the fifth season

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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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

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The Stillness, in all its glory

/ 10 Comments / Natter, The Broken Earth / By

So, I still don’t like the idea of maps in fantasy novels in general. But I needed one as I wrote The Fifth Season, so after I scrawled something hideous in a Microsoft Word file and sent that to Orbit, and the collective screams of horror died down, they worked with artist Tim Paul to create something much better (click to embiggen): Yeah, OK, I could get to like maps a little now. Maybe. Seriously, Tim did an awesome job, especially considering he got a lot of vague guidance from me like, “I can’t remember if those pokey things are

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It’s a(nother) book!

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So strange and amazing to be here at the publication of my sixth novel. I remember being a newbie writer and struggling just to imagine myself publishing one book. That was only… hmm, eight years ago? I got my agent in 2007, as I recall. I remember despairing, as it became clear that my first book wasn’t going to sell first, and giving serious consideration to quitting all this shit. Wow. Confession: I had a despair moment again while writing The Fifth Season. Convinced myself that it was just too strange, too dark, too hard to write, and no one

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The Fifth Season is coming!

/ 3 Comments / Appearances, The Broken Earth / By

And I’ve got some stuff lined up in the next few weeks. I will not be doing a book tour; I’m still in Deadline Hell on book 2 of the Broken Earth trilogy, which is due at the end of August. So this is it for big events… but I’m amenable to the occasional podcast appearance or phone interview. (No guestblogs or text interviews, sorry; those eat up too much writing time.) Week of July 27th: Goodreads giveaway Some lucky people will have a chance to win a free signed copy of any of my novels, including The Fifth Season.

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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

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New author photo, starred review

/ 13 Comments / Review, The Broken Earth / By

For those of you not be-Twittered or a-Facebooked, these are the new author photos I got recently, since my old one was a whopping 7 years old. (Time flies when you’re having fun.) And while that old photo was awesome — taken by fellow pro author and amateur photographer E. C. Myers, with a little touching-up by fellow pro author and graphic designer Kris Dikeman — it was time to retire it. Haven’t worn my hair that way in years, and also I’ve earned my “older and wiser”, and I wanted that to show. So this time around I went

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