On Writing

Wherein I ramble about technique, process, etc.

The essay that inspired the collection’s title

/ How Long, On Writing, Shorts / By

For reasons that I cannot fathom, I can’t figure out how to change the sidebar of my blog anymore. It’s probably something simple, but since I don’t really use this blog much anymore, I’ve forgotten most of my PHP and CSS. Plus, WordPress keeps changing things to make them harder to figure out! Argh. Anyway. So here is the link to the essay that I mentioned, but did not include, in the collection How Long Til Black Future Month. Enjoy!

The essay that inspired the collection’s title KEEP READING

TFS Snippet

/ 2 Comments / Snippets, The Fifth Season / By

So, I’m working on the revision of The Obelisk Gate, now that I’ve gotten my editors’ notes. And as I work on it, I’m reminded of changes that I made to The Fifth Season, in turn. Like this whole chapter that I removed, which would’ve been chapter 5. This was when I was playing with having Alabaster’s PoV included in the story — something I ultimately decided against, because I wanted TFS to thematically be Essun’s story. Note that all of this is non-canonical; I changed some names of places and concepts, some customs, etc., as I revised. So, spoilers,

TFS Snippet KEEP READING

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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Midnight in Karachi interview

/ 1 Comment / Interview, On Writing / By

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and it’s been hard to keep track of them. I post them on Twitter or FB usually, but I wanted to point to this one in particular since it contains a lot of behind-the-scenes info on The Fifth Season and the Broken Earth trilogy. MASSIVE SPOILERS HEREIN, and I strongly do NOT recommend you listen to it if you haven’t read TFS. But for those of you who’ve read the book, you might find it interesting. A great Skype-based interview with Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi.

Midnight in Karachi interview KEEP READING

Creating races

/ 14 Comments / On Writing, The Broken Earth / By

So, now that The Fifth Season is out, I can finally talk more about the making of. Over at Scalzi’s I blogged a bit about why and how I chose to use second person, among other things. Now I’m going to talk about creating the Sanzeds, the orogenes, and the stone eaters. BTW, after further thought on this topic, I’m going to use the words “race” or “people” rather than “species” in talking about these groups because all three are obviously people. It used to bug me to see “race” used in lieu of species, particularly when the human race

Creating races KEEP READING

The Apocalypse of Unfortunate Implications

/ 44 Comments / On Writing, The Broken Earth, The Mysterious Glowing Box / By

Just saw a trailer for the Shannara TV series that’s soon to exist: Very pretty. Don’t think I’m going to particularly go out of my way to see it, because at this point I’m a little tired of New Zealand landscapes, orcish hordes, and John Rhys-Davies. I like Tolkien, but I was never a fan of Tolkien clones in textual form, and the film medium doesn’t make them any more palatable. But those of you who are Shannara fans, yay! Enjoy. I got distracted from the cool landscapes and glowing beads and so on, though, by the fact that once

The Apocalypse of Unfortunate Implications KEEP READING

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.

A Tale of Two Characters KEEP READING

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

A world in which race matters KEEP READING

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

Launch Day! KEEP READING

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