The My Writing Process Blog Tour (#MyWritingProcess on Twitter) has been doing the rounds on the internet lately.  Participating writers of all genres, backgrounds, and tastes have to answer the same four deceptively simple questions about how they approach the endlessly fascinating and diverse process of writing.  I heard about it from Edith Hope ( Read more... )

There's been a certain amount of action on the cover front of The Freedom Maze over the past few months: concepts, sketches, tweaks have flown back and forth between Gavin Grant of Big Mouth House (which is the children's division of Small Beer Press, for those of you who didn't know) in Northampton and me in New York.

Today as ever was, he sent me ( Read more... )

This is not a review.  Reviews require the writer to be measured, dispassionate, fair-minded.  I'm not feeling any of those things, so I'm writing a burble, a blurt, a burst of enthusiasm.  Consider youself warned.

I finished Catherynne Valente's Deathless, actually, two days ago.  I'd been reading more and more slowly, so I wouldn't get to the end ( Read more... )

I knit, from time to time.  I've committed the odd (and I do mean odd) baby hat.  But I'm not a knitter.  I was taught to make mittens, but that was in another century and I've completely forgotten how.  I have a pattern for a tea cosy small enough to fit my favorite pot, and I've made a knitting date with my oldest friend, who is a knitter, to ( Read more... )

I just this moment finished the second book in N.K. Jemisin's trilogy, and Ellen's not home, and I need to tell someone about it, and you all are here, so--Hi!

Once I began to get over the sheer deliciousness of it all (suffering gods and art that is magic and some really flaming hot sex, Goodness Gracious!), I noticed that this is a book written ( Read more... )

 
Curses                                                              Jim Butcher                         
How the Pooka Came To New York City          Delia Sherman                           
On the Slide                                                     Richard Bowes              
The Duke of Riverside                                     ( Read more... )

Because I'm all behind as a cow's tail (as my grandmother used to say), I just now got around to reading Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms (Warner, 2007).  It's beautiful.  I love the language, a musical Caribbean dialect that never seems precious or forced and goes down smooth as silk.  I love the narrator, Calamity Lambkin, snarky, prickly, ( Read more... )

My constant advice to all students of writing has always been to read, read, read. Time being the unyielding thing it is, I've also noticed that the more I write, the less I've been reading myself. There's something wrong with that. So I've been making a concerted effort to read more, fueled in part by a great influx recently of books I really, ( Read more... )

As some of you may know, I'm not a writer of non-fiction. I did my time in the fields of Academe, and mostly, it gave me blisters. When I left those fields for the wild expanses of Fiction (speculative or otherwise), I swore I'd never write an essay again.

I changed my mind, of course. Not often, and on a case-by-case basis. One such case being ( Read more... )

( Read more... )