Snippets

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, […]

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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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You can tell a lot about a fantasy novel by its glossary

/ 28 Comments / On Writing, Snippets / By

Was just working on the glossary for The Fifth Season. Glossaries are both fun and frustrating for me — fun because a glossary is worldbuilding at its most stark, and frustrating because it’s part of the story, and can enhance or detract from the reading experience if it’s mishandled. The tension between TELL THEM EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, HA HA HA and tell them nothing, nothing, they don’t need to know gets kind of uncomfortable after awhile. That’s why I’ve asked that all of my glossaries be located at the backs of my books, rather than the fronts — because, like maps,

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An alternate appendix

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Stealing Martha Wells’ idea; I’m going to be posting the occasional deleted scene from my various works over the next few weeks. And since people have asked, I’m starting with the one I read at Comic Con, during my “Spotlight” panel. This would have been the second appendix of The Kingdom of Gods, if the short story “Not the End” hadn’t smacked me between the eyes after I wrote this. Enjoy! APPENDIX 2: Spider Speaks The following is a recorded and transcribed vision of the godling known as Spider (Litaria designation 3301-A, Nahadothan niwwah godling attached to Teman Protectorate, northern

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Snippets 3: Kingdom of Gods outtakes

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Previous Snippets posts can be found here. The Kingdom of Gods was hard to write! It was the first time I’ve ever started a book without a clearly-established plan in mind — I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there — and under deadline pressure. So I wrote several starter versions of the book before I found the right voice and direction for it. Some of these got quite long; I probably wrote an entire novel’s worth of material in order to find the right way of telling this story. But that’s OK, because I

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Snippets 2: The Gods’ Realm

/ 1 Comment / On Writing, Snippets / By

(Snippets 1 is here.) One of the things I had to spend a lot of time on, in creating the Inheritance Trilogy, was figuring out what went on in the gods’ lives when mortals weren’t around to see them. This was something that I knew might never actually show up in the story — the gods are the focus of the trilogy, but it’s their interactions with mortals that matter most — but I still needed to understand it. I’ve heard other writers compare worldbuilding to an iceberg, and I think that analogy fits perfectly: readers see only ten percent,

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Snippets 1: The Broken Kingdoms

/ 3 Comments / On Writing, Snippets, Spoilerrific / By

Going to try something new now, as I lead up to the publication of The Kingdom of Gods (remember, kids: October 27th!). I’ll try to post these once a week or so. Like many authors, I make lots of false starts in the process of writing a novel. Some had legs, but just didn’t go far enough toward my goal; some were badly-written crap; some would have been beautiful — in a different novel. I tend to keep most of my significant text cuts, just because I’m a textual packrat and I’m always worried I might change my mind about

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