tina_black

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/10/the-big-idea-eleanor-lerman/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60101

Pets are more than just roommates we feed and scoop poop for, they’re often a source of emotional support and comfort in our complicated, lengthy lives. Author Eleanor Lerman explores the bond between furry friends and humans in her newest collection of short stories, King the Wonder Dog and Other Stories. Whether your cat is in your lap or on your keyboard, give them a pet as you read along in the Big Idea.

ELEANOR LERMAN:

Having just completed a book of poetry in which much of the work examined the concept of grief about a lost parent (and offered the idea that even Godzilla might be lonely for his mother), I was thinking about what I might write next when I saw a tv commercial that featured a group of older women. They were all beautifully dressed, had expensive haircuts that made gray hair seem like a lifestyle choice, and were laughing their way through a meal on the outdoor terrace of a restaurant. I won’t mention the product being advertised, but they discussed how happy their all were to be using it and to have the love and support of their charming older women friends, who used it too. This is one version of aging in our culture: cheerful, financially secure, medically safeguarded, and surrounded by supportive friends. In this version, the body cooperates, the future is manageable, and loneliness is nowhere in sight.

That’s one way older women—and men—are portrayed in our culture: happy as the proverbial clam and aging with painless bodies and lots of money to pay for the medical care they will likely never need. In literary fiction, however, aging men and women are often depicted in a very different setting: traveling alone through a grim country, with broken hearts and aching bodies until we leave them at the end of their stories hoping—though not entirely believing—that we will avoid such a fate ourselves.

So, what I decided to do in King the Wonder Dog and Other Stories, was to explore what is perhaps a middle ground by writing about both women and men living alone who are growing older and are confounded by what is happening to them. They still feel like their younger selves but are aware that their bodies are changing, that the possibility of once again finding love in their lives is unlikely and that loneliness has begun to haunt them like an aging ghost.

Having had pets in my life for many years—and being aware that animals, too, can feel loneliness and fear—I paired each man and woman in my stories with a lonely dog or cat and tried to work out how that relationship would ease the sadness in both their lives. One memory I drew on was how, when I was young and living alone, I had a little cat that someone had found in the street and gave to me. I had never had a pet before (other than a parakeet, which didn’t give me much to go on) and this little cat was very shy, so I didn’t quite know how to relate to her. But somehow, bit by bit, she cozied up to me, and when I was writing, she was always with me, sitting on my lap or on my feet.

I have no idea how animals conceptualize themselves and their lives, but I do know they have feelings and I hope that for the eighteen years she and I lived together, my cat felt safe and cared for. And still, today, I sometimes think about the unlikely sequence of events that brought us together: how a random person found a tiny kitten, all alone, crouched behind a garbage can, and how that random person was sort of friends with a sort of friend of mine who happened to tell me about the kitten and asked if I knew anyone who would take her and I said yes: me. I don’t know why I said yes, but I’m glad I did. Her name, by the way, was simply Gray Cat, which probably shows how unsure I was about whether I would be able to care for her well enough to at least keep her alive.

After that, I was never without a cat or dog, and now I usually have both. The little dog I have now is a sweet, happy friend who seems not to have a care in the world, but I often see her sitting on the back of my couch, staring out the window at the ocean not far beyond my window and I wonder what she thinks about what she sees. What is that vast, shifting landscape to her? And who am I? A friend who pets her and feeds her and gives her those wonderful treats she loves? Maybe she was frightened when she was separated from her mother but otherwise, I think she is having a happy life—at least I hope so. And sometimes when I walk her, I think about what will happen when she’s no longer with me and I’m even older than I am now. Could I get another dog? I have painful issues with my back that sometimes make it hard for me to walk and I certainly can’t walk any great distance—could I maybe get a dog that doesn’t need to walk too far or somehow shares my disability?

All these thoughts have gone into the stories in King the Wonder Dog, in which men and women are growing older, have illnesses, are frightened by how lonely they feel, and in one way or another—and often to their surprise—are able to bond with a dog or cat who is also in a tenuous situation. And through that bond, the people and the animals find at least a little bit of happiness in their lives, a little bit of the shared comfort that arises from one creature caring for another. I hope those who read the book will feel some of that comfort, too.

King the Wonder Dog and Other Stories: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/10/the-big-idea-eleanor-lerman/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60101

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/10/a-whole-lotta-tussle-goin-on/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60089

For a time there Smudge was our only boy cat and that meant that he wasn’t able to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes, which was tusslin’. He’d tussle with Zeus, our other male tuxedo (just as Zeus would tussle with Lopsided Cat, our previous male cat), but when Zeus passed on he no longer had a tusslin’ partner. Sugar and Spice were simply Not Having It, as far as tussles went. Smudge would tussle a bit with Charlie, but Charlie is a dog and roughly eight times the mass. It was an asymmetrical sort of tussle, and those are not as fun.

The good news for Smudge is now Saja is here, and Saja loves him a tussle or two. Or three! Or five! We will frequently find the two of them smacking each other about for fun and exercise. The two seem genuinely happy to wrestle on the carpet or otherwise pounce on the other for a couple of minutes. Sugar and Spice are still having none of it from either of them, so this is the best solution for both. And as an observer and appreciator of brief moments of domestic chaos, it’s nice to have the occasional tussle back in the house. Here’s hoping both of them have a long and happy time to tussle together.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/10/a-whole-lotta-tussle-goin-on/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60089

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/09/the-big-idea-justin-feinstein/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60051

What are stories but information laid out before the reader? What if that information was conveyed through multi-media formats and told through emails, newsletters, and other digital means of communication? Author Justin Feinstein has brought us something truly unique in his new novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. See how he twists traditional storytelling methods in his Big Idea.

JUSTIN FEINSTEIN:

I didn’t set out to write a novel told through “found” digital files; it happened organically.

My debut novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is comprised of chat transcripts, emails, TED Talks, error messages, and other digital detritus from a near-future AI company. But it wasn’t the result of some grand epistolary vision – I just started writing a chat between an aging, jaded copywriter (i.e., me) and a hyper-intelligent bot he had been hired to teach the nuances of advertising. I didn’t even know what I was writing, maybe a script?

As the dialogue evolved beyond consumer motivation and taglines, and into larger issues like sentience and purpose, I realized I had a larger story on my hands. Other characters (both human and bot) emerged, as well as other file formats. Every time I added a new element, it would offer its own unique opportunities for character and plot development.

For many months I toggled between writing and tinkering with a posterboard covered with Post-it notes, color-coded for different file types. The modularity of the format lent itself well to this process, which is a normal step for screenwriters and one that, as I learned, can provide much structural value to a novelist. It also helped keep me engaged on days that the blank page felt too daunting. I’d move a note from here to there, or add a new one and notice how it would affect the story. Even in revision, long after I’d dismantled the posterboard, I was still shuffling sections around to play with the chronology and build tension or sustain momentum.

It’s worth noting that while Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is my debut novel, I’ve written both another novel and a memoir, neither of which I was able to sell. For those books, I just started writing and kept going until they were done. So, both the process of writing this book and the format itself were foreign to me, and a big departure from how I’d worked in the past (and seemingly an improvement).

As a result of this newfound process, I became hyper aware of the order of information, its consequences for characters, and how it could guide the reader. For example, a mundane error message might not hold much weight early in a story, but the same error message in a later spot could bring significant narrative impact, due to the built-up context.

It was also fun to explore the tonal potential of these different formats. As anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation knows, company-wide emails are often saturated with an everything-is-fine and nothing-bad-is-happening perkiness that borders on the maniacal. Writing them made the company in my novel, Uniview (“The most trusted name in AI”), feel like a character itself. Since the story is linear, I was able to use weekly all-company emails (aka, The Weekly View) as a summation of what was happening, or at least the way UniView wanted to “spin” it. This added a layer of depth to the narrative, since both company employees and readers of the book knew the reality behind the spin.

Once I had a draft that I felt good about, I shared it with my wife, Julia Fierro (founder and director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and a damn good editor). I was hoping for some validation and slightly worried that I had created a Beautiful Mind-esque monster that only made sense to me. Fortunately, Julia was impressed and in awe that I had managed to write a book with no exposition or character interiority (i.e., thoughts) – a fact I was somehow only loosely aware of. It wasn’t that I had intentionally avoided it, just that it didn’t fit within the structure I had stumbled into.

That said, I did leverage little tricks to provide context where needed. If a character was entering a physical environment for the first time, they could comment on it or interact with it – like how the copywriter in my book, Noah, bumps his head when getting in a car and jokes about his lankiness, or how he later notes that the AI lab looks like a Swedish furniture showroom. He also has a call early on with his therapist, which is a helpful narrative vehicle for getting to the heart of a character’s fears and desires.

But Julia’s main note for me was that the video surveillance “scenes” in the book felt flat with only dialogue and made them nearly identical to the MP3s/audio recordings. It was a great note, and one I sat with for a while. She was right, but breaking the structure and format of the book for only one file type (i.e., by adding descriptions of what was happening) just felt wrong.

Eventually I landed on not just a solution, but what would become a key component of the book. The head of HR at UniView is a bot, Lex, who handles nearly all aspects of the employees’ lives, well beyond their work. The company champions a symbiotic relationship in which its bots monitor all aspects of employee behavior (hence the book’s title) and tailor their AI offerings accordingly. So, I was able to pepper the video scenes with “behavioral notes” from Lex, which served the double duty of describing gesture and movement in scenes, while simultaneously characterizing her through reactions and commentary. And even though she “doesn’t make mistakes,” the few moments where she struggles to interpret sarcasm or nuanced behavior are some of my favorite in the book.

I don’t know that I’ll ever write a solely digital file-based book like Your Behavior Will Be Monitored again, although I’ll probably keep working with mixed media/epistolary formats. But I can say that playing with Post-it notes is officially part of my process now.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Village Well

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/09/the-big-idea-justin-feinstein/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60051

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/07/dilly-dallying-in-denver-day-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59994

Last month, I went out to Colorado to visit one of my besties from college (Alex) for their birthday. I was out there for a week, and three of those days were spent in Denver, where they were kind enough to host me in their lovely apartment. In those three days, we explored so many different amazing restaurants, cafes, the botanical gardens, and even went into Boulder. I’d like to share the details of my trip with y’all, so buckle in because we are flying first class to Denver, baby!

I flew first class out of Cincinnati through Delta, and every time I fly through Cincinnati, I always try to stop and have a drink and a snack at Vino Volo. I love Vino Volo and if an airport has one, I’m there. I’ve been to the one in Minneapolis, the one in D.C., and I think one in California, maybe their Sacramento location? Anyways, Vino Volo is an airport-exclusive wine bar that has offerings like a charcuterie plate, soups, salads, flatbreads, just some light bites to go along with your wine, beer, or cocktail. So even though it was 10am and my flight was about to board, you know I had to get a little caffeine in me with an espresso martini.

I had a very short layover in Minneapolis, and made it into Denver at about 2pm. I took the train all the way to my friend’s apartment which is literally directly across from the train tracks, and our awesome reunion began. Also, I’ve never taken a train by myself before, I have only had friends in New York help me with the subway, a friend in Portland come with me on the bus system, and friends in Norway help me with the bus while I was very drunk, so public transportation isn’t my forte. It took me so long to figure out where the train was, how to get there, what ticket to buy, and what train to get on. I literally did not know what I was doing but I just hopped on one and hoped it was going the way I needed it to, and it did!

While I was visiting, it was Restaurant Week in Denver. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Restaurant Week (in any given city that participates) is where tons of restaurants in the city will offer a special, pre-fixe menu exclusive to the week, and usually offer it at a hell of a steal. The restaurants participating can offer their menus at four prices, $25, $35, $45, or $55 dollars. This gives people who maybe can’t splurge on a Michelin-star meal a chance to try multiple items for a fraction of the cost.

In our efforts to be culinarily and financially savvy, we also tried to hit specific happy hours. So our first meal in Denver was at Uchi, with an early reservation time of 4 o’clock so we could check out their happy hour menu.

Uchi is over in the RiNo district, so it’s super close to Denver proper. Uchi is founded by James Beard Award winning chef Tyson Cole, and actually has multiple locations across the US. It is upscale, chic, and incredibly inviting with its warm wood and atmospheric lighting. The servers are friendly, the drinks are delish, and the food is truly next level.

Here’s the happy hour menu:

Alex and I knew right off the bat that we wanted to do the omakase. A nine-course tasting menu of chef’s choices. What could be better?

And of course, we needed a fun bevy to go with our meal:

I got a sake that was on the happy hour menu called “Hoyo Sawayaka Summer Breeze” and they brought it to me in an overfilled tasting glass that (intentionally) spilled out into a wooden box that the glass resided in. They said that the overpour is a traditional symbol to represent hospitality and appreciation for the guest. I was told I could pour the glass out into the box and drink out of the box, but I decided to just drink out of the glass and then the box. I wanted the experience but didn’t want all of my drink to be out of the box.

The Summer Breeze sake was quite good! It was a little bit drier than I expected, but it was very light and crisp. I’m glad I tried it.

Alex got the Nikko mocktail, which you will see in a photo further on. Non-alcoholic amaretto, coconut milk, raspberry, and pineapple. This was a deliciously creamy drink that wasn’t overly sweet, but had such a nice tropical flavor to it.

Finally, our first course came:

Raw oysters on the half shell! This presentation was beautiful, and two oysters for each of us was the perfect start. These oysters were so fresh, not fishy at all, and made even more fresh by the microgreens on top. Served cold and fresh, just how I like ’em. The oysters are normally five dollars a piece, so this being the first course of a $60 nine course meal was already a good sign.

Up next were these tuna temaki with avocado. Now you can see our bevs, too!

I love a temaki, it’s like sushi in a different font! The simple combo of tuna and avocado with rice and seaweed is a certified classic, absolutely nothing wrong here.

For our third course, we got tempura fried Japanese pumpkin:

I truly love tempura fried anything and I especially love when it’s pumpkin. It’s so similar to a sweet potato with it’s slightly sweet and earthy flavor. The tempura on the outside was so perfectly crispy, my friend and I agreed it was delightfully crunchy.

This next course was extra special, because it was actually a birthday gift from the kitchen for my friend:

First, can we appreciate how cute the little happy birthday sign is? Alex kept the paper fish as a keepsake. Anyways, what we have here is raw ocean trout atop a butternut squash puree, topped with beet chips, apple, and microgreens. This was so good. The ocean trout was tender and had a beautiful, non-fishy flavor, the butternut squash puree was a wonderful accompaniment and its smooth texture contrasted the crunchy beet chips and crisp apple perfectly.

Also, who else is loving the dishware here? This plate is excellent.

Back to our regularly scheduled omakase, we have what I’d consider to be the most beautiful dish of the evening:

I can’t remember if this was bluefin tuna or yellowtail tuna, but it was definitely tuna and it was dressed with ponzu. The mandarin orange slices accompanying it had all of the white parts removed by hand to avoid that bitter pith flavor, and it is topped with roe (I can’t remember what kind!) and microgreens.

This tuna was so succulent and had a lovely mild flavor, paired with the sweet and juicy mandarin slices and bright ponzu, oh my gosh. This dish was seriously an absolute harmony of flavors, everything worked together so perfectly to create a delectable bite. One of my favorite bites of the evening.

Then we had these crispy rice squares:

If I remember correctly, these were topped with salmon, creme fraiche, and lemon zest. What part of that equation isn’t delicious?! We had yet to have any misses in the dishes.

Next was a course that was cooked fish, much to my surprise. This was their seared walleye:

The walleye was served hot and flaked apart nicely, I do think this was a little bit of a small portion for the two of us to share, but honestly everything else was already such a steal price-wise that a smaller course isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Especially because this next course was HUGE:

This giant pork chop served alongside a truffle soy glaze and apple puree, with granny smiths on top, was truly divine. The truffle flavor in the sauce was prominent but not overwhelming, the apple puree was so smooth and creamy, and the crunchy breading on the outside of the perfectly cooked pork chop was just the right level of golden brown. This was an absolute home run of a dish. And look at that nice bowl!

Finally, it was time for dessert, and as stuffed as we were, we couldn’t wait to dive into this dish:

Sweet cream gelato, chocolate mousse, and fried milk balls, topped with some sort of cocoa crisp thingy that I can’t even remember! I truly did not know what to expect with fried milk balls, but lordyyy they were so good. Crispy outside, basically sweetened condensed milk on the inside, like a lava cake but with milk. The sweet cream gelato was unbelievably bomb, and this was a showstopper dessert all around.

Oh, also, I ordered a cocktail a couple courses prior to the end, and it never came but I was like, eh that’s okay. But then it ended up being on my bill, so I brought it up to the server and he apologized immediately, took it off my bill and gave me the cocktail on the house!

For sixty dollars a person, this meal was incredible. Fresh flavors, unique combinations, beautiful presentations, good service, and food that I definitely can’t get around Bradford. We loved everything, and this was definitely a great birthday dinner for my friend.

After going back to their apartment and digesting for a bit, we decided we needed a late night matcha, and hit up Milk Tea People just before they closed. Alex highly recommended their matcha to me, so while I did end up getting a strawberry matcha, I couldn’t resist also getting the drink that was truly calling my name: the black sesame jasmine cream.

Alex got the orange blossom matcha on the right there, which was slightly floral and definitely more matcha-y/earthy than some sweeter, creamier matchas end up being. For my strawberry one, it was good but it was much less sweet than I anticipated, with the strawberry portion being more like a tart, fresh strawberry flavor. I actually ended up adding strawberry milk to mine to make it sweeter and creamier.

The black sesame drink was my favorite, though, with very prominent black sesame flavor, nice and sweet, and extra creamy. These drinks were a bit more on the expensive side with each one being nine dollars.

We spent the rest of the evening catching up and spilling tea, and I got plenty of pets in on their cat, Callie:

Day one complete and I was definitely beat from traveling, but stay tuned for day two!

Have you been to Denver before? If so, have you been out to Uchi? Don’t forget to follow them on Instagram, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/07/dilly-dallying-in-denver-day-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59994

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/06/a-bedazzling-book/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59984

At my event this evening in Upper Arlington, my interlocutor Tom Winegard presented me with this copy of The Shattering Peace, which had been bedazzled by his spouse as a gift to me. This is the first time that I had heard of bibliodazzling, but apparently it’s a thing people do all the time these days. I have to say I don’t mind the effect. The book is now at home in a place of honor on my shelf. I am bemused and bedazzled.

Also, the event itself was a lovely time! Thank you to everyone who came out to see us.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/06/a-bedazzling-book/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59984