I decided to jump to this character after reading some recent reviews which noted that Scimina is the most two-dimensional character in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I agree with this characterization wholeheartedly. Cut for spoilers:
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.) Continue 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!
FAQ?
I made a joke on Twitter yesterday about “the FAQ I’ll never post”… and then I thought about it, and tried to decide whether I needed an FAQ. I think I might; I do seem to be getting a few basic questions over and over in interviews. A few examples:
- Why is the book called The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms when we see only a few of them?
- Which mythologies were your inspiration in creating the cosmology of the book?
- Is this your first novel?
I haven’t yet gotten a lot of questions about the plot or characters of 100K, though, which would be the basis of this FAQ. So I’ll ask you guys: should I post a 100K FAQ? What questions about the plot and/or characters of the book would you like answered?
(Reminder: I’m in crunch mode on book 3, so my replies — if any — will be a bit slow. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves, though!)
Home!
ICFA was lovely, as was the weather down in Orlando… ’til the day I needed to travel home. Also, since that day was the end of spring break for much of the country, the Orlando airport was a madhouse. I arrived early, hoping to fly standby and get home at a reasonable hour rather than an insane hour, and the standby list was seventy people deep. So I sat at the airport for seven hours, then flew home at the insane hour anyway. And the weather followed us the whole way, so it was a long, fraught flight full of vomit-inducing turbulence. (Didn’t. But thought hard about it.)
Since the con culminated a very busy week (the KGB reading went wonderfully, and I finished my copyedit!) I am very, very tired. It’s going to take me a couple of days to recover from this trip — which I don’t have since I’ve got classes to teach tomorrow and Wednesday. Also, my top priority for the moment is now finishing Book 3, which is in the home stretch, and due very soon. So it’s going to take me a little while to catch up on email (hotel charged $15/day for it, the cheapskates), blog comments and posts, etc.
That said, it was a great trip. I did a reading with author Steven Erikson (of the Malazan Book of the Fallen) fame, which was very cool. (And he’s a very cool guy. I’m going to have to give book 1 of that series another try — I bounced off it the first time.) Met Suzy McKee Charnas! Fangirled at her, and she sat me down and had a Deep Conversation back! ::shinysparklyjoy:: Also, Orbit generously donated some copies of my book to the convention, so that the academics who make up most of ICFA’s attendance might like it and maybe add the book to their literature, folklore, media, and rhetoric courses, and so on. Spoke to one prof who’s already said she’s going to use it for her grad class. Grad students! Will be required to read my book! (Hopefully they’ll like it better than some of the crap I had to read in grad school.)
While I recover, though, allow me to introduce you to something glorious: the Flash game Robot Unicorn Attack, from Adult Swim Games. It is possibly the single most insane, surreal game I’ve played in years, and it’s wonderful for mindless stress relief. Enjoy!
The Cascade Effect
Things haven’t really slowed down for me since Launch Week, which is a good thing, but the result of this has been that I’ve been a little slack on blogging. Sorry, folks! But here’s what’s going on this week, for example:
- The copyedit of book 2, The Broken Kingdoms, is due on Friday. But…
- …since I’m traveling to ICFA on Thursday, I actually need to get it done by then. Except…
- …since I have to work on Wednesday, and am doing a reading as part of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series that night, followed by our usual Chinese group dinner afterward, I really need to get it done by then…
- …which means I actually need to finish the copyedit today.
So, not much blogging from me this week.
All that said, the past week/weekend has been fantastic. My writing group’s retreat helped put me in just the right mental space to tackle all the stuff that’s going on, so I’m not feeling overwhelmed, just very very busy. I got some very good news about a certain prestigious writers’ workshop that I’m going to be in — more on that later. And on Saturday I got to be on the radio! I was the guest of the week on Jim Freund’s long-running and famous (infamous?) “Hour of the Wolf” broadcast, on WBAI 99.5. You can listen to a stream of the show here (scroll down or search in-page for “Hour of the Wolf” for March 13th) — but note that it will be taken down at the end of the week, so hurry! Note also that there’s about 20 minutes of music at the beginning — it’s great old school ragtime jazz, listen to it — and then the talking starts.
So, back to work for me. In the meantime, here’s a candid photo of the Altered Fluid gang on the last day of our retreat. I love this photo because it’s so perfect for us — we’re all so clearly headed in our own directions, but we’re doing it together. As the photo’s taker, Paul Berger, quipped: “spontaneously symmetrical, yet still incoherent”. Yeah, that’s us in a nutshell.
Wolfin’ it up this Saturday
I mentioned this here awhile back, but just a reminder: this Saturday I’m getting up at stupid o’clock in the morning to go on Hour of the Wolf, the long-running science fiction radio broadcast on WBAI 99.5 FM, hosted by Jim Freund. It’ll be my first time on the show by myself, which means I’ll be a bit nervous, and my brain doesn’t fully switch on ’til at least sensible o’clock in the morning, so I’m sure I’ll be a veritable fountain of babbling and incoherency. But it could be fun.
If you happen to be awake between 5 and 7 a.m., please do tune in — and note that there’s a call-in portion for the show. Ask me anything! I’ll be so sleepy that I’ll actually answer honestly.
For those of you who would rather not get up before dawn, you can always download the episode later from the WBAI website — look in the archives. (Speaking of which, if you search there, you should find the previous times I’ve been on Hour of the Wolf as part of Altered Fluid’s writing group demos.)
Several posts in need of a header
Am just getting back from the annual Altered Fluid writing retreat — it was awesome — but boy are my arms tired. And my brain, and my immune system, and so on. I need some recovery time, so in the meantime shall give you a bit of annotated linkspam.
First and foremost, I want to point you at a philanthropic effort that needs more attention. Last year, the sturm und drang of RaceFail produced a number of beautiful results, once of which was the Con or Bust fund, intended to get more fans of color to attend SF conventions, ideally Wiscon, which wants them. (Wiscon’s just cool like that.) Buuuut, since Wiscon’s in the middle of the country, it ain’t cheap to go there, so the fund needs more money. I have an auction going there for a signed copy of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and it’s currently at an impressive (well, to me) bid. Let’s see if we can get it higher! BTW, lots of other authors are offering signed stuff, and also other cool things like rumballs! There are rumballs, ya’ll. Go bid now.
Also, I’ve been enjoying my month as featured author over in the Barnes and Noble forums (join us! Or if you’d rather, feel free to join the 100K Open Thread). To pair with that, forum admin Paul Goat Allen has also posted a review/interview of 100K on the B&N blog. It’s based on a short interview with me that’s a bit buried within the forums, so I’m going to point to it here if people would like to read my complete answers. Paul sees some connections between me and Octavia Butler that I don’t, but there’s room for interesting discussion here. He also compares 100K to Ursula LeGuin! Which is a better match than Butler, IMO, and also holycrap! LeGuin! I feel all shiny.
Also, another shiny thing I saw recently on Orbit’s site: Lauren Panepinto, the Art Director there (who designed the 100K cover and has just shown me the prelim of book 2, and its AWESOMENESS CANNOT BE DESCRIBED), shows in two minutes how she creates a book cover — in this case book 3 of Gail Carringer’s hilarious Victorian supernaturals series, Blameless. Strangely absorbing.
Also! Also! Also! Book 2 of the Matthew Swift series — The Midnight Mayor — is out! People who’ve heard me rave about book 1 of this series, A Madness of Angels, know how much I’ve been anticipating this book. I’m only about a third of the way into it — been rationing it; also, retreat — but thus far it’s just as good as the original. So go buy it!
BTW, if you’re wondering, I did 7500 words at the retreat. Not as many as I’d hoped — I went in with admittedly ambitious goals of doing twice that much — but still pretty substantial for 4 days’ work. And book 3 is at 92,000 words thus far.
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms Open Chat Thread
OK, since the book has now been out for more than a week, I think it might be fun for me to create a space here where readers can chat with each other about the book’s characters or content. Spoilers will abound necessarily, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the thread to make sure things stay civil, but other than that I will be hands-off here. Want to speculate about future books of the trilogy? Rant about characters who should’ve gotten more story time, or characters you just want to hate? Rave about characters who surprised you in a good way? Have at it.
Going to see if I can find a way to put this as a permanent link somewhere in the sidebar, so people can add things to it on an ongoing basis.
Interview at Sci-Fi Fan Letter
Still on retreat, and making good progress — wrote 2000 words yesterday and did 2 chapters of copyedit. Also, having fun.
But in the meantime, the promotion machine churns on; I did this interview with Sci-Fi Fan Letter awhile back, and they’ve posted it today. Check it out! An excerpt:
When and where do you write?
I make myself write every day, at least a thousand words a day, preferably two thousand. Generally I work best in midmorning to afternoon (which is one of the reasons why I quit my job), and I work equally well in my home office or in a local coffee shop (though that gets expensive and fattening, since I have to “pay rent” by buying coffee and food). When an idea has really grabbed hold of me, though, I start writing everywhere, anytime. I have often brought my laptop to bed with me; once I typed out a few paragraphs while cooking dinner, with the laptop balanced on top of the microwave. Don’t try that at home, kids.
Note: interview contains a spoiler for late in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.