On Writing

Wherein I ramble about technique, process, etc.

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 notes that the immersive fantasy should function on all levels as a complete world. However, many immersive fantasies fail to incorporate one of the most basic elements of any human society: our tendency to divide ourselves into socially-constructed subgroups such as race, gender, class, etc. […]

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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 that hasn’t been published — written whole additional tales about her, beyond the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

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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 own, a la the District of Columbia or Singapore) in the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy. In particular people seem to be fascinated by Darr because it’s a matriarchy and a warrior society — which is why I’m fascinated by it too, quite frankly.

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Character Study: Dekarta

I have to admit that Dekarta fascinates me. He’s probably the only truly religious character in the whole book, for one thing. This is a world where everyone believes in gods because hello? they’re right there in your face. (I’m wrestling with the idea of how an atheist would function in this world right now, in book 3.) But not everyone believes in the gods. Especially among the Arameri, understandably; it’s hard to feel reverence for beings you can order about and put on a leash. But Dekarta feels true faith toward all the gods, even the Enefadeh. In fact,

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I am the market.

Was having a conversation with someone in the publishing industry recently, and it triggered an epiphany for me. Basically, I think The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms became my “breakout” novel (i.e., the one that actually got published, as opposed to the ones still sitting in my harddrive) because I stopped caring about what the market wanted. OK, let me clarify. (Cut for length and a bit of profanity.)

I am the market. KEEP READING

Character Study: Yeine

Writers cannot live by fiction alone, and I need some mental breaks from working on Book 3, so it occurred to me that folks might be interested in learning more about the thought processes involved in creating and writing the characters from the Inheritance Trilogy. This will be a series; you’ll be able to find all of them under the category header “character study”. And naturally I figured I’d start with our girl Yeine. Cutting for spoilers!

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Sexing Up Gods Pt. 2: SMITE as an STD

OK! Now that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has been out for a week, I can finally start to make some posts that include spoilers. These will be tagged “Spoilerrific” from here forth, and will be cut so that innocent eyes will not be sullied by the GIANT HONKING PLOT DETAILS FROM DEEP IN THE BOOK unless the really want to be sullied by them. So I repeat, if you have not finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, don’t click on the “continue reading” below! On the heels of my previous post, I had another thought on the topic of “sexing up”

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