Infrastructure is all that everyday stuff we take for granted, from roads and bridges to garbage collection and cell phones. It’s one of the things that allows societies to function smoothly, if they want to. It’s vitally important…and it’s also vastly boring. Consequently, writers tend not to pay a lot of attention to it. If [...]
So I’m back from five days at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates and beginning to recover from the hideous jet lag and nearly 24 hours of travel (each way, counting layovers and plane delays) that it took to get there. Since I’m still not quite mentally ready to tackle a [...]
The first I heard about the Boston Marathon bombing was when my father called Monday evening to tell me my nephew was uninjured. My nephew goes to school in Boston, and had been watching the race, but not at the finish line. I’d been driving home from out of town, listening to CDs instead of [...]
January 27, 2013 – 6:18 am
Do people actually need spoiler alerts for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? If so, consider yourselves alerted. So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and made arrangements for Friday, two days ago. After [...]
October 14, 2012 – 6:54 am
I’m back home at last, after a solid week without a decent internet connection (hence the lack of a post last Wednesday. My apologies). Conjecture was great fun; I recommend it to the attention of anyone in the San Diego area around this time next year. The hotel was a big of a maze, and [...]
September 30, 2012 – 6:34 am
As my regular readers know, I’m currently on a three-week (roughly) road trip with my father, from Chicago to San Diego for Conjecture and then back. I let my Dad plan the route. If I ever do that again, I will double-check it a week in advance and find out whether there is anything going on [...]
September 12, 2012 – 6:42 am
It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of material for writers, but stepping back a pace [...]
September 2, 2012 – 2:50 pm
I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with this. Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. [...]
August 12, 2012 – 10:26 am
So this week has been crazy, yes, but it’s the last two days in particular that really did me in. Saturday in particular. It went something like this: Wednesday Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners. Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know there’s a bird outside this window? [...]
I spent last weekend at 4th Street Fantasy convention, which was one of the best I’ve been to in a long time. The only trouble with 4th Street is that almost every single minute, you were faced with, for instance, the choice between a fascinating conversation about folklore in the con suite, a fascinating conversation [...]
First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available in nice, legal ebooks, one way or another [...]
Before we get to the post, I feel obliged to mention that we’re doing some more blog maintenance tomorrow – might as well get it over with as soon/much as possible – so there may possibly be another short outage. We’re expecting this bit to go smoothly, but just in case it doesn’t, I figured [...]
It looks as if we have successfully migrated the blog and web site to the new servers, knock wood. I’m afraid a couple of comments got lost in the switchover, sorry. The whole process was a whole lot more involved than I’d expected, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work! Basically, [...]
As many of you have noticed, the blog was out for a week and is now back. Unfortunately, the “back” part may be temporary; it’s back because the migration to the new server didn’t work properly and we had to un-migrate it. This means that some time in the next week (hopefully within the next [...]
So after all these business posts, people wanted me to write about retiring. I’m not surprised; it was kind of exhausting to think about doing all that stuff. In any case, this is the retirement-for-writers post. The very first question is: what does retirement mean to you, as a writer? Writing isn’t quite the same [...]
February 5, 2012 – 6:23 am
One of the great things about collaborating is that if you pick the right collaborator (and the right method), you can write until you get to a sticky spot, then hand it off to your collaborator and let them deal with it. In most cases, what is sticky for you will not be sticky for [...]
January 4, 2012 – 6:18 am
First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) [...]
January 1, 2012 – 6:55 am
Last Wednesday, I updated my blog, checked my email, did all the usual computer things, and at the end of the day, I logged off and went to bed, as usual. Thursday morning when I turned on the computer…everything had gone missing. By which I mean, the machine still ran, but it behaved as if [...]
December 28, 2011 – 8:17 am
The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, “So, what [...]
December 25, 2011 – 6:18 am
Merry Christmas (or midwinter holiday of your choice), everybody! I’m mostly taking the day off, but I couldn’t leave you with nothing at all on the blog, so I thought I would give you some links. As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video [...]
December 7, 2011 – 6:34 am
A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn’t know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I’ve learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because next week, the five Lyra books are being [...]
November 27, 2011 – 6:41 am
This is the time of year when a lot of high school students are thinking about college, and as a consequence, I’ve had several earnest requests for information about the best places to go to school, what to major in, etc. Since I usually figure that what one person is brave enough to email and [...]
November 23, 2011 – 6:16 am
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is generally considered a family day, so I thought I’d talk about family and writing this time. One way or another, family is something every writer has to deal with, and it’s never nice and clean-cut. Family can be supportive, or they can be a big obstacle, and [...]
October 5, 2011 – 6:58 am
The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think. Let me unpack that a little. It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster [...]
September 25, 2011 – 6:59 am
Some years back, a good friend of mine told me a story about her nine-year-old son, who came to her wanting to read a particular series of adult books that he’d heard his late-teenaged siblings talking about. The books in question were great adventure books, but they did contain several explicit mentions of sex – [...]
August 17, 2011 – 6:49 am
Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters – so the reader is rooting for them? This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it’s something that took me a long time [...]
Rather than do a normal sort of round-up of how wonderful last weekend’s Fourth Street Fantasy con was, I opted to collect an assortment of interesting comments heard and overheard during the course of the weekend. A few were made by panelists on actual panels; some were made at panels by members of the audience; [...]
First things first: a bit over two weeks ago, our own Michelle Wood emailed me that she’s done a wonderful video trailer for the Frontier Magic series. I’ve been planning to put a link to it on the website, but I’m in the downhill rush to finish the book and updating the web page is [...]
Diana Wynne Jones died on Saturday. I heard the news on Monday morning, so I’ve had a day and a bit to absorb it before trying to write this. Which is probably a good thing; I’m not sure I’d have been able to do anything but wail if I’d tried to say anything right away. [...]
April 15 is coming up fast, and for anyone who made money writing, it tends to be rather traumatic. No matter how much you set aside from your payments, it never seems to be enough (for those of us in the U.S., that 15% Social Security payment is a perennial killer). And of course they [...]
One of the things that happens when you write books that are marketed as Young Adult or childrens is, you get letters from kids who have been assigned to write them in class. It’s really obvious, for two reasons: first, the number of letters drops off markedly during the summer months, and second, the class [...]
Disasters bring out the best in a lot of people. We see the pictures on TV or the web, and want to help; it’s a natural, human thing. Writers are human; we have those same reactions. We pull out our credit cards and donate to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders and other organizations. [...]
January 2, 2011 – 6:50 am
I think I was back in high school when I first started setting goals for myself on a regular basis. I didn’t start saving copies of them until I was out of college, though, and I rather regret that. At this point in my life, looking back over 35+ years of goals is really interesting. [...]
December 26, 2010 – 10:34 am
Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short. And now that we have that [...]
September 5, 2010 – 6:43 am
There’s an old story about time management and prioritizing that I dearly love, not least because I’ve seen it repurposed several times. The story, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with already, is the one about the professor who walks into class with a large jar. He proceeds to fill it with big [...]
August 16, 2010 – 8:27 am
Every saga has a beginning, and this one begins four weeks ago, when my editor sent me a three-page, single-spaced revisions e-mail and a copy of the ms. for what is now Across the Great Barrier that was full of comment balloons. It didn’t arrive. We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and [...]
These days, when people talk about a “Cinderella Story,” they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it’s a Cinderella sports team that’s just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling’s welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what people seem to be interested in is the [...]
Once again, the auto-posting has failed me. Coming up next: all the posts that didn’t while I was out of town with no internet access. I’ll put the rest of the chapter up in two-day intervals, starting tomorrow morning (Saturday), so people have at least a little time to digest them. Thanks for your patience.
I am home again after another four-day trip to Chicago to get my Dad’s taxes signed and meet with the lawyer about family business stuff. I am more than a little chuffed, because this is the first time in at least six years that Dad hasn’t needed to file an extension. (You all did notice [...]
March 30, 2010 – 10:28 am
Last Saturday there was a meeting of the local Mythopoeic Society, at which they planned to discuss Thirteenth Child. They very kindly asked me to attend, and spent considerable time arranging to have the meeting on a date when I was sure I could make it. And I spaced it. I have a list of excuses [...]
February 28, 2010 – 10:54 am
For those of you just tuning in, I have two sisters who are professional artists. The one who does theater scenery and tromp l’oeil lives here in town, and when I moved into my new house some years back, she decided to paint my closets for me. With scenes from children’s books/movies. I’ve already posted [...]
January 21, 2010 – 4:42 pm
When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe [...]
January 3, 2010 – 3:45 pm
It being the new year – and the first year of a new decade – I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people’s New Year’s Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that “write a book” is, in some form or another, on an awful lot of people’s lists (it [...]
December 20, 2009 – 11:46 pm
As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to “redecorate” the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets with decor from my favorite children’s books. This [...]
December 8, 2009 – 11:02 am
The cake! Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!
December 7, 2009 – 5:50 pm
I am grumpy. It’s partly my own fault, and partly not (at least, I think it isn’t). The part that I think is not my fault has to do with the refusal of my blogging software to upload pictures, despite several hours of trying different formats with the supposedly-easy-built-in-uploader. The software finds the right file, [...]
December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm
A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it. “Run!” Jeff cried. (“Jeff cried” is the speech tag.) Jane said, “I can’t.” (“Jane said” is [...]
November 29, 2009 – 1:32 pm
I had brunch this morning with my friend Rosemary, who is about as crazy as I am but on just a different enough axis that we stimulate each other to new heights of silliness, rather than bogging down because we’ve each had exactly the same idea and can’t build on it. Anyway, Rosemary is one [...]
November 19, 2009 – 11:25 am
Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued, and misunderstood job…which is most especially misunderstood by [...]
October 7, 2009 – 9:19 am
So I spent last week in bed with something that wasn’t quite the H1N1 thing but had ALL the nasty symptoms (reading between the lines of what my doctor told me, this means I can STILL CATCH the stupid flu and end up going through all this AGAIN). All better, but I’m now faced with catching [...]
October 2, 2009 – 6:30 am
Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the last of four parts, and the end of the story that I [...]
October 1, 2009 – 6:30 am
Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the third of four parts. __________ Fantasy is about possibilities; that’s one of [...]
September 30, 2009 – 6:30 am
Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the second part of four. __________ I wrote that story for this speech, [...]
September 29, 2009 – 6:37 am
Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. It begins with a story, because I am a writer and most things lead me [...]
September 28, 2009 – 11:13 am
Every year, the American Library Association holds Banned Books Week in September. This is that week. I’ve felt rather strongly about Banned Books Week for a long time – even before I met the teacher who was nearly fired because she put “Dealing With Dragons” on the reading list for her fifth-grade class (a parent, [...]
September 12, 2009 – 9:18 am
I asked Caroline to do a guest post on her view of writing Kate and Cecy, particularly The Mislaid Magician. And this is what she says: — Pat said, “You’re going to kill me.” That’s the way I remember my first encounter with THE MISLAID MAGICIAN. Pat Wrede and I were just finishing up with [...]
August 22, 2009 – 11:46 am
So last weekend, my brother and his family came to visit. We had a lovely time, despite the fact that they all had colds. You see where this is going already, don’t you? But to really understand this, you have to know that when I get a cold, I usually have a week of being [...]
August 19, 2009 – 9:08 am
Part of the way down Wisconsin (if you’re coming from Minnesota via I94), there’s a spot where they were doing road work about six months ago. They finished up the first part, but apparently they want to do more on the same stretch at some unspecified future date. Because instead of removing the big orange [...]
August 14, 2009 – 8:35 am
Cazaril, my Maine Coon/Tabby rescue cat, has been seriously annoyed with me lately. I think it’s all the travel – he really doesn’t like being left home with just Nimue for company. So he’s been trying to get me up several times a night. To play with him. (How I know this is, I made [...]
Every so often, I have an encounter with readers (usually academics, but sometimes not) who are happy to tell me, in detail and at great length, all the reasons why I wrote something, or wrote it in this or that particular way. (Usually because they object to the reasons they’ve come up with…but I digress.) [...]
The day I spent at the American Library Association convention was long and intense, full of talking to exceedingly intelligent librarians. How I know they were exceedingly intelligent is this: I do not normally talk in my sleep, but the night after the convention, I woke myself up out of a sound slumber by saying [...]
I have a confession to make: I have never deliberately written a trilogy before in my life. Yes, I know, there are four Enchanted Forest books, and three Kate and Cecy books, and the Lyra series, and so on. But with all of those, I didn’t set out to write more than one book. I [...]
When I was a kid, my father told us bedtime stories. The five of us would get together in our pajamas and sit around on the biggest bed in the house, and Dad would turn the lights down or off and start talking. Unlike many parents who do this sort of thing, he never, to the [...]
Rain is a good thing, at least right here, right now. We’ve been badly in need of it…and we finally got some this weekend. It’s still wet and drippy and dark out, which means that a) I don’t have to do any yard work today, and b) the cats are curled up in their favorite [...]
(I meant to put this up right after the con, but … oh, well, better late than never.) More or less in chronological order: 1. Sitting in the Governor’s Club Thursday night listening to Ellen Klages tell stories and having chocolate martinis and flourless chocolate cake. 2. Friday’s panel on “Cultural Appropriation,” which was excellent. [...]
Do not go out of town for a week and FORGET TO TAKE THE NEW PASSWORD for your shiny new blog.
The new modem is now working, but the wireless still isn’t. I probably should have expected it-it’s one of those corollaries of Murphy’s Law: The week before you leave home on a trip, everything that can go wrong will. But I am going to ignore my chore list today, because the weather is beautiful. If [...]
Yesterday morning, my modem died the ultimate death. Dead modems turn out to be dreadfully hard to diagnose, or at least, that’s what I conclude after spending two hours on the phone to tech support trying to determine why my Internet connection was unstable. Add another hour to run out and get a new one [...]
As you may have noticed, I was in Chicago earlier this week, doing publicity for Thirteenth Child. It was a little strange; I haven’t really done the school-visits-and-bookstore-signings thing in my home town before. Oh, I’ve signed at bookstores, but it’s usually been me calling them up and saying “Hey, I’m going to be in [...]
A good many years ago, I was on a panel about the business side of writing. About half the panel were full-time writers; the other half still had day jobs. During the question-and-answer session, someone directed a question at James P. Hogan, one of the other full-timers on the panel:, something along the lines of [...]
A week of conventioning followed by a bad case of stage fright followed by a bad cold has severely limited my blogging. Also, the comments and email seem to be broken–I apologize for not noticing sooner. On the up side, I am learning all sorts of new things about WordPress and Plesk and my service [...]
Welcome to my blog! It’s still something of a work in progress, so I welcome comments. I’m also interested in questions, since I can already tell that coming up with stuff to talk about on my own is going to be even harder than I was expecting.