Close To Home: Val’s Bakery

Posted onMarch 28, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    8 Comments

A little over a year ago, I heard of a bakery in Dayton called Val’s Bakery. All of the local foodie Instagram accounts I follow were raving about how good it was, and I was eager to try it. I finally did this past Sunday, and I can confirm, their ravings were completely warranted. And I have a trusted foodie, Bryant, to back me up on this, whose opinions I will be sharing alongside my own today.

Val’s Bakery is located in Dayton, super close to the Oregon District, and has been there since 2020. They offer an array of fresh baked pastries and specialty coffee beverages. They also sell cute things like candles, wax melts, some jewelry, and other little goods and doodads.

Bryant and I had planned to get there right when they open, as I had heard they tend to sell out of things pretty quick, so I wanted to get ahead of the masses. Despite getting there about ten minutes after they open, I was very muchnot ahead of the crowd, as there was already a line out the door. And it was 33 degrees that morning (cries in Fahrenheit). After waiting outside for about ten minutes, we finally scooched our way into the warmth, and joined the long line on the inside.

In total, we waited in line for a little over 45 minutes. I am such an impatient person. I truly detest lines, so when I say that this line was more than worth it, you can rest assured I absolutely mean that.

When we got to the counter, there wassomuch to choose from. And you can see a list of all the optionshere. We ended up ordering nine pastries and two beverages. Everything together cost $75 (surprisingly, there was no option to tip). Let’s take a look at what we got.

First up, my beverage. An iced honey matcha with lavender earl grey cold foam:

There is no word in that drink name that doesn’t equate to “heaven” for me. The cold foam was lavender-y without being overwhelmingly floral, and I liked the proportion of cold foam to the actual beverage. The barista had told me the matcha is unsweetened, so most people get vanilla syrup in it to sweeten it up a bit. I chose honey syrup, and it added the perfect touch of sweetness while still leaving room for the pleasant earthiness of the matcha to come through. It was a very balanced beverage.

Bryant got their vanilla bean bourbon stout latte, also iced, but it just looked like coffee so we didn’t think it warranted a cutesy photo. He said it tasted mostly just like a vanilla latte, but was still plenty good.

As I mentioned, we got nine pastries, but their pastries are huge, so they stacked some stuff on top of each other to make them all fit in the same box. So you can’t see everything in this shot because some stuff is under other pastries, but here’s what the box looked like:

We were ready to dig in.

We started with this honey mustard sausage roll:

As you can probably tell from the photo, this thing was insanely herbaceous. The honey mustard was intensely flavorful, and the sausage inside was good, though it had a bit of a hard time staying inside the pastry. Bryant and I both gave it a 7.5/10. We’re big honey mustard fans so this was pretty good.

Sticking to savory items, we tried the Caprese croissant:

The texture of this croissant was wonderful, and the mozzarella was soft and pillowy. There was a perfect amount of pesto that really added to the freshness of it. We absolutely loved this one, and both agreed on a 9/10.

We finished off the savory items with their focaccia, which apparently rotates flavors:

This focaccia, much like the honey mustard sausage roll, was absolutely loaded with herbs, though we found this one to be overwhelmingly so. There was too much thyme, and it was a little too salty. The texture was really great, though, and the golden brown top is super pretty. This focaccia earned a 4/10 from Bryant, and a 5/10 from me. It probably would be better as sandwich bread, so the salt and herbs can be more evenly distributed over a larger amount of ingredients and surface area.

Finally onto the sweet items, we were super excited for this ube cruffin:

When I ordered this, the older gentleman behind me in line asked what the heck ube was, and in case you’re unfamiliar as well, it’s Japanese purple sweet potato! It’s one of my absolute favorite flavors, and is my favorite color, so win-win all around. The texture of this pastry was a dream. It was like a light, fluffy cloud dusted in sugar. The ube cream was seriously bomb, but I was slightly disappointed that there seemed to be only a little bit of the ube cream in it. Like, if I’m getting an ube croissant, I want it to be ube-licious, you know? The parts without ube cream were still delicious, but I would’ve really liked to see more cream. Bryant didn’t mind the ratio, and gave it an 8.5/10, while I gave it a 6.5/10.

And to be fair, I saw a lot of other people’s photos of their ube croissants on Instagram, and they looked a good bit more filled than mine, so I think I just happened to get a slightly underfilled one.

Isn’t this the prettiest blackberry goat cheese Danish you’ve ever seen?!

Truly a beautiful pastry. Blackberry and goat cheese is an undeniably great pairing, and that is true here as well. The goat cheese was pleasantly tangy, and the blackberry compote was plentiful, making sure every bite was loaded. It was very delicious but also very rich. This one was a solid 7/10 from both of us.

Next was this eye-catchingly giant salty honey palmier:

Nothing makes a baked good better than maldon flaky sea salt. This croissant was buttery, perfectly sweetened and slightly sticky from the honey, and nicely crispy. As Bryant said, it is simple but wildly effective, and was an 8/10 from both of us.

We opted for this lemon lavender sugar cookie next:

This cookie had a really pleasant texture, like a nice structure to it. It was definitely lavender-y, so floral haters beware, but I didn’t taste a whole lot of lemon in it. The cookie was just a little bit salty, which is good to balance out a sugar cookie. Overall this was a really good cookie, especially if you’re like me and love lavender. This was a 7/10.

And here is their strawberry mascarpone Pain au Chocolat (white chocolate):

So, on the bakery’s website, theypretty clearly state that you really gotta eat most of their stuff the same day or it won’t be very good. Cookies can go a little longer, but generally anything like this one should be consumed ASAP. Sadly, since we got NINE pastries, we couldn’t really consume them all in one day, so this one got postponed, and I suffered the consequences of my actions. (The cookie was also next day, but was fine because like they say, cookies can go a little longer than most of their goods.) So while this pastry was not good for me because I waited too long, Bryant actually ate it in a timely manner and said it wasso good, and even gave it a 9/10, and I was very jealous as I listened to him regale tales of how delicious it was.

When I inevitably go back to Val’s Bakery, I will get this one again and eat it before anything else. I must try it.

The final piece of this adventure was the raspberry matcha cube:

I love the cube shape of this one, it really sets it apart from the rest. Definitely kind of an odd shape to try and eat, though. The croissant texture was good, and the matcha icing was a little earthy and not too sweet. I didn’t realize that the “raspberry” part of this cube was actually raspberry jam inside, which totally took this pastry to the next level. It was like a jelly-filled donut but with matcha. All around a really yummy pastry, and it got an 8/10 from me.

Unfortunately, Bryant made the same blunder as I did with the previous pastry, and he waited too long to eat his half. He said the flavor was fine but it was definitely on the stale side when he got around to eating it, so he didn’t feel like his ranking of it was fair.

And that brings us to the end of our culinary journey through nine of Val’s Bakery’s pastries! I probably don’t need to eat another pastry for a hot minute, but you best believe when I do, it’ll be Val’s.

If you’d like to check out Val’s Bakery for yourself, they’re currently open Wednesday-Friday from 7am to 2pm, Saturday from 9am to 2pm, and Sunday 10am to 2pm. If they sell out of pastries, they still do coffee service until close. They also have a second location in Kettering that is a drive-thru coffee bar, and serve pastries there, too. You can check out Val’s Bakery’s Instahere, and their other location’s Instahere!

Which pastry looks the best to you? Are you a matcha fan? Is lavender totally your jam? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

The Big Idea: Kait Ballenger

Posted onMarch 28, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    Leave a Comment

When trying to reignite your passion for writing, having a sexy fallen angel be a star in your show is a good way to do it. At least, that’s what authorKait Ballenger discovered in the process of writing her newest novel, Original Sinner. Read on to see just how devilishly charming Lucifer can be.

KAIT BALLENGER:

Writing for joy can be a revolutionary act—and a romance novel can help dismantle the Christian patriarchy. 

That’s what I learned from my newest novel,Original Sinner, a dark romantasy where Lucifer and the other seven deadly sins are billionaire celebrities in a God-abandoned New York City.

It might seem obvious that a book about the devil would question traditional power structures—after all, Lucifer is the original rebel of Christian mythos—but when I first began writingOriginal Sinner, that element of the narrative wasn’t readily apparent to me.

At the end of 2021 when my idea forOriginal Sinner first began, I was down on my author luck—in between contracts and drowning in rejections from various failed proposals. I needed a miracle, or so it felt.

Enter Lucifer.

Original Sinnerdid start as an act of rebellion, but my aim wasn’t purity culture or the Christian patriarchy—it was traditional publishing. I was going to throw out the rulebook and do whatever the hell I wanted on the page. I was going to reclaim my writing joy—and I did.Original Sinner was supposed to be nothing but pure unadulterated romance novel joy.

But as soon as I put pen to page, what started as a passion project quickly turned into something more.

Call it frustration with our current political situation: how far-right Christian beliefs have encouraged the culture of anti-intellectualism we now find ourselves in, or maybe, I was simply working out the fact that when I was fifteen, when my church separated the boys and girls to have the talk about the “value” of our virginity, my youth pastor didn’t have an answer to “what about my best friend who was raped?”

Charlotte, the heroine ofOriginal Sinner, is the runaway daughter of a fundamentalist Evangelical preacher. The religion she grew up in, the religion so many current and former Christians grew up in, aims to keep women small, subservient, and unheard. 

But like so many victims before her, when Charlotte finds freedom working at Lucifer’s company in New York City—the one place she believes her abusive father won’t dare come looking for her—she doesn’t know what to do with that freedom, and she quickly falls prey to the devil himself.

Yet what’s unique aboutOriginal Sinner is that it seeks to irreverently critique the very power structures it employs. At first glance, Lucifer, a billionaire CEO and experienced Dominant who behind closed doors would give Christian Grey a run for his money, and the Christian patriarchy appear to have a lot in common.

Both are born of hyper-religious, fundamentalist backgrounds.

Both employ strict rules and protocols.

Both wield immense power to subjugate.

And both seem incapable of recognizing their own hypocrisy.

But unlike the anti-woman tenets of Christian patriarchy, Luciferisn’t anti-woman, and while Charlotte’s initial bond with the fallen angel may have been born of trauma, the devil is in the details.

Lucifer always asks for Charlotte’s consent.

Lucifer would never hurt her—at least not without her permission when they’re alone in his playroom, of course. 

And that’s where the true feminist power of the romance genre lies: in consent, in the dismantling the patriarchy, in the rejection of purity culture, in celebrating the joy of women and other marginalized people’s sexualities, and more importantly, our happily-ever-afters.

Even if it takes dating the devil to do it.

Original Sinner: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|TikTok

An Expensive Product I Do Not Recommend, And A Pricey Product I Do

Posted onMarch 27, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    24 Comments

I buy a lot of expensive shit. Most of the time, I think it’s worth it, or at least worth it enough that I don’t have to come on the Internet and complain about how not worth it it is. Unfortunately, two weeks ago I bought something thatis worth complaining about, and I’m here to warn you all against it.

To start off, I steam my clothes regularly. I absolutely hate wrinkles, and spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure I don’t have any in my clothes. For the past few years, I’ve just usedthis $25 steamer off of Amazon. It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done. And it has the least silly looking design compared to other steamers I’ve seen. Okay, now that you know the lore of my consistent steaming lifestyle, we may begin.

I had been getting ads forNori, a handheld steamer/iron for your clothes, for legitimately a year at this point. It looks like a giant hair straightener that expels steam out of the hot plates. It was on “Oprah’s List of Favorite Things 2022.” The Nori is futuristic, it comes with six different fabric options, unlike the minimalistic steamers off Amazon that just spout steam all willy nilly with no regard for fabric type. It’s cute, it’s trendy, it’s a bit novel, and it’s $120. That was entirely too much for me to spend on a steamer, especially when I already had one that worked perfectly well.

But, they wore me down. I kept seeing ad after ad and promotion after promotion, and it finally got to me when I saw that it came in purple and I could get it for thirty bucks off. So I said fuck it and bought one. Even though the price of the Nori was now $90, they only do free shipping on orders over $100. So after I paid for shipping and taxes, it came out to $110, so I really didn’t save all that much.

This thing does not work. Like at all. It is so inefficient and does not get rid of wrinkles, pretty much at all. I have tried so many different clothes, different fabrics, I’ve tried it with and without the steam function, and it just does not get the job done. Hell it barely even starts the job. It’s so inconvenient to use, and I absolutely hate it. I truly don’t know what the issue is, I really feel like itshould be working. I’m literally clamping fabric between two hot plates and steam is involved, how is itnotworking? I don’t know, but I’m so sick of this thing.

Long story short, I don’t like this product and I wish I hadn’t bought it. I grew up believing that you get what you pay for, so higher quality things were always going to be more expensive. It frustrates me to no end when something is expensive, but then sucks.

So, I’d like to tell you about a product that is more expensive, but that I actually thinkis worth it and doesn’t fucking suck.

Geometry is a towel company. They make kitchen towels, bath towels, workout towels, apparently they even have dog towels now! I first noticed them because they have some seriously stellar designs. I absolutely love some of their prints for their kitchen towels. But $18 is a lot to spend on one kitchen towel, even if it is a super cute design. But I did it! And y’all are lucky I did because now I can tell you about how worth it they are.

Ilovethese towels. These are, without a doubt, the greatest kitchen towels of all time. They’re way bigger than any other dish towels I’ve had before, and are more light-weight, making for quicker drying time. I love the fabric, I love the designs, they’re a breeze to wash and dry, and best of all, Geometry works with real artists for their collections, and are environmentally conscious. You can read about their sustainability effortshere, and check out their list of artists they’re partnered withhere.

It’s so refreshing to see brands that actually care about artistsandthe planet. It feels good to buy something high quality that also isn’t from a business that absolutely sucks, ethically speaking.

If you’re curious about the designs I got specifically that I love so much, I have purchased all of these in the “tea towel”:

Spring Sprout

Fall Sunflower Cottage

Spicy Pumpkins

Ghosts In The Garden

Creamy Veggie Soup

Full Moon Cookies

Pumpkin Pie

Spiced Gingerbread

As you can see, I have a particular fondness for the ones that have the illustrated recipes on them. Or food items in general. There’ssomany more prints I want, but I have to ask myself how many kitchen towels I really need at one time.

If you don’t share my taste and don’t particularly care for the ones I linked, they have such an incredible variety of prints and designs I’m pretty positive you could find one you like. Especially because they have so many good spring and floral ones right now. You can even filter certain colors or certain styles like “abstract”, “coastal”, “retro”, etc.

So, yeah, best tea towel of my life. I’d love to give their bath towels a try! I keep wanting to try waffle knit towels so maybe I’ll give theirs a whirl.

Have you heard of either of these brands before? Do you steam your clothes? What’s your favorite print you saw from Geometry? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

View From a Hotel Window, 3/27/25: St. Louis!

Posted onMarch 27, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    14 Comments

Not just one parking lot here.Butseveral. Truly, the motherlode of all “view from a hotel window” photos, parking lot-wise.

Tonight! 7 pm!The Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis library! Please come, I woke up at an ungodly hour to be here.

Tomorrow!I’m in Saratoga Springs! At 6pm this time, so be aware of the change in time. But also please attend! I will need to get at an ungodly hour again! There are a lot of ungodly hours in a book tour.

— JS

The Big Idea: Nicholas Binge

Posted onMarch 27, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    2 Comments

On the other side of tragedy comes inspiration. Such is the case for authorNicholas Binge, who decided to construct his feelings into something tangible. Come along in the Big Idea for his new novel,Dissolution, and see how the core of this novel unfolded for him.

NICHOLAS BINGE:
Over the past decade, as I’ve watched two of my grandparents (on different sides of the family) succumb to dementia and memory loss, two sides of the affliction stood out to me. The first was seeing the way my Gran didn’t just lose her memories, but her entire identity. It was less that she couldn’t recognise her family, but more that she no longer exhibited the traits and behaviours that made her uniquelyher. That terrified me — that your identity could be scooped out of your body in that way? It’s haunted me ever since.

The second pivotal moment came with my Grannie, on the other side of my family, and its impact on my Grandpa. They’d been in one of the most loving and devoted marriages you could imagine for so many decades, been each other’s everything across continents and generations, and my Grannie’s dementia tore through that. Again, it wasn’t that she didn’t always recognise us or him. He no longer recognisedher. She was no longer the woman he married, and yet, somewhere in there, was the constant and persistent hope that she still could be.

As a man in his mid-nineties, caring for her physically broke him, yet someone else taking over was never an option. He was duty-bound to a partner he no longer really knew, living in a mixture of hope that she might sometimes return, and of guilt that he couldn’t do more to help her. It left me with so many feelings I wanted to explore about the human capacity for love in the face of tragedy, and how we can salvage hope in situations that feel inevitable. And for me, as its been for a long time now, my only way of doing that is through fiction.

These experiences, of course, are not isolated or rare. My biggest revelation when talking with people about my new book is the sheer number of people who care for family members with dementia, and how universal the pain and suffering it brings. When writing, I did a deep dive into the concept of memory, reading everything from academic studies about memory formation to personal accounts of various forms of memory loss, and even, on the other end of the scale, case studies about extreme ‘memory athletes’ who push themselves to learn thousands of digits of Pi.

What I learnt is that the very nature of memory is contradictory. It’s inherently unreliable: we construct and reconstruct it all the time, and our memories of events shift and change depending on how we feel when we remember them, and how they fit in with the narratives of our lives. And yet, we rely almost entirely on memories to construct our identities and realities. Sure — we have Wikipedia and textbooks for cold hard facts — but when it comes to our day-to-day, the important stuff like our relationships, our sense of self, our hopes, dreams, regrets… it’sall memory. This is our reality, and it’s built upon smoke.

This led me to the central technological conceit of the novel: if you couldsee someone else’s memories of events rather than your own, what would that do to your identity? What would about your reality? And if we couldall do it, what would that do to reality as a whole?

I could talk here about superposition, or the ways in which observation leads to definition, and how I think our memories not only recall but literallyshape the past, but while that’s the ‘sci-fi’ dressing of the narrative, the core idea of the book is an emotional one. Think back to my Grandpa no longer recognising his wife of over seventy years. What if he could get inside her head? Would he find the woman he was looking for, or would he, unknowingly find something else?

This leads us then to Maggie, the eighty-three-year-old protagonist of my novel. Her husband has Alzheimer’s, and though she feels duty-bound to care for him, it’s the loneliest she’s ever been in her life. Then someone shows up at her door and tells her that he isn’t losing his memories, someone isstealing them to hide a long-buried secret. If she does what he says, she can reverse it. She can have him back.

What happens after that speaks to my penchant for horror, thrillers, and the irrepressibly weird. Expect to be surprised, expect to be shocked, expect to be a little horrified as the conspiracy that opens up takes us across the globe and swallows centuries. But beneath all of this, expect a love story that is ultimately about hope and holding on. I wanted to ask: what do you do when the person you love most in the world forgets you and forgets themselves? How do you salvage the important memories, even as you watch them dissolving in front of you?

Dissolution:Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials:Website|Bluesky

View From a Hotel Window, 3/26/25: Knoxville!

Posted onMarch 26, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    6 Comments

There we go. I know when you think of my “view from a hotel window” you are thinking of quality parking lot photos, and this one doesnot disappoint. Not only does it have a parking lot, it also has a very fine back of a grocery store. This photo has everything!

Tonight! At 6pm! You can see me at the Fable Hollow bookstore (here’s the link for tickets). And then tomorrow, I will be in St. Louis,at the Clark Family Branch of the library there, at 7pm. So that’s your Wednesday and Thursday sorted!

— JS

The Big Idea: Roanne Lau

Posted onMarch 26, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi

The only thing worse than beasts are man-made monsters. AuthorRoanne Lau explores the idea of how monstrous humans can truly be in the Big Idea for her newest novel, The Serpent Called Mercy. Follow along as she tells us a bit about the inspiration behind the novel, and she reworked her words to truly fit her vision.

ROANNE LAU:

The Creature Lab

I grew up on a steady diet of JRPGs—Japanese role-playing games, a genre defined by popular series likeFinal Fantasy andPersona.

If you’ve played these games, you’ll know what I mean when I say the enemies you’d encounter were an OG source of dopamine back in the early PlayStation era. You’d stroll through an area lovingly rendered to push the limits of those ancient gaming systems, then—swoosh—the screen would warp and swirl around, an addictive battle theme would kick in, and your character party would be thrown into a new screen, facing some bizarre monster to fight.

The monsters would vary wildly in design, ranging from the grotesquely tentacled menace known as the Malboro to the deceptively cute knife-wielding Tonberry.

You never knew what you’d be up against until the battle started—and there was something thrilling about that slot-machine-esque gamble of seeing some unpredictable monster grace your screen, and you racing to figure out its weaknesses before it whittled your health points down to zero (you could, of course, just brute force your way through most battles by spamming the Attack button—but I always preferred testing all the variables out and discovering if the monster was weak to Ice or Fire or whatnot).

I know what you’re thinking. My bookThe Serpent Called Mercy, with its monster-fighting arena premise, must’ve been crafted with the desire to replicate the same electric thrill of encountering a beast in the PlayStation-rendered wild and analysing how to defeat it. 

But weirdly enough, despite the fact that I came up with the monster-fighting arena early on in my writing process, I barely featured it in my first few drafts beyond the occasional paragraph, glossing over each battle as quickly as possible so I could focus on the three things I really wanted to explore:

1) The emotional arc of my protagonist Lythlet—an underdog in every way possible, from her unappealing appearance to her slumdog social status—who wrestles between ambition and morality as she rockets to fame and success over the course of a year.

2) Non-romantic character dynamics—how platonic and filial love can be both complicated and healing, how friendships that once uplifted can later become hindrances, how the choices we make or don’t make can dramatically shift the shape of a bond, either preserving or ending it.

3) Wealth inequality—how socioeconomic realities and abject poverty can shape a person’s fate, how systemic injustice rooted in political corruption destroys the future of those trapped beneath society’s descending boot.

These three things formed the bedrock of my book from its earliest drafts to the final version hitting shelves right now.

But the monster-fighting arena? That only got fleshed out after a beta reader left a comment: “So you have this arena you mention occasionally, but you don’t actually do anything with it…” That one, single note made me frame the arena in a new light. It wasn’t just a silly backdrop to show how much corruption had spread through the underbelly of the city, but the perfect stage to explore all three of Lythlet’s struggles: ambition, morality, and society’s injustices.

So, I delved deeper into the arena scenes, fleshing out the battles I’d glossed over. The monsters came flooding in, beasts popping into my imagination almost fully formed, with just a few secrets for me to unravel alongside Lythlet as she fights them. She’s not particularly strong, so she has to rely on her wits—and that means sussing out the beasts’ weaknesses the same way I used to handle thoseFinal Fantasy battles back in the day. 

I had fun injecting my monsters into my book: beasts made of all-consuming shadows, two-headed horrors that spew fire and drill metaphorical ice into minds, gargantuan man-shaped abominations that try to swallow my protagonist whole, and much more.

Yet none of these monsters measure up to the other evils my characters face throughout the story: the leering gaze of the wealthy spectators dehumanising these arena combatants for their entertainment; the emotional manipulation of the cunning match-master in charge of the arena, whose persona I stitched together from fragments of the volatile, controlling people I’ve encountered in life; and the unleashed ambition and greed of a downtrodden slumdog finally getting her first chance at greatness. 

At its core, the Big Idea ofThe Serpent Called Mercy is beasts, monsters, and rampaging creatures bent on wanton destruction—and some of them take human form: corrupt politicians, power-hungry ladder-climbers, manipulative overlords, and the traumatised intent on passing on their trauma.

But perhaps the worst of all these monsters are the ones that live inside of us: pride, greed, envy, insecurity masquerading as ego, and childhood wounds left to fester. 

The Serpent Called Mercy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-a-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

View From a Hotel Window, 3/25/25: Louisville

Posted onMarch 25, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    5 Comments

For most of these pictures I’m looking down, usually at a parking lot, but today I’m looking up toward the sky. Hello, Louisville, I am in you, and will be at your public library tonight at 7pm. Please come visit me, I drove all the way here to see you.

Tomorrow: Knoxville! You have a day to prepare. Preparewell.

— JS

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is Out Today, and Also Hello, I Am On Book Tour, Please Come See Me

Posted onMarch 25, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    39 Comments

First things first: When the Moon Hits Your Eye is now out in North America (Thursday in the UK) and available at your local bookseller and/or favorite online bookstore and/or wherever it is you buy books, with the audiobook version, narrated by Wil Wheaton, available on Audible.

It’s about what happens when the moon inexplicably turns to cheese, you know, like it does (or could.You never know). Is it a fundamentally absurd premise? Yes. Yes it is. Have I now made a career out of making fundamentally absurd premises work better than anyone has a right to expect? Yes. Yes I have.

In fact, here’s my favorite review of the book, from Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning writer Mary Robinette Kowal:

“This is one of those books that should absolutely not work. It does. I laughed in an airport lounge loudly enough that people turned to look at me. I also cried MORE THAN ONCE over a book about a MOON MADE OF CHEESE. Fuck you, John Scalzi. How dare.”

Yes. YES.

It also got excellent reviews fromKirkus(“A ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos”),Publishers Weekly (“Scalzi’s ability to balance scathing satire with heartfelt optimism shines”),Library Journal (“Readers who love humorous science fiction… are going to be rolling on the floor laughing out loud while reading”) andBooklist(“When the Moon Hits Your Eye does what sf does best”). Oh! And!The Guardian (“Often very funny and occasionally moving, this is a welcome bit of comic relief”)! So that’s all good.

I know many of you pre-ordered the book (thank you!) but if you have not, this week is an excellent time to get the book, however you prefer to get it. If you want signed copies, there are some floating around in various bookstores (I signed a whole bunch of signature sheets), or you can order from my local booksellerJay and Mary’s Book Center, who has a couple dozen signed copies available. Or, you can order from one of the bookstores I am visiting on my book tour here in the US, who will be happy to take your order, have me sign it, and ship it to you.

Which brings us to the next part:

Second part second:I am on book tour! It started off last Sunday with an event in Columbus with Mary Robinette Kowal, and continues on starting today with stops in Louisville, Knoxville, St. Louis, Saratoga Springs, Decatur, Concord, Austin, Brookline and Harrisburg.Here is the whole tour itinerary, with links for tickets. Most of the stops are ticketed, so please do check that tour itinerary! If you come visit me on tour you will here a special sneak preview of The Shattering Peace, the seventh book in the Old Man’s War series, and some other exclusive bits you’ll only get from seeing me live. So please come see me if you’re in or near those cities.

In addition to the formal tour, I am also going to be at Awesome Con in Washington DC, C2E2 in Chicago, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, The Gaithersburg (MD) Festival of Books and Phoenix Fan Fusion. And I will be at Worldcon in Seattle in August. Also remember I am very likely doing a second book tour this year, in September, in support ofThe Shattering Peace, with dates, cities and venues to be announced. Trust me, if you live here in the United States, you have a reasonably good chance of having me show up somewhere near you sometime this year.

I am so happy withMoon, and so happy it is now out in the world and ready for you all to read and enjoy. It’s a special, weird and fun book. I hope you all like it. Look to the skies, and see you out there on the road.

— JS

Attending Bram Stoker’s Dracula Cocktail Experience in Cincinnati

Posted onMarch 24, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    17 Comments

If there’s two things I love, it’s vampires and cocktails. So when I saw that a performance of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was coming to town, and that it would be accompanied by four themed cocktails, I knew I wanted to attend. I got my mom and I tickets, which were around sixty bucks each, and we drove down to Cincinnati.

The event page said to dress in our finest gothic attire, so my mom wore a black velvet jumpsuit, and I went for a more vampiric route with a wine colored velvet dress. We even got matching red nail polish for our manicures and pedicures that day! We ended up being a smidge overdressed, as most people wore extremely casual clothes. A lot of sports team hoodies and jeans were seen, though some people did wear dress shirts and some nicer attire. But honestly very little “goth” was seen.

The event was held atThe Williams Frances Theatre, a newly renovated event center that was originally built in 1928. The theater was set up simply with rows of chairs, and seating was first come first served, so my mom and I just picked some seats somewhere in the middle.

The stage had this desk and other little table thing for the duration of the show, and the covered bench was a multipurpose piece, as well. There were three actors, and they were also our “bloodtenders” for the evening. So it was definitely more of a minimalistic performance.

Before the show started, they brought around the first drink, The Vampire’s Kiss:

This one was vodka, St. Germain elderflower liquor, and I think cranberry juice? (They tell you what’s in it when they hand it to you, and I should’ve written it down because I have a terrible memory.) I liked this one, though!

The show began and opened with Mina writing a letter to her fiancé, Jonathon Harker, and she basically gave us all the exposition of how he has gone on a journey to Eastern Europe to sell property, and that she can’t wait to marry when he returns and whatnot. It’s the first and last we see of Mina, as the rest of the show was strictly Jonathon and Dracula.

They’d do a couple of scenes, and then come back around and hand out more drinks. It allowed for lots of bathroom breaks and talking amongst ourselves, so overall it was a really casual set up that I kind of enjoyed.

I didn’t take a picture of the second drink because it looked a lot like the first drink without a garnish, but it was decently enjoyable as well. So here’s the third drink, Dracula’s Elixir:

This one consisted mainly of coconut rum, pineapple juice, and orange juice. (Also, all of my photos are not very good because it was dim enough in the theater that my phone had to have me hold still for a solid three seconds to actually capture the photo, and there was a lot of odd shadows, as evidenced by the way my hand looks in this one.)

The show was much funnier than I anticipated, although I guess it kind of has to be when there’s only two actors talking to each other on an unchanging stage. The actors for Jonathon and Dracula interacted so well together, they were really a joy to watch. Jonathon’s actor really showed his talent when portraying Jonathon losing his mind and becoming a disheveled, paranoid version of himself.

The actors were quick to improv on things, like when they stood too close to each other and their mics had some intense feedback, they made a joke about it. They also utilized a couple Jim-from-The Office looks at the audience, which everyone laughed at. Overall it was just kind of a silly, fun show with actually pretty good acting, and some decent, fun drinks.

Speaking of which, this was the final one, The Sweet Sacrifice, which is what Jonathon told me he was about to be when he handed it to me:

I believe they said this one was strawberry vodka with strawberry and cream liquor. It was sweet, creamy, and a great one to end on.

All in all, it was a fun way to spend a Friday evening. The actors clearly had a lot of fun and the crowd did, too. The actor/bloodtenders really were out there doing their best, providing us with good service and a fun show, so what more can you ask for!

My mom and I got sushi afterwards at my most favorite sushi place and it was absolutely bomb as always, so it was a pretty great Friday.

What’s your favorite version of Dracula? Have you ever read Dracula? How was your Friday evening? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

Hello From Columbus

Posted onMarch 23, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    12 Comments

Mary Robinette Kowal and I did a joint appearance today at the Columbus Public Library, she to promote her terrific new book The Martian Contingencyand me to get a jump on the release ofWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye this Tuesday. As you can see, it was reasonably well attended; we had between 400 and 500 folks show up, and lots stayed to have books signed as well. It feels like a good sign for both of our books, honestly. And of course it was lovely to spend time with Mary Robinette, who is one of my favorite folks. A lovely Sunday all around.

— JS

The Kaiju Preservation Society a Finalist for the 2025 Kurd Lasswitz Preis

Posted onMarch 22, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    14 Comments

What is that? It’s a well-known science fiction award in Germany, roughly equivalent to a Nebula or Hugo for German-language work and translations. Kaiju (known in Germany as Die Gesellschaft zur Erhaltung der Kaijū-Monster),is a finalist in the “Foreign Novel” category, which covers work published for the first time in the last calendar year, along with these other authors and works:

Das Licht ungewöhnlicher Sterne [Light from Uncommon Stars], Ryka Aoki (Heyne)

Von der Angst [von Oktoberrevolution 1967], Kir Bulytschow (Memorandum)

Dex & Helmling [Monk & Robot], Becky Chambers (Carcosa)

Ferryman[The Ferryman], Justin Cronin (Goldmann)

Manhunt[Manhunt], Gretchen Felker-Martin (Festa)

Der Plan zur Rettung der Welt [The Great Transition], Nick Fuller Googins (Heyne)

Das andere Tal [The Other Valley], Scott Alexander Howard (Diogenes)

Die Stimme der Kraken [The Mountain in the Sea], Ray Nayler (Tropen)

Die letzte Heldin [Some Desperate Glory], Emily Tesh (Heyne)

Übertragungsfehler [Fugitive Telemetry], Martha Wells (Heyne)

I have in fact been a finalist for the Kurd Lasswitz Preis before, and even won it once, in 2010, for The Android’s Dream. It’s nice to be a finalist again. Congrats to the other finalists as well! The winners in all categories will be announced in July.

— JS

Your Friday Orange Report

Posted onMarch 21, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    28 Comments

Last night, while shopping at Kroger, I came across these oranges:

If there’s two words you could use to get me to buy a fruit, it’s sugar and gem. Intrigued, I picked them up and read the side of the container, which says that these oranges were grown in optimal weather conditions in an Californian orchard. Apparently they’re harvested at their prime for extra sweetness.

Well, I do prefer sweeter oranges to more tart ones, so I decided to give them a try. It was $3.99 for the package, so a dollar an orange.

I won’t lie, I had high expectations. The container promised me a “divine eating experience.” However, these definitely just tasted like normal oranges. They weren’t wondrously sweeter than other oranges I’ve had, ’twas nothing special about them, sadly. The container also said they have a good aroma, but honestly they don’t smell like much. Definitely a let down!

Fear not, dear reader, for there was one thing I did buy that was surprisingly incredible. It was Murray’s Honey Lemon Wensleydale. I have tried Murray’s Cranberry Wensleydale multiple times and use it fairly often on charcuterie boards. This Honey Lemon one is surely about to be become a new staple. That is, if they keep it around. This was my first time seeing it out of all the times I peruse the artisan cheeses at Kroger! Hence why I decided to try it.

The Honey Lemon Wensleydale is creamy, sweet, lemony goodness that tastes more like it belongs on a dessert board than paired with meats and mustards. It’s truly a delectable cheese that I would honestly give a 10/10. If you have a Kroger with a cheese bar near you, I highly recommend seeing if yours has this one in stock!

Have you tried these Sugar Gem oranges? Were you also let down? Or do you prefer tart oranges? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

Vernal Equinox Sunset, 2025

Posted onMarch 20, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    6 Comments

It’s been cloudy all dayand I didn’t suspect I would actually get a shot of the first sunset of Spring, but then, at the last moment, there was a break in the clouds, conveniently at the horizon. And here we are. Welcome to Spring, northern hemisphere!

— JS

Something Beyond Materialism

Posted onMarch 20, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    31 Comments

There is something about me that I have always known, but especially in recent years have found to be even more true than before. First, I am materialistic. Second, I am an extremely sentimental person. These two things are certainly correlated.

I have the issue of holding objects so near and dear to my heart that it hurts. And it’s not just things like a grandmother’s necklace, one passed down and made of precious gemstones. It’s not a lighter from a beloved great uncle that his grandpa used in the trenches of World War I. And its not the dried flowers from a loved one’s funeral. It is the dishware at my house.

A simple set of black dinner plates, with matching smaller plates and two different types of bowls. My parents have had these dishes since before I was born, and they are the dishes that I ate basically every single meal of my life off of. To this day, they are used on a daily basis. They are scratched, some are chipped, but it matters not. They serve their function and need not be replaced.

These plates have serviced me my entire life. That means something to me. They are now precious to me. They were there for every single dinnertime conversation between me and my parents. All of my Saturday morning cartoon sessions with cereal were eaten out of those bowls. I hope we never stop using them.

Though I no longer use my childhood comforter for my bed, we still have it, tucked away in a closet. It has a rip in it and isn’t particularly interesting looking, just white with purple flowers. But I love that thing dearly. If I was dying, I’d want to be wrapped in that blanket. It is the ultimate comfort item that immediately transports me to my youth. It kept me warm every night of my childhood. That means something to me!

As many of you know, I have a bit of an obsession with stuffed animals, especially Squishmallows. When I tell you they matter to me, you’re probably thinking, well yeah of course, who doesn’t have a soft spot in their heart for a plushie or two? But if I told you that I have cried over them on several occasions, you might think me a smidge looney.

Why on earth would I cry about Squishmallows? I really can’t explain it, but it’s like my heart’s empathy setting gets dialed to 11 around them. I love them so much. I can’t throw them or handle them haphazardly, they’re literally like fragile little babies to me. If I drop one or one falls off the couch I legitimately feel so bad about it. If I just like, think about how much I love them hard enough, I cry. I LOVE THEM!!

I don’t know what it is in me that makes me care about objects so much. I think part of the reason I fear tornadoes and house fires so much is because I can’t imagine something as devastating as losing all my stuff. Of course, I’m fortunate enough that if something did happen to our home or my stuff, we could just rebuild and replace things. But losing my stuff sounds like a nightmare. I love my things.

About a week or two ago, I turned off the lights in my bedroom, and for some reason I noticed the glow-in-the-dark stars that adorned my light switch cover. Usually, I don’t see them, because they’ve always been there, so I tune them out. But that night, I saw them, glowing in the darkness. Glowing 23 years after I put them on my light switch cover. Glowing every night of the past two decades. They were always there for me, a source of light in the dark, for my entire life.

I stared at them for too long, and ran my fingers over them as I cried. Even writing about it now, I see them glowing in my mind and have tears in my eyes.

If you’re thinking, wow this girl cries pretty easily (and pretty often), you’d be right. I cry like, every single day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Over anything and everything. See a sad TikTok, cry. See a cute dog, cry. Hear a really beautiful song, cry. See an old photo of my parents, cry. Burn a batch of cookies, cry. Watch The Lion King, bawl.

I’m just very emotional, I guess. I don’t really know what to with it. It’s not particularly useful to be overly sensitive, but I guess it’s better than apathy.

What’s something you hold dear in your life? Any special trinkets? Or do you think I’ve lost it? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

The Big Idea: Lif Strand

Posted onMarch 20, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    1 Comment

Sometimes,asLif Strand learned in the writing ofStolen Sisters, writing “The End” is actually the beginning. The beginning of what? Strand explains it all in this Big Idea.

LIF STRAND:

Stolen Sisters, the second book in my Mangas County Mysteries series, was one tough haul. My fault, of course. I took the concept of pantsing perhaps a little too far. I wrote whatever felt right, expecting the story to get worked out as I typed.

And then one day I realized I had reached something like The End except it was more like just stopping writing rather than a nice wrap-up ending. In fact, the whole story was a wreck. Admitting this so late in the game was scary as hell.

You know the old saw about too many chiefs and not enough tribe members? Hello, my characters: each one competing for primary plot position and not a one of them willing to step down to subplot status. I kind of knew that, but my brain had reached overload with this manuscript, what with multiple crises in my personal life, and — dare I say it — certain political events.

So I called in the posse.

My editor is a gem. A saint. A genius who can wade through crap and find buried treasure. He had edited Dark Green, the first book in the series, and he discovered a viable second book in the current mess of a manuscript. Here be the treasure, he said, and I started excavating.

Except… at The End of each of the multiple revisions, the story was still not quite right. Weirdly, it took butting heads with my writing mentor, an accomplished and prolific author of police procedurals, for me to figure out why.

The head butting baffled me. It was like my mentor and I weren’t talking about the same story. I mean, yeah, we were talking about the same words in the manuscript — but obviously no,not the story I thought I had written.

I chewed on it the situation for a good while before I figured out why we were talking at cross-purposes, which led me to the light-bulb moment when I realized where I had gone astray: I never had wanted to write a police procedural.

Forget who-done-it — what grabs me is why people do what they do and how they feel about it. My mentor kept saying no, no, no, that’s not what police procedurals are about and these are the parts that are the problem. Okay, but those were the parts I most wanted to keep!

I absolutely did not want a hard-edged crime solver protagonist who had seen it all, one who could shoot a bad guy in the afternoon and have no problem falling asleep at night.

I wanted my main character, Jessie Torres, to be like the women I admire in real life, the ones who are immersed in (and pressured by) ongoing relationships and responsibilities, and who struggle to claim the time and emotional space to live their own lives. 

Jessie doesn’t get to shunt the real world aside just because she’s a cop (she’s actually a special deputy, not that it matters). She deals with crimes and a personal life. She has family and social/cultural obligationsand a tough job that takes an emotional toll on her — like it does on real-life cops but not so much on fictional ones. Jessie hasn’t slept well in a long time.

All ofthat is what my story was about, not just crime solving.  

Oh, there is a crime to solve in Stolen Sisters, but it is murder associated with human trafficking and the physical violence, psychological manipulation, threats, and deception that go with it. No way could I write about human trafficking and limit myself to just writing about how the bad guys get caught.

Not only that, but Stolen Sisters is about good guys who happen to be women. Most of the secondary characters are girls and female elders. They’ve faced the bad guys and survived it, but they’re not recovering on fainting couches being soothed by a male hero. No, they are doing whatever they can to make sure other girls and women don’t have to go through what they did.

Jessie is vulnerable but brave, powerful without relying on force, intelligent and talented but not all-knowing, and not always sure of who she is or how she’s going to do what needs doing. On top of it, she is willing to pay the price of being a hero even though being a hero is not what it’s about for her.

In other words, no Wonder Woman in this story, but many women on the hero spectrum.

So this brings me back to head-butting. My editor had encouraged me in each revision of the Stolen Sisters manuscript to expand even more on Jessie’s thoughts, feelings, reactions, and inner struggles, and to continue to develop her ambivalence about her Apache ancestry and spirituality. My mentor said that my editor couldn’t be more wrong. Oops.

In my opinion — ultimately the only opinion that matters because I’m the one doing the writing dammit — is that I should write what I want to write. For me, that would be the real-life crises that many people have opinions on but don’t know as much about as they think they do, plus women who will do the rescuing themselves, thank you very much.

I didn’t have to do much rewriting to make The End work forStolen Sisters. I just made Jessie more like the person who lived in my head and less like the protagonist of a police procedural crime novel. Thanks to my writing mentor I clearly see that I have to write what I feel called to write and tell it like I mean it — or why bother writing at all.

Stolen Sisters: Green Avenue Books|Amazon

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In Which I Blather On About Humor in Science Fiction For an Hour

Posted onMarch 19, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    3 Comments

A couple of weeks back I chatted with the folks at SFF Addicts about writing humor in science fiction, and the conversation on the topic went on for more than an hour, in no small part because once you wind me up on a subject, I just don’t stop talking. Nevertheless, over the course of the hour I talk about writing humor in science fiction, how humor differs from drama, particular in its failure mode, and why it was so hard, for many years, to convince mainstream science fiction publishers to admit their novels might have humor in them. Enjoy.

— JS

Drop What You’re Doing And Play The Google Doodle Game Today

Posted onMarch 19, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    17 Comments

I got on my laptop to get down to some serious work today, and opened Chrome. Upon opening Chrome I saw a very intriguing Google Doodle, and to see what it was for, I clicked on it. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a game.

After playing said game, I am here to tell you to go play it immediately. This may just be the greatest Google Doodle game of all time, which is a bold claim because I love many of the Google Doodle games.

It’s a card game against the moon! I absolutely love the concept, as well as the actual card game rules and play style. It’s so simple yet so fun. The art style is super pretty, and the music is lowkey incredible. It actually reminds me ofStranger Things with its synth vibes. The SFX is nice, too. There’s so many little details that I’m seriously loving about this game.

Okay, that’s all I came here to say. I hope you give it a try!

-AMS

Some Quick, Spoiler-Free Thoughts On “Mickey 17”

Posted onMarch 17, 2025  Posted byAthena Scalzi    31 Comments

On Friday, I went to see Mickey 17 in theaters. Unlike most movies I’ve seen in theaters recently, I actually saw a ton of marketing for Mickey 17. This was one movie I wasn’t going into completely blind, which I generally try to do.

If you have yet to see one of its trailers, Mickey 17 is a science fiction film about a guy who volunteers to be “an expendable” on a journey across space to another planet. He’s given grueling tasks that are often fatal, and when he dies he is reprinted so he can keep on keepin’ on. Most of the story revolves around the titular character, Mickey 17. Of course, hijinks ensue when Mickey 17 is still alive, but they already printed Mickey 18. This causes some issues, as “multiples” are not allowed.

The premise definitely interested me, but what really made me want to see it was Robert Pattinson. Not gonna lie, I am a big Rob fan. Yes, I was indeed aTwilight kid, but more than that I think he is a fantastic actor, and to see him in increasingly strange and wonderful roles over the past few years has been a joy. I especially love his Batman.

Watching Robert Pattinson play two characters that are the same guy but wildly different is atreat. The way he interacts with himself on screen is so fun and interesting. I think playing two characters shows just how impressive his range as an actor really is. It reminds me a lot of Michael Fassbender’s performance as both David and Walter inAlien: Covenant and how interesting it is to see him interact with what is essentially another version of himself.

Aside from Robert Pattinson’s double whammy, Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette both provide extremely fun performances as well. They were superbly cast, and really added to my enjoyment of the film.

Performances aside, Mickey 17 was very different than I had imagined it would be. It was much more of a comedy than I anticipated, with a lot of rather goofy dialogue and line deliveries. The plot went in an unexpected direction, and I never knew what was going to happen next! It was definitely a unique movie, both in plot and in tone.

I actually really love the whole “your memories are stored and then implanted into a new body” type stories because it raises so many ethical and moral questions. It reminds me a lot of Astro Boy, and how even though Toby’s “consciousness” and memories are uploaded into a robot body, the real Toby did die, and Astro Boy is not truly Toby.

These existential dilemmas are presented in Mickey 17as well. After all, how many times can you be reprinted before there’s not really any Mickey 1 left in the copies? Truly fascinating stuff, and also heartbreaking to reconcile with the knowledge that the previous “you” really did die. Love it.

All that being said, I recommend catching this one in theaters if you can. It’s a lot of fun and I think y’all will really enjoy it. It’s nice to see some more sci-fi in the theaters, especially some that isn’t sci-fi horror likeAlien: Romulus. I like goofy sci-fi (not biased)!

Have you seen Mickey 17 yet? What did you think? Do you like clone-type stories, too? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

The Church Desk

Posted onMarch 16, 2025  Posted byJohn Scalzi    12 Comments

A few weeks ago I inaugurated my work desk at the church,but there were still a couple of things missing, namely a full-sized keyboard and monitor. The MacBook is nice and all, but I notice getting a crick in my neck after a while. The monitor and keyboard (and mouse) are nothing especially fancy, but they are more comfortable to use for a long period of time. Plus now if I want I can open up the MacBook and rock a dual screen. Look at me being fancy.

This is how I’m spending my weekend. Hope yours is all right for you.

— JS

Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, EIC – AMS
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