Posts by Authors

• Member News: December 24, 2011

  Member News

  Courtney Schafer‘s novel The Whitefire Crossing got three great reviews this week (nothing like reading a book with snow on the cover right before Christmas! ).  First, Bastard of Bastard Books reviewed Whitefire on Only the Best Scifi, calling it a “very promising debut which I highly recommend.”  Seak of Only the Best Scifi reviewed the novel on Bastard Books, saying “I really enjoyed myself with this one.”  The third review is from Chris Hawks of SMZb, who says, “This is a really good book.”

  Courtney was interviewed by Greg Wilson and Brad Beaulieu on Speculate! The Podcast for Readers, Writers, and Fans – click here to listen .

  Katy Stauber‘s novel Revolution World is #6 on B&N Book Club’s Best SciFi Releases of 2011 – congrats, Katy!

  Stina Leicht‘s forthcoming novel And Blue Skies From Pain was featured over on A Dribble of Ink – go check out the gorgeous cover!

  Martha Wells‘s new novel The Serpent Sea is now shipping from Amazon, and has started showing up in bookstores – run go get your copy!

  Only one more week left of the Night Bazaar in its current form!  But fear not, the blog’s not going anywhere – coming in 2012, a new slate of Night Shade authors will be taking the stage.

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• Member News: December 17, 2011

  Member News

  Martha Wells‘s novel The Cloud Roads is FREE on the Kindle right now!  Hurry on over and get your copy before the promotion ends!  And go read N.K. Jemisin’s post on the Book Smugglers for a rousing recommendation of both The Cloud Roads and sequel The Serpent Sea (out Jan 3, so not much longer to wait!).

  Thomas Roche was interviewed about ebooks, the future of reading, and The Panama Laugh at the blog Beyond Black Friday. His interview also appears as part of the Kindle subscription blog Me and My Kindle.

  Brad Beaulieu’s novel The Winds of Khalakovo got a great review from Pat of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, and made Pat’s top ten SFF novels of the year – congrats, Brad!

  Courtney Schafer participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld, discussing her favorite SFF books and TV shows of the year.

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• Howard Andrew Jones: Writer Myths

  Guest Post

  Howard Andrew Jones is the author of The Desert of Souls (Thomas Dunne Books, 2011), Plague of Shadows (Paizo, March 2011), short story collection The Waters of Eternity, Managing Editor of Black Gate magazine, and editor of the Bison Books historical collections of Harold Lamb. Visit him online at www.howardandrewjones.com.

  There are any number of writer myths, some more obviously fanciful than others. I think most working in the industry or working hard to join it know that a novel contract almost never means book tours, limousine rides, and sudden wealth. But there are other myths writers still hear a lot about today, and they’re complex enough that they can’t be confirmed or denied with a few simple words. I want to take a look at three of the ones that have confused or aggravated me the most over the years.

  1. Write What you Know

  This warhorse gets trotted out year after year, decade after decade. Many creative writing programs enforce it so stringently that we have an entire genre of fiction narrated by grad students in creative writing programs, because the authors are writing what they know.

  That’s fine if writing about your writing program is what inspires you to write (or if that’s what you want to read), but enforcing that dictum seems like a misapplication of sound advice by overzealous disciples – those who implement the law without understanding the reasons.

  It is really hard to write about, say, ancient Sumatra if you’ve never read anything about Sumatra, let alone ever been there. While reading submissions at Black Gate I’ve come across any number of stories that had to be rejected because it was clear from the start that the author didn’t actually know anything about the subject, or even the tenets of the genre. Those are the people this advice is for. If you don’t know anything about Sumatra, or police procedures, or deep space, but want to write about those particular things, you don’t have to personally experience them, though that would surely help (if you have a time machine to research your authentic pirate novel, let me know, I need to borrow it) – you have to put the effort into the research so that you know the material and can effectively bring it to life, thereby writing what you know. (more…)

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• Member News: December 10, 2011

  Member News

  Huge congratulations to Katy Stauber, who sold her second novel Spin the Sky to Night Shade, for publication in fall of 2012!  Spin the Sky is a science fiction reinterpretation of the Odyssey, set in near-Earth orbital colonies.

  Martha Wells has a guest post on the Book Smugglers blog for their Smugglivus Fest, sharing the books she loved in 2011 and the novels she’s looking forward to in 2012.  She also has signed copies of The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea entered in the Magick4Terri fundraiser auction.

  Brad Beaulieu had an interview with Justin Landon over at A Staffer’s Musings, where Justin grills Brad about Russian literature and themes and stuff (it’s a long but very interesting interview!).

  Brad, Courtney Schafer, and John Hornor Jacobs also contributed signed novels (and one ARC, in Brad’s case) to Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity fundraiser – see here for details.

  Only three weeks left of the Night Bazaar in its current incarnation!  During our final weeks we’ll be discussing our lessons learned as debut authors and looking back at the year we’ve just had from both professional and personal perspectives.  And tune in tomorrow for a guest post from Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls and editor of Black Gate magazine.

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• Aliette de Bodard: Playing to Your Strengths, Playing to Your Weaknesses

  Guest Post

  Aliette de Bodard has won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction, as well as Writers of the Future. She has also been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Award.  Her Aztec mystery-fantasies, Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and the forthcoming Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide.  Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses–not only characters but writers, too. We have natural abilities, as well as things we are less good at: when I started out, I could effortlessly plot–the rhythm of a story was something I could understand instinctively, and I had very little trouble with pacing my stories. I had, however, very little eye for a smaller kind of rhythm, the one found in sentences; and it took me several years of reading Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip and various English poets before I could understand the basic musicality of the language.

  Strengths and weaknesses do not remain static: I used to have lots of trouble with exposition, struggling to remove infodumps from my narration, and to offer up information to the reader at a point where they needed it. Writing story after story, and being critiqued, led me to becoming better and better at exposition. It is very clear to me when I pull out early stories such as the very first Obsidian and Blood ones: “Obsidian Shards” has a very complex background, but exposition is delivered in large chunks, at a time in the narration when the reader needs it. This ensures that the relevant information is present, but it’s a clumsy technique. By contrast, when I wrote the last Obsidian and Blood book, Master of the House of Darts (more than four years after writing “Obsidian Shards”), I handled exposition in more subtle and fluid ways: I inserted worldbuilding into the way my characters breathed and thought, touched up my dialogue with typical expressions from the Aztec culture, and broke up descriptions into smaller chunks that brought atmosphere to a scene without overwhelming it. It’s evident, looking at both pieces of writing side by side, that in four years I have progressed immeasurably as a writer, by adding to my strengths. (more…)

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• Member News: December 3, 2011

  Member News

  Courtney Schafer has an interview over at the Chimeras blog, in which she talks about engineering vs. writing and gives a sneak peek of The Whitefire Crossing‘s sequel, The Tainted City.  Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist also has a free exclusive excerpt from The Whitefire Crossing, as part of Night Shade Books’ holiday countdown/advent calendar extravaganza.

  Brad Beaulieu‘s book The Winds of Khalakovo has had a busy week. It got two great reviews, one from A Fantasy Reader, and the other from A Staffer’s Musings. Brad’s also going to have an interview posted with Justin Landon at A Staffer’s Musings as a follow-up to that review, so keep an eye out for it.

  Also, Brad and Greg Wilson, over at Speculate, interviewed Maurice Broaddus. They spoke to Maurice about writing balancing life, writing, and editing, how faith intersects with speculative fiction, and pimping airships.

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• Adam Christopher: Staying on Target

  Guest Post

  Adam Christopher was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up watching Pertwee-era Doctor Who and listening to The Beatles, which isn’t a bad start for a child of the Eighties. In 2006, Adam moved to the sunny North West of England, where he now lives in domestic bliss with his wife and cat in a house next to a canal, although he has yet to take up any fishing-related activities.

  When not writing Adam can be found drinking tea and obsessing over DC Comics, Stephen King, and The Cure. His first novel, EMPIRE STATE, is out from Angry Robot books in January 2012. For more information, please visit angryrobotbooks.com.

  Adam can be found online at adamchristopher .co.uk and on Twitter as @ghostfinder.

  Staying on Target: How growing up with Doctor Who books shaped my childhood and turned me into a writer

  Books and reading are two of the most important things we need as we grow up. I don’t need to tell you that, or explain why this is. You and me, we know this is a fact. And for some of us, reading and writing went hand-in-hand – I’ve still got exercise books full of stories I wrote from about the age of seven up, and, perhaps not surprisingly, these stories reflected what I was reading at the time.

  I’m of a certain age where the term “YA” didn’t exist, not as a distinct marketing term anyway, when I was growing up. Books that might fit that category now certainly did exist, and there were books that were either labelled as suitable for “12+”, or were somewhat clunky, calculated “teen” reads, heavy with issues and serious business that for me, as a fan of ghosts and spaceships and time travel, were of no interest at all.

  My greatest childhood reading memory, the books that meant the most to me, that spurred me on to write my own stories, were the Target Doctor Who novelisations. From 1973 to 1991, 152 paperbacks were produced (plus three early adaptations from the 1960s), novelising the TV adventures of the famous Time Lord.

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• Genevieve Valentine: With Thanks

  Giving Thanks

  Genevieve Valentine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Teeth, After, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she’s a co-author of Geek Wisdom, a book of pop-culture philosophy from Quirk Books.

  Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is out now from Prime; you can learn more at http://circus-tresaulti.com. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog [http://genevievevalentine.com].

  She is very thankful to The Night Bazaar for the invitation to blog.

  When my novel Mechanique came out earlier this year, I spent a week on a four-hundred word Acknowledgments page, trying to balance brevity with judicious thanks to all those who made the book possible. It was all that was required (very few people like to curl up with 20 pages of acknowledgments), but it also didn’t encompass the full scope of thanks I knew were due.

  When the Night Bazaar asked me to write about things I am thankful for, I decided that, despite my general allergy to sincerity, it was the perfect time to thank some of those who enrich my life, make my writing possible, and brighten the entire world (results pending).

  I’d like to begin with my parents, who (when as a child I made the announcement that I wanted to write professionally) proposed not to look at my writing pre-publication, in case it would make me too self-conscious. As it turns out, I was the world’s most self-conscious teenager, but never about that, so, mission accomplished! I appreciate that my parents trusted I knew what I wanted and let me go about it how I chose, though even today I have occasionally described a story I’m working on, and there’s a little pause before my mom says, “I’m sure it will be very nice,” in a tone that suggests she’s trying to decide what to tell her family and friends if they call up asking her what the hell is going on with me, which I assure her repeatedly will never happen.

  Related: Thanks to all family and family friends who have called my mom to ask what the hell is going on with me. It’s good to keep her on her toes!

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• Member News: November 19, 2011

  Member News

  Kameron Hurley‘s novel, Infidel, got a great review in Strange Horizons, which had this to say, “Infidel is a fast-paced book with a lot of action and smart character moments, mixed with cynical battlefield philosophy. I highly recommend it.”

  Thomas Roche‘s short story “Hell on Wheels” can now be heard as a radio programme at the BBC Website, read by Peter Maniker, at the BBC Four Extra Radio Pulp Fiction website.

  Over at Speculate, Brad and Greg Wilson finished Episode 29, up their discussion of Night Shade’s The Book of Cthulhu by discussing writing technique based on the stories they read and their interviews with editor Ross Lockhart and contributors Laird Barron and our own John Hornor Jacobs.

  Read an interview with Martha Wells over at Insite Magazine, in which she talks about her career and how she finds inspiration for characters.

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• Rob Ziegler on War

  Guest Post

  Rob Ziegler lives with his wife in rural western Colorado. SEED is his first novel.

  I was six when I learned about the end of the world. My dad and I were having burgers at the Boardwalk, our little town’s only diner, where tables consisted of repurposed and shellacked heavy-cable spools and where, behind the polished maple bar, hung a clearly displayed Colt .45 in a well-used holster, a hunting rifle, the head of a six-point buck, an American flag. It was 1979, and I’d just asked my dad if the Iranians were our worst enemies, because I’d been listening to the old ranchers at the next table talking about bombing that place straight back to hell. I knew the answer was yes, because Iran had taken hostages and it was on the news every night, and even the old ranchers were talking about it. Iranians were bad, bad people.

  But I remember: my dad setting his burger carefully onto his plate and leaning forward to peer at me from beneath the brim of his best cowboy hat. The clean one, his going-out hat. I remember him shaking his head, and his eyes tightening around the words:

  “The Russians.”

  He told me, in vivid detail, about nuclear weapons. How a nuke detonating ten miles off would vaporize you before you could blink, and for some reason I imagined this happening to my mom. He told me how, at that very moment, the Americans and Soviets were poised to fire nuclear missiles at each other—enough missiles to vaporize everything, over and over and over.

  It began a period in my life lasting several years, until high school, during which I had recurring dreams about the flash of white light, usually viewed through my bedroom window, over the mountains to the east. That’s where the dream began and ended. The flash, and I would start awake, thinking of my friends, of my mom, of my dog and my brother.

  I didn’t want them to get vaporized.

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