Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 14

5 Years a Novelist: A Retrospective on the Writing Life

In January of 2011, about five years ago now, my first book, God’s War, was finally published after being bought and sold and sold again, since about 2007. That was a long and exhausting time, that publishing carousel.

But God’s War will always have a special place in my heart, as selling that series twice enabled me to get out of the poverty hole I’d been in, pay off the three credit cards I’d been living on for a year, and move out of my friends’ spare bedroom into my own apartment.

Five ye...

More Books I Have Been Reading

When you find yourself casting about for ideas, it means it’s time to refill the bucket. So I have been. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of what I’ve been reading the last few weeks.

Writing How-To’s

I Give You My Body: How I Write Sex Scenes by Diana Gabaldon

As those who’ve read my work know, while I do have the occasional sex scene in my novels, it’s generally only a few lines. My books aren’t romances, so this isn’t something I’ll dwell on for pages, but sex is still an important t...

America’s Long Hangover

Good morning, America. Are you hungover? Honestly, I think I’ve been hungover since the 2000 election, which was a whopping 16 years ago. Two timelines diverged in a wood, and lo, we took the darker one, and here we are, America, perpetually drunk or hungover.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why nobody cared to show up to that election. We’d come off the prosperity of Bill Clinton’s 90’s, artificially created by the deregulation of the banks that would eventually undo us all. While the Silicon...

The Madhatter Teaparty: Rescuing Your Characters from Endless Cups of Tea

Plot kicks my ass. It kicks my ass up one end of a story and down another, because honestly, all my characters want to do is snark at each other over tea. Or whisky. Or coffee. Or bug juice. Whatever. Any excuse for them to sit around flinging zingers at each other and discussing what they are going to do next works for me.

This over reliance on tea-and-conversation scenes is a hallmark of discovery or gardener writers like me. When we get stuck on what happens next, we just sit the character...

I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke

This, from Merrit Tierce, has been making the rounds:

I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke

My first thought: yeah, well, welcome to the club.

Ha ha, just kidding: I kept my day job. I kept my day job – I keep my day job – even though some days it pains the hell out of me, because yeah, I’d be broke immediately if I quit. Like, no contest. And I’ve published five novels and an essay collection in the last 5 years, with two more novels coming out next ye...

Going Dark ’til January 9th to Prep for EPIC 2017

I’ve cancelled the rest of my appearances for this year, which I know surprised and worried a lot of people, but frankly, there is a lot of writerly-shit on deck right now, and I keep falling further and further behind. You have to know when to cut off promo and shift into writing hermit mode, and this is that time. So: no more appearances til next year, and no more hours spent being chatty on Twitter until January, which I am announcing here so I will hold myself to this pledge. You may get...

Why Being a Writer is an Exercise in Cognitive Dissonance

Being a writer is a weird thing. I guess any time you live publicly, it’s like living in an abusive relationship. You’ve got a bunch of people publicly and simultaneously declaring that you are the most talented and humane person in the world… and also the biggest jerk hack that ever lived.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage people to have a very firm internal compass. It helps to have good friends and colleagues to reach out to when you’re feeling low, sure, but if you don’t have a f...

Do Authors Check Out Those Business Cards New Writers Give Them at Cons?

At various conventions, I’ve had new(er) authors come up to my signing table or come up to me after a panel and basically just give me their cards. I’ve also had authors hand me their books or, in the case of a couple of very smart new authors, ask if they can swap one of my books for theirs, so it’s a win/win for both of us (this is how I met Myke Coleand the reason I read Run Time by S.B. Divya, which I enjoyed and tweeted about. That is A+ networking).

Yet the question I hear from folks is...

The Author as a Busy, Busy Bee and Other Bee-Filled Nightmares

Over the last month or so I’ve become one of those writers with a Secret Project (I know – I hate those people too) on top of The Broken Heavens manuscript due at the end of the year, on top of The Stars Are Legion copyedits due the end of the month, on top of the Patreon to pay back our dog’s vet bills (I will not even put the number here, but suffice to say it’ll be year’s end before it’s all paid off), on top of the usual Locus column, and the day job, andplanning for the next project my a...

What I’ve Been Reading: The Nonfiction Edition

The last month or so has been a non-stop glut of nonfiction reading. My creative bucket has been a little low of late, which signaled to me that it was time to get back to work. I’ve also been spending less time on Twitter, which has indeed helped me up my reading time. Reading is, as ever, a crucial part of being a writer, whether it’s nonfiction reading like this to refill the idea bucket or fiction reading to study for craft purposes.

Stiff by Mary Roach

Easily the most interesting and en...