Spotted an intriguing line in io9′s Power List of 20 people who rocked SF/F in 2010. I’m not one of them, alas, though I noted a great blurb there about Orbit’s publishing director Tim Holman. Tim rightly deserves the spotlight in that article, but, well, I’m just gonna own my narcissism here. What caught my [...]
Category Archive for ‘On Writing’ 
The Inheritance Trilogy That Could’ve Been*
Trilogy: A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works. Per Wikipedia, page last modified 23 October 2010 at 11:14. I note this because I’ve gotten some questions lately about my choice to make the Inheritance [...]
A Few Points of Clarification
…on some things I’ve been asked about, privately and in interviews, re the Inheritance Trilogy lately. I’m a big believer in the idea that a book’s text is fundamentally interactive. It means both what the author intended it to mean and what the reader interprets it to mean, with the actual value falling somewhere in [...]
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Cliff’s Notes version
Hey, readers! Has it been too long (a whole six months!) since you read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? Have you forgotten all its little plotty bits and pieces, but don’t have time to go back and re-read before you tackle The Broken Kingdoms? Well have no fear! I’m here to help. Here you may download [...]
I can write two books a year, but I can’t do NaNoWriMo.
It’s that time again — no, I don’t mean Launch Week for The Broken Kingdoms; I mean NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is simple — write. Write as fast as you can. Write for thirty days, and try to finish a novel within that time. Write even if you write [...]
Bridges and Centers
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “bridges” since reading this analysis of a prominent New York Times reporter’s writing on Africa, and his admitted tendency to center his stories on the non-African foreigners (usually Americans) present, rather than the people whom the stories are ostensibly about. Texas in Africa — correctly, IMO [...]
Brainstorming Immersive Inclusive Worlds
Long post is long! And full of intellectuobabble. But hey, this is for Readercon; it’s appropriate. I mentioned this in my previous post about Readercon, but I’m going to be running the following workshop there (description as submitted to Readercon; I think it’s been trimmed down for the program book): Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy [...]
Character Study: Kinneth
I’ll post pics and shout-outs from RT later this week; it was a lot of fun, but I’m still in the grind on book 3 and now working on copyedits for book 2, so necessarily limiting my blogging time ’til that’s done. Anyway, Kinneth. I could have — and did, in an early short story [...]
Atheism in a world of gods
I mentioned in passing awhile back that I’ve been contemplating atheism in the context of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Book 3 currently contains a minor character who describes himself as atheist. When he meets Sieh — a god — the following exchange occurs (cutting for length and worldbuilding spoilers for the second and third books):
Darre Details
One of the reader complaints I’ve seen a few times about 100K is frustration with the amount of detail allotted to the barony of Darr, since it’s one of only a handful of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms we get to see (beyond Sky, which isn’t so much a kingdom as a self-incorporated city-state of its [...]
