Controversies

And now a word from our sponsor

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Said sponsor being me, that is. I own this site, pay all costs, and derive most of the benefit from the labor that generates its content, though it would be pretty silly of me to invoice myself. That said, I could invoice myself, if I wanted to, because the work that I do writing posts for this blog has a real cost. Take that post I did a little while ago on feminization, and the fear thereof, in epic fantasy. It took me about four hours, spread over several days, to write that post — and it’s not my best […]

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What’s universal? An informal survey.

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ETA: Time’s up! Comments closed. Will post summary/moar thinkythoughts soon, though prob’ly not ’til I’ve escaped Deadline Hell on Dreamblood revisions. This great post over at the Rejectionist on the African American fiction section in bookstores made the rounds on Twitter yesterday, so I’m signal-boosting it here. You might remember that this is a subject near and dear to my heart, as well as my career. In that post I mentioned that I would eventually get around to tackling the subject of universality. …But this is not that post. Because I need some data, first. This is not an attempt

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And Just In Case…

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…anybody sees my post over at Whatever on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, and decides to come over here and start something… a simple admonition: Don’t. ETA: And because somebody decided to be hard-headed, just an FYI: I’ve put the blog on moderation until further notice. If you’ve commented here before and been approved, you should be able to comment freely; if you’re a newbie you’ll have to wait ’til I get around to approving it. Sorry, but this is why I said “don’t.”

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German News

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Couple of announcements. First, for those readers who live in Germany, the German version of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — Die Erbin Der Welt — is available now from Blanvalet! To that end, the publisher has generously offered to do a giveaway of 5 copies via Darkstar Fantasy News, a German review/fan site. These folks did a great interview with me recently (here’s the English version), so if you want a copy — and, uh, you speak German — hop on over and check out their giveaway! And in other German news, good news — after some behind-the-scenes discussion regarding

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It’s Not the Same Story

/ 35 Comments / Controversies, The Mysterious Glowing Box, WTF World? / By

My staycation continues. It’s amazing that I can suddenly watch so much TV. I don’t watch much under ordinary circumstances, and when I’m in deadline mode I only turn the thing on to play video games for stress relief. Thus I’m usually horribly behind on just about any show that’s “hot”. I’m just now about to watch the first season of “Heroes” and the third season of Doctor Who… yeah, I know. But when people ask me how I find time to write… well, that’s how. This usually applies to movies, too. I think I’ve missed Iron Man 2; don’t

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Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

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Title quote from the first Matrix film; Morpheus. So, noticed that the German version of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is now available, when it showed up on Goodreads under “other editions” recently. That was my first time seeing it. For those of you who aren’t Goodreads members (why aren’t you?), here’s what it looks like: According to Google’s translation tool, the title is something like “The Heiress of the World”. Submitted without comment for now. (Am talking with my agent about it.) Feel free to discuss. Oh, and there’s a description of Yeine in chapter 1, if you’re wondering what

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Boycott? No, thanks.

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And here I thought I was done with controversies for the week. For those who haven’t heard, there’s been a big to-do in the past few days over another instance of cover art whitewashing re a YA novel called Magic Under Glass by debut author Jaclyn Dolamore. Like the last instance, it turned into a big thing, with some big-name editors and authors in the field weighing in on the issue. And a whole lot of readers got pissed off — again — as they should, IMO, because the problem of whitewashing has gone on for literally decades in the

Boycott? No, thanks. KEEP READING

Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF

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This post is for MLK Day. It’s also prompted by the coincidental approximate anniversary of RaceFail, which began in January of last year. (Missed the fun? Google is your friend. But here is a good place to start.) For those who want the Twitter version, RaceFail was a several-months-long conversation about race in the context of science fiction and fantasy that sprawled across the blogosphere. It involved several thousand participants and spawned several hundred essays — and it hasn’t really ended yet, just slowed down. But the initial outburst was very frank, and frequently very heated, and over the course

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Cold-Blooded Necessity

/ 1 Comment / Controversies, On Writing / By

I haven’t previously weighed in on the Great Pay Rate Debate triggered by this post by John Scalzi* because a) I’m busy, and b) I don’t care. Which is not to say that the pay issue is irrelevant — it’s definitely relevant, and important. I just don’t care about it. It’s not an emotional thing for me. It’s just business. OK, that was intentionally obtuse. Basically, I draw a very clear distinction between the art of writing, and the business of publication. Writing is something I’m very passionate about. I angst over nearly every aspect of it, constantly. Publication, though,

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