Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 23

The unBREAKable Kimmy Schmidt

It’s the Netflix original series with the most catchy theme song around, and the most unapologetically feminist comedy series I’ve seen since… I don’t even know when.

I would like to tell you that the backlash is officially getting pushback here in 2015, with shows like this sneaking onto the air, but let’s be real about how The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt finally saw daylight. Tina Fey is co-helming this one, and NBC ordered a bunch of episodes initially, but when they got the final product, t...

Is Becoming a Pro Writer Worth it?

I spend a lot of time talking craft and word count and publishing as a business online, and I do my fair share of exhausted-tweeting, like last night when I sat up until 10:30 signing bookplates for newsletter subscribers. Or on Saturday when I squeezed out my 5,000 words for the week in one go, annoyed that I hadn’t hit my goal of 10,000 because I desperately needed to sleep. I subtweet about lawyers and contracts on occasion, and talk far too much about marketing and how to build promotion...

How Book Titles Turn Browsers into Readers

There’s no “rule” for book titles. Not a single one. They aren’t copyrighted, so you can call your book whatever you want. Call it WAR AND PEACE or WIZARDS OF EARTHSEAor THE CLOUD ATLAS or whatever. You can do what you like.

Got that out of your system?

Now let’s get to work.

Titles are easy for folks to confuse. Ask the guy who wrote thisTHE CLOUD ATLAS how many more sales he got when this THE CLOUD ATLAS got a movie deal. Not a bad problem to have! But when you have two midlist books BOTH call...

Grist for the Mill: What America’s Next Top Model Can Teach You About Publishing

After writing 9,000 words on Saturday and spending Sunday doing, well, everything else I don’t have time for during the week, I sat down Sunday night for some trashy TV. I was out of Pawn Stars and Swamp People and Storage Wars, so I opted for season 6 of America’s Next Top Model, which is just one step up from something like Road Rules or Honey Boo-Boo.

One of the fascinating parts of this show for me on this go-round was noticing, again, how blatantly these young women are developed as grist...

It’s Always Been Awful Under the Boot: On the Fatigue of Everyday Horror

In May of 1921, a group of vigilantes burned down a wealthy community in Tulsa, Oklahoma over the course of about 16 hours. More than 800 people were admitted to local hospitals and police arrested and detained more than 6,000 people. The riots left 10,000 homeless and destroyed 35 city blocks. Up to 300 people died during those 16 hours.

But you don’t hear about this 16 hours of madness in any history book – inside Tulsa or outside it.

There were no camera phones. No Twitter. Not even a fax ma...

All Together Now: Building a More Pragmatic SFF Conversation

I’ve been thinking a bit about the “generational divide” among feminists in SFF in particular, though I have a post I want to write about Tumblr feminism as well that will go into this more in-depth. There’s the camp that says we’re all overreacting, that things aren’t so bad, and were never bad at all, that they never experienced any harassment or any bias against their work because they were women so they can’t see the issue, and then there’s the camp with the long and exhausting stories of...

Life on 10,000 Words a Day: How I’m Hacking My Writing Process

I’ve talked before about how I don’t write every day. This idea blows the minds of some folks who follow me on Twitter during the long marches right up before deadline, when I’m updating them with insane word counts while weeping into my whisky and mourning extravagant character deaths. But the reason I binge write – and, in fact, the reason it’s often necessary – is because I’ve tried writing every day many, many times before in my twenty years putting words onto pages, and I find it absurdl...

What I Get Paid For My Novels: Or, Why I’m Not Quitting My Day Job

In the spirit of honesty and transparency that’s often sorely lacking in the literary world, here’s what I’ve been paid for my novels for the last 7 years.

Many of you don’t realize I’ve had writing contracts for 7 years! That’s because the first contract I ever signed was canceled. They paid it out anyway. But it was nearly three more years before those books saw print, so my professional writing career didn’t start until 2011.

Needless to say, I’ve had a day job this entire time because I lik...

Books You Should Be Pre-Ordering

It’s 2015 folks, and hot damn, does time fly. One of the fabulous things about being an author is that I get to see some books early, and tell you about THE BEST ONES. Plenty of studies tell me not to talk about these books before you can click BUY NOW HOLD IN MY HOT HANDS. But I know how important pre-orders are to first-week sales for authors and their success.

PLUS I know how awesome you feel when you’re the first to buy something that EVERYONE will be talking about and you can be like, “Ye...

So You Think You Finished a Novel…

I completed all the chapters in my latest novel, The%20Empire Ascendant: Worldbreaker Saga #2EMPIRE ASCENDANT, last night. It’s the fourteenth book I’ve written, but just the fifth that will be published.

There’s a reason I had to write so many trunked novels that will never see the light of day before I wrote ones that did:

I don’t have a natural gift for this, folks. I’m not a genius. I’m here, now, through a combination of very hard work and luck.

Oh, I enjoy writing. I have a mad imagination...