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?
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...