Water Down Words Up

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/welcome-to-the-neighborhood-aecha-cafe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55980

A couple days ago, my cousin sent me a Facebook post from AeCha Cafe that said they were having their soft opening. A new bubble tea shop was opening in Tipp City and this was the first I was hearing of it?! Though I wasn’t able to go to their actual soft opening on Tuesday, I did make it out there yesterday with my cousin and her three kids.

AeCha Cafe is smackdab in the middle of Tipp City’s historic downtown, and has the prettiest blue tile storefront:

We walked in and took a look at the menu. They offer milk tea, fruit tea, some coffee options, lemonade, matcha, all that good stuff:

I had never heard of Cha Dum Yend before, so I asked about it and was told that it’s like Thai Tea without the milk. My cousin doesn’t drink milk so she actually ended up getting that, and I got an iced strawberry matcha. I know, I know, I should’ve gotten bubble tea since I was at a bubble tea place, but a strawberry matcha just sounded so nice and refreshing in the moment! I promise I’ll try the bubble tea next time.

Initially, I thought that the space was pretty small, but it turned out there was a whole other section of the shop with a decent amount of seating, and it even had this comfy looking couch section:

I noticed a couple of wall decorations that were perfect backgrounds for aesthetic photos, like this neon-sign and wall sticker set up:

After careful consideration of where to take my drink photo, I chose the latter:

I’m glad that this cute little shop moved in, and am excited to visit here more this summer with my cousin and her kids. It’s a great location and I’m looking forward to seeing more from them once they’re all settled in and in the groove of things.

If you’re in the area, be sure to check them out and support them in this first week of being open! Their hours are Tuesday-Friday from 8am-8pm and 10am-8pm on Saturday and Sunday.

What’s your favorite milk tea flavor? Do you like popping pearls or tapioca pearls? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/06/welcome-to-the-neighborhood-aecha-cafe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55980

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