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...
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...
When you are afraid to jinx it, but for the first time in a long time, the writing is going really well.
For years, I’ve been struggling with brain fog, exhaustion, health challenges, and just being kind of burned out, honestly. I’d forgotten what it was like to...
Heads up about a very cool Ukrainian SFF Anthology!
“Embroidered Worlds presents a living snapshot of imaginative fiction in Ukrainian culture today, including stories that span and cross the speculative...