Kameron Hurley's Blog, page 39
July 17, 2012
Whine, Whine, Whine: Why I Stress About the Writing Life
I’ve been going through some behind-the-scenes growing pains in my whole writing fiction career thing right now (a popular place to be at when one finishes a trilogy, I hear), which good sense and propriety says not to detail too publicly. This is against my nature, as longtime readers will know, so I’ve had to deal with venting privately to family and friends. Which, if you’re somebody who processes things best by writing them down, isn’t ideal at all.
Suffice to say that dealing with this “q...
July 12, 2012
Writing Conflict
I was always OK at writing the Big Conflict in a novel. You know, the war, the genocide, the revolution, the revolt, the coup, the big hulking thing that the novel centered around. But it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write about interpersonal tension, and longer still to realize that it was often the interpersonal stuff that interests me most, and keeps people reading.
I’m currently in the process of creating a “what do they want?” cheatsheet for the characters in my next novel, L...
July 11, 2012
Starve Better
A couple years back, I had an old high school classmate email me out of the blue and ask if I could offer himsome tips on writing, because he really wanted to be a writer so he could “Work from anywhere and make money typing on the beach in Hawaii.”
No, really, that’s what he said.
This email made me so angry that I just deleted it without a response.
By that time, I’d been trying to make a living at writing for nearly fifteen years. I’d gotten over a hundred rejectionsand stopped keeping count....
July 10, 2012
“You’re No Different Than That Thing in the Cellar”: Thoughts on “The Woman”
Note: this is a film that is about violence against women. Triggers ahoy.
Long-time readers know that I get really pissed off with creative work that employs random violence against women as some kind of lazy shorthand. Creators do this for all types of reasons. You don’t have to work too hard at characterizing your bad guy if you just have him randomly rape somebody. We all get our ire up and go, “Yep, that’s the bad guy!” without caring too much who he raped or why. In fact, we generally hea...
Books you Should be Reading
In an ideal world, I’d write up whole blog posts about each of these, but for the sake of brevity, here’s some great books I’ve read this year that you may love, in no particular order:
Ian Tregillis’s Bitter Seeds is… a great book. The Nazis have invested in a supersoldier war program that exploits and tortures young children, effectively turning them into Xmen who battle the Allies. On the other side, England is calling on its old-school socererors and their loose command with the creepy “fa...
July 5, 2012
The Gender Breakdown of Who’s Reading God’s War
In a discussion with my UK editor yesterday about the differences in the reading composition of UK/US readers, I said that even though I’dexpected that most of my readers forGOD’S WARwould be women because of Nyx and her bad-ass self, 90% of the fan mail I got was from men. This got me to thinking about what exactly the fan makeup of the book really was.
In fact, it made me a little worried that my uber-kickass-matriarchy had totally failed to reach the women like me who I’d really wanted to c...
July 3, 2012
Swords and Sociology, Redux
I was reading a well-known science fiction author last night and found myself repeatedly bumped out of the story by all the techno-babble. I’m not averse to techno-babble, mind, it’s just that I didn’t buy that this POV character viewed the world through techno-babble glasses. If you’re staring at a sunset, it’s highly unlikely that you’re thinking all about the technology that allows you to see it, or the different gases and substances in the atmosphere around you, unless that’s your job or...
June 27, 2012
WorldBuilding 301: The Difference is in the Details
Last night I was watching a show about emotions – how people overcome grief and trauma, how depression and happiness shape our lives. The parent of one of the VA Tech students who was killed a few years back said he talked to a nurse who said that the most unnerving part of her experience in responding to the shooting was not triaging the bodies, or processing the dead. It was walking the line of thirty-four dead college students and hearing their cell phones going off; constantly, incessantl...
June 25, 2012
In Which I Share My Hate Mail
This is the visage of a repulsive, irrelevant writer. BEWARE!!
I used to get a lot of hate mail and death threats, so when I got my latest hate note in response to this guest post of all things, I just shrugged it off, clicked the “spam” button and went on with my life.
But then I saw somebody on Twitter post something about how trolling was like bullying. And, in fact, when I re-read this latest note, it did read a lot like something I’d have gotten in middle school. It was like somebody on th...
June 18, 2012
Deals, Deals Deals: GOD’S WAR UK & Audio Editions
I’m pleased to share that GOD’S WAR, INFIDEL and RAPTURE will be published in the UK (and the British Commonwealth) by Ebury Publishing, a subsidiary of Random House, UK. For those keeping an Irony Meter handy, my first contract for GOD’S WAR, which was cancelled and resulted in us heading over to Night Shade, was originally signed with Bantam-Spectra here in the US… Bantam-Spectra is also a division of Random House.
It’s a crazy, crazy business, folks.
In more Good News, Audible has also bough...
