Book Promotion Notes from the First Week

Maybe not as timely as it could be, since everyone’s finishing up Nano novels, but just in case: 8 Ways to Outline a Novel on Litreactor

Some of you have two weeks left to sub to She Walks in Shadows. All woman Lovecraft antho, pays 6 cents a word (pro rate). Guidelines.

Good piece about science-fiction writer Nnedi Okarafor on BookRiot. “I came to her work at a time when the debate about a woman’s place in the world of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction was getting a lot of buzz. I realized that I’d read a few of the women who’d made their mark in that realm ““ Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jo Walton- but I felt as though I hadn’t gone far enough. Okorafor’s stories have encouraged me to travel further down that path.”

Interested in a writer’s retreat? Here’s a pretty good list of them.

Ray Bradbury talks about creativity and how our motives shape our writing. On the same site, Umberto Eco talks about the pleasures of maps of imaginary places.

What happens in your head while you’re reading? Your brain on stories.

David Cronenburg is interviewed about his process of novel writing, as well as finding beauty in unlikely corners. “There are many realities we need to ignore in order to function. Whenever we’re reminded of that, however obliquely, it is very disturbing””there’s a real dissonance that’s happening there. But of course it’s part of the function of art to keep that dissonance happening.”

An article with a lot of resonance for the self-pub versus traditional publishing argument about day jobs, found via M.C.A. Hogarth.

In The Atlantic, Jeff VanderMeer talks about the uncanny power of weird fiction.

Great piece about writers and their real influences, the things that shape their writing.. “I have a theory: the thing that makes you a unique writer hasn’t got so much to do with your influences as it does with how you became a writer in the first place. I think your preferences””your obsessions””come just as much from the first sorts of things you consumed and were passionate about. Whether that’s pop music, comics, “lowbrow” fiction, soap operas, or anything else, the thing that matters most is what started you writing stories.”

This is going to be a longer, 8-10k word space opera piece that I got asked to do.

Most people called her Phoenix. Her former crew used “Captain” before that and “Sir” afterward. Her hair was silver – not white, but genuine, metallic silver, a long fall against her pale blue skin, the color of a shadow on a piece of willow ware, that made her seems ageless despite the century that lay upon her, and all those decades of pirating.

They said she had been the best slideboard rider of her time, and perhaps the best battleship pilot of all time, back before her parents and lover were killed and she turned rogue.

They said she had done terrible things in her pirate days.

They said she’d been ruthless in her rise to power, moving up the chain from god knows where, an origin she’d never, ever spoken of to anyone, not even her own daughter. She’d killed some captains, slept with others, called in favors and maneuvered and betrayed and seized power with a brutal efficiency that still underlay what now seemed a calm and orderly, rules-bound government.

They said she had killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, or people — sometimes at a distance, sometimes up close, with knife or fist. They said she’d killed a crew member when the shuttle she was in needed its mass reduced and the man hadn’t even argued, just nodded and stepped into the airlock, never said a word as the door closed and the lock cycled, just stared in at his captain as she stared back.

They said time had mellowed her.

They said working with Mukopadhyay, even though he was crazy as a spiral comet, had mellowed her.

They said helping colonize a whole planet, setting up its government, the rich and intricate system that now encompassed the whole solar system called Shiva, had mellowed her.

Not to mention motherhood, they said, a change which no woman escapes going through during pregnancy. It alters the hormones in your system. Softens you. Makes you less rash, less harsh. Takes away even the sharpest edge, not to mention the hormonal craziness, which some women never recover from, after all.

Sure, changes you in a good way, they were quick to say.

But softer, definitely softer.

She’d never do those sorts of things now.

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