Ah, the holidays. That lovely time when lists begin to dominate my life: holiday shopping lists, menus for family meals, packing lists for shipping and travel, eight million flavors of to do. I’m sure all of you reading this post, in any culture can relate. But there’s one list I’m working on right now that [...]
Category Archive for ‘On Writing’ 
A Writer’s Education
Apologies in advance; not gonna talk about writing for the moment. Instead I’m going to talk about the writing life, in a way. See, I took the GRE on Saturday. I did OK. Astounding on the verbal and abysmal on the quantitative, as I expected. I’ve been using my verbal skills steadily and with increasing [...]
Thinking Out Loud
In honor of The Kingdom of Gods finally being out in all markets, I decided to share this: an old post from my other blog, which was originally friendslocked because it contained early thoughts on the latter books of the Inheritance Trilogy. Thought it might be fun to share because it’s a look inside my [...]
Character Study: Sieh
Been holding off on this one for quite awhile, because I couldn’t think of a way to discuss it and avoid spoilers for The Kingdom of Gods. But now that KoG is finally out everywhere (!!!) I can tackle my favorite character in the whole Inheritance Trilogy. Spoilers, tho’. Seriously. If you haven’t read KoG, [...]
Snippets 3: Kingdom of Gods outtakes
Previous Snippets posts can be found here. The Kingdom of Gods was hard to write! It was the first time I’ve ever started a book without a clearly-established plan in mind — I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there — and under deadline pressure. So I wrote several starter [...]
Snippets 2: The Gods’ Realm
(Snippets 1 is here.) One of the things I had to spend a lot of time on, in creating the Inheritance Trilogy, was figuring out what went on in the gods’ lives when mortals weren’t around to see them. This was something that I knew might never actually show up in the story — the [...]
Snippets 1: The Broken Kingdoms
Going to try something new now, as I lead up to the publication of The Kingdom of Gods (remember, kids: October 27th!). I’ll try to post these once a week or so. Like many authors, I make lots of false starts in the process of writing a novel. Some had legs, but just didn’t go [...]
Considering Colonialism
A few years back, I read a great anthology: So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Meehan. Having not really started studying historical analysis or the impact of colonialism back then, I wasn’t entirely clear on what “postcolonial” meant. “Colonial” I got, since as a longtime fan [...]
The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy (and everywhere else, but for now, fantasy)
One of my favorite manga is a shoujo (girls’) comedy serial called Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge (YNS), sold in the US as The Wallflower. Now, the Japanese title has a more complex meaning than a phrase like “the wallflower” can encompass, in part because it’s referencing a phrase that’s fairly esoteric to Japanese culture — the [...]
Locus Roundtable on, er, Me
Locus, that nice magazine that just gave me a big shiny award, also does other cool things. Who knew? Like, they have a series called Roundtables, in which they ask a bunch of writers, reviewers, and other literary folk to chat about a particular work or topic. And — starting before the award, actually — [...]
