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The Big Idea: Annye Driscoll

Posted on March 31, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      13 Comments

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

The Big Idea: EC Wolfe

Posted on March 30, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

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

The Big Idea: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan

Posted on March 24, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

You know ’em, you love ’em, authors Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan are back again with another installment of their speculative fiction guidebooks. Hop on board the Big Idea to see how they’ve done it again in Spec Fic for Newbies Vol. 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Even More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

TIFFANI ANGUS & VAL NOLAN:

Imagine a classic scene: A car driving down a lonely rural road… a bright light overhead… an examination table aboard an alien spacecraft… and then, instead of the typical medical business, our protagonist—let’s call her Sally—finds herself sitting across from an extraterrestrial. This being communicates with a curious thought-to-text translator device it places on the table. When the entity speaks, its words appear in the air between them:

“My species has learned all we can about your physiology. Now we wish to know about your culture. Does your society… tell stories?”

Sally, who’s been studying Creative Writing, is only too happy to discuss this. “We sure do,” she says. “Lots of different kinds! Science Fiction stories, Fantasy, Horror. And they take all sorts of different forms, like written fiction, TV shows, comics books…”

The alien’s already wide eyes expand even further. “And your species just instinctively understands how to tell these stories?”

“I mean, kinda. We’ve been doing it since we sat around campfires in the Ice Age. But we benefit from practice, you know? Plus, it helps to have guidance from enthusiastic instructors. Not literary snobs who want to make everyone write the same way as them but people sympathetic to the kinds of stories you want to tell.”

“And does one need to go to a school or university for this?”

“Not necessarily. Some people who’ve taught Creative Writing at universities have written books about it.” Sally looks around, finds her backpack (which conveniently materialized beside her), and pulls out a copy of Spec Fic for Newbies Vol. 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Even More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror by Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan. “This, for example, helps novice scribblers and even more seasoned writers learn how to write thirty different subgenres and major tropes. It gives deep dives into the history and development of each subgenre or trope, offers spotter’s guides to their typical manifestations, and provides writing exercises to get you started. Plus, it’s all based on real classroom experience!”

“Subgenres…” The alien’s word floats in the air. “We have heard of these. So many to keep track of.”

Sally thinks about this for a moment. She reaches for the translator. “Can I…?”

The alien nods.

Sally quickly finds the translator’s settings and alters a couple of font choices. “There,” she says, returning the device, “I’ve set it so that when I mention a subgenre that’s in Spec Fic 3, it will appear in bold. That’s what they do in the book. Like all this”—she gestures around the silver room—“is a recognizable Alien Abduction narrative. But the book covers everything from Dinosaur Tales to Swashbuckling Fantasy to Fungal Horror to Superheroes.”

“Fascinating.” The alien considers the book. “I wish I’d been able to study this.”

“They don’t teach Creative Writing at Space Academies?”

“Our universities mostly produce Mad Scientists,” the alien says. “Oh!” It points at the bolded word. “It did the thing!”

Sally smiles. “It’s fun, isn’t it? Plus, when Angus and Nolan discuss subgenres in the other volumes of the series, they underline its name so you can track it down easily.”

“Yes.” The alien turns Spec Fic for Newbies over in its spindly fingers. “I was wondering: can I just jump in with this third volume?”

“Oh absolutely! They’re all stand-alone books. Though if you want to know more about the previous ones…” She takes out her phone. “Have you got wi-fi here? Like, space wi-fi?”

The alien turns the translator upside down and shows her the password.

“Okay, cool,” Sally says, logging on. “So, Angus and Nolan have written about the previous volumes on Scalzi’s blog. You can read about Volume One here and Volume Two here.” She passes her phone to the alien, who reads the blog posts with interest.

“And people find these guides useful?” it asks.

“Useful and enjoyable,” Sally says. “The first two volumes were included on the Locus Recommended Reading List and shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards and British Fantasy Awards. Those are, like, big deals on our planet.”

“The section on Magic Schools and Dark Academia sounds interesting,” says the alien, now looking through the table of contents. “As does the section about Magical Realism.”

“I like some of the horror stuff myself,” Sally says. “I’ve lately given a go to writing about Near Death Experiences and Urban Gothic and Weird Fiction.”

“And?”

“And I’ve been trying lots of things that I never thought I’d try. The book is really encouraging that way. Angus and Nolan don’t believe in gatekeeping. The whole ethos of Spec Fic for Newbies revolves around bringing people into the realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror by giving them the tools to explore these really rich and rewarding imaginary worlds.”

“I see there’s lots of jokes, too,” the alien says, the translator registering its chuckles as a series of curious emojis. 

Sally makes an affirmative noise. “Yeah, the authors have a really snarky sense of humor. Angus and Nolan don’t take themselves too seriously, which is another thing that separates this book from the really dry, old-school academic writing guides. Though, of course, that doesn’t mean the book isn’t smart—”

The alien holds up the section on End of the Universe stories. “I can see that.”

“—but it does mean it’s approachable. Anyone can read Spec Fic for Newbies. Anyone can learn from this book. That’s their big idea!”

“Bugs!!!” the alien suddenly shouts.

“Where?!”

“Page 229!”

Sally laughs. “I haven’t got to that part yet!”

“This book tells us much about humanity,” the alien says, “as well as things about Elves and Kaiju.”

“And we’ve barely even covered half of the subgenres here!”

The alien returns the book to Sally. “Where can I get my own copy?”

“Direct from Luna Press.” She opens up the website. “Or from any of your usual retailers.”

“I think I would like to beam down and pick one up right away!”

“Great,” says Sally, “let’s go get you writing!”

Spec Fic For Newbies Vol. 3: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Amazon UK|Blackstone UK|Waterstones UK

Author socials: Tiffani’s Website|Val’s Website|Tiffani’s Bluesky|Vals’ Bluesky

The Big Idea: Lynne M. Thomas & Katy Rawdon

Posted on March 19, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      7 Comments

Like two peas in a time travel pod, archivist and author Katy Rawdon teamed up with Hugo-award winning editor Lynne M. Thomas to craft the perfect time travel narrative. Take a closer look at famous time travel stories from all across the globe in The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination, with a foreword from one such writer herself, Connie Willis.

KATY RAWDON (a.k.a. KATY JAMES):

Archives are made of time. Time is made of archives. Archives are where time gets mixed up, turned around, and pulled apart.

I have always been obsessed with time, frustrated with it, wanting to tear at it and see what’s behind and underneath it. No doubt that’s why I became an archivist some thirty years ago, so that I could look at the physical remnants of time and preserve them, see what’s missing, and organize and interpret time’s leftovers for people who, wisely, do not think about time all the… time.

When I was approached to submit an idea (a big idea!) for a book series jointly published by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) called Archival Futures – a series that tackles big ideas around the archival profession – there was only one possible topic for me to write about: time.

While the phrase “archives are like time travel” is thrown around a lot, I knew the relationship between historical records and time was far more complicated. Archives reinforce and challenge our very conceptions of time, of what has happened, of what will happen, of what is truth and what is unknowable. The evidence of archives can be used to demonstrate how the past is so much more faceted than the narrow stories of history we tend to tell ourselves and others. Archives can also be selectively wielded as propaganda, or erased to allow for falsehoods to sprout and flourish in the empty spaces. Time can be illustrated, illuminated, rendered invisible, or constructed in new ways using the material items created in the course of history. 

Unfortunately, all of this turned out to be so complicated that the series’ word limit of 50,000 was never going to cover it, as I painfully discovered while writing the book proposal.

I am forever grateful that the inimitable Lynne M. Thomas stepped into my creative mess and provided direction: Why not analyze the depiction of both archives and time travel in popular narratives (books, television, movies, etc.) and see what we could unearth? As a romance author (Katy James) as well as an archivist (Katy Rawdon), I was more than happy to spend time in fictional worlds in order to better understand my non-fictional archivist profession.

It turns out that we unearthed a lot – about cultural views regarding time and time travel, the popular perception of archives and archivists, and the ways current archival theory and practice intersect (or don’t) with ideas about time and time travel. 

How does time work? How is it understood by different people and cultures? How do archives help or hinder our understanding of the past (and future)? How can popular narratives about time travel and archives guide archivists to shift their methods to a more expansive, inclusive, transparent approach? How can archival workers apply current archival theory and practice to all of the above ideas to better serve their communities and increase the use of archives?

Researching this book and synthesizing all of the swirling concepts was a real mind-twister of an exercise, trying to write our expansive, big ideas while keeping it succinct and legible for archivists and general readers alike.

We hope we’ve succeeded.

LYNNE M. THOMAS:

Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, the right project turns up at exactly the right time. As a professional rare book librarian, twelve-time Hugo Award winning SFF editor and podcaster, and massive Doctor Who fan, I had a moment of “I was literally made for this” when Katy explained her concept for the book to me and asked me to join her. My initial contribution was more or less “but what if we add Doctor Who examples to make all this time stuff understandable,” and then … we got excited. Because when you have the chance to dive deep into a particular rabbit hole that looks perfect for you specifically, you lean hard into your personal weird. 

Time travel stories often feature archives to prove the narrative truth of characters’ experiences. The main character goes into a locked room full of dusty boxes, and immediately finds the one piece of documentary evidence they need to solve their problem, or make sense of their experiences. And yet archivists—the people tasked with organizing and running archives—are almost always invisible or nonexistent in these very same narratives. When we do show up…well, it feels like writers haven’t talked to an archivist lately.

That…bothered us. It turns out, when you have professional archivists and librarians who are also active writers and editors in science fiction, we have thoughts and opinions about how archivists and librarians are portrayed (or not) in fiction and nonfiction. But we thought, maybe we’re seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist, it’s just that “red car syndrome” thing where experts pay more attention to the areas of their expertise in the narratives than non-experts do. So… we checked. We looked at dozens of time travel stories across novels, comics, television series, and films. We discuss Doctor Who, of course, but also Loki, Star Wars, works by Connie Willis (who wrote our foreword), Octavia Butler, Jodi Taylor, Rivers Solomon, Deborah Harkness, and H.G. Wells, among many, many more. We also looked at a whole lot of archival literature—how archivists and librarians talk about themselves, their professions, and their work to one another. And because we are both academic librarians, we laid out our findings in a peer-reviewed book. 

What we learned is that there’s a massive divide between what pop culture thinks we do, and what we actually do, and the even greater divide between the level of resources pop culture thinks we have, and what we actually have…and we posit multiple ways to close those gaps.

The Infinite Loop is where archives and pop culture’s image of archives meet and have a long overdue chat. Our hope is that these conversations will lead to archivists being better able to explain what we do, and have that knowledge spread far and wide across popular culture. Ideally, with some time travel stories that feature archivists as main characters. It’s well past time.

The Infinite Loop: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Inkwood Books

Author socials: Katy’s Bluesky|Katy’s Instagram|Katy’s Website|Lynne’s Bluesky|Lynne’s Instagram|Lynne’s Website

The Big Idea: J. M. Sidorova

Posted on March 17, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

How is it that fairy tales persist? In the Big Idea for The Witch of Prague, author J.M. Sidorova suggests that it might be because they are malleable and can be made to fit more times and places than just their own. To what use has the author put them here? Read on.

J. M. SIDOROVA:

When I think about a Big Idea of a novel, what comes to my mind first is more of a premise, an inceptive sprout from which the novel had grown. In this regard, The Witch of Prague grew out of a common fairy-tale archetype: an old hag gives a magic gift/poison apple to a young girl; think Sleeping beauty, forests, and castles. Except in this case, the archetype was invoked by true stories my Mom had told me about her young adulthood.

Thus, forests became the Cold War era Eastern European bureaucracies, castles became government departments, and the relationship between the hag and the young girl became complicated, as I, in the act of reimagining the fairy tale, subverted the heck out of it.

That said, this novel took a long time to become what it is now; it evolved in fits and starts while a sizeable chunk of my life was going by and the world was changing, and as a result it became a repository of symbolic representations for the ideas that are not new but have been important for me to unpack and highlight.

There is the Hunt of a Unicorn that, historically, fronts a host of contradictory ideas about power asymmetries between women and men; and then there is a Stag Hunt, which, as an example of a game of trust (or, more broadly, public goods game theory, like it’s better known cousin, the prisoner’s dilemma), stands for a balance of trust/cooperation vs. predation/competition in a given society.

There is also the Orwellian idea that authoritarian regimes not just restrict speech and writing, but, far more insidiously, they warp the very meaning, usage, and purpose of words, of the language itself. My main character, Alica, who’s grown up with mild dyslexia, is primed against such shenanigans because she’s always thought words were treacherous and out to get her, and one of her ways of fighting back was to invent an imaginary friend, a live typewriter with spider legs and word-swatting pincers.

So many different symbols, in other words, that at some point even I, their compulsive collector, felt that it was too much. And my awesome editors, Rachel Sobel and Huw Evans of Homeward Books, were of the same opinion: wait, is the Stag the same as the Unicorn or not? Author, explain thyself! So I went on an editing rampage, and I think I fixed things, and now all symbols are there to serve the story. 

But the big — or at any rate the permeating — idea that I would like to foreground since we are talking speculative fiction here, is what constitutes magic in this book. I think if one creates an alternative, fully magic-enabled reality for one’s tales, one can give a reader an escape, a full-on suspension of disbelief and all that, and that is fine. But if one instead injects bits of fantastical or magical into our viscerally recognizable reality, one gives a yearning, gives flickering moments of disassociation, of belief, “what if it were real?” It’s like magic comes to you, instead of you taking a vacation to go see magic.

And of course, so many works of speculative fiction do one approach or the other or anything in between. I personally, prefer the latter end of the spectrum over the former. So, what I was trying to do in The Witch of Prague was to have seemingly small, tenuous even amounts of magic within a historically accurate reality, and I was interested to work with this premise: what if magic was generated from scratch under certain unique constellations of circumstances and human lived experiences and emotional states, for instance, extreme trauma or enduring hope or devotion?

It wouldn’t be by anyone’s design, and it would be hard to predict what or who would become the magic’s “carrier” once it was produced. It would be a sort of undomesticated, involuntary magic for which no one really knows the rules or capabilities, though one could make assumptions or jump to conclusions according to one’s beliefs or character, in trying to harness it to one’s own benefit.

If we agree that as humanity, we have always been “producing” magic in our stories, histories, and self-narratives (“it was a miracle that I survived!”) as a matter of belief or metaphor, to help us parse reality or even just to communicate it — then my premise in this novel simply takes this fact and implements it. Literally and physically.

The Witch of Prague: Asterism|Homeward Books

Author socials: Website|Blog