Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 16

Llama Army: Revolution Roundup

Greetings, fellow llamas!

The llama llaunch is now in week two, so let us take a gander at what you may have missed:

Publisher’s Weekly gave Geek Feminist Revolution a starred review and listed it as one of their books of the week Kirkus also had, uh, some things to say! Entertainment Weekly asked me to list my five fav video games coming out this summer. EW also listed Geek Feminist Revolution as one of the 11 must-read books in May The Dayton Daily News ran a nice little culture article ab...

Is Living Worth It?

As I get older, I consider mortality a lot more, though never more than I did when I was 26 years old and learned that I had a chronic immune disorder.

Prior to getting this disease I felt I was a pretty tough person. I went to boxing classes twice a week. I worked out. Sure, I had some allergies, but until my long slog into illness I didn’t get sick that often. I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse, and how I’d manage to survive – a badass with a machete and a shotgun – while t...

Llama Llaunch! Rules of the Road

Hey, hey folks, my first essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution, drops TOMORROW, May 31!

In anticipation of its release, here are some things you should know that I know and some things you should know about how I’ll be comporting myself online during the launch:

Some people (the vast majority) are going to LOVE this book. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT. That’s not me being puffed-up. I’ve already seen this happening. It’s cool! We’re all happy! Some folks will find it not to their taste, o...

I Thought About Quitting…

Hey you.

Yes you.

I know you’re ready to quit. I know you’re ready to quit living loud. I know living loud looks like the best way to draw fire for being who you are. For being the best you. For being smart. For being smarter. For being happy. For being loud. For being a woman, especially if you aren’t white. Someone who’s nonbinary. Someone who speaks truth to power.

I see you. I know you’re ready to quit.

Don’t quit.

The world is engineered to get you to quit. It makes it easy for folks who...

The Establishment Has Always Hated the New Kids

“I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more.”

– John W. Campbell, frothing about the New Wave

If you spend a lot of time studying history, you’ll know that it helps toput the slings and arrows of the present into perspective. If you’ve been reading science fiction for the last ten or twenty years, you have likely noticed a certain shift in the field the last couple of years. A certain… bump in the leve...

Dancing for Dinner: Fame, Publishing, and Breakout Books

Fame is a funny thing, because it used to come with a certain dollar amount. Or, that’s what I’d always assumed, anyway. By the time youbecame generally knownvia one of the four publishers, or three TV channels, or big record labels, there was an assumption that you were making a living wage, at the very least. With the proliferation of niche audiences now, though, you can become famous to a great number of people long before generating the income you probably need to protect yourself from th...

A More Hopeful Future

While traveling, it occasionally comes up in casual conversation with non-SF people that I’m a writer. These can be uncomfortable conversations, as they often turn into me explaining what science fiction is, or giving synopses of my books on the fly to people I know won’t read them, or listening to someone talking about how they always wanted to write a novel. So when I was sitting at breakfast this weekend and two women came up to me asking what I was reading, I answered honestly that two of...

Comedy is Hard: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 2

Spoilers for both seasons.

The first season of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt knocked my socks off. It was a show about women recovering from abuse, but this was no Jessica Jones. This was funny, irreverent, and clever without being nihilistic about it. One of the things I’ve loved about television recently is that we get to have so many different kinds of female heroes. It’s not just Supergirl OR Jessica Jones. It’s not just Buffy out there swinging by herself. We get a full range of female c...

How (and Why) I Write My Books Non-Chronologically

So I write the scenes in my books out of order. I had some vague idea that this wasn’t what most people did, but it was so normal to my process that I didn’t think it was very interesting. Yet I had a few people on Twitter ask me to break this process down because it sounded intriguing. It’s always funny when people ask you to break down your process because if they didn’t, you know… well, I wouldn’t interrogate it much.

I often try and start a novel from the beginning, but my brain isn’t alw...

The Slog on the Mountain, The Calm Before the Storm

It’s been fairly quiet around here recently. As it turns out, when you’re 6 weeks out from the publication of one book, copyediting another book, actively writing a third book, doing a Patreon story every month or so, and contemplating the projects you’d like to pitch next, you run out of time for non-essential writing things like blogging (remember that I STILL have a day job on top of all this!). Understandably, I’ve also been less interested in wading into the screaming mire that is every...