I’m excited to be appearing (virtually!) on a panel at the first Filipino-Canadian Book Festival next month. My event is on Saturday, July 13 at 10.15 am PT. Here are the details: World-building and Cultural Research for Storytelling Join us for this insightful author panel on creating immersive worlds, grounding…
I'm excited to have the chance to geek out about both character development and video games at the SFWA Blog! In my article "Character Development Lessons From Video Games," I talk about some of my favourite character-driven fantasy and role-playing video games, and the lessons they taught me in developing…
In writing The Quiet is Loud, Seeker of the Lost Song, and two other works-in-progress, I've noticed a few resources I return to often. These resources might be useful for other sci-fi/fantasy authors, so I thought I'd share them. Let me know if there are any that you use that…
Today is Peter Gabriel’s 74th birthday, and it's good timing. Lately I’ve been thinking about the way his Genesis years influenced my writing. It might not be obvious mainly because he’s a musician and I’m a writer. Of course, though, in Genesis he did write most of the lyrics he…
⫸ (AKA If you like one or more of them you'll probably find something you like in my work):⫷ ⌯ Robin Hobb: Thoughtful examinations of character and a wide range of relationships. Major events happen in the world but her books feel somehow intimate. Her "Fitz" books were a major…
You may have heard that Substack recently came under scrutiny (to say the least) for its position on platforming/making money off Nazis - namely, they don’t see a problem with it. So I want to get out of the Nazi bar. I’ve spent the past few days trying out alternatives…
I'm having a lot of fun with my newsletter. It's been nice to return to slightly longer forms of expression considering, you know, *gestures vaguely at the state of social media*. I realize that this blog/journal can count as a longer form of expression, but honestly I'm still not sure…
Recently, I heard Jeanne Dielman described as "three and a half hours of a woman in her apartment going about her daily life. I watched it once in college when I was really depressed." I decided to watch it based on this description alone. A couple of the IMDB tags…
Javi came to life before I got into bookstagram (as little as I consider myself "into bookstagram," that is), and his love of books was extrapolated from my own. But during final edits of The Quiet is Loud, I started to worry that maybe I had been an unwilling host…
I recently asked people on Instagram to recommend “pretty and fartistic” movies to me, and I got several good suggestions. I picked the first two, The Terrorizers and La Notte, at random, and was pleasantly surprised to find that books and writers featured heavily in them. These movies were also very pretty, and I took a lot of screenshots for the blog. This might surprise you, but my screenshots skewed heavily towards the writing and books. And I have to say, even though of course I hate it when writing isn’t going well, it’s so satisfying to see writers in movies who are having a bit of a shitty time. At least, until I start relating to them!
I’ll show the books-and-writing ones first, and the other ones at the end – enjoy!
(more…)
