The Folded Sky and Angel Maker publication date changes
Hey folks, Sorry to say, but due to circumstances outside my control, both The Folded Sky and Angel Maker are getting their publication dates shifted. Angel...
Livestream Saturday Nov 16th with Madame Askew!
Please join us tomorrow at 1 pm EST as we sip the tea both metaphorical and actual! https://www.youtube.com/@madameaskew2739
And just like that I'll be gone in the rain
So I am bulk-deleting my tweets, and then I will set a pointer in a pinned tweet to bluesky and this place and my Patreon, which is where I expect to be...
Angel Maker Cover Reveal!
Oh my gawd, y’all. Cover art by Cynthia Sheppard; Cover design by Clarissa CS Ryan That’s it. That’s the whole post.
Angel Maker updates and cover art, with more to come, and miscellaneous quotidiana
Hey folks, So I just got back from teaching Viable Paradise—a weeklong flat-out sprint of pedagogy—and of course my laptop’s charger died on the second day....
I don't even know if I'm going to call this book Shipwreck Star anymore.
I may have totally lost control of what I am doing here. I’m also aware that I’m right at the 30K wall, and historically what happens there is that I have to...
The Folded Sky UK Cover Reveal!
Hey, everybody, I am thrilled beyond words to bring you the cover for the Gollancz edition of THE FOLDED SKY, available Summer, 2025! Dr. Sunyata Song must...
The Dye in Doritos Can Make Mice Transparent
clears throat The future is guesswork, the past not apparent. The things we all ‘know’ disappear in a tide. The dye in Doritos can make mice transparent. Our...
Autumn is here
And this is how I'm getting my work done this morning. Duncan, Fafhrd, and Gurney like me for my body heat and the snacks I provide.
I am the god who waters the lawn--
—and has filthy fingernails. So last spring, I talked with some nice landscapers about getting our motheaten front lawn patched with loam and seed, and we...
A partial list of things I haven't been doing much of lately
tl;dr I think I need my meds adjusted So a funny thing has happened in the last year or so. I went on and then off a biologic for my psoriatic arthritis (It...
New White Space novel coming Summer 2025
Just look at those colors Dr. Sunyata Song must travel across the Milky Way to learn to communicate with the greatest discovery of her century: an artificial...
Newsletter/Patreon format and WorldCon updates
Hello, folks, Happy Saturday morning, if it's Saturday and morning where you are. I’ve just spent three days on the couch mostly doing nothing but watching...
Into the compost heap of literature.
I’ve been working on White Space IV, which I had to toss out completely and go back and start drafting from scratch, because the damned thing just didn’t...
Readercon schedule and post-Readercon panel at Pandemonium
Hey, folks! I’ll be attending Readercon in Quincy MA from Thursday July 11 through Sunday July 14, where I will be appearing on the following program items....
Clarion Write-A-Thon
Hey folks, This is just to say that I am participating in this year's Clarion Workshop Write-A-Thon and you can pledge (I believe it's tax-deductible) to...
MetaStellar YouTube interviews!
I'm late with this link because of conrunning, but here's Part 1 and Part 2 of an interview I did with the lovely folks at MetaStellar Magazine! Hope you enjoy!
Process is a funny beast
I’ve realized something new about how I work, and it might be useful to other people. I sometimes have a hard time starting or continuing a project because I...
Futurescapes Author Conference Appearance (online)
I'm teaching a course at the Futurescapes author conference May 25-26! Get access to ten different one-hour craft courses taught by ten different authors on...
How to establish a writing habit in five minutes a day.
I shared this on Bluesky with my friend C.L. Polk, who was struggling with being stuck on a story they are working on. It’s very simple, and it works. When...
This is a surprise to me... (discounted ebook edition)
ANd I promise I won’t be sending you emails every day in general—but MACHINE is a Kindle deal today! So if you like space opera and giant bugs and medical...
Li Bai Drowns While Embracing the Moon
Hey, folks. To inaugurate this new space, I bring you a poem from a long time ago, which I’m pretty sure isn’t currently available in its finished form...
Welcome to the Monkey House... I Mean the New Digs
Greetings! This should be the first email from Buttondown, and the continuation of the great Throw Another Bear In The Canoe publishing empire. This is a...
So I Wrote A Sequel To KAREN MEMORY.
Not to bury the lede or anything. Nine years ago, give or take a couple of months, _Karen Memory came into the world and was a surprise hit with just about...
What is this nuance thing, what good is it, and do I even want some?
That’s an excellent question, and I’m here to tell you that the answer is “It depends.” Nuance is not exactly on-trend currently. Social media and the social...
I've been thinking a lot about caracaras.
Caracaras, if you don’t know, are a subfamily of Falconidae (Here’s a Wikipedia link) that fills an ecological niche much more like corvids than like...
Fallow time can bite my shiny metal @$$
I have an entire novella in my head, just ready to be written, but every time I sit down to write it a get a few paragraphs and it peters out because the...
Where I'll be and what I'll be doing! (MidSouthCon Edition!)
Hey, folks! This is just to let you know that I will be appearing as one of the Guests of Honor at MidSouthCon just outside of Memphis TN this coming...
More Cheap Books! (Machine for $1.99 in North America.)
The second book in the White Space series, Machine, is now $1.99 in ebook the US and Canada (and if I am checking correctly, £3.99 in the UK). So if you were...
Author points: what are they, how do they work, and how can I get some?
Hello, all! Author points is a term I coined decades ago to describe the goodwill a reader has toward a writer’s work if they are already invested in that...
Chronic pain and other delights. Also, Ancestral Night is still on sale.
First things first! Ancestral Night is still on sale for $1.99 in North America! Get it while the getting is good! In unrelated news, I’ve been trying a...
The tiny personal hell of author's notes, cheap ebooks, and but also, a FOLDED SKY publication date!
auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhh wubwubwubwubwub
The Bite Sized Chunk
How do you deal with a project that’s just enormously, overwhelmingly big? You just do the next thing, is all. This applies whether the overwhelmingly big...
A happy ending depends on where you stop telling the story.
Sometimes I think that fiction is soothing because it posits there are solutions in this world, rather than just practices. You can do a thing and get to the...
They tell you to be here now but they don't unpack what that means, now do they?
Throwanotherbearinthecanoe Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid...
Social media does have its uses.
In my last email, I was talking about how social media and the unblinking Sauron-eye of the Internet can make creating good art very hard, because that sense...
It's hard to make art when you're guarded and the internet is a terrible place to be vulnerable.
The older and crankier (or maybe the older and wiser) I get, the more I think social media and being Extremely Online can be really bad for innovation and...
A few of the things that cancer taught me
Eat right, exercise, and die anyway.
We judge because we're scared
A little bit of housekeeping: I will most likely be moving this newsletter to a different platform in the New Year, but ideally that move will be seamless...
Publishing and marketing is sure a thing right now
Hey, folks, So I was mentioning in my last missive how anxieties and tensions are running high in the writer world, and how a seismic shift seems to be...
Substackers against Nazis
I am not one of the drafters of this open letter, but I endorse its message wholeheartedly. Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj: We’re asking a very simple question...
"Does any of this matter? Is this thing even on?"
When I was a kid, there used to be catalogues of text-only T-shirts with often off-color but sometimes profoundly philosophical sayings on them. This is a...
Unthrilled
I’ve realized in the past week or so that I’m really tired of thrillers. This is a weird place for me to be, as somebody who has at various points in her...
WRITE SCIENCE event at the MIT Museum
I should have posted about this before now, but the holidays and family stuff got away from me! So anyway…. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow! I'll be at the MIT...
on the importance of fallow time*
*even when it pisses you off to be doing nothing. I finished my first draft of Angel Maker this week, which, because of the way I work in iterating passes,...
The City is the Forest
What follows is an essay I wrote over a decade ago or so for, if I remember correctly, Realms of Fantasy magazine, which I am posting because (a) I think...
Two anthologies and a WFC peopling hangover walk into a bar...
Hey everybody! I am not yet home from World Fantasy Convention and afterwards visiting family, so this will be brief as I am on the questionable hotel wifi...
The worst habits you learn in writing workshops and how to unlearn them
Scott and I just got home from teaching the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop, and boy am I tired. (I have a covid test cooking right now, as has become the...
Quiet on the northwestern front...
Hey folks, I’m just about to head off to teach Viable Paradise tomorrow, and things have been busy around here with preparations to travel for most of the...
Audiobook sale!
The audiobook of An Apprentice to Elves is on sale for 60% off! (An Apprentice to Elves is the third book in the Iskryne series, after A Companion to Wolves...