Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 33

Magic. Mystery. Polyamory: How to Talk About Your Next Book

I did my first radio interview this weekend (it won’t go live for three weeks. Patience, grasshopper). I’ve done a podcast before, but radio was new, and I was pretty excited. So I asked ahead of time for the questions so I could prepare some responses. Which, you know, you should always do.

What invariably happens in interviews is that somebody asks me, “Who are your favorite authors?” or “Who are your favorite women authors?” and I can only think of like three people on the spot, and in the...

When a “big name” author ranted about my review of their book

It might come as a shock to some, but I haven’t always been a published author (ha ha). Oh, sure, I’ve been writing and sending out stories for 18 years, but it’s only since 2011 that I’ve had a book (and then three) on the shelves. Here on my blog – which I’ve had since 2004 – I dug into books and skewered the abysmal gender politics of pretty much every SF/F book I read. Cause let’s face it – nobody’s perfect, and SF/F suffers often.

By analyzing what other authors did wrong (and right) it h...

Why I’m Not Writing YA (though I often wish I was)

When you’re told that all of your friendsare out ridingFalcor the Luck Dragon to Disneyworld, where they will stay in Cinderella’s Castle and eat bon-bons all day while getting escorted to the front of every line via air-conditioned pumpkin carriage, it’s really, really hard not to go with them, even though you know Florida is really hot, you don’t really like bon-bons, and you know they only ride the rides you don’t like. Because while you’re sitting at home, looking at your sales numbers an...

Why Every Storyteller Should Be Watching Orphan Black

Warning: Contains mostly minor spoilers. If you haven’t watched at least to the first few episodes of the season of Orphan Black, stop reading now, go to Amazon Instant, and buy them. Done? Great, now can keep reading.

I love to rant about crap on the Internet. Here’s how this thing I loved fucked up. Here’s how it could be better. Here’s the whitewashing, the sexism, the bullshit. It’s like putting up a dartboard and throwing darts all day. Fun, for awhile, but then it gets tedious. By focusi...

Ponies for Everyone: Scrubbing Women from My Little Pony Fandom

So I’ve been wanting to address the entrance of dudes into My Little Pony (MLP) fandom for awhile now. I’m a fan of lots more fans in a fandom, especially a traditionally female one. It’s awesome to see guys excited about a show that’s about friendship and magic. The more the merrier. Yet, like any other woman-loved-fandom or job-traditionally-held-by-women that suddenly interests dudes (computer programming, anyone?) I can’t help but get a chill every time somebody conflates My Little Pony f...

The Writing Life Readers Don’t See

It’s perhaps not a huge secret that the last couple of years have been rough for me on the writing front. Writing careers are sticky things. They move slowly. Ever….so… slowly. For an impatient Twitter addict like me, the slow crawl of writing a book – let alone publishing one – can be agonizing, and the longer I slog through it, the more I understand why even established authors are happy to self-pub. Your work gets to market faster and you have a lot more control over it. Getting a check fr...

Practice Makes Permanent

If you say you want to be a writer, people will tell you to write. That’s sound advice. Writers write shit. But what a lot of folks fail to mention is that there are plenty of people writing hundreds of thousands of words a year who just keep writing the same shitty words, the same shitty books, the same shitty unpublished (and sometimes published) shit. They never get any better. It’s just churn. They stagnate.

Back at Clarion, Carol Emshwiller said something I didn’t really understand at the...

Six Chapters Til Brooklyn

I’m down to the last six chapters on The Beast. This may be one of those “stay up until 5am just to finish the fucking thing” days.

My partner says he’ll buy me 30 days of World of Warcraft the minute I finish, even if it’s 5am, so there’s a motivator, too. As are my social media passwords.

It’s a lovely day today, and I’m up early to take out the dogs, buy mums, exercise, and shop for the week’s meals. But after that it’s book time. Which is good, because tomorrow I have a big freelancing job...

What’s Happening in the Land of the Lost

I’ve been spending a great deal of time working on my latest project, a fantasy epic that’s already weighing in at 160K. For reference, God’s War was about 98K. So this is a bear of a book for me. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve picked up enough freelance work to hire an assistant, which has helped speed this agonizing process along immeasurably, and she will be thanked profusely in the acknowledgements to this next book. I’m also spending a great deal of time reading about military strateg...

Yes, I’m Writing a Book…

Which is why things have been so quiet here. I was gunning to be done with the huge revised monster and sending it off to my agent before heading out for my trip this week, but that hasn’t happened.

All I can say to everybody is, I think the wait will be worth it.

Until then, enjoy one of the fine views that’s inspired this book: