly because it uses bagged frozen corn. You just add the corn to a skillet and add the coconut milk and spices and you’re ready to go once it’s heated through and thickened up just a tad. Legit the easiest thing I made all day.

For the ginger spritz, the ginger syrup is homemade, and uses an absurd amount of fresh ginger for it. This part was time-consuming because I had to peel like half a pound of ginger and dice it up to cook it in the sugar and water, but letting it cook was super easy. You just have to let the sugar dissolve and the ginger flavor infuse nice and good before letting it cool and straining it. I proceeded to put the syrup in a pitcher and add a big ol’ bottle of sparkling water and ice. I completely forgot the lime, to be honest. But it was fine, okay! It was just really good homemade ginger ale pretty much.

On that note, I know this whole time you’ve been thinking to yourself, what about the mango lassi?! Well, I’m glad you asked, because it was inevitable that I would forget ONE ingredient. And it was the whole milk for the mango lassi. So while I had the mango, the honey, and the plain whole milk yogurt, it was too little too late.

Okay, so buying all the ingredients, making everything, yada yada. How did it all taste?!

Well, I’m not usually one to toot my own horn too much (especially when it comes to food, as I often think there’s multiple things I could’ve done better), but this food was literally the bomb dot com. Everything was so flavorful and fresh and straight up delicious.

The ginger spritz was spicy and had quite a bite from the ginger, but was perfectly sweetened and bubbly.

The chicken was cooked perfectly, and the sweet potatoes were soft and nicely seasoned. The caper raita was creamy and savory, and the quick-pickled cucumbers were bright and acidic to cut through that richness.

The carrots were roasted to the perfect texture, wildly flavorful from all the different spices, and the herb salad was incredibly bright and herbaceous, which paired perfectly with the creamy labneh. Plus, I especially loved the dates in the herb salad for just a touch of sweetness. It was extremely balanced.

The corn was honestly the most subtle dish, with a very mild flavor. It mostly just tasted like sweet corn in a slightly sweet, creamy sauce. Part of this is surely due to the fact I removed the seeds from the jalapenos that cooked in the corn, so if you want more flavor and heat in this dish feel free to leave the seeds in to infuse more spicy-ness.

The chickpea soup was pretty good, too, but definitely pretty mild in flavor compared to some of the other dishes. Even though there’s no dairy in this soup, it actually turns out pretty creamy from blending everything up. The chickpeas have a lot of starch in them that thicken the soup up really nicely.

The soup was warm and comforting, but if you really want it to be the best it can be, take Issa’s advice of adding fresh lemon juice, cilantro, and chili crisp to your bowl. I had never had chili crisp before this soup, and I decided to try Fly By Jing’s chili crisp, as I had heard good things and they’re partnered with another brand I like (Fishwife). Turns out their chili crisp is seriously amazing with just the right amount of heat, and I definitely need to try their collab product with Fishwife now. If I get sick anytime soon, I’m definitely making myself a bowl of this soup loaded with lemon juice and cilantro.

Finally, the cake. I absolutely loved this cake. The olive oil and extra egg yolks make it so moist and dense, and it has a great chocolate flavor from the full cup of Dutch-process cocoa powder. The buttercream is truly decadent. So rich and buttery, sweet but wonderfully spiced from the chai mixture. I definitely recommend using a high-quality butter for your buttercream, as it’s literally in the name (I use Kerrygold). This cake is sure to be a crowd pleasure, because who doesn’t love chocolate cake and luscious buttercream?! My grandma even tried some and said it was the best cake she’s ever had, so yeah.

Everything I made was just the right amount to serve my four friends and myself. Except there was a TON of cake leftover, even though I cut them huge slices that they had to take home.

I highly recommend making everything I made, there were zero misses. I’m so glad I tried out some new recipes and was able to have my friends over to enjoy them with me. It was a nice night, even if my body was seriously sore afterwards and there was a mountain of dishes waiting for me at the end.

I didn’t take many pictures because I was so busy cooking and serving, but here’s just a couple I got.

The chicken and sweet potatoes with the caper raita:

Five chicken thighs spread out around on a green, oval platter, atop cut up sweet potatoes. There's a dish of caper raita in the middle of the platter.

I know it looks like the chicken thighs are burnt but they’re just uh.. extra crispy. Not burnt! Certainly just blackened, like, in the good way.

Here’s the carrots on top of the labneh with the herb salad on top:

A wide and shallow bowl holding the labneh, carrots, and herb salad. The herb salad covers most of the carrots, with thinly sliced red onion and tons of green herbs visible.

And half the cake!

Half of the cake, with a frosting covered knife next to it.

And of course, the aforementioned mountain of dishes:

A huge, overwhelming pile of dishes filling the sink and surrounding counter space.

Funny thing is, I did dishes constantly in between everything I made. And I still ended up with this after everything was said and done. Good thing I have a decent dishwasher!

So, there you have it! A soup, main, two sides, dessert, and beverage all from Third Culture Cooking. Even though it was a lot of cooking and a lot of cleaning up, I loved making everything and I’m so happy everything turned out great!

Which dish sounds the best to you? Would you have decked out your soup with chili crisp? Have you tried chai buttercream before? Let me know in the comments, be sure to check out Zaynab Issa on Instagram, and have a great day!

-AMS

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Posted by John Scalzi

Kansas City near downtown is an interestingly medium-density sort of place: Lots of multi-story-but-not-too-big apartment buildings, and a lot of greenery. I like it.

Tonight! 7pm at the Unity Temple, sponsored by Rainy Day books. I think you can still get tickets!

Tomorrow! I’m back in my home state of Ohio, at the Parma branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, with the even also beginning at 7pm!

Please come see me at one (but probably realistically not both) of these events. It would be lovely to see you.

— JS

The Big Idea: James Kakalios

Sep. 22nd, 2025 03:06 pm
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

Look, up in the sky! It’s not a bird, or a plane, it’s author James Kakalios soaring in with a brand new book. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest release, The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood, to see just how scientific some of your favorite movies can get.

JAMES KAKALIOS:

My first book The Physics of Superheroes, was published in 2005 and used examples from print comic books to illustrate physics principles. Three years later, the release of the Iron Man and The Dark Knight films would light the match that ignited the superhero explosion at the multiplex. Now, not a year goes by without the release of several superhero movies and television series. There is little doubt that future historians will refer to the early part of the 21st century as the Golden Age of Geekdom!  

The Big Idea for my new book came a few years ago when I saw a five-year old boy walking with his mother in Antalya, Türkiye. The boy wore a tee shirt with Captain America’s face on the front, a knapsack with the MCU Avengers on his back, and a small, plastic Captain America shield on his right wrist. Captain America. Created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two young men just trying to make a living writing and drawing comic books in New York City during the Great Depression, little dreaming that their character would continue to inspire all over the world eighty years later. I realized that the penetration of superheroes into the popular culture was so thorough that, even for those who’ve never read a print comic book, I could use these heroes (and the occasional villain) to explain the physics behind a wide range of phenomena that were left out of my first book.

In the All-New, All-Different The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood I consider concepts and situations in superhero movies and TV shows and examine the real-world physics that underlies these fictional scenarios. While I don’t go to the movies with a pad of paper and a calculator, waiting for my physics-sense to start tingling, I’m nevertheless delighted whenever the characters on the screen, big or small, get their science right. It is just such examples, admittedly cherry-picked, that I discuss in my new book.

In this new book, you, Fearless Reader, will learn the real physics underlying the multiverse (true to its name—there are different interpretations of what “multiverse” means); if there really is a Quantum Realm (yes); why someone the size of an ant can knock someone out with one punch and yet be light-weight enough to ride atop a flying ant (it involves the Higgs boson); whether Superman really could reverse time by flying rapidly about the Earth (yes, by becoming a Tipler cylinder); whether nanotechnology can fabricate and alter Iron Man’s suit (not yet, but maybe soon); whether we can create fibers as strong as Spider-Man’s webbing (actually, scientists have made threads sixty times stronger); whether physicists put the word “quantum” in front of everything (yeah, pretty much); whether we can control devices just by thinking (yes); and the connection between the Infinity Stones and one of the greatest mathematical minds of the twentieth century (hint: she’s not Albert Einstein). This book will confirm what we all have long suspected—they couldn’t put it in a movie if it weren’t true!

With illustrations by acclaimed comic book artist and five-time Eisner Award winner Gene Ha, this book will discuss topics ranging from Artificial Intelligence to quantum computers to why your footprints look dry when walking along a wet shoreline. You’ll learn how semiconductor devices work, how information is transmitted in the brain and why an average increase in the global average temperature a few degrees is such a big deal (and what we can do about it). 

Prepare to get educated in the nerdiest way possible.


The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-A-Million|Powell’s

Author’s socials: Website|Bluesky

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September 22nd, 2025next

September 22nd, 2025: Now I wish that my computer really DID have a Valu-Maxx Junior processor sticker. I for one LOVE to lower expectations!!

– Ryan

September is Suicide Prevention Month

Sep. 21st, 2025 12:12 am
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Posted by Frank

A scene from ‘PostSecret: The Show’.

Suicide is America’s secret. We keep it from ourselves, but not talking about it only makes it worse.

Suicide is the most preventable form of death in this country. We know what we can do to save lives. We know what works.

By lifting the stigma surrounding mental illness and attacking the stereotypes about suicide that can prevent young people from reaching out for help when they need it – that can save lives.

By sharing our feelings about anxiety, depression, and loneliness before those secrets wall us up – that can save lives too.

67% of students tell a friend if they are thinking about suicide rather than a parent, teacher, or counselor.

That sounds like a lot of pressure if you are that friend, but it’s really not. It just means doing the little things. Asking questions, listening without judgement, validating their feelings, and referring them to a professional.

You don’t need to be a trained professional to help a friend – you just need to be a good friend.

The post September is Suicide Prevention Month appeared first on PostSecret.

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Posted by John Scalzi

It’s just a little before 3pm on a Saturday in Boise, and I’ve fed myself on a Subway Bacon Chicken Ranch sub (with oatmeal raisin cookie), and now I’m going to lie around on a bed in a darkened hotel room, watching YouTube cooking video until my brain is ready for a nice afternoon nap.

These are my unhinged tour habits! The pure licentiousness is the stuff of legend!

Anyway, hello, Boise. I will see you tonight at that most hedonistic of night haunts, the public library.

Tomorrow! Denver! I’ll see you at the Tattered Cover Colfax! 3pm — that’s right, it’s an afternoon event, because it’s Sunday, and we get our iniquity done early on Sunday.

— JS

The Big Idea: William Alexander

Sep. 19th, 2025 09:28 pm
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER:

Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves. 

It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station. 

This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system. 

Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld

Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. 

As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension. 

Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different. 


Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

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Posted by John Scalzi

Today’s view not only has a parking lot, but also a freeway onramp! This makes it a high-quality view from a hotel window!

(The room and hotel are pretty nice, just to be clear. Tor does not put me up in murder hotels.)

Tonight: I’m at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, 7pm! Be there or be somewhere else, I guess.

Tomorrow: I go all the way to Boise, Idaho, for an event at the Boise Public library (Hillcrest Branch), co-sponsored by Rediscovered Books. Also at 7pm! The event is free but please register at the link so they know you’re coming.

— JS

t-rex in: a flight of fancy

Sep. 19th, 2025 12:00 am
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September 19th, 2025: I recognize that this hobby is not for everyone. BUT: it is for SOME of the ones.

– Ryan

Hello From Santa Cruz

Sep. 19th, 2025 04:37 am
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Posted by John Scalzi

Forgot to post a “view from a hotel window” view today, but this interesting contraption was right down the street from me, so I thought you might like it instead. Tonight’s event was lovely and tomorrow I will be in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore at 7pm. You should come by and say hello to me there.

— JS

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Posted by Dan Savage

It’s gonna be a very brief struggle session this week — hardly a session, barely a struggle — since I’m a dozen times zones away from home and dying of jet lag. Got this via email… With Jimmy Kimmel, many journalists, many professors, and even fast food workers getting fired and suspended for pointing out … Read More »

The post STRUGGLE SESSION: Gonna Be a Shortie… appeared first on Dan Savage.

The Big Idea: Dan Rice

Sep. 18th, 2025 04:34 pm
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

What’s scarier, a haunted school or lifelong trauma? Spooky season is upon us and author Dan Rice has brought the ghost stories with his newest book, Phantom Algebra. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how ghastly high school can really be.

DAN RICE:

While writing Phantom Algebra, I encountered a challenge I had never faced before. The setting is a shared universe, specifically the fictitious town of Pinedale, North Carolina, located approximately fifty miles or so from Raleigh. The action needed to center around the berg’s haunted high school, Pinedale High.

I wanted the protagonist, Zuri, to be an outsider —the new kid at school —and not someone who believes in ghosts. But how to get her to Pinedale? I could have had a parent land a job in the city and have the story open with the family moving into a new home or Zuri stepping onto the school grounds for the first time. I don’t know…I felt that had been done before and wanted to do something a little different. 

I settled on the horror trope of a traumatic past. Zuri and her mother are on the run, have been for years, from Big Jake: estranged father, abusive husband, former boxer, and full-time gangland enforcer. This leads them to Pinedale after Zuri coldcocks her current high school’s star quarterback, ending his attempt to sexually assault her.

Despite the trauma of watching Big Jake nearly beat her mother to death, Zuri is a fighter like him, dreams of being a world champion, and remembers fondly learning to punch, kick, and grapple under his tutelage. Zuri can’t escape the past because every time she follows her first instinct to solve her problems with her fists, she perpetuates her family’s violent legacy. Isn’t that true of all of us? We can never escape the past because it is carried within us. The best we can do is to learn to cope healthily.

At Pinedale High, Zuri encounters challenging academics, especially mathematics, and a student body that believes the school is haunted. She doesn’t believe this for an instant, only giving credence to what she can beat into submission. When circumstances prove she can no longer deny the ghostly world, Zuri is presented with a problem as gnarly as an algebraic equation. How can she battle bullying poltergeists she can’t see or strike?

Zuri navigates Pinedale with the aid of new friends, fellow outcasts like herself, and eventually bonds with a tween spirit haunted by trauma she cannot escape even in death. Freeing the spirit from her abuser means unearthing Pinedale’s celebrated founding father’s legacy of filicide and satanic magic. Many of the town’s inhabitants haven’t an inkling that Pinedale’s foundation is awash in the blood of an innocent, but they will suffer for their communal past unless Zuri and her friends can face down monsters living and dead.

In the end, I found that Pinedale High being a shared story universe didn’t limit my storytelling. By leveraging the character-centric horror trope of past trauma, I told Zuri’s unique story while remaining within the bounds of Pinedale, the high school, the nearby haunted forest, and the handful of shared characters that give the series continuity.


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November 2017

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