I’m in the middle of getting ready to go to Chicago this weekend for the Nebulas, but I just got word that prints of Lauren Saint Onge’s wonderful cover art for the Subterranean special editions of the Ancilary books are available for purchase.


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So, uh, this is a thing that happened. I mean, not just Ancillary Mercy being a finalist, which is super awesome (and thank you to the readers who voted for it!), but also, look at the novelette category.

Yeah, my story “Another Word for World” is a finalist for the Locus Awards this year. Like novel, the other works in the category are pretty ( Read more... )

The other day, while I was reading a (published) work of fiction, I came across a passage that seemed to me was a result of the author being determined to write the piece in 3rd person limited, but wanting very badly to do something that would have benefitted very much from the piece being in omniscient POV. Instead, the author had kluged together ( Read more... )

I just spent an awesome week in Japan, and an awesome weekend at Hal-Con, where I was a guest of honor! It was pretty excellent. It’s a fairly small convention, well-run, and they took great care of me. Which was extra-important considering I speak about two words of Japanese; I can, if pressed, say “Hello” and “Thank you.”

The convention put ( Read more... )

Quite frequently someone at a reading will ask me if I’ll ever explain about that icon Breq is carrying. And the answer is, I already have.


Residents of Noage Itray could look up and see the ballcourt hanging ten miles overhead, four meters wide and fifty long from goal line to goal line. Stands stretched along each side, row upon row of seats ( Read more... )

So, by a certain point it became obvious that when I would set to work on a fantasy piece, I would end up centering it around a particular animal. Maybe two animals. This was handy, because at the time I was writing these a trip to the zoo was generally greeted with enthusiasm by most of the other people in the house, though they would sometimes ( Read more... )

“The Endangered Camp” is one of my few short science fiction pieces.

Back in the day, when I first decided to try to sell short fiction in earnest, I ran across an interview with then-F&SF slushreader John Joseph Adams.  F&SF was of course one of the venues I wanted very badly to sell to, and I had not managed to get anything past JJA and onto then ( Read more... )

Last time I mentioned working diligently during a particular period to write shorter and shorter, until I reached the (for me) region of ultimate fiction shortness. As a result of that effort, I have several very short pieces out there. One of them was for a rather unusual anthology, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. Pieces took the form of entries ( Read more... )

I had a fabulous time at Vericon last weekend! I got to hang out with some wonderful folks and have some great conversations, and it was just overall a wonderful weekend. Some highlights! First off, the hotel bar had an interesting drink menu:


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Remember I said that a good deal of my short fiction career involved my learning to write to shorter and shorter lengths? This is true-up to a certain point (not long past this story, in fact) you can (more or less) put most of my work in chronological order just by arranging them by descending word count. (Once I hit 300 words I figured I’d ( Read more... )