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Selections from the Intragalactic Encyclopedia of Habitable Planets
My story, "Selections from the Intragalactic Encyclopedia of Habitable Planets," came out a few days ago in Kelly Ann Jacobson's new anthology, Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction....
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SevenEves: 600 pages of info-dump leaves little room for plot
Neal Stephenson doesn’t shy away from big concepts, long timelines, or larger than life events. His most recent novel, SevenEves, begins with the moon blowing up. Readers never find out what blew up...
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Writing Lessons from Hamilton
Like much of the online community, I’ve been listening to the musical Hamilton a lot lately (I’d say “non-stop,” but The Toast already made that joke). In addition to what it means to me as a person,...
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Hugo Nomination #1: Naomi Novik's Uprooted
I haven't sent in my Hugo nominations yet--I need to get on that--but one of the novels I'll certainly be nominating is Uprooted. Agniezska is the brave, stubborn, sensitive heroine of Naomi Novik’s...
View ArticleThe Teen Ghost-hunters of Stockton
A writing exercise from the Iowa Writer's Workshop MOOC I took in the fall. And yeah, it's based in a thinly-disguised Oxford full of old ghosts and teenagers so ... just a thinly-disguised Oxford then...
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Hugo Nomination #2: Cat Valente's Speakeasy
For my first nomination, check out Naomi Novik's Uprooted. My first novella nomination is Cat Valente's Speak Easy. I held off on reading Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente for a few weeks after it...
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Hugo Nomination #3: FantasyLiterature.com
Okay, okay, so this is one where I actually have skin in the game*. The review site that I write for, FantasyLiterature.com, is Hugo-eligible--yay! I've been reviewing for FanLit for almost 2 years...
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Hugo Nomination #4: Dennis Mahoney's Bell Weather
I've already covered Naomi Novik's Uprootedand Cat Valente's Speakeasy(a novella). Which brings me to the second full-length novel nomination ... Dennis Mahoney's gorgeous, strange, spell-binding Bell...
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The Fairy-Tale Archetype of the Sexy Witch
The Witch in Snow White Last spring, I taught a class on fairy tales and fairy tale adaptations (you can see some of my student’s final projects here). I structured the class around archetypal...
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Sorcerer to the Crown: A fun Regency Fantasy with a heart
Zen Cho’s debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown* is a heck of a lot of fun.A quick description of it may not sound like it, though. It revolves around the magician Zacharias Wythe as he negotiates his new...
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Evolution of a Sci-Fi Class
A few years ago, I was approached by an academic publisher to review a proposal for a sci-fi textbook. I was excited to do it, but a little confused as well; I’d only taught a class on speculative...
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Hugo Nomination #5: Austin Grossman's Crooked
Austin Grossman’s Crooked is my favorite book I read in 2015*. I expected good things from Lev Grossman’s twin brother, but not much otherwise as I am not — was not — a big fan of Nixon or, indeed, of...
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The Wild Girl: A moving novel about the literary history of fairy tales
Kate Forsyth’s book, The Wild Girl, was published in Australia in 2013 but has recently been released in the United States in both hardback, Kindle, and audio versions. It tells the story of an unsung...
View ArticleWriteFest Writing Exercise 1: Setting
Last week, I went to Houston to the WriteFest conference and took a 4-day workshop on speculative fiction with Cassandra R. Clarke. Houston was great--good food, great art--and the workshop itself was...
View ArticleWriteFest Writing Exercise 2: Non-Human Characters
For this exercise, Cassie let us pull 4 random characteristics that real animals have on Earth, and then combine them to create a new character. And it had to be sentient. My four characteristics...
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Writing, Twitter Anxiety, and the Myth of Production
This past fall, I became much more active in the SF/F writing community on Twitter. Almost immediately, I fell into one of the deepest and toughest bouts of anxiety I’ve ever faced.Anxiety is...
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WriteFest Exercise 3: Fan Fiction
For this exercise, Cassie asked us to pick a minor character or villain from a story we are familiar with, and write a scene from their point of view. I chose Terry Pratchett's Death of Rats. ** The...
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How to Deal
It's been a week and some change since the 2016 US Presidential election, and it's probably not a surprise that I wasn't excited about the results. I am, specifically, sad that we have lost a...
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How to Grow New Ideas
I got a rejection last week that put me into a minor tailspin. "We liked this story a lot," it basically said, "but it didn't do enough new and different with X-plotline." I wasn't upset about the...
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The Spiritual Hunger of the Young Pope
HBO has given me two gifts in the past six months: Westworld and The Young Pope. Both totally obsessed me from the moment I started watching them, taking up space in my brain in a way that TV doesn’t...
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