Look who's featured on John Scalzi's Blog! Plus Book 1 Is Live!

plus some free SFF and fat bears

Sept 25, 2025

While the Gods Sleep: The Perilous Gods, Book One released yesterday!! 🥳

Wow. Well the big day finally arrived. While the Gods Sleep has been released into the world. Here are some of the recent reviews that have been coming in:

Order links for While the Gods Sleep: https://geni.us/whilegodssl​

And just last week I got even more really good news about this set, but that's going to have to wait for its own announcement in another newsletter, hopefully soon. ;-) What? You want a hint? Well, okay. How about an anagram: kuiaobosdo (But you didn't hear it from me!)

So What's All This About John Scalzi??

John Scalzi, science-fiction author of Old Man's War and many other novels, hosts a feature on his blog called The Big Idea. The point of the feature is to give authors a place to talk about the writing process for their book -- their "Big Idea" and how they executed that idea or struggled with it or maybe ended up with something entirely different. In my essay, I talk about my lifelong love of myth and folklore, my influences for the books, and how my big idea to write about ordinary mortals who get tangled up in the affairs of the gods turned out to be harder to execute than I'd expected.

While the Gods Sleep on John Scalzi's "Whatever" blog can be found at this link: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/the-big-idea-l-d-colter/​

While you're there, surf around a bit. He usually runs a couple of features a week covering a wide variety of books!

In case you missed some other background on the writing of While the Gods Sleep...

I've talked about a katabasis (the Greek word for a descent into the underworld) and my character's two childhood near-deaths that were nearly my own in this recent newsletter: https://l-d-colter-speculations.kit.com/posts/three-weeks-and-counting​

FREEBIES!

Want a one-chapter preview of my new book? If you'd like to read the full first chapter to get a feel for While the Gods Sleep, I have this excerpt at bookfunnel. It's a part of the promotion below, but since you're already a newsletter subscriber, use the special bypass link here and you won't need to sign up again.

HOWEVER, DO go to this link to see all the other selections of free books, stories, and excerpts: https://books.bookfunnel.com/septfantasy/3zjhgitj1u​

Free Fantasy & Science Fiction for September 2025

BTW, if Greek mythology is your thing, here are some books I've enjoyed:

The first is a fantastic fantasy-adventure book and one of my all-time favorite reads (I've read it four times and it was a major influence for me wanting to write my own Greek-mythology-inspired novel.) The other three are literary-leaning: a wonderful exploration of a what-if about the Minotaur, a Gene Wolfe classic about an amnesic soldier in ancient Greece who is a pawn of the gods, and a literary re-telling of the Iliad from the point of view of Briseis, a king's wife given to Achilles after the sacking of Lyrnessus. (Also, it might be good to mention here that my book isn't a retelling of any existing tale, but an entirely new and near-contemporary story that borrows heavily from Greek mythology, kinda like some of the books below.)

Cute Animal Video (just under 2 min)

Have you heard of Fat Bear Week? Well it's going on right now. The bears have spent the summer building up their reserves for winter hibernation coming soon. This week the junior champion is crowned and next week is the championship for the adults at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. I couldn't find a good short video from this year, so here are the contenders from 2022 to give you an idea:

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Until next time, happy reading!