Character Study

On Family

/ 11 Comments / On Writing, The Broken Earth, The Fifth Season, Thinkythoughts / By

I’ve been dealing with an unpleasant family issue lately in my personal life. Not anything I intend to talk about here, and I’ve found a good therapist so don’t worry, but thinking about these things triggered some thoughts about family in The Fifth Season that I wanted to share. Now, As You Know Bob, I am not a perfect writer. It’s entirely possible that I did a poor job of trying to depict the relationships in this story, which are admittedly complex. But here’s what was in my head: the black family. Really, any families formed under oppressive conditions — […]

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Tricking readers into acceptance

/ 46 Comments / The Broken Earth / By

OK, to start this post off, I have to say that it is only for people who have already read The Fifth Season. Haven’t read it yet? This post is not for you. No, seriously. If you haven’t read TFS, scram. Oh, so you wanna be hard headed. OK. But I am not responsible for any damage done to your reading experience, if you continue. And if I may say, TFS is a lot more fun with its surprises unspoiled. But from here forth I’m going to assume you’ve read it.

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Character Study: Deka

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I’ve heard a few complaints from readers about the fact that Deka’s role in The Kingdom of Gods isn’t advertised in the jacket copy. That’s my fault, partly; I do get a say in the copy, and it seemed more important to me to emphasize the novel’s plot rather than its relationships. All things considered, these books are marketed as fantasy, not romance, and Deka is more important as a love interest than he is as a mover and shaker in the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Not that love interests are meaningless, mind you. Since love and desire are key drivers

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The Two Shahars

/ 4 Comments / 100K / By

It might seem a bit unfair to put both Shahar the Matriarch (whom I’m going to call Shahar1) and Shahar the — whoops, spoiler — — Last Arameri Ruler — — in the same Character Study. But since I deliberately constructed the younger Shahar’s life as a “what-if” reflection of her ancestor’s, I thought this might be the best way to do it. I’ll call the younger Shahar “Shahar2” for lack of a better description. And as you noted above, this one’s full of spoilers; if you haven’t read The Kingdom of Gods and you care, stop now. OK, don’t

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Character Study: Sieh

/ 9 Comments / On Writing, Squeeage / By

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, might want to skip this one ’til later.

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Here, have a pretty.

/ 3 Comments / Fan Fun / By

Folks who follow me on Twitter already saw this, but otherwise it’s buried in the comments of the previous post. So I decided to bring it out here where everyone could see, since the author was kind enough to share it with me, and since it’s amazing: Click to biggify, which is well worth it. Original here at Casey’s art Tumblr, where you may comment to the artist directly. I don’t know Casey, and haven’t yet mastered the mysteries of Tumblr so haven’t sent a response to her — but Casey, if you’re watching, my response is WOW. As I

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Locus Roundtable on, er, Me

/ 1 Comment / 100K, Awards, Interview, Natter, On Writing, Review, Shorts, Thinkythoughts / By

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 — they decided to talk about me. Disclosure: I’m on the Roundtable list, but I obviously bowed out of this conversation. So a couple of the folks there have met me in real life, one (Rachel Swirsky) knows me quite well, and the rest I only

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Character Study: Itempas

/ 6 Comments / 100K, BrightGod / By

OK, this got prematurely posted a few days ago thanks to the unmiracle of scheduled blog post publishing; I clicked “OK” when I should’ve clicked “Save for later”, basically. Took it down a few minutes later, but those of you on the RSS feed might’ve seen it already. Sorry ’bout the confusion. Anyway: I spent a lot of time trying to decide whether it was safe to do a Character Study for the big guy yet, given that his role in the trilogy isn’t yet over. (Not a spoiler; if a god’s not dead, s/he’s not done.) Spoilers for both

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