Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 20
September 15, 2015
What Will You Sacrifice? The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Reading is a very personal experience. And so we start here, with the personal:
What would you sacrifice, to achieve your life’s ambition?
I know what I’ll sacrifice for mine, because I’ve already done it, and it is this:
I will sacrifice everything. All of it.
And I will never look back.
I didn’t have any hobbies in school outside of writing, or many friends. I came home and I wrote. I wrote in class. I wrote during summer breaks. I wrote on vacation. I wrote when other people went to birthd...
September 14, 2015
New Story Covers: Self-Pub/Hybrid/Trad Chat
After finishing the cover for “The Judgement of Gods and Monsters,” my second Patreon-funded short story, I got a lot of compliments on the cover, and afew people asked who had done it for me.
I’m still pretty cash poor around these parts, funneling most of my money toward getting out of debt, so I’ve been doing these on my own for some time. What I realized with that cover, and with the one I did for “The Light Brigade” is that I had leveled up enough at this skill that it was probably time...
September 8, 2015
The Crucible
Today is September 8th. The sequel to THE MIRROR EMPIRE, EMPIRE ASCENDANT, comes out in 26 days. The first excerpt just went live at Tor.com. Goodreads is giving away 5 free copies to celebrate the mass market release of MIRROR EMPIRE that dropped September 1. I start a social media countdown at 7 days out, at which point begins a 32 blogpost, 3 interview, 4 podcast promotional tour. That’s 19 days from now.
In 38 days, I have a story due for a space opera anthology coming out next year.
In 5...
September 2, 2015
Do Your Fucking Work and Fuck the Rest
Putting this here for reference because I’ve been seeing a lot of people arguing about useless know-nothing bullshit lately, and falling headfirst into this trap.
Listen. The haters are here to keep us hating back, to keep us from doing our work. They are a distraction. You are punching at clouds. You are punching at bullshit that you could hit a whole lot better with your work.
Do the work.
Ignore the distractions.
They are trying to keep you from doing your work.
Toni Morrison says it with...
On Social Media Breaks, and the Pressure to Stay Connected
As someone who’s adept at using the internet to connect with folks and broaden my audience (I can safely make that statement without disclaimers now), you might think I’m one of those tense, big-eyed folks slavering at the keyboard screaming, “YOU MUST BE JACKED INTO THE MATRIX AT ALL TIMES OR RISK OBSCURITY.” But one of the things I’ve kept top of mind throughout my career is this: the writing comes first, and in order to write I need to be sane. The marketing brain and the writing brain are...
September 1, 2015
Bad Plants in New Packages and Other Cool Stuff
The mass market paperback edition of the grim, parallel-universes colliding epic THE MIRROR EMPIRE is out today and includes a bonus first chapter of EMPIRE ASCENDANT.
READ IT AND WEEP MY FRIENDS.
EMPIRE ASCENDANT can now also be pre-ordered from Audible, and will be out the same day as the ebook and paper version, October 6th.
As this is a Tuesday, that also means a bunch of otherBRAND SPANKING NEWbooks are hitting the shelves today, including these reads:
August 31, 2015
Books You Should Be Reading
In a land where geological apocalypses recur every 100-300 years, one society has survived by enslaving the planet’s geomancers to try and prevent apocalyptic events from disrupting their lavish society. Get ready for a ruthless, pulls-no-punches exploration of slavery, madness, and betrayal told with some very clever narrative tricks that will leave you impressed with the author’s gutsy confidence. As I was reading THE FIFTH SEASON I couldn’t help but feel I was witnessing a...
To Blurb or Not to Blurb: My Book Reading & Rec Policy
Sometime in the last year, the number of requests I’ve gotten to blurb or simply early-read books has gone up tremendously. For folks who can read a book in a three or four hour stretch, this may not be a big deal, but unless I’m in the midst of a gripping made-for-me book, it takes me a long time to finish things (and even then, bare minimum, it takes me 3-7 days). Add in all my other deadlines, especially here at year’s end, and I’m just overwhelmed.
I’ve been hearing a lot of murmurs at co...
August 5, 2015
The Future of Work is Here – and It Sucks
I woke up this morning and read this essay “Why Your Rent is so High and Your Pay is So Low” and nodded and sighed as I read it. It blows away a lot of assumptions held by older people in particular about “kids today” and “how they don’t work hard enough.” The joke I saw on Twitter summed up this position perfectly:
Baby Boomer: “In my day I worked three jobs!”
Millennial: “I fucking WISH I could GETthree jobs!”
I got my Master’s Degree and started temp work at $11 an hour. This was after wor...
July 28, 2015
Do Pro Writers Really Not Know if their Work is any Good?
So I wanted to talk about this phenomenon that I and many other writers experience right before a book drops. I felt this most when I wrote RAPTURE, and I’m here again with EMPIRE ASCENDANT, because these were books I wrote and rewrote massively right before deadline. It meant I didn’t have time to sit back and look at them from a great distance and get an objective look at them. With GOD’S WAR I literally had years of waiting between draft revisions as the book was shopped, picked up, droppe...
