film reviews for the Fresno Bee. His experience as a film critic influenced his writing, particularly his humorous works, as films were meant to be an accessible form of storytelling. In 1996, he and his family moved to the Washington, D.C. area after he was hired as the in-house writer and editor at AOL. He was laid off in 1998, and since then he has been a full-time freelance writer and author. Scalzi was first elected president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2010. He was the only nominee on the ballot. He had previously run as a write-in candidate in 2007, challenging the sole ballot nominee that year, but was not successful. He left office when his third term expired on June 30, 2013, having not sought reelection to a fourth term. He garnered significant media attention by taping raw bacon to his cat "Ghlaghghee" in September 2006. As a result of the coverage, Scalzi began maintaining a web repository for links to "All Things Bacon" on the Whatever site. Career Fiction Scalzi's books are known for their humor. His style of writing has been influenced by Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Joe Haldeman. Scalzi's first novel, Agent to the Stars, was written in 1997 and published free to read on his website in 1999. He asked readers to donate money to him if they enjoyed the novel, and earned around $4,000 over a period of five years. Subterranean Press released a limited-edition hardcover version in July 2005, featuring cover art from Penny Arcade artist Mike Krahulik; the novel was later released in trade and mass-market paperback by Tor and audiobook by Audible. A first-contact story, it is about a young Hollywood agent hired by a space alien to make their species more appealing to humans. It received mixed reviews; Booklist called it "absurd, funny, and satirically perceptive," while Publishers Weekly criticized the plot as predictable. Scalzi's first traditionally-published novel was Old Man's War, a military science fiction novel about a 75-year-old man who is recruited to fight a centuries-long war for human colonization of space. It was inspired by the works of Robert Heinlein, especially Starship Troopers. Scalzi intended to sell the book commercially, so he chose the genre of military science fiction because he felt it would be the most marketable. Like Agent to the Stars, it was first published on Whatever;