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!
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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?
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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...