(“Found object” associated with a series of fantasy novels I wrote in my early teens.) One project for this year is to get a handle on 30-plus years of papers, correspondence, rough drafts, and what I would call “project histories.” This includes a lot of material from before email and the internet, which means sometimes […]
Lately, I’ve received considerable pressure from an individual to adopt a particular term to talk about fiction that engages with global warming. I don’t particularly care for the term, but there are plenty of terms I don’t care for or I find limiting and in all cases I respect the freedom of other people to […]
As we all know, authors make great predictors of the future. Looking at anyone’s twitter or facebook page will prove that the average writer (1) has an opinion and (2) has a brilliant, all-seeing mind. Therefore, it’s important for all peoples that we predict the future. Here are my predictions for 2016. Happy New Year! […]
(Shared Worlds 2015 poster and student writing book cover. Art by Jeremy Zerfoss.) For eight years I’ve been a part of Shared Worlds, a unique SF/Fantasy writing camp located at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I currently serve as co-director of the camp, with founder Jeremy L.C. Jones, with my main focus running the creative […]
I was thrilled to be on Science Friday today along with host Ira Flatow, producer Annie Minoff, and space archaeologist Sarah Parcak. We were talking about the current SciFri Book Club selection The Lost City of Z by David Grann and you can listen to the show here. I’m glad they’ve devoted several segments to […]
Now that I’ve got your attention…here’s the link to that feature, which includes Annihilation but also a bunch of really fascinating titles, some of which I haven’t read. Also some nice design featured. Even if you are watching the Super Bowl, you could do worse than spend half-time listening to NPR’s To The Best of Our […]
I can’t even tell you what it feels like to box up the entire Southern Reach trilogy–every last major draft, print-out and handwritten scrawl, every notebook and scrap of scribbled inspiration. But it’s done because it needs to get out of the house and into storage just as a de-cluttering issue. And after I took […]
One nice thing about being home for a while–I finally got around to shelving some of my favorite books, into one bookcase of awesome. Certain publishers and imprints I collect because I know that most everything they produce I’ll gobble up. Ranks and ranks of Dedalus anthologies of international fiction, along with decadent novels. Great […]
Eye on Design has run a very nice piece on Rodrigo Corral’s cover for Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, including comments from Corral. I think the cover’s probably the best I’ve ever had for a book–simple yet complex, and daring from a commercial standpoint. There’s great attention to detail, starting with the deliberate juxtaposition of a natural […]
Having finished co-writing an introduction to our anthology Sisters of the Revolution (May 2015) with Ann and writing an intro to an upcoming Thomas Ligotti reprint (Songs… and Grimscribe) from Penguin Classics, I’m engaged in a lot of reading. A fair amount of this reading is in some way applicable to Borne, the new novel I’m […]