Communing with the Writing Gods

A while ago I decided I loved John Scalzi's books. First I read Old Man's War and it was awesome. Then I read Redshirts and that was awesome too. The kids and I were going on a driving holiday so I bought the audiobook of Agent to the Stars, read by Wil Wheaton, and you guessed it, it was awesome.

By the time I read his latest book, Lock In, it was just too much. I needed to speak to this man so I emailed him and we caught up on Skype, just like that.

John Scalzi is a great guy and an absolute dream to interview. Once he starts talking it's like a freight train of ideas blasting toward you. We discussed writing (obvs), world-building, feminism, awards, stormtroopers, redshirts and lightsaber cross-guards. If writing, world-building, feminism, awards, stormtroopers, redshirts or lightsabers interest you in any way at all, you do not want to miss the June and July issues of Aurealis.

Yes, that's right. This interview is so big it cannot be contained in one issue. So big in fact we had to split it into three, some of which may end up on the website just so we don't miss anything.

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New project

I've been working on a book of family-orientated children's stories, drawing on my experiences bringing up my kids as a single father. I asked AI to interpret one of the stories in art and it came up with this image (after a couple of dismal failures). It's actually a fair representation of the story. Now, to begin the daunting process of finding a publisher for this collection.

A Hand of Knaves - A New Anthology from the CSFG

Rogues are my all-time favourite characters, be it in books, movies, videogames, or tabletop RPGs (yes, I was the thief who stole your Ring of Featherfall while you slept and didn't say a word as you jumped off that cliff thinking you'd be fine) and thanks to CSFG Publishing I now get the opportunity to co-edit an anthology of stories entitled A Hand of Knaves - which will be 100% about thieves, scoundrels and rogues! So as you can probably guess, I'm stoked the CSFG committee decided to run with our pitch. In even better news, my co-editor is the unstoppable Leife Shallcross , who apparently doesn't have the word sleep in her vocabulary as she edits her upcoming novel The Beast's Heart , completes her second novel (which I've read and which is absolutely amazing), helps out with Conflux, as well as fulfilling her day job and doing all her other lifey things. We are super-excited for this and make no mistake, we both love the concept and want to produc...

Flies in the Soup: John Scalzi Part 2

Interview: John Scalzi Part 2 By Chris Large Interview first appeared in Aurealis #82. Welcome back John. At the moment your new book Lock In, [discussed in the last issue] is a standalone novel. Are you considering writing more in this world? Or is this it? No! I’d be happy to write more in this world if there was a desire from my publisher and from my audience. I don’t ever write anything but standalone novels. Old Man’s War was a standalone novel. I wrote that one book, right? And then it took off and my editor said, “You need to write another one,” and gave me some money. I said “Okay. I see how this works.” That’s how Old Man’s War became a series. Android’s Dream was supposed to be a series. I’d signed a contract for a second book but when I started writing it, it was terrible so I stopped doing that and wrote something else. So Lock In is currently a standalone book but if my publisher comes to me and says, “Yeah, I want you to write the second ...

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