The Big Idea: Bishop O’Connell
Posted on May 16, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 1 Comment
Is being a hero a selfless act if the hero has nothing they’re sacrificing? Author Bishop O’Connell explores what a hero really looks like in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Stain of a Nation. Come along as he shows you what bravery looks like when someone has everything to lose.
BISHOP O’CONNELL:
Lost Cause Mythology is bullshit idea that the Confederate cause during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Spoiler, it was centered on slavery. In Two-Gun Witch, the first book in this series, I wanted to counter that trope. I created a character who actually fought for a just cause and still lost. It served as a rather subtle attack against the myth. In Stain of a Nation, I drew inspiration more from John Brown in how I’d tackle the notion. If the book’s title sounds vaguely familiar, it’s a middle finger to a pro KKK and Lost Cause mythos film from 1915 called Birth of a Nation. That’s about as subtle as this story gets.
I love history for the stories it contains, but also the lessons it can teach. Granted, sometimes those lessons can be hard to learn, especially when dealing with the darker and more shameful periods of our lives. However, if reading your nation’s histories only make you proud, you’re not reading history. You’re reading propaganda. That’s the legacy of Lost Cause mythology; a whitewashing, softening, or (especially recently) a complete erasure, of our nation’s darkest aspects.
Where I grew up, I was taught a fairly honest history of slavery, the civil war, and their aftermath. Even so, what I learned on my own horrified me, both in content and that it hadn’t been in our text books. A lot of people in other parts of the country learned an almost nauseatingly sanitized version of that period. Unfortunately, as more stories are told, America has witnessed a redoubling of efforts to ignore, erase, or explain away our nation’s historical horrors. I didn’t set out to write a book as a direct counter to that, but it seems the timing of the release accomplished anyway.
In Stain of a Nation, a found family (a few of whom worked on the Underground Railroad) learn of a town that decided not to accept the results of the Civil War and the 13th Amendment. They drag the recently freed back into bondage, using dark and terrible magic to do so. The protagonists react as any reasonable person would, they set out to free the enslaved and burn the fucking town to the ground. In the doing, they find examples of how deep human cruelty and depravity can run. I’m sorry to say only the magical aspects of what I’ve written are fictional. The rest actually happened, and more frequently than most, myself included, wanted to know.
Few reading this, especially on this site, will grumble about virtue signaling, or white guilt, or something other such pile of horseshit. Just in case though, rest assured Stain of a Nation isn’t either of those things. Neither is it some self-insert white savior story. I’ll be honest though; it might be a bit of a power fantasy. I do love the idea of those with the power to do something, stepping in and helping those who don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, while I sometimes enjoy the idea of a God mode character curb-stomping slavers and fascists without breaking a sweat, that isn’t a hero. A hero can do something, but also has something to lose, sometimes everything, and does it anyway. History might well abound with such people, but we frequently don’t hear about those who did just as much, but often against more, and with less. In some cases, more socially palatable legends drown the grim histories. More often though, their stories disappear because no one knows. They fought and died in anonymity, their only legacy being the results of their efforts. Mind, that’s a pretty awesome legacy.
I regret we won’t ever know their names, but we can still recognize and celebrate them. While not my only goal, it was one of them when I wrote Stain of a Nation. As impressive as the main protagonist, Talen, is, I made sure to shine the light on others who stood against darkness. Some of whose names you’ll learn, others you won’t.
In short, Stain of a Nation is a book about heroes, big and small, famous and anonymous. None of whom ever enslaved someone because of their skin color. Never donned a hood to terrorize, murder, or torture someone for the same. They marched for equity, not segregation. They stood to be heard and recognized as humans, not to intimidate or coerce silence and obedience.
Stain of a Nation: Falstaff Hardcover|Falstaff Paperback|Falstaff E-Book
Author socials: Website|Facebook|Bluesky|Amazon Author Page
The Big Idea: Lorna Graham
Posted on May 15, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 2 Comments
The future is what we make of it, but what if our past isn’t as solid as we thought? Author Lorna Graham explores the idea that maybe the past isn’t always how we remember it, and how to reconcile with our past selves. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Where You Once Belonged, to see what your past has in store for you.
LORNA GRAHAM:
Where do our foundational ideas come from?
And what if they’re wrong?
It all started with a scene from a movie, a scene that made the top of my head tingle in the darkened theater.
The movie, 1998’s Living Out Loud, stars Holly Hunter as Judith Moore, a Manhattan woman whose husband has just left her for a younger model. Judith has few friends and zero confidence. She is so lonely that she regularly daydreams about the strangers around her. In a restaurant, a woman sits down at a nearby table with a friend. The women notice Judith and beckon her. Judith smiles but when she blinks we see the world as it really is: the two women, happily chatting, paying her no mind. Judith returns to her book, dejected.
But, being played by Holly Hunter, we know there’s spunk in Judith somewhere.
Indeed, there are other daydreams, ones that hint that she was once quite the bad-ass. In these dreams, we see Judith as a teenager with a tattoo on her hip, pulling a hot guy into a make-out session in an alley with gusto.
Back to the present, and Judith becomes friendly with Liz Bailey, a singer played by Queen Latifah. One night, Liz gives Judith a pill, presumably ecstasy, and takes her to an underground club in the Meatpacking District. As Judith wanders the dance floor, the lights change, and she’s plunged into another daydream, one in which the women around her begin to dance in unison, as if in a Broadway musical. Judith feeds off of their energy, moving to the forefront and dancing in a way that hints at her long-buried daring and sexuality.
She feels a tap on her shoulder. Slowly she turns and sees her teenaged self, tattoo and all. Judith gazes at her young doppelganger, her eyes full of emotion. The two embrace and begin a tender slow dance. The camera pulls back and they slowly disappear into the sea of dancers. The next morning, Judith starts taking charge of her life again.
When the lights came up, I knew I’d found the idea for my next novel.
Commonly, when we imagine an adult encountering his or her younger self, it’s assumed the point of the encounter is that the elder will counsel the younger. The fantasy is that we, with all our worldly experience, can advise the youthful ones on how to deal with their difficulties and insecurities; we can hug them and provide assurance that everything will be alright. What struck me about the scene from Living Out Loud was that this idea had been turned on its head. Here it is the teenager who has the lesson to impart to her grownup self. In fact, her teenaged self is the only one who could truly remind Judith that she used to be adventurous and bold. Thanks to her, Judith reconnects with something fundamental in herself: the exact thing she’ll need to move forward.
As I began to play with this idea as the basis for a book, a character came to me: a woman who had traveled so far from the idealistic teenager she had been—a woman who had, in fact, become such a cynic and a sell-out—that only a face-to-face encounter with her young self could possibly reveal to her the many errors of her ways and, just maybe, set her back on the right path.
I knew my protagonist would be a newswoman. As a network news writer, broadcast journalism is a world that I know. I also happen to think there isn’t quite enough workplace fiction out there, considering work is where we spend about a third of our lives.
But more than that, I thought the world of journalism was the perfect backdrop for a battle royale between idealism and cynicism. My character, Everleigh Page, is a 42-year old executive producer of an award-winning magazine show. While she loves her work, she’s covered the world long enough to have witnessed terrible deeds done by corporations to consumers, husbands to wives, governments to their people, and religious leaders to their flocks. Her personal motto might as well be, “Expect the worst. Always.”
In truth, it’s not only decades in the news business that have turned her dark. A seed was planted long before. Her mother died when she was a child and, as soon as she graduated from high school, her father moved to Europe and started a new family. Everleigh’s understandable takeaway: People will desert you. They cannot be trusted. These are words that echo so regularly in her mind, it is almost as if she fetishizes her own cynicism.
There is, however, a brief, shining moment when Everleigh is unplagued by these thoughts. In college, she is lucky enough to fall in with an exceptionally kind group of friends. She has a best friend, Dilly, who urges her to work at the school paper, where she flourishes. And she’s invited to join an off-campus house, where she gains eleven “sisters” who quickly become the family she no longer has. With their wind at her back, she writes hard-charging articles for the paper, challenging the powerful and exposing dark doings at their upstate bucolic campus. She basks in her friends’ support, and for the first time since her mother’s death, feels as if she is precisely where she belongs.
But at the first sign of trouble within the group, Everleigh is flooded with doubts and misgivings. She turns against her friends, sure that they’ve betrayed her. She leaves school abruptly, and enters the wider world a guarded, solitary soul determined to become so successful, she’ll never need to rely on anyone again.
Indeed, she rises high within her network, largely because she produces good journalism, but also in part by doing the not-so-honorable bidding of her boss, Gareth: killing an important story that an advertiser won’t like and laying off a pair of talented staffers. Everleigh’s reward comes when Gareth announces he’s tapping her to become President of the News Division, her dream come true.
But when her 20th college reunion takes a magical twist, everything starts to look very different. A portal into the past reveals that her memories of her college days are faulty. The stories she’s told herself—over and over again until they’ve formed a kind of mental crust—about her friends from back then, are inaccurate. The betrayal she’s always believed she endured at their hands was but a figment based on a misunderstanding. A realization dawns: She’s been mistaken about so much, what else might she be wrong about?
I had always planned to explore how time and emotion affect memory in my novel. But as I wrote, I realized I’d stumbled onto something else: the notion that sometimes our beliefs about our selves, our lives, and the world, are rooted in something less than solid ground.
We might all want to look in the mirror on this one. Start small. How many of us bear grudges, whether against family, friends, or colleagues, whose beginnings are murky, lost to the passage of time? So many of us have a side of the family we don’t speak to, sometimes going back generations. When we ask our parents where it all started, what the trouble was all about, we receive defensiveness, or a garbled answer. They don’t remember. Or what about fallings-out with friends? Even if you think you memorized the conversation that ended it all, are you sure you recall it accurately? It’s easy to remember the transgressions against us; harder to remember those we have ourselves committed. Anyone who’s ever had a relationship-ending spat that wasn’t yesterday might want to re-examine what generated it, with some humility around our ability to remember accurately.
But this isn’t just about relationships. It’s also about cognition, even bedrock beliefs that guide us and our principles. Why? Because emotions can significantly affect how we form and hold beliefs, influencing our judgments and decisions. They can underpin beliefs, creating certainty that overrides doubt. Even moods can influence beliefs, as they can act as “retrieval cues” that make it easier to access memories and information that align with our feelings, which can, in turn, reinforce certain beliefs.
An online search reveals hundreds of psychology resources that offer help in uncovering one’s core beliefs and peeling them back to their origins. Most offer this guidance as a way to understand and potentially escape negative patterns in thoughts and behaviors. Advice ranges from looking for recurring themes in our thinking to reflecting on our childhood experiences and significant events to identify potential origins of our bedrock beliefs. Once that is done, we are able to challenge their validity and attempt to replace them with more true, more helpful ones.
This suggests that, unsurprisingly, a good many of us are battling troublesome ideas within ourselves whose power is strong precisely because their origins are murky. Most of us won’t get to travel back in time to determine where any misconceptions began in order to begin the process of unwinding them. But I hope the story of one fictional woman who does, albeit with the help of magic, inspires others to try.
Where You Once Belonged: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Love Death + Robots Vol. 4 is Now Out
Posted on May 15, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Animation nerds, today’s a big day for you: Volume 4 of Love, Death + Robots, Netflix’s acclaimed animated anthology series, is out and available for streaming, with ten new episodes, including two, “The Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners,” that I wrote both the stories and scripts for. Both are also directed by Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for animation, so that’s pretty cool, too. Although Love Death + Robots is animation, I will remind folks that the animation is aimed at an adult audience, so don’t be surprised to see, you know, blood and sex and claymation vibrators (I am responsible for that last one).
The two episodes in this collection mean that I have seven episodes of work stretched out across four seasons of the series. I’ve talked before about how working on the series has been an enjoyable process, and this season was no exception to that; for me, at least, working on this season has been another example of “best case scenario” television collaboration. The folks at Blur (the animation studio making LD+R for Netflix) continue to be the best at what they do, and also — this is no great guarantee in film and TV — respectful and appreciative of the writers whose work they engage with.
Some notes on this season’s episodes from me:
“The Other Large Thing” is based on a story of mine I wrote back in 2011, back when Twitter was still fun and I was about to reach 20,000 followers over there. To celebrate 20K, I decided to write a short story where each sentence was 140 characters or less, that being the max length of a tweet at the time. I did not post the story one tweet at a time (I did it as a long-form post using Tweet.ly), but I could have, and that was the most important thing. Then, of course, I posted it here, because this is where I post most of my very short stories.
There was a fair amount of adaptation required for the script version of the story, not in changing the overall arc of the story, but in getting into it faster; in the original I did a certain amount of scene setting that wasn’t required by animation (because you can see things on screen), and let the cat’s basic nature arrive to the reader more slowly than it does in the animated short, in which who the cat is and what its plans are are right up front. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; it’s just the nature of both media and how you structure story for both of them.
I am delighted that Chris Parnell, who you may know voiced the cats in both of the “Three Robot” episodes of LD+R, is on cat duty here. He does an excellent ego monster of a feline and I believe there is a real future for him in these roles, if he chooses to pursue them. I am equally delighted that we managed to get John Oliver as the robot. He brings a delicious polite British mania to his domestic android.
“Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners” is based on my short story “Your Smart Appliances Talk About You Behind Your Back” which I wrote to read while I was on book tour, and also for my Miniatures short story collection. The premise was simple: your smart appliances know everything about you, and when prompted, they spill the beans to an interviewer, because frankly, you have problems. This short story was very episodic, which lent itself well to animation.
Lovers of animation will note a certain similarity between this episode and the classic Aardman animated short “Creature Comforts,” and those similarities are intentional, and a fond tribute. Mind you, that short had jaguars and polar bears, and our short has a toilet and a toothbrush. There’s enough variation, I assure you. Also, this short features what I expect is the largest number of celebrity voices per capita of any of this season’s episodes, which is nice.
Oh, and watch the credits of “Smart Appliances” for a particularly amusing easter egg.
With both “Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances” I provided the words, but it’s Patrick Osborne as director who built the rest of the structure around them, along with his production teams, and the actors. It’s all very much a collaboration. My words were the starting point, but Patrick and his people brought everything to the finish line.
Likewise, my episodes are only two of ten; there are eight others in Volume 4 with their own fantastic writers, directors, actors and production teams. Check them all out; they’ll be worth your time.
— JS
Bearded Iris Week Has Returned
Posted on May 14, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
Krissy planted bearded iris plans several years ago, and there’s about a one week window every spring when they’re actually blooming, and this week is that week! After this week there’s just some green plants in front of our yard — which is still nice, but not the same. Sometimes I miss the Bearded Iris Week because I’m traveling, but this year I’m here for it, so I’m going to enjoy it while I can. Such is life: Catch those evanescent moments when they come around.
— JS
My Time In San Antonio
Posted on May 13, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 18 Comments
Hello, everyone! Recently I mentioned I had taken a long weekend trip down to Texas to visit a friend from college that lives in San Antonio. While there wasn’t anything in particular from my trip that I thought deserved its own feature post, I figured I would just tell y’all a brief summary of the things I got up to and saw whilst in Texas.
When I flew in, San Antonio was celebrating Fiesta, an annual two week celebration showcasing tons of food, music, drinks, and events. My friend very specifically wanted me to come down during Fiesta so we could try out some of the events together.
We only ended up doing one event, called “Taste of the Republic.” It’s a $150 ticketed dining event that is meant to represent the six culinary regions of Texas: North, West, Central, South, East, and the Gulf. This event had twelve chefs participating, so each region was given to two different chefs, plus there was one dessert chef. Each booth gave out a small plate of their featured dish to represent their area, and each one also had an alcoholic pairing to go with it.
When you checked in for the event, you were given a plastic wine cup to carry around and get pours from the food booths at. However, some had different beverages to offer, like a rum cocktail, a THC-infused non-alcoholic drink, etc. Of course, like the food, these were all small pours so you could just taste everything. The ticket we purchased included all the food and alcohol, and technically you could go back for seconds at any of the stands since it was all inclusive.
While I thought that the event sounded like so much fun and like something right up my alley, neither my friend nor I enjoyed our time there. It was so crowded, it was hard to navigate the small courtyard at all, plus there was nowhere to sit and eat, so you just had to stand and eat, but even then there weren’t any tables or stands to rest your items on. It’s really hard to eat when you have your food plate in one hand and your drink in the other and you’re jam-packed like sardines. I got shoulder-checked multiple times with nary an “ope, sorry” or “excuse me.”
The food was incredibly mid, and only an hour into the four hour event, three booths had already sold out of food entirely. Also, they had a DJ there and it was seriously so loud. Like way too loud. I could barely hear my friend and we weren’t even close to the stage area. It was so overwhelming and none of the food was good. The few alcoholic beverages we did try were just awful. They had the most nasty mango Tito’s slush drink that I swear was radioactive.
Even if you managed to take advantage of every single booth and every single alcoholic beverage available, I still don’t think it would’ve been worth $150. My friend and I agreed that HALF of that is what the tickets should’ve been priced at. There was no reason for an outdoor food booth type of event with small portions and mid food to be priced at close to $200. They clearly sold too many tickets and some of the booths were ill-equipped to go through that much food.
So, that was disappointing, but whatever.
Aside from Fiesta, my friend had some great places to show me. She took me to Summer Moon Coffee, a coffee shop that has over 50 locations, half of which are found in Texas. They roast their coffee beans on oak in brick ovens and use a special ingredient called Moon Milk, which is their “signature sweet cream.” Apparently it has seven secret ingredients in it, but can be made dairy-free and does not contain honey so it can be vegan, if you like.
I got their iced blueberry crisp latte and my friend got the iced apple crisp latte. Both were so good! Very sweet, very flavorful, super yummy all around. Plus, they have pretty cute merch.
We also dined at a restaurant called Best Quality Daughter, which is an Asian fusion restaurant with some off-the-wall items like alcoholic boba.
I wasn’t planning on like, drinking in any substantial way, especially since it was only lunch and not dinner, but I had to have the Dirty Thai-Tini.
Oh my goodness. This was one of the absolute best espresso martinis I have ever had. It was so sweet and rich and creamy. It tasted so much like Thai tea which I just adore. Banger drink for sure. My friend tried a sip and she loved it, too.
For my other drink I just had the Thai salted limeade, which was great, too. Very refreshing.
In terms of actual food, we just wanted to share a couple items. We got the smashed cucumbers which ended up being so much more delicious than I could have anticipated. Not only did it have a super tasty sesame garlic dressing, but also came with some cherry tomatoes and tons of fresh cilantro. The flavors went so well together and everything tasted so fresh and green.
We also split a lunch special. We got the cashew chicken and a spring roll. The chicken was super good and not at all too spicy for me, and there was plenty of rice for us to split. I didn’t know if splitting an appetizer and lunch special would be enough but I was definitely full by the end. And the prices are good! I highly recommend checking them out, and will definitely be back the next time I’m down there.
We checked out so many shops in that same area, just perusing and mostly window shopping with some small purchases here and there. I tried not to buy too much since whatever I got I’d have to fly back home with. I did end up getting a substantial amount of paper goods, though, since I can’t help myself around stationery.
Another one of the nights, we went to an El Salvadorian restaurant called Gloria’s Latin Cuisine, which I didn’t realize until now has over twenty locations, mostly in and around Dallas. They bring you chips and salsa but also bring out a black bean dip, which is neat. We got the ceviche trio as an appetizer and it was bomb, I love a fresh ceviche. We both ordered the red snapper with poblano rice and chipotle butter sauce. I was afraid the poblano rice would be spicy, or maybe the chipotle butter would have a kick, but honestly they didn’t at all but boy were they flavorful! It was a great dish.
For dessert we tried their Cuatro Leches cake which was honestly out of this world. I didn’t expect it to be so dang delicious, but it was so sweet and moist, and the orange zest provided the most incredible brightness. My friend also said it definitely exceeded her expectations.
Now, I did have the single worst espresso martini of my life there (it was tequila based), but the food was bomb for sure.
Other than having fun shopping and dining in San Antonio, we rented a condo in Rockport and drove down to have a lil’ beach day. We ended up finding a great AirBnb! It was so cute and perfect for what we needed, and the host was nice.
While in Rockport we went to the beach, I got stung by a jellyfish, and we walked to a bar close by and got blasted and I accidentally went into the men’s bathroom and took a picture of this Jägermeister sign:
Be the meister, y’all.
So, yeah, that’s about all we did was hang out and eat good food and shop around and go to the beach! And spend quality time together talking and catching up and all that good stuff. I’m so thankful I got to see my friend and happy that I got to visit her hometown finally! She always comes to Ohio to visit all of her college friends so I was glad to go down there instead.
What’s some of your favorite spots in San Antonio? Have you been to the coast in Texas? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Constituent Service Signed Limited Print Edition Now Available For Preorder
Posted on May 12, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
Yes, Constituent Service, my humorous novella about local politics in a city where aliens live among us, and which was a great success as an Audible Plus exclusive, will be available in print and ebook versions later this year (November, in fact), and you can preorder it now through Subterranean Press.
The print version will be a signed, limited edition, meaning that when they’re all gone, they’re all gone, and if you pre-order directly through Subterranean Press, you will also get an ebook version of the story at no additional cost. Yes! Two formats for the same price (and the ebook is DRM-free to boot)! Plus you get this very cool cover, done by Tristan Elwell, the same artist who did the now-iconic cover for Starter Villain.
(And yes, both the chicken and the scuba gear are relevant to the story.)
Here is the link to pre-order the signed, limited edition from Subterranean Press. Remember that it is indeed a limited edition, so if you want to be sure to get it, you should pre-order, and do it as soon as you can.
And yes, this is a busy year for me: When the Moon Hits Your Eye in March, Love Death + Robots Vol. 4 this month (this week, in fact), The Shattering Peace in September, Constituent Service print/ebook in November and I’ll have something as yet unannounced out as well, probably in October. That’s a lot! But, darn it, you’re worth it. And don’t you forget it.
— JS
56
Posted on May 10, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 65 Comments
Wow, just look at this dork. Someone should tell him to, like, calm down or something.
In other news, hey, it’s my birthday, and I’m 56 today. It’s not one of those “significant” birthdays, in terms of age markers, but it’s still another birthday, and I’m still happy to have it. I’m not old enough to be in the “every new birthday is a gift” category of things, but, without sounding overly morbid about it, I’m aware that actuarily speaking, at this point I almost certainly have more birthdays behind than ahead.
Which is fine — I’m not one of those people who wants to live forever — but it certainly does lead to a bit of introspection in terms of what I want to do with the time remaining to me. I am fortunate that when thinking such things, I’m coming from a position of being happy with my life and accomplishments, so when I think about it, there’s no thought of making up for lost time, rather, what can I do with my time that will add to the happiness of the world, both mine and others.
To be clear, I’m not thinking about it in any deep way, and given the history and genes of both sides of my family, as long as I don’t fall down stairs or taunt an apex predator, I am likely to be around for some time yet. You’re not getting rid of me that easily (plus I have a book contract that conservatively will run until I am 70, so I want to be around at least that long). It’s just that birthdays are good days to do a little reflection and assessment, and even a tiny bit of planning. That’s what I’m doing with mine. As well as being a goofball with my Bass VI, clearly.
— JS
New Books and ARCs, 5/9/25
Posted on May 9, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 25 Comments
Just in time for Mother’s Day weekend, a double-sized stack of new books and ARCs that have arrived here at the Scalzi Compound. What here would make a perfect reading gift for a mom (or, really, for yourself)? Share in the comments!
— JS
Attending A Cooking Class At Tablespoon Cooking Co. Hosted By Midwestern Lesbian
Posted on May 9, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 15 Comments
That’s a pretty long title with a lot of unfamiliar words in it, so let’s break down what the heck I’m talking about before we get into it!
There’s a group I found on Instagram a while back called Midwestern Lesbian, an LGBTQ+ organization that focuses on putting on and promoting queer friendly events in Cincinnati. They host all sorts of events at local Cincinnati businesses, like bar crawls, pottery nights, and even include plenty of free events like their Sapphic Stroll.
I have wanted to attend one of their events for so long, but I seem to literally always be busy on the weekends when they’re having events, and they’re all the way down in Cincy, which is not super close for me.
Finally, I saw they were having an event on a Thursday evening. I could actually make that work. Better yet, it was a cooking class! The cooking class was held at a place in Cincinnati called Tablespoon Cooking Co., a business right across from the Findlay Market that serves to teach people of all skills how to make a yummy dish, step-by-step, while supplying great cocktails and good jokes.
When I first walked in, I immediately loved how chic the space was. While the back portion was more of the industrial, stainless-steel kitchen type of deal, the front portion was so cute with dark green velvet for the backing of the booths, 3D lemons and leaves all over the wall, hanging lights from the high ceilings, even the bathroom (which was pink!) was cute. You can even take a virtual tour of their space on their website if you want to see for yourself.
Our cooking stations were already set up and good to go for us:
For this class, the menu was a whipped ricotta crostini dish with an espresso martini. So girl dinner, am I right? All the ingredients and equipment were provided, with the instructor going through everything and providing plenty of tips and tricks.
I came alone, and anyone who came solo got partnered with someone else who was solo. I was a little nervous about that, but I ended up getting along really well with my co-chef and she was a delight to talk to and cook with! Honestly everyone I talked to was seriously awesome, and it was just amazing in general to be surrounded by so many cool, like-minded people. I felt so comfortable and everyone was so friendly.
Plus, all the staff at Tablespoon were quite friendly. They were all very welcoming and did such a great job with everything. I definitely would love to plan my own private cooking class there for like my birthday or something like that.
The martini was made closer to the end of the cooking portion, so there were drinks available for purchase beforehand that you could sip on during the welcome portion and throughout the cooking part, as well. I ended up ordering their Spring Spritz, which was strawberry cardamom syrup, Lillet Blanc, lemon juice, Cava, and soda. It was so light and refreshing, and perfectly sweet. A very balanced cocktail that was also quite pretty.
After putting in blood, sweat, and tears (or maybe just olive oil, thyme, and salt), here’s how our dish turned out:
I thought it was so cute! My co-chef didn’t particularly care for Bailey’s in her espresso martini, so I put all of the portioned out Bailey’s into my drink, hence why mine is a little different (or maybe a lot different) in color.
Everything turned out so tasty, and we all sat around and ate our completed dishes while chatting. It was so exciting getting to learn more about everyone! I seriously had such a good time at this event.
When I had originally bought the ticket, which was $60, Tablespoon asked me if I wanted to add some fresh baked cookies onto my order. I was like, obviously, and ordered a dozen of their triple chocolate chunk brown butter cookies, which was $23 dollars. They packaged them up so nicely for me!
Of course, treats are always tastier when you share, so I offered a cookie to everyone else in the class. Little did I know that Tablespoon actually gives everyone a cookie at the end of the class to take home with them! These cookies were absolutely bomb. They were thin and crispy but still like soft on the inside, the brown butter adds such a depth of flavor, and the salt was the perfect finisher on these bad boys.
Also, everyone was offered 10% a purchase from their little shop. The shop had things like jams and pistachio spread, a jar of brown butter bits, Diamond Crystal kosher salt, some random kitchen tools like a baking sheet and thermometer, just some odds and ends like that.
So, yeah, I’m super glad I attended this awesome cooking class! I was very tempted not to go because I really didn’t feel like driving a full two hours there, but I knew if I went I’d have fun, and I did.
Don’t forget to follow Midwestern Lesbian and Tablespoon Cooking Co. on Instagram if you’re interested in future events from either of them!
Do you like espresso martinis? Have you ever done a cooking class before? What did you make? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day.
-AMS
Adventures In Chicago, Part 4: L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates & P.O.S.H.
Posted on May 8, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 13 Comments
I still have to get through my Chicago adventures, so back to it we go! Today I want to talk about two shops we visited that I personally really liked and think are worth checking out. And the best part is they’re directly next door to each other! You can walk right out of one and in to the other lickity split.
The first shop I want to talk about is called L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates. You might be able to guess from the name, but it’s a chocolate shop. I’d never heard of them before, but I love fancy chocolates, so I was excited to check it out and also wanted to get some chocolate as a gift for my grandma and mom.
Turns out, Chicago isn’t their only location. They’ve got seven locations, including NYC, Boston, and DC. The Chicago location is super convenient to visit, as its in Downtown/River North, so not out of the way at all.
When you walk in, there’s high shelves displaying chocolate bars, chocolate assortments in gift boxes, bags of drinking chocolate, chocolate out the wazoo! There’s also a glass case of individual pieces of chocolate you can create your own assortment with, and a counter where you can order coffee, drinking chocolate, and tons of different pastries.
It’s on the smaller side so when it gets crowded it’s a bit difficult to navigate the space and look at everything, but it wasn’t particularly crowded when we were visiting. In fact, an employee started assisting us and was super friendly. He told us all about the different chocolates and about their signature blend dark chocolate bar.
One thing I thought was really cool is that they have a variety of single source chocolate bars. They have seven different sources around the world to choose from, and we ended up picking Madagascar because it said it had hints of vanilla and floral notes. Plus, the packaging was purple, so I automatically wanted that one above all the others. But of course we had to get their Burdick Blend dark chocolate bar, as well.
L.A. Burdick is known for their chocolate mice, which are adorable little mouse shaped chocolates that they’ve been making for thirty years, and they’re made entirely without the use of molds. They’re all hand-shaped and take over three days to make. That’s some serious commitment right there. They are so adorable that I’m not convinced I could even eat them.
While at the shop, I saw some penguin shaped chocolate as well, and realized I had seen this brand of chocolate before. I think it was just this past Christmas someone sent us an assortment, and there were penguins in it. It was all coming back to me. They didn’t have them in the shop at the time because it was April, but I also remember the chocolate snowmen that came in the gift box, too. Those were so cute!
(Photo courtesy of L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates)
I mean just look at him! I actually do remember feeling slightly bad eating him because I have a serious, over-empathetic response to cute things, but he was in fact very tasty.
Moving on, they had plenty of other fun seasonal shapes and specialty chocolates. I ended up getting two milk chocolate bars with hazelnuts, as my grandma and mom do not like dark chocolate or even white chocolate. I also picked up a bag of chocolate dipped mangoes and apricots for my dad.
Then, I went over to the glass case and the same employee from earlier helped me put together a six-piece box. Little did I know he slipped in an extra piece for me! So sweet. Look how pretty these are:
I can’t remember every single one I got, but I know I got the earl grey one, the mango, the fig, and I’m pretty sure I got the Porto Baton (cinnamon, cardamom, hazelnuts).
After grabbing the four bars and making the custom assortment box, the employee checked us out and wrapped everything so nicely for us. I absolutely adore their packaging, the details really make this experience feel more lux and special.
(I kept the ribbon.)
I told the employee how lovely the shop was, and he revealed he was the manager of the establishment so he super appreciated me saying so! Overall, it was a lovely experience and I really want to go back and try some of their pastries and get a hot chocolate. Their pastries seriously looked so good, and hot chocolate is my favorite drink ever, so a revisit is a must.
So, yeah, if you’re in the area and like fancy chocolates, check out L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates.
And then pop on over to P.O.S.H. next door! P.O.S.H. is a small, eclectic shop that features so many fun vintage finds, as well as new items, too. While they certainly have quite a variety of items, their main focus is on tableware, dishes, and decorative pieces that would be sure to impress any guest at an event you’re hosting.
This shop was like a paradise for me, as I am obsessed with beautiful dishware, tea seats and creamers, jadeite, ornate cutlery and glassware, and just pretty things in general. Not only do they have a wonderful assortment of dining ware, but they have some interesting food items as well, such as pistachio curd, lavender syrup, honeys and teas, fancy salt, and tons of jams and spreads.
They also have cookbooks, tons of cocktail books, hosting guides, and lots of paper goods like cards and stationery. They even have some soaps, and I ended up buying a mini bar of Mistral soap in the scent Lychee. It smells so good. I also bought a bag of sugar cubes. I know that sounds silly, but this bag contains like, twenty individually wrapped (in paper) sets of two sugar cubes and I plan on having a tea party sometime soon, and I thought that they would be so adorable to set out at everyone’s placemat on the table. I have a vision, okay.
There was seriously so much to look at, I felt like I could’ve spent twice as long as I actually did in there and still not have seen everything. I really wanted either this sardine plate or, well, this sardine plate, but I didn’t want to travel with them so I had self-control and didn’t buy them.
Anyways, if you like fun, ornate, shiny things, definitely check out P.O.S.H.! Your inner crow will thank you.
Have you been to either of these shops before? What kind of chocolate do you like? Do you have a sardine plate (I’m jealous)? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
The Big Idea: Christina Consolino
Posted on May 8, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi
Getting older isn’t always fun, especially when navigating menopause. Author Christina Consolino is learning how to deal with these changes, and as an author, how to write about them. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, The Marriage Debt, to see how her own journey inspired this story.
CHRISTINA CONSOLINO:
Conversations with my female friends about sex and intimacy have, naturally, changed since I was in my twenties and thirties. Back then, most of us didn’t dwell on the topics. Maybe we’d exchange a tip or two regarding birth control or how quickly our doctors cleared us for “activity” after giving birth, but details about our sex lives were our own business. Now, firmly set in our forties and fifties and approaching “the change,” we’re much more open about what’s happening behind closed doors, specifically with respect to changes in our libidos.
When asked, most of my friends claim to have a decreased libido, a few say their libidos have not changed, and only two people admit to an increased libido now that we’re older. More than one person said to me, “If I could never have sex again, I’d be fine with it!” Please note that my sample does not include transgender women, but it does include women across the sexuality spectrum, all of whom are nearing or currently experiencing changes associated with menopause.
When I began talking to my friends and acquaintances about their libidos, I had just dipped my toe into the waters of perimenopause, the transitional time that leads up to menopause. My cycle—highly regular from my first period—morphed into something as unpredictable and torrential as our Ohio weather. My skin—already aligning itself in the dry category—seemed to turn brittle and flaky overnight. Tinnitus took root in my left ear, intermittent numbness arose in my right little finger, and my breasts—already saggy from nursing four children—migrated farther south. My mood dipped, my joints ached, my ear canals itched, and my desire for intimacy tanked.
Thanks to the conversations with my friends, I knew I was not alone in my journey. I was not alone in feeling irritable and off-kilter and emotional. I was not alone in saying I no longer wanted to have sex with my spouse. I was not alone in recognizing that my husband, a person I would choose again as my life partner in a heartbeat, was not the problem. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, the problem was me.
Because my writing often stems from personal experiences, the usual two questions quickly arose in my mind: One, did I want to write about it? And two, could I write about it?
One lesson I’ve learned over my years on the planet is that being authentic usually serves me well. Much of my contemporary fiction involves mental and/or physical health issues, and my second novel, The Weight We Carry, grew from my personal experience with my parents’ health issues, more specifically, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s for my mother. I didn’t purposefully pick the subject for that novel, or my debut, so when it came time to think about a third book, my mind kept returning to that one conversation topic: changes in a woman’s libido during perimenopause/menopause.
So, the answers to my two questions? Yes and yes.
That’s when Nika Stewart sat up and spoke to me. Mother of two, fully employed elementary school librarian, divorcee now happily married. She’s involved in her children’s lives, gives her father a home, and serves as director of the school’s spring play. Nika has a full and satisfying life, one she carefully fashions for herself, and yet, like most folks, she must juggle the good and the bad, the easy and the difficult. And, like many women, she focuses more on her responsibilities than she does on herself.
It’s no wonder, then, that the veil of menopause, which seems to hover over almost every aspect of her life, becomes too suffocating. At a time when she should be able to celebrate a sexual freedom unlike any she’s experienced before—after all, she’s with a dedicated and supportive partner and is fulfilled with two children—her body takes her hostage.
I wanted to explore that hostage situation through a character that wasn’t me—how it impacted Nika’s life and her relationships. I wanted to write a book I’d enjoy reading if someone else had written it. I wanted to shed light on someone else’s experience with the joys and perils of moving out of the reproductive years. I wanted to unearth what issues bothered other folks and what solutions they relied on. As author Paulette Stout likes to say, “I wanted to speak the quiet parts out loud.” In this case, not only for me, but for the sake of other women and women’s health in general.
Once I focused on those “wants,” Nika and her story clarified, including her backstory, a rich and poignant narrative that shaped who she was. A feeling of shame here, a dig at her self-esteem there, multiple, denigrating events—some subtle and some overt—that could not exist in a vacuum. Instead, Nika had to dig deep, look at her past, and come to understand herself. In doing that, in finding that power, Nika does something remarkable—she finds her voice, which is the big idea. She cultivates the strength to say what she wants and what she doesn’t. She fights back against those who tell women what they should and should not do, what they should and should not wear, what they should and should not look and behave like, what they can and cannot do.
Nika finds the ability to stay strong and speak her morals, to become an ally to those who need her. Nika proves it’s never too late to learn how to find that voice and use it.
Thankfully, as Nika learned her lesson, I also learned mine.
The Marriage Debt: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Blackwell’s
An AppyHour Double Feature!
Posted on May 7, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 12 Comments
I never got around to posting March’s box from AppyHour, or April’s, for that matter, so I’m going to do both in this one post. Woohoo!
If you happened to miss my posts over AppyHour’s January and February boxes, AppyHour is a subscription based charcuterie company that mails board-ready artisan goods right to your door. Meats, cheeses, crackers, nuts, spreads, all you need is a board to put them on!
So let’s dive right into what I got in my March box. The theme was “Old World Tavern,” a theme I was particularly excited for. I can’t deny that always I’ve dreamt of being a D&D innkeeper, serving the heroic party of misfits a meal and some ale. Feel free to follow along in the tasting guide.
Here’s what March entailed:
We’ve got dried Sierra figs, a California clothbound cheddar, a basil pesto gouda, a wedge of Dragon Slayer, honey & herb prosciutto, a Spanish cocktail nut mix, Blake Hill’s red pepper jelly, Blake Hill’s French onion spread, beef & caraway salami, and Martin’s Handmade Pretzels.
A closer look at the basil pesto gouda:
Hailing from Wisconsin, this semi-firm cow’s milk gouda is made with imported Dutch ingredients. It’s also crafted by Marieke Peterman, one of the few women who holds the prestigious title of “Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker.” But how does it taste? Personally, gouda is one of my favorite cheeses, and this cheese did not disappoint. It had a soft, creamy texture and a lovely herbaceous flavor that I really enjoyed. This would definitely be a crowd pleaser on any board.
Now presenting the California clothbound cheddar:
All the way from Modesto, this cow’s milk cheese was actually made exclusively with the farmstead’s very own cows. It’s aged in cheesecloth for fourteen months and crumbles beautifully into perfect bite size pieces as a result. You seriously can’t go wrong with a cheddar, and this one is no different. Savory, slightly nutty, super tasty all around. We all really liked this one, it’s definitely something I would gladly put on a board again!
For our last cheese, the one I was most excited about, the Dragon Slayer:
Another cow’s milk cheddar, this one is made with mustard seeds and ale. I absolutely love whole grain mustard, so having this cheese be full of mustard seeds was a real treat. It was bold and tangy, with a surprisingly smooth, buttery type of texture. It was well balanced while still having plenty of mustard flavor, and I like how brightly colored the rind is (don’t eat the rind).
And here’s the salami after I sliced it up:
Getting the casing off this sucker was a bit of a pain, but once the casing is off you’re left with a savory, flavorful salami that is surprisingly tender in texture. This salami was very dark in color, like darker than any other salami I’ve seen before, which I found kind of interesting. I liked how when I cut it into pieces, they each had a funky, unique shape. Made for a more interesting presentation on the board.
Here’s what I ended up doing with everything:
I served the pretzels and some other crackers I had on hand on the side, as it was a smaller sized board. The prosciutto was good but I’m not sure if I really tasted honey or herbs. The figs were excellent, sweet and rich. I didn’t care for the nut mix, but I absolutely loved the red pepper jelly. The French onion spread I also had in my January box, and it’s pretty good, too. The pretzels were super duper crunchy, and I like that each one is hand-twisted.
Overall, I was really happy with this box! I loved the cheeses, the figs, and the spreads. The meats were good and honestly I can get over some mid nuts.
So let’s see what April had:
The theme for April was Spain (here’s the tasting guide). We’ve got a Mahon Menorca (DOP), a chub of ramp salami, a Queso de Murcia al Vino (DOP), some Jamón Serrano, a mandarin orange spread, a blackberry rosemary jam, and a Wooly Wooly Diablo.
Also, my mom was a bit of a goober and accidentally threw away the box before taking out everything in it, so not pictured is a bag of Piri Piri Cocktail Mix (peanuts, cashews, rice crisps, fava beans, and fried corn, seasoned with piri piri), and a box of Jennifer’s Homemade breadsticks (I love those things).
Okay, so, I had definitely never heard of any of those cheeses before, and I didn’t know what DOP meant. So, if you also don’t know, it stands for Denominazione d’Origine Protetta, which translates to Protected Designation of Origin. Essentially, it guarantees that whatever product you’re buying, whether it’s cheese, prosciutto, olive oil, etc., is made from a specific location. So if these cheeses say they’re from Spain and have that DOP label, they’re definitely made and packaged in Spain. Hooray for learning something new!
I feel like you can actually see the cheese pretty clearly in the unboxing photo, so I won’t do individual close up shots of those, but here’s the ramp salami:
I have never had ramps before, but when I found out about them last year from one of my favorite food bloggers, I really wanted to try them. If you haven’t heard of them before, ramps are like a wild onion/leek type plant that grow in North America in the springtime. They are said to have a very pungent smell and flavor.
Lemme tell ya, this salami smelled FUNKY. I opened the paper it was in and was immediately like phewww. It smelled kind of like feet? It was very strange and very strong, and I hoped when I took off the casing (which was a pain to get off) that it wouldn’t be so strong. The actual taste of the salami was seriously toned down compared to the smell, but still very pungent and funky. So this salami was a bit more of an acquired taste, I fear. As for texture, it was extremely buttery with huge pockets of fat throughout. This was a weird one for sure.
Here’s the board I made:
Okay hold on she’s prettyyyy though! I really like how this board turned out! I ended up having to use some stuff I had on hand since I didn’t have the nuts or crackers from the box, so I used Snack Factory Pretzel Crisps and some pita thins I can’t remember the brand of, plus some random package of trail mix for the nuts/dried fruit accompaniment. I also threw some blueberries on there for a fresh, colorful component, as well as some mint from my herb garden for a nice garnish.
Let’s get a close up shot and talk about the cheeses:
It turns out I did know what one of the cheeses was. The Queso de Murcia al Vino is a “drunken goat” cheese! I love drunken goat cheese and every time I put it on a board, people tend to really like it. It’s a goat cheese that’s been soaked in wine, giving the rind a beautiful purple color (don’t eat the rind). Every time I use it, I make sure to cut it and present it in a way that shows the rind. It’s semi-soft and perfect to cut into pretty triangles, lovely and creamy and is not overwhelming if you’re someone who typically doesn’t care for goat cheese. Great addition!
As for the Mahon Menorca, it’s a cow’s milk cheese made on an island in the Mediterranean that reminds me a lot of a cheddar with its crumbly texture and sort of sharper flavor. Not too sharp, though, as it still has some buttery-ness to it. The rind is rubbed with olive oil and paprika which gave it a really pretty rind, but the rind is inedible so that seems unfortunate to me.
The Wooly Wooly Diablo is a sheep’s milk cheese, so I really liked that this box had a goat cheese, cow cheese, and sheep’s cheese. Normally, sheep cheese is a little too much for me, with its funkiness and pungent smell, but this was much less intense, more like a Manchego. The name and description would lead you to believe that it’s a spicy cheese, since it’s made with mojo picón, but it wasn’t spicy at all. I’m thankful for that, but I think if you’re someone who likes spicy stuff and buys a cheese with the word “diablo” in it, it should be a little spicy!
Apparently the rind is listed as inedible, but uhh.. we definitely ate it, so.
As for the other meat on this board, the serrano was very similar to prosciutto, in fact so similar that I definitely wouldn’t know the difference if I wasn’t told it. But I absolutely love prosciutto so this serrano is still totally a win in my book, I thought it was great. There’s beauty in simplicity, and this aged, Spanish dry-cured ham is proof of that.
So, how were the spreads? Absolutely bomb. Both the orange spread and the blackberry spread were so delish, we totally cleaned out both little jars. The mandarin orange spread had some pieces of peel in it but wasn’t bitter at all, and the blackberry spread is made with rosemary, giving it that warm, holiday-esque flavor. I have no idea what brand they were but they were both the same brand and they rocked.
So, there you have it! Another board in the books, and I’m really looking forward to the May box since the theme is “Fields in Bloom.” If you want to try AppyHour and get $20 off your first box, I actually have a different referral code now than I previously did, so make sure you use this one if you want to try it. I have so many $20 off from you guys using my link that I’ll probably be doing these posts for the next year (slightly joking, but also it’s kind of true), so thanks, y’all!
Honestly, I’ve been really happy with my boxes so far, and I’m also really happy with the customer service. I’ve reached out several times to their team with questions, and they’ve been super helpful, plus they even read my initial blog post so that was nice of them.
Which cheese looks the best to you? Did you also receive one of these boxes? What were your thoughts on it? Let me know in the comments and have a great day!
-AMS
The Big Idea: Omar Hussain
Posted on May 7, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 2 Comments
Just because you can’t hear the music through the page, doesn’t mean your writing can’t be lyrical. For author Omar Hussain, taking inspiration from artists and songs was an integral part of writing his debut novel, A Thousand Natural Shocks. Dive in to his Big Idea to see where the tempo takes you.
OMAR HUSSAIN:
Relentless Energy via Kurt Cobain & Co.
Writing is, as much about anything else, the act of transferring energy from the page to the reader. So how does one do that when composing a novel? For me, this was one of the biggest ideas, goals, and questions I carried while writing my debut, A Thousand Natural Shocks.
In short, A Thousand Natural Shocks follows Dash, a crime reporter investigating a local serial killer in Monterey, California. However, he fills his nights trying to forget one dark memory from ten years prior. But in doing so, he finds himself involved with a cult that offers a pill that when taken once a week for four straight weeks, will completely erase his memory. As he consumes the pills, Dash’s reality begins to shatter. He begins to glitch. He starts to lose control of what’s real and what isn’t. To make matters worse, he learns about the cult’s dark secret just as the serial killer has nearly hunted him down. With his mind hanging by a thread, Dash has to stop the killer and evade the cult before he forgets his identity entirely.
While the plot, setting and natural tension would deliver a fair amount of energy, I wanted to make sure the writing itself contained artistic sensibilities that added to that energy. While there were plenty of literary influences for different components of this book, I found inspiration in the form of music to galvanize the language’s intensity.
Trip hop in the form of Massive Attack and Portishead helped inspire prose capturing the noir setting and mood. This genre of music and its patented slow-burns, introspective electronic mood shifts, and atmospheric layers helped set the tone for Dash’s turbulent journey through the novel.
Post-punk revival/electronic embodied by TV on the Radio grounded the writing conveying Dash’s frenetic mind. Songs like “DLZ” and “Wolf Like Me,” with their start-stop-start tempo jumps and lyrical swoons mirrored what I wanted for my narrator’s psyche.
I leaned on modern but classically trained composers like Clint Mansell to help truly underscore emotional developments and cinematic scenes. Like films, novels contain parts of the story that swell with emotions. These paragraphs often took the form of elongated sentence structures mimicking musical arrangements similar to the ones Mansel is known for composing, unfolding over several bars in his medium, over multiple pages in my book.
And finally, the early 90s alternative rock that helped pattern the kind of energy I wanted from page one until the final word. This can best be exemplified by the book’s most common refrain: “God is love. God is life. God is a bomb. Tick, tick, tick.” These words open the book, and in so doing, I was emulating the first few bars of Nirvana’s Nevermind album and the first song that’s now ingrained in most popular music fan’s minds: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” If you listen to the opening guitar riff of that song—the power chords mixed with the scratching interludes—and overlay those sounds to the first lines of A Thousand Natural Shocks, you’ll find roughly the same tempo and staccato dynamic jolting the action forward.
A Thousand Natural Shocks: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop
Life in a Computer Wallpaper, 5/7/25
Posted on May 7, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 9 Comments
Yes, from certain angles, where I live looks like the Windows XP default wallpaper. But! My picture has a dog in it! Over on Bluesky, where I posted a similar photo, I was told that high cirrus clouds like these portend rain to come, and indeed, we’re meant to get rain later today. But for now, it’s pretty glorious. Not bad, Wednesday. Not bad at all.
— JS
The Big Idea: Pat Murphy
Posted on May 6, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 7 Comments
As awesome as it is to be introduced to new, fantastical worlds, it can be equally amazing to learn about people that exist in our world, and how that knowledge can inform fictional tales. Author Pat Murphy explores this idea in the Big Idea for her newest novel, The Adventures of Mary Darling. Follow along to get glimpse into the research that went into turning an old tale into something new.
PAT MURPHY:
When I was in fourth grade, I read J.M. Barrie’s novel, Peter Pan. The story fascinated and annoyed me in equal measures.
I wanted to go on an adventure to Neverland. Who wouldn’t want to fly away to a magical island? But I didn’t have much use for Wendy, who seemed obsessed with being a mother and getting a kiss from Peter. Fourth-grade me had no use for all the stuff about Wendy and Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily mooning after Peter Pan. It was all about the adventure.
As an adult rereading Barrie’s novel, the character who captured my attention was Mary Darling, mother of the children who flew away with Peter. From Mary’s point of view, the story of Peter Pan is a child abduction story. Mary comes home from a dinner party and her children have been snatched from their beds.
Now if you were the victim of a crime in Victorian London, where would you go for help? To Sherlock Holmes, of course.
At that point in my thinking, I realized something that no one else knew — Mary Darling was Watson’s niece, the daughter of his brother Henry. Somehow, that relationship had never come up in the works of Doyle or Barrie, but it seemed quite right to me. Once I had settled that in my mind, I knew I had to write Mary Darling’s story.
My work often blends the fantastic view of the world with the rational/scientific approach. I’m trained as a scientist and I believe in science as a way of understanding the world. But I’m also very aware that there are other ways to view the world. Holmes lacks that awareness. He has one set of tools and he applies them – even when they don’t fit the situation.
You might think that’s enough of a Big Idea for a book: a viewpoint shift from the children who flew away to the mother who was left behind and the injection of the extremely rational Sherlock Holmes into a world of the fantastic. But as I considered Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, I found much more to unpack.
J.M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle created these characters at the end of the 18th century, when every girl was destined to become a mother and the sun never set on the British Empire. Not surprisingly, the works of both authors reflect the attitudes of the Victorian era. I was planning to address the misogyny of that time, but I quickly realized that any examination of these works must also address their attitudes toward indigenous cultures and peoples.
So, that’s the other part of the Big Idea. This isn’t just Mary Darling’s book, though she plays a starring role. To rescue her children, she must gather allies – including a Solomon Islander whose village was destroyed by Western civilization, a Malagasy woman who runs an island that the pirates think of as their own, the infamous crew of the Jolly Roger, and, of course, Tiger Lily and her people.
To give you an idea of my writing process, I’ll tell you a little bit about how Tiger Lily’s people found their way to my version of Neverland. I’ll start by saying that I found nothing – absolutely nothing – remotely acceptable in Barrie’s account of Tiger Lily and her people. Barrie’s Native American characters would be right at home in one of the penny dreadful books that Barrie loved, stories that provided sensationalized stereotypical views of the peoples and lands that Britain had claimed as their own.
But Tiger Lily and her people are very much part of the Peter Pan story, so I needed to find a historically and culturally accurate way to bring them to the island, and then give them a role to play once they were there.
I’m not a historian, but I love doing research – particularly research into history that has been ignored, neglected, or willfully disappeared. A conversation with Thomas Deer, the historical and cultural liaison for the cultural center in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawà:ke, led me to consider the history of Native Americans in show business – Wild West shows, vaudeville, and theatre. At a time when most Native Americans were restricted to reservations, being in a traveling show made it possible for them to escape the reservation. By traveling with a show, a family could protect their children from government agents who took Native American children to residential schools that were explicitly designed to force the children to assimilate to white culture.
The historical record includes accounts of many Native American performers — including Thomas Deer’s ancestors, “The Famous Deer Brothers,” a family stage act that toured the United States, Europe and South Africa. Thanks to “The Famous Deer Brothers,” I could justify having a group of Native American on Neverland. In my world, a traveling troupe of performers from the Kanien’keha:ka nation (known to American colonists as Indians or more specifically Mohawks) was on the way to South Africa when they shipwrecked on Neverland.
I’m not a Native American. My ancestors were Irish and Ukrainian and I was raised in suburban California. So to gain an understanding of the Mohawk culture, I did research. Lots of research. I read extensively. Because language and culture are intertwined, I took a beginning Mohawk language class through the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community. I worked with Mohawk cultural consultant Lune Dube, who helped me understand a culture that is not my own. I learned about the power of grandmothers in the Mohawk culture. I learned about how Native American performers of many different cultures all pretended to be the Plains Indians that colonists and Europeans wanted to believe in.
In figuring out other characters and situations in The Adventures of Mary Darling, I used a similar, slightly haphazard process, guided by luck and persistence and friends I met along the way. This is not a process I recommend, but it is one I enjoy.
I write, in part, to give myself an excuse to learn about worlds I don’t know – and to incorporate that knowledge into my own life. For me, part of the Big Idea for any work is stretching my boundaries — learning new things, expanding my understanding of the world and the people who inhabit it.
The Adventures of Mary Darling: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Author socials: Wesbite|Facebook|Bluesky|Goodreads
Read an excerpt.
Some Spoiler-Free Thoughts On “Sinners”
Posted on May 5, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 13 Comments
When I first saw a trailer for Sinners, I was intrigued by what appeared to be Western Vampires, but I was simultaneously disinterested because the trailer made it look like a horror movie, and a goofy one at that. There were so many cringe jump scares and silly effects that horror movie trailers always tend to use. Now that I have seen the movie, I feel confident saying the trailer did it a disservice.
I was surprised when I started seeing a huge amount of positive reviews for Sinners, because like I said I just thought it was some forgettable horror movie. But everything I saw about it was seriously hyping it up, to the point where I knew I needed to go see it, and I now had some pretty high expectations for it. I tried not to keep my hopes too high, as I was afraid of being disappointed, but I couldn’t help but be excited after seeing so many glowing reviews.
I was not disappointed.
Sinners was absolutely enthralling, truly a wild two-hour ride. With its gore, fight scenes, and moments that made me laugh out loud, it was a strange yet evocative blend of horror, comedy, and adventure, with the vibes of a western. It is bizarrely romantic, yet gothic and bloody. But I suppose those things are not so different.
It is also a film that is not necessarily made for me. Of course, I can watch it, fully enjoy it, and there’s lots of things I can take from it, but it is not for me. And that’s great! Seeing such different stories be told is part of what makes art so great. In my research before writing this post, I saw a critic on Rotten Tomatoes say it was a sort of like a “blaxploitation” film. It was a term I’d never heard before, and had to look into.
There’s a whole art movement that I never even knew about! I love that I got to learn something new, and I think it would be ignorant of me to not give proper acknowledgement to the roots of these types of stories told by such incredible black filmmakers.
Long story short, I am a very whitey white girl, and all my thoughts on this film are coming from a place of being a basic white girl, so just keep that in mind as we go through this.
I really enjoyed Sinners, there was never a part that felt slow or boring, or like the movie was dragging, which is impressive because it’s over two hours long. It did feel like a two hour movie, but not in a bad way.
I loved every performance in Sinners, everyone did such a good job and really brought their A-game to this film. Each character was so interesting and fun, and the side characters felt surprisingly three-dimensional and didn’t give that sort of classic “side character” energy. All the characters felt like real people, and made a lot of choices that seemed like something real people would do. I think what I’m getting at here is that usually horror movie performances are cheesy and the characters make a lot of questionable or downright silly choices, but that wasn’t the case here.
The cinematography of Sinners was quite interesting, with a significant amount of one-take shots. The atmosphere and lighting was a total vibe, the sets were great, the costumes were super cool, everything was so immersive and overall looked awesome. It’s just a really pretty film with some really pretty people and I love it for that.
I respect what they did with the lore and rules of the vampires, every fiction is different in that way but I like what they did with their vamps. Man, I really love vampires.
I seriously think you should catch this one on the big screen if you can, it’s a great time and I think even if you don’t like horror (like myself) or Western types, you’ll enjoy Sinners.
I usually don’t do, like, out of ten ratings for movies on the blog, but for me Sinners was an 8.5/10. And if you made me choose a whole number, I’d round up, not down. Awesome film.
Have you seen Sinners? What did you think of it? What other vampire movies do you like (I’m partial to Fright Night (2011))? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
P.S. The one thing I didn’t like about this movie (and most movies) is there were some seriously loud parts. So it goes with seeing movies in theaters these days, but just be prepared for some rather sharp, loud noises. It’s not horrible but there are a few occasions of it.
Spice, Sitting, 5/4/25
Posted on May 4, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
Although Spice sits at my desk daily and likes to sleep by my pillow, she is actually pretty reluctant to lay on me while I’m sitting… until, apparently, I got the Eames chair. Now when I’m sitting in the chair, she’ll come up and plot down on my chest, especially if I have the computer open. Why now? Why this chair? The walnut-sized brain of a cat will be forever a mystery. At least she’s cute while she does it.
How was your weekend?
— JS
RIP, Jill Sobule
Posted on May 1, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
We met on the JoCo Cruise, where we were both performers, and where we declared our mutual fandom. She told me she wanted to make a musical out of Redshirts, which was deeply flattering. She did a one-person musical of her own instead, “Fuck the 7th Grade,” which was the better choice, I think. She was a delight and I’m terribly sorry she’s been taken from us all.
— JS
Scalzi Reads Scalzi: The God Engines
Posted on May 1, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi 22 Comments
After finishing Lock In, so many people told me that I should read Redshirts, or Starter Villain, or another one of my dad’s books that is full of snarky humor and curse words. It’s what he does best, after all, right? So you can imagine my dad’s surprise when I told him my next pick was The God Engines. I was told it was unlike anything I’d seen from him before, and to buckle up.
Boy howdy, he wasn’t kidding. And here’s your spoiler warning!
If you haven’t read it, The God Engines is a science fantasy/space opera-esque novella from 2009. Short story shorter, it’s about these cosmic beings known as “gods” that humans have enslaved and now use to power their spaceships, so they may spread the good word of their Lord throughout all of space. The main character, Captain Ean Tephe, is a faithful man and loyal to his god, but loses his faith when he finds out the true nature of what he serves.
I was excited to read this one because I love novellas! Sometimes reading a big ol’ novel can be tough, and it can be nice to have a full, complete story in less than 200 pages. It was perfect for my plane ride to California.
I struggle to read fantasy because worldbuilding can be hard for me to grasp. The way magic systems work within a fantasy world often don’t make a lot of sense to me. There’s also so many names and places introduced right at the beginning that don’t really mean much right off the bat. ‘Twas the case for The God Engines. I know you’re not supposed to understand everything right away when reading a fantasy novel, but it tends to frustrate me nonetheless.
It wasn’t until about chapter four that I started to really get into this book. I finally started to understand how things worked in this world, at least for the most part. There were still a ton of characters I was getting confused and larger ideas that I wasn’t completely grasping yet, but I was getting there, and the prose was interesting in the meantime.
I enjoyed how formally this book was written. It’s a style choice I respect, especially from someone whose work is usually uhh.. not like that.
The God Engines was an uncomfortable read for me, as I don’t like to read about torture or body horror or the annihilation of souls. It was dark and full of dread, and not a world I would want to live in, personally.
I love a classic “this is the bad guy, and I serve the good guy.. oh wait the roles are actually reversed” story. I really, really loved the idea that the only reason the other gods lost to the humans’ Lord is because none of them were willing to do what their mad god was doing. Completely obliterating souls. They all got captured, tortured, and enslaved, all because they weren’t willing to cross the line that their oh-so-righteous god apparently loves to cross.
I enjoyed the moment everyone loses faith, especially the asshole priest I wished would get punched in the face the entire time. He got what was coming to him, no doubt. And of course the idea that the humans’ faith is true power, some kind of unseen energy, is really cool.
Honestly, I didn’t care about any of the characters much, but they all die anyways so I suppose there’s not much reason to care about them. I did like that Captain Ean was a somewhat honorable man at least, or had some kind of moral compass that made him not be a complete monster. The line about being an imperfect version of his perfect god, only for his god to be revealed as a horrific, evil being, was pretty chilling.
I love that there is no happy ending. Our cast of humans were not the good guys, they reaped what they sowed. I don’t blame the imprisoned god for what he did to the crew. I like that there was no last minute way out, no one coming to save them. Yet they prayed anyway. Beautifully done.
Awesome concept, really unique and original, great prose, perfect length, and a memorable story all around. I enjoyed this one! I am surprised to see how many people want more books in this world. I thought it was a perfect end, and that we need not revisit this universe. Our stay was brief, but that’s the way it must be. I like standalones, anyways.
Have you read The God Engines? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
What I Got Krissy For Her Birthday
Posted on April 30, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 82 Comments
So here’s a fun fact that you probably don’t know about Krissy: She likes to go camping. She and her family used to do a lot of it when she was younger, and she will still do it occasionally with friends. But she doesn’t get to do as much of it as she likes to, because it’s hard to carve out the time, and also she wants to be able to camp with Charlie, our dog, and it’s difficult to find a place for that near us.
Or was. Not anymore, because for Krissy’s birthday, I bought her a campground.
(A wild Fictional Interlocutor crashes through the underbrush) You did what now?
I bought Krissy a campground.
A campground.
Yes.
How?!?
In this particular case, by going onto Zillow and discovering it was for sale. Specifically, a couple miles up the road for us, a heavily wooded 6.51 acre plot of land went up for sale. It is almost entirely on the banks of the Stillwater River, and because it is technically in a flood plain, and the river occasionally rises, no permanent structures can be built on it. It can be used basically for two purposes: for camping, and as a private nature preserve.
And, well. As it turns out, Krissy wants to camp with her friends, and I’m down with keeping as much of the land as possible in a natural state to encourage local flora and fauna to flourish. So this was a pretty great piece of land for us to pick up.
So you’re saying you just bought a bunch of land so you could vibe with nature.
Yup, basically. There are animal trails all over the site, so we know deer and other creatures wander through it, and I’ve already spotted a bunch of different bird species there. The river burbles and meanders along — it’s called the Stillwater for a reason — and while it’s just off a rural road, that road gets almost no traffic. And since it’s only a couple of miles from the house, when we’re done vibing with nature, we can come back to indoor plumbing and critter-free spaces. It’s kind of perfect for what both of us want out of it.
Okay, but the words “flood plain” were mentioned a little while back.
Indeed they were. The land abuts an actual river, and while the river is mostly lazy and well-behaved, from time to time there is heavy rain and suddenly the river channels a lot more water, and that water will come up on the property. Very recently, in fact, we had some torrential rains and flooding and the results are visible on the property; there’s a fair amount of flotsam that got shoved into various corners.
How do we feel about this? Well, in a very real sense it doesn’t matter how we feel about it; the river is gonna do what it does whether we have an opinion about it or not. More practically, however, we are buying this bit of property with the understanding that, rarely, the river is going to come up on it and make its presence known. Again, we’re not planning any permanent structures on the land, and we couldn’t get permits (or insurance!) even if we did. We’re content with working with the nature of the land here, not trying to fight it. We’re going to let the river and the land do what they do, and enjoy what it affords us the rest of the time.
So you’re not going to try to mow it all down and make it, like, a field of grass?
One, absolutely not, and two, even if we wanted to it wouldn’t really be possible, much of the land is essentially steep riverbank that not suited for domestication. There is one large field area that has ground cover on it that we’ll keep covered with local plants and flowers and such, and we may plant local trees and bushes as well, as much for functionality as anything else (our land is much less likely to wash away if there’s, you know, a good root system in it). We want to have our land here be friendly to all sorts of plants and animals, including pollinators and fireflies.
That said, we are going to have some part of it reserved for a camp site, and generally there’s work to be done to clear out flood debris and otherwise deal with mud patches and such. There will be some work involved! But the end result will be nature-facing, not lots of bluegrass or whatever.
Do I even want to know how much this cost?
It cost less than the church but more than a used car; turns out acreage in rural Ohio is not all that expensive.
It’s still kind of a bougie thing to buy your spouse recreational acreage.
Sure. That said, this is going to be a space that has the potential to give us, family and friends a lot of joy over the years, and by owning it we keep a long stretch of the Stillwater River accessible to wildlife with no concern that it will be developed. We’ll have deer and foxes and wild turkeys and turtles and fish here as long as we have it. All of that feels like a reasonably good investment.
And I get to make Krissy happy, too. That’s a bonus.
What are you going to call it?
“Camp Krissy,” of course.
So what are you going to get her next year?
Probably just a card.
What if people have other questions?
They can ask them in the comments, of course.
— JS
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying