John Scalzi's Blog

She takes a pretty great photo, if you ask me. I acknowledge I am biased.

Also, here she is in her natural environment, which is to say, with a big damn sword:

Where does one get a big damn sword? Friend, you’re asking too many questions.

— JS

Every year as the holiday season begins we’ve run a gift guide for the holidays, and over the years it’s been quite successful: Lots of people have found out about excellent books and crafts and charities and what have you, making for excellent gift-giving opportunities during the holiday season. We’ve decided to do it again this year.

So: Starting Monday, December 1, the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide returns! If you’re a writer or other creator, this will be an excellent time to promot...

The YouTube video above fascinates me, because it details how people making $500,000 a year — economically fortunate by any sane measure — are still frequently living paycheck to paycheck. One signal reason for this is the issue of lifestyle comparison, and the fact that income disparity in the 1% is vastly wider than the income disparity within other segments of American life.

Huh? Well, as an example, let’s look at the third quintile of income in the US. In 2023 that third quintil...

Unlike other members of my family, it has been literally years since I’ve baked anything, and even longer since I baked anything more complicated than a frozen pizza. But for this Thanksgiving, I will feeling a little ambitious, and I saw a recipe on the Dessert Person YouTube channel that looked good, so I thought I would give it a shot.

And what do you know, I pulled it off! Please see above my 7-layer holiday bars (pre-bar form), most prominently featuring cranberries and coconut....

Normally when I do a cover I sing on it, but it turns out it’s hard for me to sing Adele songs! At least without some considerable reconfiguration. So, I’ll keep working on that, but in the meantime the instrumental track I made for “Someone Like You” is nice and calm and soothing, and I thought y’all might like it. Enjoy.

— JS

Well, this is lovely: When the Moon Hits Your Eye made it into the final round of this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards, in the category of science fiction, along with the other works you see here. This is a very nice peer group to have, I have to say.

If you feel like voting for Moon, or, indeed any other book in this finalist group, here is the link for you to do so. If you vote for Moon, hey, thanks! If you choose something else, that’s cool too.

I’m actually very happy with Moon...

Man, the things you see at local parks.

You know, I'm not sure I ever really read the Pond Rules at our local nature preserve all that closely before

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-11-25T01:24:28.945Z

— JS

If you’re an author, or honestly if you just happen to be standing near an author these days, then you have probably seen a flood of emails in the past couple of months promising you that whoever is sending you the email can promote [Insert name of one of your works here, even if it is over a decade old] to Amazon/Goodreads/their book club/a nebulous agglomeration of readers/etc. Either up front, or after an email exchange, will come the ask of some amount of money, usually a couple hundred...

WordPress, which is the blog software and hosting service Whatever is on (and has been since October 2008) is celebrating its 20th anniversary today, a fact that I found out thanks to a lovely call-out from them in their own blog post about the day. Speaking as someone whose blog was buckling under traffic and technical issues before it migrated to WordPress, I am both happy it has lasted this long, and also that it is still thriving and continues to be an excellent home for and partner ...

When writing a novel, a lot of people think of the process as sort of rigid. You have a specific story to tell and it needs to be an unchanging vision all the way through. Author Colin Brush, however, says in his Big Idea that flexibility is required when creating a story. Follow along to see how in the making of his newest novel, Exo, he made sure to be adaptable and listen to those around him.

COLIN BRUSH:

The budding novelist with some notes for a story is faced with one gargantuan problem: ...