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I’m a-doin’ the Write-A-Thon

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I’ve never been to a Clarion. Or any six-week workshop. Never worked in the kind of career field that would permit it, and never had a fortuitous conjunction of money and unemployment in between careers. Still, I like the idea of the whole thing — creativity boot camp, total immersion in ideas and discipline with the isolation necessary to foster the imagination to its fullest. It’s something I get in smaller increments with my writing group, particularly when we go off on our annual retreat — but how cool is it to go on a massive, six-week-long retreat with guest […]

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The obvious vs the oblique

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You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet lately. Sorry! It’s the whole two-fulltime-jobs thing; doesn’t leave a lot of time for extras. So in the spirit of maximizing efficiency, this is a two-birds-with-one-stone post: I’m going to talk about writing, which I haven’t done here for awhile, and I’m also going to plug a new novel that rocked my socks off. The novel is Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, which has already gotten some nice press. It deserves more. When I first started out as a short story writer, I had a rough

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The Tough Guide to Fantasyland’s Exotic Locales

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More smart stuff from other people. Rising star of the SFF genre Shweta Narayan posted this hilarious (but also sadmaking) homage to Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland — the Tough Guide to Fantasyland’s Exotic Locales. She explains, My cold-addled brain has been sort of fixated on context, of late, namely the racist/Orientalist/fetishizing contextual stew that Secondary-world Fantasy inherited from the Romantics, and Regency fantasy and Steampunk implicitly take on as part of their world-view unless it’s explicily undermined; and I’ve been wondering how to talk about it without shifting the focus to individual examples. (Which isn’t to deny

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Futurestates

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I was given a heads-up on this by unusualmusic over at the Racebending blog, and was so wowed by what I saw that I want to share. With everybody. I blog a lot about how frustrated I am by the lack of social realism in SFF. If even half the energy SFF creators expended on getting the science right could be put into getting the people right, I think the genre would be taken more seriously — both by those who are already fans and by those who scorn us. But leaving aside what greater social realism might do for

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Brilliance from Hal Duncan

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The status quo is segregation. It’s a state of segregation in which black, queer and members of other abject groups are not deemed to belong as main characters. This is the segregation of not being able to sit at the front of the bus. They may be allowed in as an exception if it “serves the plot” (c.f. your reviewer’s expectation of a *reason* for the character’s gayness.) This is the segregation of being stopped in a white neighbourhod and challenged on your purpose in being there. They may be allowed in as Gay Best Friends or Magic Negros in

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Stuff’s a-comin’

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I’ve mentioned this here before, but just saw this great writeup on the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities anthology forthcoming from Ann and Jeff VanderMeer over at io9. This Lambshead volume — not to be confused with the last one — is jam-packed with stories and snippets by some seriously shiny literary lights, including Helen Oyeyemi, China Mieville, Alan Moore, Naomi Novik, and many, many more. (This is my first time seeing the full ToC, and holy crap I’m in some good company ::boggle::) Won’t be out ’til June of this year, alas. Less stressful of a wait is

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Hardcover!

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An update for those of you who like your epic fantasies like you like your significant others — er… hmm. I’m not sure I can continue that analogy and avoid an X-rating. Uh… um… Just finish that one off yourselves. Anyway, the Science Fiction Book Club’s versions of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms are now available. And their versions are hardcover. So for all of you who’ve been complaining to me that it’s not hardcover, why isn’t it hardcover, how can it be epic fantasy if it’s not hardcover and you can brain a dragon with it…

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Monday Fantastic Monday; Carl Brandon Drawing ends!

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Today has been a really good day. Can’t talk about why yet, alas, until things are official. But whoa, the coolness. Best Monday ever. I can’t wait to tell you. All that aside, though, there’s one good thing I can tell you about, or remind you about since I’ve already mentioned it here and on Twitter, etc.: the Carl Brandon Society’s raffle/drawing to raise money for the Octavia Butler Scholarship! The eReader you might be able to win is chock full of fantastic and skiffy fiction donated by authors and anthologies, including one story from me. Tickets are only a

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SLF Travel Grant

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What I’ve been doing in my spare time lately: I was one of the judges for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Travel Research Grant this year. I was one of the winners of this grant a few years back, and I used it for a kickass trip to Canyon de Chelly in Chinle, Arizona, in the Navajo nation. Winning this grant was one of the pivotal experiences that helped me feel like a “real writer”, and persist long enough to get an agent and sell a novel. So it felt great to give back, so to speak, and help another

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It’s September 1. Do you know where your sample chapters are?

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Why, right here — that is, if you’re looking for chapter 1 of The Broken Kingdoms. There is now a page devoted to book 2 live in the overhead navbar, too. As I mentioned awhile back, I’ll be posting the first three chapters of book 2 over the course of the next three months, leading up to Launch Day (November 3rd!). Chapter 2 will be posted on October 1, and chapter 3 on November 1. Many of you have already read an early excerpt from chapter 1, of course — it appeared in the back of the US edition of

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