While reading the linked articles on Mike Glyer’s daily round-up of Puppy and Puppy-adjacent posts, I stumbled across a post by Dave Freer from February called “To Serve One Master - The Reader“.

The major thrust of the blog post is the idea that however an author intends a work to be received is secondary to how readers receive it, which… okay. ( Read more... )

A Super Serious Meditation on the Nature of Speculative Fiction

One of the squawking points that the Puppy campaigners keep returning to in their quest to prove the existence of a shadowy Social Justice Warrior cabal that at some point took over and subverted the Hugo awards (thus necessitating that they ride in as liberators) is the 2014 ( Read more... )

A Super Serious Meditation on the Nature of Speculative Fiction

One of the squawking points that the Puppy campaigners keep returning to in their quest to prove the existence of a shadowy Social Justice Warrior cabal that at some point took over and subverted the Hugo awards (thus necessitating that they ride in as liberators) is the 2014 ( Read more... )

“Why do you write?” is a question that most authors who find themselves famous enough will eventually face in an interview. I don’t anticipate that happening, but as luck would have it, it’s Mother’s Day, and that means I can give my answer anyway.

Most authors whose answer to this question get quoted enough for you to have read them have something ( Read more... )

Mythic Delirium Press is doing a Kickstarter to fund the next edition of their amazing genre-blending Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. You can help them to produce it and pay their contributors while reserving your copy and/or buying another Mythic Delirium title.

Perks at the higher levels include signed, limited edition chapbooks by a number ( Read more... )

If you think about it, it’s kind of weird that speculative fiction even exists as a genre. In a way, all fiction is speculative. If we weren’t imagining a world that is other than the one we know in some fashion, it wouldn’t be fiction.

But it goes beyond that, because once upon a time, there wasn’t a special word for fiction that was fanciful, ( Read more... )

Eric Flint, author of the time displacement/alternate history 1632 series, has written a really interesting essay in support of his original comments on the Hugos and the Puppy mess. In his attempts to clarify a point that was apparently misunderstood in the original post, he has a lot to say about the actual size of the genre fiction audience.

I ( Read more... )

I think it could probably be described as a “novelette”, as its final length is likely to be between 10,000 and 25,000 words. Though classifying stories by length is always a little bit weird to me, as a story can be that length and still have a short story’s structure.

This book is something I would broadly classify as epistolary. The story is ( Read more... )

So, one of the things that’s motivated me to start a proper blog is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, tackling some subjects that are much bigger than 140 characters. Because of this, some of what I’m saying here is going to be a rehash of stuff I’ve already said. But for people who don’t follow me on Twitter, or haven’t otherwise ( Read more... )