The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/31/next-week-in-upper-arlington-oh/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59938

I’m popping up to the Columbus area next Monday at 6pm to take part in an event sponsored by the Ohioana Library, celebrating 100 years of Ohio authors (of which I count as one, considering that 95% of my novels, including my debut novel Old Man’s War, were written here in this state). In my event we’ll talk a bit about me and also a bit about Roger Zelazny (born in Euclid, OH), making a throughline about science fiction in Ohio. It’ll be fun! Plus I’ll probably sign books and may even talk a bit about my upcoming novel Monsters of Ohio. It seems appropriate.

In any event: See you at Storyline Bookshop in Upper Arlington, April 6 at 6pm!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/31/next-week-in-upper-arlington-oh/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59938

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/31/the-big-idea-annye-driscoll-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59922

Feeling crafty? Cosplayer and author Annye Driscoll has got you covered, with their newest book showing you how to work with pretty much every material you could ever hope to sew. Grab a thimble and check out the Big Idea for Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fabrics & Unconventional Materials.

ANNYE DRISCOLL:

“Can you expand it to include… everything?”

Ominous words from my editor that led to the biggest and best thing I’ve ever made. 

(And I’ve made some really cool stuff! Including a six-foot-long hot dog on a fork and a suit of armor for a spider.)

When I pitched what would become my third book, I called it “Sewing with Difficult Fabrics” and it was targeted firmly at the cosplay sewist. Sequins, faux leather, plastic fur—these are the weirdo kinds of materials that costumers struggle with, but that the average sewist will use very rarely. My goal was to help my fellow weird-thing-makers!

When I’m not an author and cosplayer, I’m a software developer. I’m very familiar with scope creep: when the project expands and expands and balloons out of control. I’m comfortable with my boundaries and I have no issue pointing out and turning down scope creep, when I need to.

With Fabrics, what happened wasn’t so much scope creep as…scope jump scare. Scope avalanche. My editor saw my outline, added a few things that fit the theme, and then added basically everything else. She liked the concept of the book and my previous work, and thought we had a chance to make something big, comprehensive, and seriously cool.

The resulting book is a literal encyclopedia: Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fabrics & Unconventional Materials. I researched, practiced with, and then explained how to work with over a hundred kinds of fabric, and then added in some weird materials for the costumers. (Like paper! A surprisingly satisfying material to sew with.) 

(And, although I want to boast, there’s no way to say something like “it includes every kind of fabric.” Fiber arts are literally thousands of years old; there are—and have been—thousands of variations of fabrics and textiles.)

I got confused a lot. Did you know that sometimes two-way and four-way stretch fabrics are referred to as “one-way” and “two-way” fabrics? So if you’re trying to buy a two-way fabric, you may see it labeled as “two-way” or “one-way”. 

And oh my gosh, the language differences. What I in the United States call a muslin—a practice piece for a future project—is actually a type of fabric in British English. A muslin is also often referred to as a toile… which is a second, completely different kind of fabric. I had to decide, at one point, that I was writing the book from my own, American English perspective, and that I’d just do what I could to anticipate and reduce confusion.

All that to say: writing an encyclopedia was really hard. It was, by far, the hardest I’ve ever worked on a single project. Over 500 of my own photographs are in the book. I messaged, wooed, and profoundly thanked a little over fifty guest makers (imagine wrangling release signatures out of fifty artsy-fartsy folks!). I had to keep a list of “I decided to spell words this way” to try to maintain consistency (I went with nonslip over non-slip, for example).

And it was worth it. I am so proud. Writing and photographing Fabrics made me a better teacher, photographer, and maker. It pushed my limits and tested my tenacity. I am so so proud of it.

I can’t wait for folks to learn from it, to be inspired by it, and to make cool stuff with it!

Check out excerpts from the Supplies and Knits chapters of the encyclopedia here.

Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fabrics and Unconventional Materials: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop.org|Waterstones|Indigo| signed copy on the author’s website

Author’s socials: Website|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/31/the-big-idea-annye-driscoll-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59922

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/30/march-marches-on/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59908

March was a much busier month than I expected it to be, but it also flew by and I feel like I can’t even keep track of what all happened. I don’t know how we’re at the end of March already, and yet the trip to Colorado I took at the beginning of the month feels very far away. Somehow there’s never enough time to do anything, and when I look back at what I have done it feels like nothing got accomplished at all. It’s like every single day I have no free time and am always running around doing something, but then at the end of the day it feels like nothing even got done.

This past month I’ve truly felt so overwhelmed by everything. And when I say everything I mean any and every little thing stresses me out in a disproportionate way. It’s like my brain doesn’t know the difference between a small problem and a catastrophic one, and so my response to either ends up being the most extreme reaction possible and results in a meltdown and a paralysis of my ability to function.

Every issue is day-ruining, every problem brings me to tears, nothing feels possible to overcome, whether it be the laundry, grocery shopping, or calling the plumber for the tenth time because of leaking in the basement. Everything takes so much longer to accomplish than I think it will. I am either not managing my time well or maybe just not budgeting for things correctly in the first place. Surely it’s a combination of both.

There’s always something more to do. It never ends. There is never a moment of “whew, I got everything done!” The satisfaction of completion, of achievement, never comes. The stress doesn’t end, it continues from one day into the next. I go to sleep anxious and stressed about the problems tomorrow me will face, and then tomorrow me wakes up and is stressed about the problems that have to be taken care of that day. It feels like a vicious cycle and I feel like I’ll never be free.

I keep thinking it will get better, but it hasn’t.

But if I explain the things that are causing me so much stress, I just sound ridiculous and more than a little pathetic. I mean, everyone has bills. Everyone has dishes and laundry to do. Everyone has appointments to keep. Everyone has to grocery shop and cook for themselves. These are very normal, well known life things that everyone does and manages on a day-to-day basis. So why am I drowning? I don’t even have a 9 to 5 or kids or anything that makes my life so much harder and more overwhelming than everyone else’s. In fact, I have the opposite! I have financial security and a WFH job and supportive family and friends, and I still feel suffocated by the menial, tedious, repetitive tasks of daily life.

Every task takes so much amping up for me to do. I cannot simply do a task, I have to work up to said task. I have to prepare mentally to accomplish the task. I need proper motivation, and I so rarely have it.

There are so many things within the house I thought would be done by now, like furnishing the sun room, painting the walls, fixing up the guest bedroom, and yet none of these have been accomplished despite having moved in in November. I just thought these things would be done by now. Or at least started. But they’re not. And my Christmas tree is still up.

Plus, nothing feels like it matters in the face of what’s happening in the world, but that’s a tale as old as time and told by everyone at this point. It hardly feels like an excuse anymore. Oh no, I’m witnessing unspeakable horrors all day every day! Well, time to do the dishes. At least I still have running water, unlike people near data centers. Oh, they’re building a data center twelve miles away from me? Right, right. Well, I guess I’ll just go ahead and do my taxes. Oh, the US is committing horrific acts of war with our tax dollars? Again? Right, right.

I know I’m sounding very doomer, and I rarely bring these types of thoughts here, but good lord March was heavy and I can’t really figure out why it was so bad. But it was, and I posted pretty much zero content. I don’t want to feel like my writing doesn’t matter, and I don’t want to feel like the things I do in my day to day life don’t matter, but that’s where I’m at right now. I know a lot of people feel the same way.

I’m hoping to catch up with a lot of posts, as I have been doing really fun and exciting stuff. And as frustrated as I am that all the good things in life are continuously tainted by the fact we live in a world run by the most evil people imaginable, I am still looking forward to sharing those good things with y’all. Because they do exist, despite it all.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/30/march-marches-on/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59908

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/30/the-big-idea-ec-wolfe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59898

Though we flip through a story’s pages as quickly as our eyes allow, do we ever stop to think about the story that lies in between the pages? The one that happens off-screen, out of sight, and in the background? Author EC Wolfe has, and she used these thoughts to craft a new novel in her Kerovosian Chronicles series, Shrike.

EC WOLFE:

I’m sure I’m not the first to say that real characters and stories don’t have to come from some deep place to be compelling.  Compelling characters and stories come from real places, places that we can connect to as individuals.  This is why, as an author, I spend a lot of my time asking “What if?”  Granted, asking the question aloud has gained me a reputation for being a little bit weird, but asking the questions of myself and then answering them on paper has gained me a reputation as an author.

My hard drive is full of answers to “What if?” left in folders labeled Scrap.  These ideas languish in digital purgatory until I can answer the next question, “What happens next?”  The answer to that question is singularly responsible for the second two books in the Water Girl series; I just kept answering it.

Shrike is different.

Shrike is the sixth book in the Kerovosian Chronicles, but it’s not “What happens next?” nor is it “What if?”   Shrike is the answer to a question that could have been asked in books one through five, but those books were about Chana and Thorne, and Voil and Kade, and Navi and Harker, and Ceff and Nythan, and Kerovos.

But this book isn’t about them.  It’s about the ones who brought Kerovos’s plan to fruition and yet were little more than a footnote for their troubles.  Shrike isn’t about what happens next, it’s what happened when we weren’t looking.  The Shrikes didn’t just appear and help out of the goodness of their hearts, so where did they come from?  What sort of person would take Kerovos up on a job offer?  What did it cost them and what did they gain?  Did anyone ever know what they did?

It stuck out to me that there were several stories left untold once I’d finished the fifth book, several characters that deserved the pages necessary to explain their motives, their victories, and their failures.  Like ours, the world of the Kerovosian Chronicles is full of players shuffling about on a game board, for good or ill.  Some of them stood out more, and like a tag you can’t rip out, it bothered me until I took the time to figure out why.  I realized that Kerovos had taken their glory in his eponymous book and I felt compelled to give it back to them.  It’s an honor to grant them the story they’d been denied, these characters who made choices just like you or I.  Hard choices.  Painful choices.

Like any other characters of my invention, these characters aren’t perfect.  It feels disingenuous to write perfect people since I have yet to find a person, now or in history, who was or is.  Instead, these characters are real because they aren’t perfect.  As I mentioned, it’s not deep.  You can throw a little deus ex machina in there to help them along but it’s still about the choices people make.  There are always more What Ifs and scrap on the hard drive, but for now, I’m happy to share Shrike.  A story about real people and the answer (but not really) to yet another “What happens next?”

Shrike: Amazon

Author’s socials: Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/30/the-big-idea-ec-wolfe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59898

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/29/the-minor-planet-johnscalzi-in-motion/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59890

See that tiny dot cruising across the night sky here? That’s my asteroid, imaged by a fellow JoCo Cruiser Geordan Rosario. He was excited to show it to me, but not nearly as excited as I was to see it in action. Look! That’s my space potato! In motion! How cool as that?

This is a good time to note that I have been given a few other commemorative items regarding my space potato this month, which I didn’t post about because I was traveling, but now that I’m at home for two whole weeks, I’ll catch up with them in a separate post.

Space Potato!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/29/the-minor-planet-johnscalzi-in-motion/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59890