Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/brief-updates-6-6-25/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55968

A few things that are up with me recently that I have not yet otherwise posted elsewhere:

1. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is one of Amazon’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2025 (So Far), and it’s nice to know that the book has made its mark at this point in the year. And while I recognize that the “so far” lists are just a way for Amazon and other places to double-dip on the marketing around “best of” lists, in point of fact lots of good stuff released early in a calendar year escapes the notice of end-of-the-year lists (there’s a reason Oscar contenders come out in December), so I can’t help but appreciate the effort. Other authors on the list include Stephen Graham Jones, Nnedi Okorafor and V.E. Schwab, so it’s worth checking out if you have not done so already.

2. I won an award! In Italy! The Italian translation of Starter Villain took the Premio Italia (not to be confused with the F1 series race of the same name) in the category of “International Novel,” with other finalist authors in the category being Charlie Stross, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds and Mike Resnick. That’s a nice peer group. The full list of winners and finalists is here. Thank you, Italian science fiction fans!

3. Longtime visitors to Whatever know that in the last couple of years I’ve been posting cover versions of songs here. I’ve collected up ten of them into a YouTube playlist called “Cover Story,” and that playlist includes cleaned up and remastered versions of three of the songs previously posted here: “Love My Way,” by the Psychedelic Furs, “That Ain’t Bad” by Ratcat, and “She Goes On,” by Crowded House. The cleaning up is mostly fixing vocals (removing intakes of breath, moving the vocals up in the mix) and changing up instrumentation in a couple of places. Don’t worry, I’m not giving up my day job to embark on a life of cover artistry, but you know what? These don’t entirely suck. I especially think “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Under the Milky Way” are pretty darn decent. And it’s fun for me, which is really the point. Enjoy.

Aaaaaand that’s it for now – I’m busy at Phoenix Fan Fusion the entire weekend long, so if you’re going to be there, come say hello. Otherwise, have a fabulous weekend.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/brief-updates-6-6-25/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55968

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/the-big-idea-vanessa-ricci-thode/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55955

What goes better together than dragons, revolution, and being queer? Not much, and author Vanessa Ricci-Thode is here to show that with her newest novel, The Dragon Next Door. Dive in to her Big Idea to see how queer wizards can be both powerful and fierce and wholesome and cozy.

VANESSA RICCI-THODE:

How did I get from action movie Hobbes & Shaw to a sapphic romantasy? It’s not as big a stretch as you might think (and don’t tell me you watched that without wondering what if they just kissed already!) Like most of my ideas, big or otherwise, it always starts with asking What If? 

“What if there weren’t so many fucking dudes in this?” is something I find myself asking all the time. Because look, I like action movies both mindless and thoughtful. But dudes aren’t the only ones who know how to throw a punch and blow shit up. And while yes we do very occasionally get Evelyn Salt and Captain Marvel and Furiosa and Wonder Woman, why not a whole lot more? 

But I don’t make movies, I make books. So here we are. I’ve always liked the grumpy/sunshine, opposites attract, odd couple type of tropes going back to the original Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. I watched Hobbes & Shaw and really got noodling on doing something similar, but asking myself “What if this was queerified and genderbent?” I grew up rarely seeing myself in anything, so you can bet your ass I’m putting myself in everything (and everyone else who never got to see themselves in things).

Another What-If central to the story: What if they kissed? But make it ace. I rarely see any of the intersections of my identity in popular media, and I decided to make this an asexual romance at a time when that was something I was discovering about myself. As important as it is for me to see myself in things, I want others to have that as well. Both MC’s are women of colour and I very much am not, so there was a lot of research going into authentic portrayal and staying in my lane. I went through every free resource plus some paid workshops provided by Writing the Other, and then I hired a sensitivity reader.

My initial musings envisioned writing a book that was some kind of fantasy buddy-cop plot with more action and less pining than the end result. I also wrote this toward the end of TFG’s first term and really had revolution and overthrowing dictators on my mind. This book’s research started with The Anti-Fascist Handbook and the history of revolutions, but once I decided it needed a baby dragon (because of course it did), things went in an entirely different direction. For starters, my characters having to care for a dangerous but sort of helpless fire-breathing puppy took things in a much more nurturing direction. 

And then I realized they weren’t just going to sit around and let the dictator take over—they’d march out and meet the threat head on. Not the revolution I was looking for, but definitely still cathartic. And, well, as a Canadian living under the threat of annexation, this book really hits differently now than when I wrote it. During outlining and then drafting, the book morphed into something more anti-colonial, stopping the takeover from happening in the first place (I was revising during the Biden years and possibly too optimistic). 

Writing this book certainly offered a lot of challenges, not only in basically throwing out half my research and having to re-outline the entire second half while I was still drafting. This book had a monster of an outline, almost 20,000 words long! But I had three POV characters with arcs to track, trying to match emotional and plot beats for all three. This is the most upfront work I’ve done on a novel and probably the most intentional I’ve been about what I wrote.

And now we’ve (unfortunately) come full circle politically, and I massaged a few things in the final editing pass to reflect that, but the core themes have always been about community and bravery and a lot of mutual pining. In queerifying some of these action and fantasy tropes, the focus on community became central, with characters who are (usually) gentle with each other despite being at odds.

While the book has some applicable messages about unity, courage and the power of spite, it’s still a cute, cozy-adjacent adventure with a pair of odd couple wizards mothering a delightful baby dragon. 

The Dragon Next Door: Amazon (US)|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Google Play (US)|iBookstore|Indigo|itch.io|Kobo|Powell’s|Universal Link

Author Socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram|Goodreads

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/the-big-idea-vanessa-ricci-thode/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55955

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/05/the-big-idea-ryk-e-spoor-11/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55942

A heart attack, life and all its craziness, and the loss of a close friend certainly threw a wrench (or multiple wrenches) into author Ryk E. Spoor’s life, but it didn’t stop him from writing this novel. Come along in his Big Idea for his newest novel, Fenrir, and read not only a story about perseverance, but a lovely tribute to a friend.

RYK E. SPOOR:

The Final Collaboration

Most of my readers know that I have worked with Eric Flint on multiple books – the Boundary series, the Castaway Planet books, and our first collaboration, Diamonds Are Forever. Most also know that it was through a long process – starting with me insulting his editing skills on Usenet – that led to Eric getting me published at Baen to begin with. Eric Flint was a mentor, a gadfly, a collaborator, and a friend of inestimable value to me. 

When we’d brought the Boundaryverse to a close with Castaway Resolution, we’d already been bouncing around different ideas for another collaboration. There was an odd alternate-universe fantasy concept, a few scattered other ideas, but we both ended up coming back to our successful collaboration in a genre neither of us tackled well alone: hard-edged SF along the lines of Boundary or other people’s work like Weir’s The Martian. 

After a few false starts, and a lot of discussion, we came up with the idea of a First Contact novel which changes up the usual approaches to this. There are a number of stories that have the aliens show up in our solar system for some purpose of their own, and at varying levels of technology (Footfall, The Jupiter Theft, etc.); there are others in which the ship in question is either automated or a derelict (Rendezvous With Rama, All Judgment Fled, etc.). We decided to intersect these by having the alien vessel approach, then experience an unknown accident that turned it into an apparent derelict. 

We created a rough outline, got a contract to write the book, titled Fenrir – and Eric became extremely busy, and then had a number of health issues, which slowed down our collaboration. I was also busy writing other books, and going through my own difficulties, at the time. COVID also intervened to make everything more complicated – and afterward, I had a heart attack of my own. But we did manage to hammer out some details, and I eventually started work on the story itself, with Eric still working on some of the key background and eventual resolution details. Naturally, whenever you’re making a new book in a new universe, you have a lot of worldbuilding to do – and you want the world to support potential sequels, as “get a long-term series” is the holy grail of a would-be professional writer. David Weber has Honor Harrington, Jim Butcher has Harry Dresden, and Eric had 1632. 

Then, one day, I picked up the phone and called Eric with a key question on the direction I was planning to take the book. No one answered, but that wasn’t terribly unusual; I figured I’d call him again tomorrow. 

I never would, though, because somewhere around the time I was calling him, Eric Flint had already passed.

His loss was felt throughout a large portion of the SF community, and none more than the multiple authors he had supported and shepherded through the beginnings of their careers – I was only one such. His publishing company, Ring of Fire Press, failed without him – which happened to include a number of my more recent books. The consequences of his passing continued for quite some time, not just for me but for other people and even the companies he had been working with. Eric had been, well, a very busy guy.

With respect to Fenrir, I felt like I’d been shot in the gut; the idea of trying to finish one of our hard-SF collaborations without Eric to provide advice, backstop, and occasional deflation of my usual space opera/melodramatic preferences was paralyzing in its quiet terror. There were huge open questions we’d just been working on when he passed, and I knew from work on Threshold, Portal, and the Castaway Planet books that my off-the-cuff inventions often improved drastically with Eric’s dry, measured, experienced input. 

But… I had a contract. I had notes. Despite my occasional impostor syndrome, I had, in fact, written those several hard-SF novels, and they’d been fairly well received. And I had Eric’s memory – his sometimes gravelly voice, his incisive and occasionally sledgehammer-hard advice, his approach to analyzing what I’d done to make it better, and, most of all, the times he’d simply kicked me into DOING things because he wouldn’t let me convince myself I couldn’t do them.

Once I’d recovered, I made myself start anew. And – sometimes with that phantom voice correcting me – I began to see how I could finish Fenrir. It wouldn’t be exactly what I’d have written with Eric; it was a fool’s errand to try to pretend I was also Eric Flint. But it was still born of both our concepts, still built on things he’d done as well as my own ideas. And slowly, it began to come together. I began to hear Stephanie Bronson speaking to me, learned about the conflicted motives of the sinister yet earnest Group that wanted humanity to just wait a little until we were sure the “Fens” were nicely dead before going to their ship; I dug into the size and power of the immense ship we called Fenrir and its owners called Tulima Ohn. I chose key technologies that weren’t utterly ridiculous to be the core of Earth’s interest, above and beyond just the appearance of another species. 

And I had a sketch that Eric had made of some very peculiar-looking creatures, his rough vision of the “Fens” – and from that sketch I found myself meeting Imjanai and Mordanthine and starting to understand the civilization that had come so far to discover our own. 

I took some old, fan-favorite technology and found a new coat of modern paint that would make it work for the story; found a ridiculous but not scientifically impossible way for Fenrir to cross the gulf between the stars, and figured out just how terrifyingly huge its energy requirements were. 

And in the end, I even figured out why Fenrir – Tulima Ohn – had made its journey across light-years to our distant solar system.

In its final form, Fenrir tells the story of the human race overcoming its own worst impulses to show its best side, and of another species facing fear and uncertainty to discover survival and friendship. It may not be exactly what would have been written if Eric Flint were still with us – but it is still, inarguably and absolutely, a new hard-SF novel written by both Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor. I would like to think that Eric would read it and say “You got a little carried away, Ryk… but it’s still a damned good yarn.”

And of course, I hope all of you will too. Thanks to you, readers, thanks to John Scalzi for this space – and above all, thanks to you, Eric.

Fenrir: Amazon|Barnes & Noble

Author socials: Website|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/05/the-big-idea-ryk-e-spoor-11/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55942

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/04/attending-night-school-at-joui-wine/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55923

Last night, my most favoritest wine bar in all of Dayton was hosting a new type of event they’re trying out. I decided very last minute to go and check it out, so I snagged myself a ticket just a few hours before the event. It’s called “Night School,” and is basically a much more casual and fun version of an educational lecture, and you get to drink during it!

If you didn’t catch my post back in January where I talked about the cocktail class I attended at Joui Wine, Joui is a super cute, lovely wine bar right in the heart of downtown Dayton. It has plenty of open space, beautiful colors and art, a stunning bar, and of course, incredible service, drinks, and food that are amazing every time. It’s truly a delight to visit.

My mother and I attended their burlesque brunch event this past Sunday (which was so awesome), and I thought, there’s no way I could go to two Joui events in one week. And then I thought, well why the heck not? And I’m so glad I did!

This Night School event was the first of its kind, and they already have more lined up for future dates. Each Night School is about a different topic, with a different expert brought in to talk about their field of expertise. This one in particular was titled, “When Marijuana Wasn’t Cannabis: A Botanical and Legal History,” and the expert on the scene was Dr. Sarah Brady Siff.

Upon arriving, I was greeted and checked in, and handed a drink voucher. I had no idea when I bought the ticket for twenty dollars that it came with a drink included, so I was stoked about that. It was basically a free drink in my mind because I thought I was just paying twenty dollars for the talk itself, so it was like a sick bonus to be handed the drink ticket.

Joui put together a special line up of drinks you could redeem with your ticket:

While I was super curious about the Cannabis Spritz and thought it was cool they’d include that given the topic of the evening, I just opted for the Prosecco. It was a lovely Prosecco, very crisp and bubbly.

Joui had moved their stylish furniture around and set up an area for the speaker with a microphone and all that jazz, and then set up a few rows of black folding chairs for the audience, but you could also sit at the bar or in the back at the high-top tables. At each table next to the chairs was a printed out packet and pencils. The packet was basically like a bunch of PowerPoint slides and you could follow along with the speaker as she went over everything.

Y’all, I learned so much about cannabis. Not just about the plant itself (which we learned plenty about the actual plant, too), but also about its history, both in terms of its legality/criminality over the years, and how the press and government talked about it. Check out these headlines included in the packet:

Dr. Siff also talked a ton about how indigenous cultures viewed marijuana, how colonizers and the US government tried to eradicate the plant, how white people demonize minorities by associating marijuana with minority groups like Mexicans; it was all super interesting and also upsetting. But that’s like, all of history.

At the beginning of the lecture we were told we could get up and get a drink at the bar or use the restroom at any time, don’t be shy. Well, people were definitely shy and I of course ended up being the first person to get up and get a refill on my beverage. But at least I inspired a few other people to get up, as well, though. What can I say, I’m a trendsetter.

For my second beverage, I got a cocktail instead of wine. There was a ton of great ones to choose from:

Specifically I got the Low Rise Jeggings, with vodka. The owner said she was out of lavender syrup, so she used blueberry syrup to make it and it turned out amazing:

Isn’t it so pretty! It was fruity and refreshing without being overly sweet, the perfect summertime drink to sip on throughout the rest of the lecture.

At the end of the lecture, there were five glass jars on each table that each had a colored scrap of paper inside. We were given a worksheet with the colors listed on it, and we were supposed to smell the jars and write down if a color was cannabis or not.

There was cannabis, hops, peppermint, ginger, and a very smelly variety of geranium. I had written down that the hops were cannabis, as well, which like I should’ve known it was hops and not cannabis because I worked at a cidery for crying out loud! I know what hops smell like (obviously I don’t)! Anyways that was a fun little interactive activity.

After the lecture, Dr. Siff took questions and hung around for a little bit after to talk with people. I spoke with her and she ended up giving me several extra printed out pages of information for me to read and look at, which was really cool. She was super friendly and did an awesome job explaining everything in a really interesting and engaging way. I feel like I learned so much, honestly.

The event as a whole was great, especially considering it was only twenty bucks. I definitely want to go to their future ones that are in August in September. The August one is over DEI and why it matters so much, and the other is over quantum physics. As you can see, there’s already a huge variety happening in terms of topics which is great.

I implore you to check out Joui Wine even if it isn’t for one of these cool events, and follow them on Instagram if you’re in the Dayton area.

Is this a topic you would’ve been interested in? Would you have tried the Cannabis Spritz or is it not for you? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/04/attending-night-school-at-joui-wine/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55923