In anticipation of ReV finally hitting doorsteps and tablets, I’ve been doing some interviews:
- My first Locus interview
- An interview in Clarkesworld
- The Big Idea at Whatever (I’ve done The Big Idea for all three Machine Dynasty novels, I believe, but this particular entry is pretty special to me.)
If you’re curious about my books or my process (or lack thereof), I definitely rambled on enough in each of these places to wipe that curiosity away forever. Snip:
The thing about the literary conversation is that yes, you should do your homework. But there are a lot of ways to go about that: there are people who swear up and down that you need to read a classic writer’s entire backlist, but they’ve never picked up a book of peer reviewed essays critiquing that author’s work. Reading those books doesn’t mean you’ve delved into them. How can you have a “literary conversation” about a book or a writer if you aren’t aware of their position in a larger critical discourse, or the broader implications of their ideas? Am I fake geek girl if I tell a hardcore Vinge fan that I found A Fire Upon the Deep almost impenetrable, but I’m fascinated by the Tines from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness and Nagel’s critique of materialism? No. I’m just a slightly different order of geek.
Life is too short. Read stuff that speaks to you and then read the authors that inspired those people. And then, look at the gaps in your reading. Who aren’t you reading? Who got left out? Why is that? That’s the homework.