Remember I said that a good deal of my short fiction career involved my learning to write to shorter and shorter lengths? This is true–up to a certain point (not long past this story, in fact) you can (more or less) put most of my work in chronological order just by arranging them by descending […]
“The God of Au” is the first story I wrote in what eventually became its own fantasy universe. I wrote it, as I said in an earlier blog post, aimed at an anthology that wanted fantasy stories about war, religion, and political intrigue. As often happens I ended up instead with a fantasy story about […]
If you’ve been reading my blog a while, you probably already know about this story, but I suspect I’ve picked up some new readers, so. Remember last time I linked to a short story, I said that my first few pieces of short fiction had been SF? “Night’s Slow Poison” is one of them. I […]
So! This will have to be much shorter than I wanted it to be, since I got home from my fabulous week-long Scandinavia Mini-Tour last night, and this morning a bunch of heavy wet snow did something fatal to my internet access at home, so I’m typing this at a cafe. Anyway! Over the last […]
I did this a while ago on Tumblr, made some weekly posts about my old short fiction, and a recent tweet reminded me that a lot of my readers aren’t aware of most of the short fiction I’ve had published. Which, I mean, if you’re not into short fiction, cool, scroll by, but just in […]
I just got an email from a person–who shall remain nameless–curious about why I might have blocked them on Twitter. I had a spare moment while tea was brewing and decided to reply. Having done so, I thought it might be worth linking to my blog post about Twitter and also posting my reply (without […]
So, a lot of people have already weighed in on the brief twitterburst the other day, when Neil Gaiman, in a well-intended tweet encouraging folks to apply to Clarion, made an unfortunate choice of words. The things I’d have said first off have mostly been said. (Disclaimer–I went to Clarion West in 2005 and found […]
I found The Poetics of Science Fiction on academia.edu and downloaded it and am mostly enjoying it and learning things from it. Stopping to note, though, the section on Pulpstyle, which is actually pretty cool and illuminating in a few ways (specifically comments about the use and effects of particular pulpy techniques). But then– More […]
There are some questions I seem to get over and over again, so I’m going to put them, and the answers, here. Q: How do you pronounce [character name]? So, with some exceptions, I actually tried very hard to keep the spelling of names consistent so that it would be fairly easy to figure out […]
Hey, check this out! 11 Things You Never Knew About Audiobooks (plus the Orbit team meet a Doctor Who star!) The Orbit team recently took a trip to watch Ann Leckie’s ANCILLARY MERCY being recorded as an audiobook by actor Adjoa Andoh (you might know her from Doctor Who). We went to the RNIB Talking […]