Kate Elliott's Blog, page 34
August 19, 2011
Powells Books Signing 9/20: Cold Fire
I'll be signing at Powells Books (Cedar Hills) with the charming and delightful Blake Charlton (SPELLBOUND) on Tuesday September 20.
I have been assured that early copies of COLD FIRE will be available. If you can't make it to the signing, Powells does mail order.
I will also bring copies of the Bonus Chapter** for everyone who 1) buys a copy of COLD FIRE and 2) wants one.
** there is a Bonus Chapter not in the published book which fits into the story. It's not in the book because it's not written from Cat's point of view and it contains explicit sexual content.
I have been assured that early copies of COLD FIRE will be available. If you can't make it to the signing, Powells does mail order.
I will also bring copies of the Bonus Chapter** for everyone who 1) buys a copy of COLD FIRE and 2) wants one.
** there is a Bonus Chapter not in the published book which fits into the story. It's not in the book because it's not written from Cat's point of view and it contains explicit sexual content.
August 17, 2011
An Interview and a Post
I've posted at the Orbit Books blog on Maps, Fantasy, Culture, & Boundaries, a Seminar with Russell Kirkpatrick.
The writer is in a constant process of determining what is important enough to be visible.
Think about visibility. If a place isn't on the map, then you can't go there on the map. If a place isn't on YOUR map, the map in your mind of what matters about the world you want to write about, then you the writer can certainly not go to places you've never thought about, places you think don't matter enough to warrant notice. Matters that aren't visible to you.
I believe that it is crucial to pause and reflect on what may be invisible in your own personal map as well as the map you are creating. What do you want readers to see? What do you want to see? What are you seeing? What could you be seeing that isn't visible to you right now?
At Tor.com, Peter Orullian interviews me (at some length).
I absolutely censor myself, and I don't say that because I'm proud of it. I say that because it bothers me that I do. But I don't do it because I believe things written down can insinuate themselves into the world as a form of contagion. I propose that the opposite is more often true: Our silence about some of the most provoking and terrible things allows injustice to fester and even grow.
The writer is in a constant process of determining what is important enough to be visible.
Think about visibility. If a place isn't on the map, then you can't go there on the map. If a place isn't on YOUR map, the map in your mind of what matters about the world you want to write about, then you the writer can certainly not go to places you've never thought about, places you think don't matter enough to warrant notice. Matters that aren't visible to you.
I believe that it is crucial to pause and reflect on what may be invisible in your own personal map as well as the map you are creating. What do you want readers to see? What do you want to see? What are you seeing? What could you be seeing that isn't visible to you right now?
At Tor.com, Peter Orullian interviews me (at some length).
I absolutely censor myself, and I don't say that because I'm proud of it. I say that because it bothers me that I do. But I don't do it because I believe things written down can insinuate themselves into the world as a form of contagion. I propose that the opposite is more often true: Our silence about some of the most provoking and terrible things allows injustice to fester and even grow.
August 6, 2011
Teaser sentences for Cold Fire
FYI if you're on Twitter or Facebook. I've started tweeting one sentence a day from COLD FIRE on Twitter under the hashtag #ColdFire. The tweets show up on Facebook, although not as a neat hashtag search.
The sentences, by the way, are randomly chosen from the text, so they're all over the place.
The sentences, by the way, are randomly chosen from the text, so they're all over the place.
August 4, 2011
"If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are"
Clarkesworld Magazine has published Part Two of its Epic Fantasy Roundtable. This is an impressively massive undertaking by Jeremy L.C. Jones, and I want to again give special attention to the fact that the roundtable includes one agent, one editor, and 26 writers of whom half are female and half male (2 that I know of are PoC).
In the July Part One to be found here, Jones asked all the writers why they wrote epic fantasy. My answer wasn't included in that part because, as it turned out, it was used in Part Two.
I want to highlight part of my answer here, and talk a little more about what I said and what it means for how I write, in light of an email conversation I have been having recently with writer Michelle Sagara West![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380451598i/2033940.gif)
msagara
.
I said:
I was an outdoor, athletic child: I preferred to play physically active imagination games outdoors. But, against that, the cultural norms of the day reminded me constantly that the things I loved to do were appropriate for boys, not for girls. People forget this. So in the beginning, as it were, fantasy novels were a way for me to escape the rigid constraints put on girls. More importantly, I could write my own stories and build my own worlds. If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are, I'm not sure you can quite understand why world-building and writing epic fantasy is so attractive and in its way a form of chain-breaking. But it was, and it is.
Long ago I made a kind of intrinsic promise to my 16 year old self that I would never betray her by leaving her out of the stories I was then beginning to write and that she loved. By which I hasten to add that I do not mean that I write stories with myself as a thinly disguised version of a main character. What I meant then and mean now is that I would never neglect or diminish or elide the female perspective in my books. That I would not bow to the idea, prevalent far more then than now, that there were proper and "natural" stories for girls and women to enjoy, but that male focused stories and perspectives were more naturally Worthy and Important. And that girls and women didn't belong there (except possibly as props or as rewards for the men).
I have to be honest. I think epic fantasy is still by and large written with a male gaze. With a few notable exceptions, unexpected amounts of it still don't do a particularly good job passing the Bechdel Test despite the historical evidence that women lived during the past.
I'm thrilled by the explosion of popularity of genres like urban fantasy, paranormal, Young Adult, and romantic fantasy (and the huge numbers of readers who crossover from the unfairly maligned romance genre to read widely throughout other genres), because they are all great genres for the female perspective--and the male as well.
But epic fantasy is the genre of my heart.
I write epic fantasy the way I do because I remember being that 16 year old girl who almost never saw people like her in the stories she wanted to read and thereby experience.
In the July Part One to be found here, Jones asked all the writers why they wrote epic fantasy. My answer wasn't included in that part because, as it turned out, it was used in Part Two.
I want to highlight part of my answer here, and talk a little more about what I said and what it means for how I write, in light of an email conversation I have been having recently with writer Michelle Sagara West
msagara
.I said:
I was an outdoor, athletic child: I preferred to play physically active imagination games outdoors. But, against that, the cultural norms of the day reminded me constantly that the things I loved to do were appropriate for boys, not for girls. People forget this. So in the beginning, as it were, fantasy novels were a way for me to escape the rigid constraints put on girls. More importantly, I could write my own stories and build my own worlds. If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are, I'm not sure you can quite understand why world-building and writing epic fantasy is so attractive and in its way a form of chain-breaking. But it was, and it is.
Long ago I made a kind of intrinsic promise to my 16 year old self that I would never betray her by leaving her out of the stories I was then beginning to write and that she loved. By which I hasten to add that I do not mean that I write stories with myself as a thinly disguised version of a main character. What I meant then and mean now is that I would never neglect or diminish or elide the female perspective in my books. That I would not bow to the idea, prevalent far more then than now, that there were proper and "natural" stories for girls and women to enjoy, but that male focused stories and perspectives were more naturally Worthy and Important. And that girls and women didn't belong there (except possibly as props or as rewards for the men).
I have to be honest. I think epic fantasy is still by and large written with a male gaze. With a few notable exceptions, unexpected amounts of it still don't do a particularly good job passing the Bechdel Test despite the historical evidence that women lived during the past.
I'm thrilled by the explosion of popularity of genres like urban fantasy, paranormal, Young Adult, and romantic fantasy (and the huge numbers of readers who crossover from the unfairly maligned romance genre to read widely throughout other genres), because they are all great genres for the female perspective--and the male as well.
But epic fantasy is the genre of my heart.
I write epic fantasy the way I do because I remember being that 16 year old girl who almost never saw people like her in the stories she wanted to read and thereby experience.
August 2, 2011
Koude Magie
I should also note that COLD MAGIC is available in Dutch as KOUDE MAGIE.
Published by Luitingh, it has almost the same cover as the trade paper version. It's a summer book, fittingly. Also my first Dutch translation. I can't tell you how the translation is. I don't read Dutch.
Published by Luitingh, it has almost the same cover as the trade paper version. It's a summer book, fittingly. Also my first Dutch translation. I can't tell you how the translation is. I don't read Dutch.
August 1, 2011
Indulging the Draft
As I have often said, I write long in first draft. I revise a lot, and I find that I am revising more with each book in large part because I'm getting better at it. If I don't know how to fix something, I can't fix it or in some cases can't even see that it needs fixing. If I do know and can see, then I can.
With TRAITORS' GATE I found that I knew the book and plot so well that while I did write a very long first draft and then cut a huge amount (the first draft was 350,000 words and I cut 50,000 words in revisions -- which, yes, still makes the final book about 300,000 words in length), I was able to focus on what I needed as I wrote so there were no extraneous scenes or conversations. (What did I cut, you may ask? I cut one newly-introduced secondary character by folding the things she needed to do with those of another characters, by tightening up and combining conversations, and by cutting excess verbiage, as I am the empress of excess verbiage).
Sometimes, as with COLD FIRE, I have to indulge myself, by which I mean write things that I'm pretty sure I will have to cut later just because I need to write them either to tell them to myself or because I want the emotional satisfaction of having written those bits.
I'm realizing this is true with COLD STEEL as well. There are scenes and exchange I have to tell myself, even if I have to cut them later. The risk in this course of action lies in my own emotional attachment to interactions or scenes or even characters that probably could be cut but to which I have become unreasonably attached. But if I don't do it, then I can get bogged down through the process of yearning for things I'm denying myself. And while denial works just fine with a drafting process like the one I used for TRAITORS' GATE, when all the emotional points I'm going to be hitting wrap exactly around the spine of the main plot, it does not work so well with these books. Why? Because I have constrained myself by writing in first person, and so there are scenes and exchanges--not to mention points of view--which lie outside the purview of the focus necessitated by the point of view.
With TRAITORS' GATE I found that I knew the book and plot so well that while I did write a very long first draft and then cut a huge amount (the first draft was 350,000 words and I cut 50,000 words in revisions -- which, yes, still makes the final book about 300,000 words in length), I was able to focus on what I needed as I wrote so there were no extraneous scenes or conversations. (What did I cut, you may ask? I cut one newly-introduced secondary character by folding the things she needed to do with those of another characters, by tightening up and combining conversations, and by cutting excess verbiage, as I am the empress of excess verbiage).
Sometimes, as with COLD FIRE, I have to indulge myself, by which I mean write things that I'm pretty sure I will have to cut later just because I need to write them either to tell them to myself or because I want the emotional satisfaction of having written those bits.
I'm realizing this is true with COLD STEEL as well. There are scenes and exchange I have to tell myself, even if I have to cut them later. The risk in this course of action lies in my own emotional attachment to interactions or scenes or even characters that probably could be cut but to which I have become unreasonably attached. But if I don't do it, then I can get bogged down through the process of yearning for things I'm denying myself. And while denial works just fine with a drafting process like the one I used for TRAITORS' GATE, when all the emotional points I'm going to be hitting wrap exactly around the spine of the main plot, it does not work so well with these books. Why? Because I have constrained myself by writing in first person, and so there are scenes and exchanges--not to mention points of view--which lie outside the purview of the focus necessitated by the point of view.
Cold Magic Giveaway & Cold Fire teasers
Bitten Books is giving away COLD MAGIC and PROPHECY OF THE SISTERS (Michelle Zink). You can enter until August 7. Contest is open internationally.
On Twitter & Facebook, I am posting one (random) sentence a day from Cold Fire in a countdown toward USA publication on Sept 26. UK/Oz/NZ publication is Sept 1. However, it is likely the USA edition will appear in bookstores earlier than Sept 26. However, the ebook will not be released until Sept 26 as far as I know (in the USA market).
I am Kate Elliott on Facebook and KateElliottSFF on Twitter.
If you are absolutely not on either of those platforms (and there is no reason why you should be if you don't want to be), and if there is actual interest, I can post one each day here, too, but since they're very short I'll only do it if there are folks here who aren't on the other platforms and who actually want to read the sentences. So let me know if you are. And if you aren't interested, or if you can read them on FB or Twitter, then SAY NOTHING. ;)
On Twitter & Facebook, I am posting one (random) sentence a day from Cold Fire in a countdown toward USA publication on Sept 26. UK/Oz/NZ publication is Sept 1. However, it is likely the USA edition will appear in bookstores earlier than Sept 26. However, the ebook will not be released until Sept 26 as far as I know (in the USA market).
I am Kate Elliott on Facebook and KateElliottSFF on Twitter.
If you are absolutely not on either of those platforms (and there is no reason why you should be if you don't want to be), and if there is actual interest, I can post one each day here, too, but since they're very short I'll only do it if there are folks here who aren't on the other platforms and who actually want to read the sentences. So let me know if you are. And if you aren't interested, or if you can read them on FB or Twitter, then SAY NOTHING. ;)
July 29, 2011
Treat
LJ must be fixed and/or no longer under attack. How can I tell? I'm getting comment spam again. I've kept anonymous commenting on so far, despite the really annoying spam, because this is my main blog and I know there are people who aren't registered on lj and don't want to be, who do occasionally want to comment.
I had intended to post every day in July (as I did last year) but the Situation prevented that. Maybe I'll go for August instead. Or maybe I'll just concentrate on writing fiction.
Today's amusing story.
As you know, our schnauzer is exceptionally intelligent (although also notably neurotic). One of the things he does that he truly loves to do is fetch the paper in the morning. We open the door, tell him to "get the newspaper" a couple of times while gesturing, and then off he goes in sheer schnauzer-waggling delight at having this Important Task to do. He brings the newspaper in his mouth (shades of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep) back into the house, and gets a treat. A good deal all around.
For reasons too complicated to go into here, Twin B came over early this morning, too early for me to even be out of bed yet.
So eventually I did get up and come downstairs.
Me to spouse (in the kitchen): "Did the dog get the newspaper yet?"
Spouse: "No. Twin B brought it in when he got here."
Me to Twin B: "Did you get a treat?"
Twin B (rolling his eyes): "Dad offered me a treat, too."
I had intended to post every day in July (as I did last year) but the Situation prevented that. Maybe I'll go for August instead. Or maybe I'll just concentrate on writing fiction.
Today's amusing story.
As you know, our schnauzer is exceptionally intelligent (although also notably neurotic). One of the things he does that he truly loves to do is fetch the paper in the morning. We open the door, tell him to "get the newspaper" a couple of times while gesturing, and then off he goes in sheer schnauzer-waggling delight at having this Important Task to do. He brings the newspaper in his mouth (shades of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep) back into the house, and gets a treat. A good deal all around.
For reasons too complicated to go into here, Twin B came over early this morning, too early for me to even be out of bed yet.
So eventually I did get up and come downstairs.
Me to spouse (in the kitchen): "Did the dog get the newspaper yet?"
Spouse: "No. Twin B brought it in when he got here."
Me to Twin B: "Did you get a treat?"
Twin B (rolling his eyes): "Dad offered me a treat, too."
July 27, 2011
Going to Places & Not Seeing the Sites
On Twitter this evening, I had a tweet conversation with Lavie Tidhar, who was stuck in the Athens airport with no time or ability even to do a crash few hours of sightseeing. But, he pointed out, he'd been in China and never seen the Great Wall, and in Paris and never gotten close to the Eiffel Tower.
What well known place have you been and missed its most (or a most) famous landmark?
What well known place have you been and missed its most (or a most) famous landmark?
