Category: Scott Recommends

That’s a photo of Rosie, my intrepid Irish Setter, and my daughter playing on Beverly Beach on the Oregon coast a few months back. You can just barely make them out on the beach if you squint. We spent a lovely few days at Otter Rock, a moody, somewhat isolated headland tucked off Highway 101 that’s great if you want to get away from the crowds but not so great if you want what the crowds are often looking for: restaurants, shops, attractions, and the like. Fortunately, Newport is only a ten-minute drive to the south, which offers all of that and more, so staying at Otter Rock is a little like having the best of both worlds.

A little news: My short story, “Strays,” just appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. This one—which involves a husband and wife team sent to track down stray missiles in space from a long-settled galactic war—is one of my favorites. That doesn’t always mean much, I’ve found, because what an author thinks is good and what a reader thinks is good aren’t always the same thing, but it is one of those stories that when I finished it I thought, hmm, there’s something here, something that resonates, something that sticks with you. If you want to take out a subscription, you can do so here; if you want to buy this particular issue electronically, you can do it here. I believe Kindle Unlimited readers can also read it right now.

Second, I’m running a End of Summer 45% Off Sale for my comic strip, Run of the House, which brings the monthly cost down to only $1.65/month. Published twice a week, that’s 104 cartoons a year delivered straight to your inbox! While I probably split my time between writing and cartooning 70/30, I do really enjoy creating the strip, feel I’m slowly getting better at it, and I’d love your support. You can sign up today at www.runofthehouse.net. The deal expires the first day of fall: September 22, 2025. Here’s a recent strip, one that only paying subscribers received:

Our summer’s been a mix of trips to the Oregon coast and the Sunriver area up near Bend, kind of the usual, but the biggest trip of the year so far was to southeast Florida. Back in April, Heidi and I flew to Miami, rented a convertible, and spent a wonderful ten days ranging everywhere from Palm Beach to Key West. Neither of us had ever been to the Miami area, and it certainly lived up to its reputation as a world class city. Since it has very little public transportation other than busses, the maze of Interstates, highways, and other roads is constantly clogged with nerve-wracking traffic, which was really my only complaint. Weather was in mid-seventies, with low humidity and almost no rain. We drove all the way down to the southern most point in the United States, visited the Hemmingway Museum, and enjoyed margaritas on a rooftop bar over looking the Atlantic Ocean.

While we’re on the subject of famous authors, most of you know my love for John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee series, so I couldn’t resist visiting the Bahia Mar marina. In the books, this is where McGee’s houseboat, The Busted Flush, was anchored in slip F-18. After MacDonald died, the marina even allowed a plaque to be placed at the supposed location in memory of author and his beloved series. After a remodel back in the 90s, however, slip F-18 no longer exists, so the marina moved the plaque indoors. There are too many photos of our trip to drop on one page, and nobody but us would want to see them anyway, but here’s a gallery of just a few for those who want a taste of our trip. Great fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve been enjoying writing the latest book, which, just as I eluded to above, doesn’t always amount to much when it comes to how readers might respond, but creating with joy is always more pleasant than creating with angst and frustration, even if I’ve come to accept that it is quite possible to love doing something even if it sometimes makes you miserable, maybe especially because it makes you miserable. I know that’s a strange thing to say, but I think one of the biggest misconceptions about taking a serious approach to something in the arts, whether that’s writing, painting, music, or some other pursuit, is that it should always make you happy.

Happiness is like the sunshine. It comes and goes. It can be very pleasant when it’s here, but it can be a very empty pursuit to seek it just for its own sake, and, strangely enough, often results in feeling unhappy more of the time if you do. One of the things I enjoy most about writing is that it’s often difficult. Not always. But if it was easy, I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much. Along these lines, I’d highly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People who Hate Positive Thinking. I read this wonderful book recently and was floored by how much Burkeman’s thinking mirrors my own, and how much the journey he takes in this book matches my own journey in recent years: first becoming disenchanted with an obsessive and ultimately self-defeating fixation on goals and rah-rah positive thinking that so took hold of me as a young man, to ultimately trying to fashion my own working philosophy by taking what I felt were the best (and often common) elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism, with a generous helping of modern psychology thrown in for good measure. It may sound like a terribly negative book, but it’s really about how freeing it can be to embrace insecurity, as Alan Watts memorably put it, and stop trying to force things all the time.

Hopefully back before too long, but if not, well, I’ll try not to force things . . .