Posts made in March, 2011

• Compelling Forces Producing a Change in Motion, sometimes confused with fate

  Influences

  

  Completely forgot the best part yesterday:  Congratulations and good luck to Brad and his novel The Winds of Khalakovo on hisrelease week! To celebrate, Brad’s giving away two copies. To get a chance to win, comment with the name of a book that’s influenced you.

  The Spouse is all the time lecturing me about not experimenting on the children, but my Mom and Granda did it to me and it never did me any harm, except for this third eye and insatiable appetite for destruction, that is.  My Mom was always working on, though never finished, her doctoral research on the training of gifted youth and I was her favorite guinea pig.  My Granda was a retired navy man with ideas he wanted to talk about and nobody to play chess with.  Consequently, at a very young age, I was reading fluff pieces like  John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, playing chess and writing papers on the nothingness of being.  Yeah, I’m weird.

  One of the side effects is that I read pretty fast  (50 to 100 pages an hour, depending on the density of words and whether I have a child pouring chocolate milk all over the pages. )  So I’ve been reading a whole lot for the last thirty years, typically about three books a week.   My list of literary influences is pretty long and tends to be mostly composed of dead people.  But here goes: (more…)

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• Pardon Me, I’m from Arkansaw

  Influences

  This week is Bradley’s release week for The Winds of Khalakovo. To celebrate, Brad’s giving away two copies. All you gotta do is comment.

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  So, I’ve been ashamed of it in my life. I’ve been inordinately proud of it. But I’m from Arkansas.

  A few facts about Arkansas. It has little more than two million people. Compare that to, say, Dallas, which has six million in just that one city. Arkansas has a billion times that in mosquitoes. We’re the rice growing capital of the world so, consequently, we’re the duck hunting capital of the world. At least that’s what it says on the signs.

  It’s flat as a cracker in the east and swampy in the south. It has soft mountains in the west, worn down by the wind and rain moving across the face of the earth for countless generations. The mountains grow higher the more west and north you go, and there’s deep forests and streams filled with trout. Bears still roam those woods, and mountain lions. (more…)

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• My Influences

  Influences

  You know, as a small aside before I get started, it occurs to me that I’d make a horrible journalist. I’m just not good at those snappy lede’s.

  Ahem. In any case. We’re here to talk about influences, yes? When I picked this topic, it was really to be able to pay homage to those that have affected my writing. I didn’t really want to make a distinction between those who meant to affect my writing, as in the case of an instructor at a workshop, and those who didn’t, as in someone I’ve read and have loved their work so much that I stole, er, incorporated some of their style into mine. The idea was to acknowledge those who have shaped us as writers.

  By the way, I loved Stina’s post this week, in which she talked about conscious and unconscious influences. I have some unconscious influences I know about, and plenty of others that I don’t even know are lingering there, but I don’t want to focus on those, mostly because I want to explore how, specifically, certain people influence me and my writing.

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• The Stories We Didn’t Read

  Influences

  Hey, it’s Bradley’s release week! That means free books! Just comment here about the writers/books that have made a great impression on you to enter to win.
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  Talking about writing influences is a lot like talking about “where do your ideas come from?”

  I got some invaluable advice at Clarion back in 2000, which was to travel a lot and read widely – outside the genre.
  Oh, it wasn’t like I hadn’t read any books outside the genre. I just hadn’t read any books outside of SF/F in a long time, because I’d read a lot of other advice in my teens that I should read a ton of books in the genre I wanted to write in. Go through enough books in one genre by just browsing bookshelves and you’ll start to wonder why so much of it is drivel. I didn’t have a taste for what sold a lot of copies to other people. I realized this probably didn’t bode well for my own future book sales, but at some point you have to give up the ghost and just write the book you want to read. (more…)

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• Like Water to Parched Earth

  Influences

  Congratulations and good luck to Brad and his novel The Winds of Khalakovo on their release week! To celebrate, Brad’s giving away two copies. To get a chance to win, comment with the name of a book that’s influenced you. Since it’s Brad’s week, he got to choose the topic and it’s a good one: influences.

  I recently discovered that I’ve conscious and unconscious influences. On the conscious end of the spectrum, there’s Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Charlotte Bronte, Terry Pratchett, and Aidrian McKinty — in that order. Snyder is a children’s book writer, and her ability to make the mundane seem magical effected me heavily as a kid. The Changeling and Season of Ponies are particularly good examples. Next came Bradbury. My father read Something Wicked This Way Comes aloud to me and my sisters when I was thirteen years old. That was when I came to love the poetry of prose. Being dyslexic, I’ve always been deaf to poetry. (I understand there’s a disconnect between the visual and auditory pathways in dyslexics which makes poetry problematic.) But Bradbury’s prose is breath-taking and beautiful. I have to assume I was more able to hear it because my father read it to me out loud. Whatever the reason, that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a writer. Later, when I came upon Stephen King’s works it was his talent for portraying realistic, psychologically sound characters that effected me. I loved that no matter what type of being he wrote about, the reader understood the motivations behind the actions and that those actions were what drove the plot. Life wasn’t just what happened to people. People made life happen — good or bad. Bronte was both more subtle and more hard-hitting. The first time I read Jane Eyre I didn’t understand most of it, but one year I had a particularly bad breakup and the man I’d been seeing stole the television and VCR (among other things) when he moved out. He actually did me a favor because that left me with my books and music, thank goodness. I decided to use the time I would’ve used for watching television for learning something new. I picked up Jane Eyre and use it to build my vocabulary. That’s when I made an amazing discovery: Charlotte Bronte didn’t merely use one definition of words. She very carefully selected words for every definition. It was as if a door had opened.She taught me to love language, not just storytelling. (more…)

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• Already Missing Diana Wynne Jones

  Influences

  Congratulations to Brad, whose novel The Winds of Khalakovo officially releases this week! I’ve been eagerly anticipating Winds ever since hearing Brad (& friends) read from it at World Fantasy last year. I love Russian-inspired fantasy – I took Russian all through high school and college – and add in flying ships, a clash of cultures, and characters with secrets, and I’m there. Though honestly, even if I knew nothing about the novel, I’d still be dying to read it just based on the gorgeous cover art. Don’t forget, Brad’s giving away two copies this week – to enter, just comment with the name of a book that’s influenced you (doesn’t even have to be sf&f!).

  Delighted as I am for Brad, I’m also writing this post with a heavy heart – because talking of my writing influences makes me mourn Diana Wynne Jones’s recent passing all the more. Dogsbody, Archer’s Goon, Fire & Hemlock, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Deep Secret are particular favorites of mine – but honestly, I can’t think of a single one of her many books that isn’t fresh, sharp, funny, and gloriously imaginative. (more…)

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• Teresa Frohock: The Truth in Your Heart

  Guest Post

  Raised in a small town, Teresa Frohock learned to escape to other worlds through the fiction collection of her local library. She eventually moved away from Reidsville and lived in Virginia and South Carolina before returning to North Carolina, where she currently resides with her husband and daughter.  Teresa has long been accused of telling stories, which is a southern colloquialism for lying. Miserere: An Autumn Tale is her debut novel and is coming July 2011 from Night Shade Books.

  A big thanks to Courtney for asking me to post here at the Night Bazaar and congratulations to Brad on his release of The Winds of Khalakovo! Brad has asked that we talk about our writing influences, a great subject for any writer. He is also giving away two copies of The Winds of Khalakovo during this week! All you have to do is comment on one of the posts with the name of a book that influenced you (it doesn’t have to be science fiction or fantasy). (more…)

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• The Winds of Khalakovo Release Week

  Book Giveaway

  I’m pleased to announce that this week is the official release week for The Winds of Khalakovo. Even though the physical book has been available from a few booksellers, it doesn’t officially hit the shelves until this week. Plus, April 1st also marks the day Winds will be available in major e-book formats: Kindle, NookBook, and ePub.

  If you’re curious to know more about Winds, you can check out the book page on my website. I’ve been extremely pleased by the review and blurbs I’ve received so far. I’ve also done a number of interviews about the release, and I have a few more that just came out: one with Alethea Kontis and the other with The Civilian Reader.

  This week, I decided I’d like for the members of the bazaar to talk about our influences. We’re going to be shedding some light on authors or instructors that helped us along the way or advised us through their excellent or inspiring prose. We’ve talked about our influences a bit in the past, but I’m hoping to share more of how, specifically, other people had an effect on our work.

  To celebrate the release of Winds, I’m going to be giving away two signed (and personalized if desired) copies of Winds. Just make a comment in any of the posts this week, including this one, about writers that have made a great impression on you. Feel free to elaborate, but the only requirement to be entered is simply to make a short comment with at least one author or book in any post this week.

  Good luck, and thanks for helping me to celebrate!

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• 10 Things Conventions Can Do For You

  Conventions and Conferences

  I got my very best piece of convention advice early in my career. It was at my first “pro” convention, the World Fantasy in 1994 in New Orleans, in a conversation with writer/editor/publisher Cecilia Tan and writer/editor/translator Lawrence Schimel — both of them old-hands by then when it comes to conventions, compared to me. I don’t remember which one of them said it. I complained, on about the third day, that I was tired and hungry. One of them told me:

  “Then you’re doing it wrong! When you’re at a convention, you’ve got to either eat or sleep!”

  Since then, I’ve attended an awful lot of genre conventions, and I’ve had great times at most of them. I rarely managed to both eat and sleep, but I tried to do one or the other, and it’s proved to be damn good advice. So I decided to compile a little of my own, none of which represents the views of any of my publishers, my fellow bloggers at Night Bazaar, or anybody who’s not completely nuts. That is to say, it’s all mine. (more…)

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• Conventions!

  Conventions and Conferences

  Ah, conventions. Let’s all pause and reflect upon their loveliness. The guys in homemade elf costumes. The vast number of funny t-shirts. The giddy arguments over whether Saruman could kick Voldemort’s butt or the social relevance of grotesques. The ever-present urge to give in and buy some of those steampunk goggles (There’s someplace in this world I could wear them. When I find it, I will look AWESOME.)

  I love them. Verily I do. Here’s why: I have two kids, two and five. My Mom thinks my writing career is the coolest thing since frozen waffles so she’ll watch my kids while The Spouse and I spend ALL WEEKEND in a hotel room. Oh yeah. A room that is not covered in cheerios and sticky juice stains. For a whole weekend, no one will wake me at 5 am, demanding chocolate milk. No one will watch Scoobey Doo’s Summer Vacation for the millionth time while I am trying to eat/sleep/write.  I could eat a whole meal without cutting up chicken nuggets into teeny tiny pieces. I could have a conversation without having to pause to take someone to the potty or answer urgent questions about airplanes or bumblebees.

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