Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 173

New Books For Old

I can tell the end of The Creature Court is on the horizon, because I've spent the day being hit in the head by other books. Important, exciting future books which are not yet. The trouble is, now I've answered the last questions about Book 3, my brain is telling me that the job is all done, which is patently not true.

Also both the books smacking me over the head today are the Wrong Books and in no way the one I planned to write next. For which I have sensibly been applying for grants...

Thirty-Tooth

I am now 32. The day has been celebrated by much and varying kinds of cake. It started out pretty badly after Jem pulled her becoming-traditional-Friday-night-teething-from-hell which meant basically I had to wake up every 1-2 hours to feed her or daub Bonjela on her gums and then feed her, and I woke up feeling wrung out and gnawed-upon. My honey and I horse traded for recovery naps and I won on account of being the one who had been chewed all night, plus the fact that I was the one...

Heading for an Ending

85827 / 120000

I've talked before about the variable nature of writing work and productivity. It's a sad fact of this job that it can be hard to tell whether a particular task will take you ten minutes, three hours, a week, a month, or a year.

Last night I had one of the most productive ten minutes of my writing career thus far!

I've been working away on book 3 for some time, and while I had a general idea of where I was going, I wasn't entirely sure how the whole story was going to wrap u...

A Book of Endings, by Deborah Biancotti

I promised myself I would get to this one eventually. I had read most of the individual stories before the release of this, Deborah Biancotti's first short story collection, and I read all of the new stories last year, as I read most original short stories, in electronic form and in a rush, in order to sift out the best ones for Last Short Story blogging.

But that's the whole point of a short story collection. It doesn't matter if you've read the stories before. They are being presented...

Yes, I did need another podcast, I can stop any time I like!

I've been working on a podcast project to celebrate the release (NEXT WEEK EEEEEE) of Power and Majesty. You can listen over at my Creature Court blog. It's just a little one by Galactic Suburbia standards – this first episode has me talking a bit about the upcoming release of the book, and reading Chapter One.

I'm planning to do about three more of these over the next month. If anyone has any special requests for the episodes, or any questions they'd like me to answer during one of the...

Our gallant heroes return

In case you missed me bouncing and squeeing on Twitter last night, my favourite podcast The Sofanauts is back! The new episode features the legendary Tony C Smith chatting with Cheryl Morgan and our own Jonathan Strahan about the Nebula results, and the changing face of the SF awards landscape.

While it's not quite the old format, which I was rather attached to, and it didn't have Jeremy Tolbert and Jeff VanderMeer ranting about Asimovs, it was still an excellent, interesting conversation...

Giants and Superstars

Farah Mendelsohn linked to a post announcing a new book of important reprints in our field:

"Long before they were household names, all of the superstar science fiction and fantasy authors in this anthology were just fans with stories and dreams. Now, for the first time ever, fifteen of the genre's most important authors have come together to show off their first published SF stories, many of them rare and never before collected… An invaluable look at the origins of speculative fiction's...

The White Cat, by Holly Black

Cassel is the only member of his family who isn't a curse worker. That means he's the only one who isn't a criminal. Except for the fact that he killed his best friend Lila three years ago, and still doesn't remember why…

Now he's sleepwalking, his school are trying to kick him out, his family are paying way more interest in him than they ever have, and he's not altogether sure he can con his way out of this one.

And then there's the cat.

I've always enjoyed Holly Black's work, though...

A Question of Canon-Building

In our most recent episode of Galactic Suburbia, Alisa pointed us towards this Mind Meld post that asked a variety of people which 10 SF books should be part of every fan's library. Alisa noted that while the women asked this question generally mentioned books from a variety of authors, and more than one female writer especially, no man asked in this first part included more than one book by a woman – and that book was always Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

While this does point t...

Too Much Birthday Cake (is actually possible)

A double birthday party weekend is always something to be trepidatious about. Ours started badly, with Jem pretty much screaming the whole night on Friday and continuing to wake up every hour or so through Saturday morning, when we were already wrecked. I pled 'too wobbly to drive' and sent my honey off to escort Raeli to her first party of the season, and stayed home to cuddle the screamy baby and watch Becoming Jane.

I enjoyed the movie, especially for an angst-ridden James McAvoy, (and...