Not the affirmative action you meant, not the history you’re making

/ 53 Comments / Awards, Controversies / By

So many people have said so many good things about the Hugo Awards debacle in the past few days. I haven’t said much myself because a) I’ve got a book to write, and b) I don’t really care. I mean, I do care about the Hugos; this is a respectable award, which as George R. R. Martin wisely points out has value because the people of Worldcon over the decades have worked their asses off to build its value. Unlike GRRM I think the contributions to that value actually go beyond Worldcon; it’s also been built up by the librarians […]

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A Tale of Two Characters

/ 17 Comments / On Writing / By

Awhile back I mentioned offhand in another post that readers seem to be harder on my female characters than my male characters. This was in the context of analyzing one-star reader reviews culled from Amazon and Goodreads, and a few folks in the comments asked me to explore that topic further. So here’s a (hopefully) interesting exercise. I’m going to compare reviewer comments on two of my protagonists: Oree Shoth from The Broken Kingdoms, and Gatherer Ehiru from The Killing Moon. (For those who haven’t read either book, remember, you can read the first few chapters here and here, respectively.

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A world in which race matters

/ 39 Comments / On Writing / By

I’ve been thinking about this article for the last day or so. I posted a link to it on my Twitter feed yesterday, and saw a few reactions to it that seemed… confused. Part of the problem is that the article gets a little muddled at points, I think because it’s talking about a complicated concept: race as identity, versus race as socioeconomic marker within in the modern (racist) political structure. But part of the problem, IMO, is the misconceptions that readers were bringing to the article themselves. A couple even asked (paraphrase, since I didn’t ask them about posting

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How an author feels upon receiving her page proofs

/ 10 Comments / silliness / By

Please excuse my messy kitchen and crap film production skills. Slightly intimidating. On the other hand, I love this stage of the book production process. I probably shouldn’t, because at this point I’ve read the novel what feels like ninety times… but I do. This is the point where that year of sweat and harsh language starts to feel like a book. A really, really, really big, book. Whew.

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Stuff I wrote (and read) in 2014

/ 3 Comments / Natter / By

Since people keep asking, here’s the very short list of stuff I published in 2014. I’ll have you know I’m postponing a perfectly good snow day nap to write this up!! “Walking Awake”, Lightspeed, June 2014, 6009 words. “Stone Hunger”, Clarkesworld Issue 94, July 2014, 7888 words. “The Awakened Kingdom”, Orbit Books, December 2014, 41,000 words. I did have one more thing published in 2014, but please note that this was a reprint, originally published back in 2012 in the anthology After. No novels — yes, I know some websites kept insisting that The Fifth Season was out in 2014,

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Launch Day!

/ 9 Comments / Pimping, Shorts, Snippets / By

Hi folks. Well, it’s official — as of today, the omnibus edition of the Inheritance Trilogy, and “The Awakened Kingdom” novella, both go on sale. The omnibus is available at all major retailers, print and ebook, and includes the novella. If you’ve already got the trilogy in separate-book form, however, don’t worry — you can buy just the novella as a standalone ebook for $2.99. It’s available for Nook, Kindle, and as a Google ebook. As for the omnibus, here’s KING OZZYMANDIAS (or Ozzy, for short) to demonstrate just what a whopper it is: …Might wanna have it delivered. Just

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Your groundbreaking is not my groundbreaking

/ 18 Comments / On Writing, Review / By

Note: I will be mentioning a few spoilers in this post. Look away now if you’re not ready for that yet! So, a few nights ago I started Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third game in a franchise I’ve liked a lot over the years. Just for shits and giggles I livetweeted my game for a few hours. Most of the feed is pretty dull — like, me eating dinner while waiting half an hour for the game to finish installing on my XBox’s hard drive. But once I finally got the game going and dug into the character creator, I

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