All My Life is Circles....

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/18/total-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60728

Fun fact: Ohio is the only US state to have a flag that is not rectangular — ours is a pennant. Also fun fact: I hardly see anyone ever fly an Ohio state flag. They will fly to Ohio State flag, which is to say, the flag of the football team that has a university attached, but not the actual state flag.

So, I got one (two, actually, the size I wanted only shipped as a pair) and have placed upon our new flagpole, on our new front porch railing. I think it looks pretty nice, and I think this picture is probably as stereotypically Ohio as a picture can get: House with a porch, big lawn, dog in the foreground. All it’s missing is an actual buckeye, I suppose.

Ironically, now I will be leaving Ohio for a few days for some personal travel. You may assume I am posting this to remind myself what home looks like, while I am away.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/18/total-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60728

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/16/the-scalzi-family-foundation-is-donation-matching-for-the-documentary-one-act-directed-by-pamela-ribon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60715

It’s fair to say that Pamela Ribon and I have come up together in the world. Back in the before times, she and I both started blogging when blogs were still called “online journals,” and our first novels came out close to each other. Since then she’s become a force in animation, working on story and screenplays for Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet and the animated short My Year of Dicks, for which she received an Oscar nomination, which is pretty damn cool, if you ask me. For a quarter of a century now we’ve stayed friends, supported each other, and celebrated our successes.

Pamela went to high school in Texas, which is where she participated in the UIL One Act Play, the largest theatrical competition in the world. Students and their teachers (22,000 of them!) enter a timed theatrical performance judged on acting and tech, watched by an audience of students and parents, three judges, and a 103-page rule book. Pamela turned her filmmaker eye to one year of the competition, following several schools across the state as they fought their way through the ranks— with all the tears and triumphs and, yes, drama, that entails. That’s now become a film, called, sensibly enough, One Act.

The filming of One Act is done, and now comes the post-production phase, where the film is edited, scored and otherwise made ready for festivals and public presentation, in time for the UIL One Act Play’s 100th anniversary. That takes money, and Pamela and her team could use some help with that. This is where we come in: The Scalzi Family Foundation has pledged $5,000 in matching funds to encourage folks to make a (tax deductible!) donation to help One Act get over its own finish line in post-production. Any amount you donate will be matched by the SFF, up to that $5k (although hopefully they will bring in more than that).

We’re supporting One Act not just because Pamela is a filmmaker worth supporting, but because we think this could be an important film. It brings a spotlight to a part of Texas life that isn’t well-known outside of its borders, and shows a part of the life of the state that can be surprising, and challenging, to outsiders. The UIL One Act competition inspires young creative folks, and changes lives, and that’s a story that’s worth telling, and making a really cool film about.

If this sounds like a film that you would like to help support getting into theaters, here’s the link to One Act’s site, which includes information on how to donate. Again, in the US, these are tax-deductible donations, so that’s pretty nifty. Every donation for the first $5k is matched by the Scalzi Family Foundation, so please feel free to spend our money with yours. We want you to, in fact.

(Also, if you feel like being a big-time donor, like in the five-figure range and above, which comes with its own tier of recognition, there’s contact information on the linked page where you can inquire about that. Go on, do it! You know you want to!)

I’m super proud of Pamela for making this film, and for everything she’s done, and happy the Scalzi Family Foundation can help to get this film that much closer to release. I hope you’ll be inspired to come along for this journey as well.

And if you are: Thank you.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/16/the-scalzi-family-foundation-is-donation-matching-for-the-documentary-one-act-directed-by-pamela-ribon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60715

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/14/the-big-idea-thomas-elrod/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60701

It can be hard to have solid opinions and identities when we live in a world of mixed messages and misinformation. With propaganda running rampant, how can we be sure if reality is really real? Author Thomas Elrod plays with this idea of a false reality in his newest novel, The Franchise. Tune in to his Big Idea to see how one man’s fiction may be another man’s reality.

THOMAS ELROD:

I think we are all a little fatigued by the long-running IP franchises on TV and in movies. Sure, we all had a good time watching Harrison Ford return as Han Solo or were happy to see Captain America wield Thor’s hammer, but lately? Eh? It all feels tired, as long-running franchises often do. Good thing Hollywood has plenty of other films and shows in development and we can look forward to some fresh stories in the coming years…

Okay, so there’s the rub. It certainly feels like not only will our big cultural mega-franchises not be retired, it is as if they can’t be. Too much of the shareholder value of Disney or Warner Brothers or Netflix is wrapped up in these very expensive properties for these very large corporations (always merging together into even larger corporations) to ever stop. They can’t. They have to continue generating revenue and growth.

What happens to culture if it can never stop recycling itself?

My big idea was this. I wanted to imagine a film franchise that just kept on going forever, kept expanding and looking for new ways to juice the IP. I was partially inspired by the failed Star Wars hotel, which tried to create an immersive storytelling experience for guests in Disney World, but which was too expensive and wonky. However, it’s not hard to see how Disney was using that experience to commodify LARPing and cosplay and other fan activities into something they could monetize and turn into content.

So I did the thing Science Fiction writers do and I extrapolated, imagining a Truman Show-esque environment where a film studio sets up a living set of a popular fantasy film franchise and populates it with people who have had their memories changed to believe they are real characters in this world. Plots are put into motion, writers and actors are hired to push the story along, and everything is secretly filmed. It’s pitched to fans as a limited-time experience, where you can sign up to have your memory temporarily altered so you can live in this world you love so much. Surely, nothing will go wrong!

The challenge as a writer is how to sustain this concept for the course of an entire novel and also how to build a real story out of it. This is always the problem with high-concept ideas. It’s one thing to come up with a hook, it’s another to create interesting characters and engage them in the twists and turns of an effective story that doesn’t become repetitive.

For me, the thing I held onto was the larger “What if” that this concept suggests, which isn’t just about intellectual property in Hollywood but about one’s identity in a world of misinformation. We all live in a kind of constructed reality, whether we know it or not, based on our sources of news, social media, entertainment, etc. We all know people who seem to live and exist in a totally different conception of the world than our own, and this is both baffling and frustrating. But we still have agency over our own lives, and if we want to spend our energy on, say, denying the efficacy of vaccines or insisting a fair election was rigged, to what extent does a person need to take responsibility for those opinions and to what extent is it possible (or ethical) to blame their misinformation reality on their beliefs?

This is a thornier question but also one which provided a way into the story, which very early on I knew was going to include many different character POVs, some from people who play a minor role in the actual plot but whose perspective ends up being different or interesting. Since some people in the story know what is really going on, some have partial information or suspect something, and some have their own views on what is happening despite possibly knowing what is “real,” the great gift of interior and perspective that fiction affords was my way to start building characters and story. My book would be about this confluence of perspectives, and what happens when they clash into one another.

Along the way there was lots of opportunity for light satire about Hollywood, deconstruction of modern fantasy storytelling, and a lot else, but being able to marry theme and structure was the key to making sure my Big Idea, my book’s hook, actually worked and remained interesting over 350 pages. It ended up being a blast to write, so I hope that comes across to everyone else and that they have just as good a time reading it.

The Franchise: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Social: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Threads

Read an excerpt on Reactor.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/14/the-big-idea-thomas-elrod/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60701

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/13/the-big-idea-sam-beckbessinger/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60684

We’ve all got a beast inside us, waiting to be unleashed. For some, they never hold it back. For others, they keep it caged until it can be repressed no longer. Enter author Sam Beckbessinger, whose fury led to the creation of her newest novel, Femme Feral.

SAM BECKBESSINGER: 

My new novel Femme Feral didn’t grow out of a Big Idea so much as an emotion, or rather, the lack of one. 

About a decade ago I was walking around Cape Town on my way to a friend’s birthday. It was one of those perfect picnic-dress days, a spring-in-your-step song-in-your-heart kind of summer afternoon. Then I realised some dude was following me. I did the things all women do. Reached into my handbag and clutched my keys. Scanned for easy exit routes or an open shop I could dash into. Sped up my walk, but not too much, because you don’t want to over-react or trigger his prey drive. This wasn’t the first time I’d been followed, obviously, but something about this time was different. I wasn’t only afraid, I was furious. I’d been having a lovely day until this creep ruined it! And I found myself having a fantasy I’d never had before: that I could reach into my bag and pull out a gun, turn to him, and make him feel afraid.

This was a shock. I’ve never been an angry person. I hate guns and I loathe violence. So much so, I’ve wondered before whether something was wrong with me. Spend time with any toddler and you’ll see that fury’s a foundational human emotion, yet it’s one I’ve barely ever felt. I’ve been a lifelong good girl, empathetic, nurturing, forgiving – sometimes to my detriment. I started to wonder, what happens to feelings you never feel? Are they still there somewhere inside of you, hidden, waiting? Do they mutate? And when they do finally come roaring out, will they be uglier for having been locked away for so long? 

Femme Feral grew out of those questions. It’s the story of a hypercompetent tech executive in her forties who thinks she’s going through perimenopause, but she’s actually turning into a werewolf. She doesn’t realise it, but once a month, she transforms into a violent beast who savagely mauls everyone who pisses her off in her waking life. The problem is, sometimes it’s the people you love who hurt you the most. Oh, also, there’s an obsessive monster-hunter on her trail – an eighty-four year old vigilante named Brenda who’s trying to find the creature that killed her cat.

The perimenopause part was fun to write, because that’s a joke about how the medical industry still somehow, in 2026, knows about as much about perimenopause as it knows about lycanthropy. When I wrote it, I was myself approaching forty, seeing the first signs of my own oncoming werewolf era (perimenopause usually begins earlier than most people think!). I can’t tell you how many of my friends I’ve seen go to the doctor to get help for a range of confusing midlife symptoms and instead of being given any actual help, the doctor suggests maybe they should try losing some weight. 

But the gorgeous thing about midlife is that it’s also – for many of us – the age our lifelong coping strategies begin to fail, and we’re forced to reckon with everything we’ve been repressing. Anger is an unacceptable emotion in women, so many of us repress it or transform it into something else. The beautiful thing about midlife, for many of us, is that our bodies no longer allow us to do that. Some of us have quite exciting breakdowns that lead to healthy realisations and overdue dramatic life changes; some of us lure our toxic bosses into an alleyway and rip their intestines out. Whatever a girl’s got to do.

This is exactly what I love so much about horror: how it allows you to speak the language of metaphor and play with our most primal emotions. It amuses me, too, that the werewolf is one of the most stubbornly masculine of monsters in our culture because we still find it impossible to imagine women as uncontrollably violent (there are some glorious exceptions, of course, from Ginger Snaps to Alan Moore’s “The Curse” to Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch). 

Unlike my previous novel Girls of Little Hope, which I co-wrote with my friend Dale Halvorsen and which we carefully planned and outlined before writing a word of prose, the first draft of Femme Feral came out of me in a hot stinking vomit (almost like … it had been curdling inside of me all this time). The first draft was a half-formed hideous thing, which I then spent several years pulling into the shape of a novel. Many spreadsheets were involved, since control is my coping mechanism of choice. 

I had a blast taking a wild premise and then trying to work through the consequences very seriously. If you could rip someone’s head off, whose head would tempt you first? What would an NHS GP say if you told him that once a month you find yourself naked and covered in blood on the other side of town with no memory of how you got there? And the question that probably vexed me more than any other (and John Landis never had to deal with): how the heck is this beast roaming all around modern London without being spotted by CCTV?

The process of writing this story was deeply therapeutic for me. I’m not sure I’ve fully worked out exactly what I think about anger, but a novel’s not a polemic so it doesn’t require you to have an argument. It only requires you to have some questions, and then to get in touch with the parts of yourself that might be asking them. In my case, that was a furious beast I had been telling myself wasn’t even there. 

—-

Femme Feral: Amazon (US)|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|UK 

Author socials: Website|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/13/the-big-idea-sam-beckbessinger/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60684

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/12/i-didnt-even-know-american-wisteria-was-a-thing/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60673

Spring is in full swing here in Ohio and it has been both very beautiful and very allergy-inducing. One of the more beautiful aspects is that there is apparently a ton of American Wisteria wrapped around my pergola by the garage, and I find it to be extremely pretty. See for yourself:

This particular bloom is more open and blossomed than the others, hence why I took its photo. Before they bloomed, they all looked like tiny purple pinecones. I had no idea that they would open up into these beautiful flower clusters. I’m absolutely thrilled these are wrapped completely around my pergola. I notice their beauty every time I leave my house.

Very grateful to have some pretty purple flowers around.

Have you seen American Wisteria before? Perhaps you’ve seen the wisteria in Japan before? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/12/i-didnt-even-know-american-wisteria-was-a-thing/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60673

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/11/raising-the-roof/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60655

In the further adventures of home renovation, the back deck has been laid and now the roofing is being put up, for shade and to keep rain off the deck. It’s looking.. pretty good! There’s more to be done, obviously. But it’s coming along nicely.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/11/raising-the-roof/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60655

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/08/hey-ai-still-sucks/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60623

I still ask “AI” questions about me from time to time, just to see what it knows about a moderately notable science fiction author and whether it will still make up things when it doesn’t know something, and as of May 8, 2026, the answer to each is “not as much as it thinks it does,” and “it definitely will.”

As always, I remind myself: If it knows this little about something I know very well, think of how little it knows about things I know nothing about. It literally cannot be trusted with anything factual (because, one again, it doesn’t know facts, it just knows what is statistically likely to be the next word), and thinking that can be is an actual intellectual hazard and fault. Don’t be the one who does that.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/08/hey-ai-still-sucks/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60623

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/07/the-big-idea-jill-rosenberg/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60615

While it may seem like fantasy is as far from the real world as possible, author Jill Rosenberg suggests that indulging in fantasies and fiction actually connects people instead of isolating them from reality. Dive in to the Big Idea for her newest release, Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself, and see if our desires are really just human nature.

JILL ROSENBERG:

People often think of fantasy and the imagination as ways to escape reality, but I think there’s a more complicated and fraught relationship between the two. What we long for, the ways we wish to escape—this grows out of our real experiences of the world. But the reverse is true as well: our “real” experiences are colored by our fantasies. 

We might, for example, wish to be an Olympic-level athlete, as one of my characters does, but this wish highlights the absence of her athletic talent, which may not have shown up as an absence if she’d never longed to be an elite athlete. That feeling of absence and desire drives her behavior, which changes her reality, and the resulting experience changes her understanding of herself and what she really wants.

Our imagination can’t free us from the world because our imagination is made from the world.  But it can alter the way we see things and what feels possible. The first story in my collection is called “The Logic of Imaginary Friends.” This is where I present this big idea most directly. A single mother is left lonely and longing when her eleven-year-old daughter goes to sleepaway camp for the first time, so she reunites with her imaginary friend from childhood.

It’s great at first, until one imaginary friend is not enough, no matter how she morphs him in her mind to meet her shifting needs and desires. The fantasies are fun, but not satisfying, and she begins to feel that she’s choosing this fantasy life over her life with her daughter, but does she have to choose between the two?

As a child, I used my imagination to revise reality. Every Thanksgiving I’d feel so excited for my cousins to visit. I’d imagine myself gregarious, irresistible, rehearsing all of the interactions I’d have, writing their dialogue and mine. But when they arrived, I could never be that person or get the response from them I wanted.

Later that night, however, I could rewrite the dialogue to be more plausible but equally thrilling, given what actually happened. That was always my favorite part of the holiday, alone in my room, taking what happened and transforming it into the holiday I longed for. But the bigger the gulf between my fantasies and reality, the less I was able to enjoy the fantasies or the reality.

It’s this competing desire that compelled me to write these stories: the desire to be known, seen, recognized and special, to connect with those around us, and the desire to hide what makes us unique, to pretend we’re no different from everyone else.

On the one hand, my characters are often reminding themselves of their freedom. Maybe they really can be anything they want to be, but when they try to do it, out in the world, it’s not so easy. They can’t control reality or other people’s responses the way they can control their fantasies. But the more they shy away and hide from the real world, the more that fear of reality infects their fantasies, or, in the surreal stories, the events of their fantastical lives. As a result, their fantasies and their lives get weirder and worse. 

Of course, my strange characters and the unusual things that happen to my characters all stem from my own strangeness and my unusual thoughts and experiences. In my real life, I do not always feel like showcasing the ways in which I deviate from the norm, but I am happy and proud to put my strange and unusual characters out into the world because I do think that fiction shows us new and different ways of being. 

The role of fiction, even surreal fiction, is to bring us closer to the experience of being a human in the real world. That marriage between—and tension between—dream and reality is what I find most thrilling and ultimately satisfying in both my writing and my life.

Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Watchung Booksellers

Author socials: Website|Instagram

Read an excerpt of one story from the collection: The Logic of Imaginary Friends

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/07/the-big-idea-jill-rosenberg/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60615

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/06/trying-out-a-new-recipe-sugar-spiced-dreams-banana-coffee-cake-muffins/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60586

One of my friends recently told me she’s pregnant with her second child, and as much as I love nice cards I knew I wanted to do something a little more for her, so I asked her to tell me what baked good she was really craving. She answered muffins, and my muffin making journey began.

Though she never specified what kind of muffins she wanted, my mind immediately went to a coffee cake type of muffin. In my experience, coffee cake always hits the spot, and there is virtually no one who doesn’t love cinnamon and brown sugar (shout out to the one person I know who is allergic to cinnamon). I just needed to find a good recipe for such muffins.

In my search for coffee cake muffins, I came across this video, showing banana coffee cake muffins:

View this post on Instagram

I knew this recipe was the one. Banana bread vibes enhanced by cinnamon brown sugar streusel?! Yes, please!

Looking at the recipe, it’s very interesting because it uses butter, neutral oil, eggs, and sour cream. So you already know we are in for a MOIST muffin. Especially with the addition of the bananas.

Honestly this recipe is very good for a casual home baker, as there’s nothing weird or hard to come by on the ingredients list. I only had to go buy sour cream and bananas, everything else I had on hand. Though I did use the very last of my flour and brown sugar for this, so sadly I will need to replenish those on my next grocery trip.

Anyways, let me tell you, this recipe is super quick and easy and these taste so flippin’ good! They were so good that I decided to make them again, and this time document it for y’all. So technically this was my second time.

Here’s the ingredients lineup:

If you’ve got a keen eye, you’ll notice I left the oil out of the photo. That was an accident, so just imagine a tall bottle of Crisco Vegetable Oil in the photo. Thanks.

The recipe says to make the streusel first, and I have no arguments against that, so I did! The first time I made it, my butter was cold and cubed like the recipe says, but the second time it was definitely not as cold. But the streusel turned out fine, in my not-so-expert opinion:

You want your streusel to kind of be like wet sand. At least, that’s what I’ve heard in the past. I covered this with a tea towel and put it in the fridge while I worked on the batter.

The first step of the batter is to mash the bananas and mix in all the wet ingredients. Finally a recipe that adds the bananas to the wet ingredients instead of making you add them at the end. Lookin’ at you, Joy of Cooking.

It says to mix until smooth and glossy, and that’s looking pretty glossified to me:

For both times I made these muffins, I actually did not melt the butter fully. It was just very, very soft butter, not liquid. So, melt if you want, but I don’t think it matters too much. Everything whisked together super easy!

In the recipe, it says to mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then fold into the wet ingredients, but why not make this a one bowl batter and just throw the dry ingredients in right on top of the wet, and then mix? Makes more sense to me. Here’s the completed batter:

I always use cupcake liners because I hate trying to get muffins unstuck from the pan, plus my pan is kind of not in incredible shape. It’s seen better days, so liners it is.

The recipe says to fill the cups halfway, then add a layer of streusel, then pour more batter and finish off with a top layer of streusel. So here’s the tricky part. How do you know how much streusel to use on the half-cup-layer to ensure that you have a decent amount in the layer, but also ensure that you don’t use too much and make it so the top layer is weak? You have to prioritize the top layer’s condition, but make sure there’s at least some in the middle.

Honestly, my line of thought is to have a decent crumble, but make sure you’re not completely covering the batter. Like you want to be able to see the batter. Then, when you do the top layer, that’s when you cover the batter completely and make it a very full layer of streusel that can’t be seen through. So here’s the half layer:

See how there’s like, a good amount of crumbles in there but you can still clearly see the batter through the spaces? Here’s the top layer:

Almost no batter visible at this point. I used every crumb of streusel in the damn bowl (ignore the streusel crumbs in the middle parts of the pan). These were ready to bake.

One interesting thing about this recipe that I haven’t really seen before is that she says to bake them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit and then reduce the temperature to 350 after five minutes, without opening the oven door. How intriguing! I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Regardless, I listened and reduced it to 350 and baked for 13 minutes since it said 12 to 15.

They come out a little ugly, but they smell incredible:

The streusel sort of just melds into the top of the muffin instead of being a defined layer on top, so they just kinda look bumpy and weird. But I promise they taste damn good. Look at that crumb!

These are super soft, moist, flavorful muffins with a delish crunchy, sweet cinnamon streusel topping. There’s cinnamon in the streusel and the batter itself, so you’re getting a lot of warm flavor here. The banana is an enhancement, not a detraction.

I gave the first batch to my friend like I mentioned, and she told me they were “AMAZING” and “insanely good” and literally told me to come back and get one immediately so I could try it myself. Thankfully, I had enough ingredients to make a second batch shortly after, and now y’all can try it for yourself.

Some of the muffins from the first batch had a weird issue of sinking in a little bit on the top in the middle, but the second batch didn’t have that issue. Not sure why.

Anyways, this recipe is going to be one I return to often. These are perfect just to gift to friends and family, or have on hand for a morning snack with your coffee. I highly recommend giving them a try.

Do you like banana bread or coffee cake better? Would you try this delish combo? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/06/trying-out-a-new-recipe-sugar-spiced-dreams-banana-coffee-cake-muffins/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60586