As you may or may not know, I'm a big fan of singer/songwriter/producer Matt Hales, otherwise known as Aqualung. renisanz introduced me to him some years ago, and I've been eagerly buying up his albums ever since. His most recent (and maddeningly hard to find) album 10 Futures features a single called "Be Beautiful", and when I first listened to it just ( Read more... )

At this time last year, I was worn out. I'd just finished substantive edits on my latest book and was cautiously pleased with how it had come together, but creatively I was exhausted. I’d written nine novels in eight years, and by the fall of 2015 I felt like all my mental energy and every scrap of pleasure I’d ever taken in the writing process had ( Read more... )

Two lovely surprises in as many days!

First, a friend on Facebook pointed me to a recent article at Tor.com featuring Quicksilver as one of Five Books With Asexual Protagonists (and furthermore declaring my post about writing Tori's character to be "excellent", which was a nice bonus ( Read more... )

The UPS guy just rang the doorbell, and look what the lovely folk at Simon & Schuster Canada sent me!


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And here I'd been thinking this would be the week I could finally get to a couple of other authors' manuscripts I'd promised to comment on! The best laid plans...
I confess to opening the Word document with a little trepidation, as one never knows what sorts of things will come up in copyedits or how much work it's going to be. Plus I haven't looked ( Read more... )

So this is a meme that made its way around to me a couple months ago, courtesy of award-winning Code Name Verity author Elizabeth Wein tagging Erin Bow (author of the gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking Plain Kate) and Erin tagging me in return. (I was also tagged by Zoë Marriott, whose sumptuous and refreshingly diverse secondary-world fantasies I ( Read more... )

NOTE: This post was written as part of the November 2012 Carnival of Aces, with the subject of Fiction. It contains some unavoidable plot and characterization SPOILERS for the novels mentioned, so click the cut-tag at your own risk.

Hi. I'm R.J. Anderson, a Canadian-born, US-published, UK-bestselling author for children and teens whose sixth novel ( Read more... )

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There has been a lot of bad news in my life lately (not for me personally, but for people I love and am close to -- serious health problems, impending operations, the sudden death of my uncle), so it was lovely to open my e-mail the other day and find out some really fantastic news for a change:

Ultraviolet has been nominated for the 2012 Andre ( Read more... )

Over on Verla Kay's Children's Writers and Illustrators Chat Board (affectionately known as the "Blue Boards"), a writer calling herself Tamilyn just posted this bit of advice, and I thought it both smart and useful:

"If I'm not writing, but only wishing I could write, then I am a Moper. I have too much pride to be a Moper, so I remind myself that ( Read more... )