writing

Bad words: depicting female arousal in your fiction.

Recently, Kameron Hurley shared this piece by E.M. Kokie on the seeming dearth of language available to workaday prose writers to describe what arousal feels like in a cis female body. Said Kokie: When I found myself stuck and looking for the words, I started pulling books off my bookshelves and scanning for the romantic […]

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Periods, and how to write them

No, not the punctuation mark. Yes, the other thing. Periods tend not to show up in fiction, probably for the same reasons that urine and shit don’t show up in fiction. They’re quotidian elements that don’t really add anything to narrative unless they’re indicating sickness or a dramatic turn — pregnancy, miscarriage, sudden reproductive potential,

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About my next Tomorrow Project story, “Permacultures.”

This month, I finished work on a story called “Permacultures,” which I wrote for the Tomorrow Project. This one’s pretty special, because it was inspired by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Grand Challenges. Here’s an introduction I wrote (which may not make it into the final book): I focused on the

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“vN” is on the Kitschies shortlist

No, really. The 2012 finalists for the Golden Tentacle: Madeline Ashby’s vN (Angry Robot) Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (William Heinemann) Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina (Doubleday) Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo (Jo Fletcher Books) Tom Pollock’s The City’s Son (Jo Fletcher Books) I really should have blogged this earlier, but, to my credit, I did share it

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I wouldn’t be a writer without Ursula K. LeGuin.

A while back, my Twitter pal Damien G. Walter wrote a Guardian column on Ursula K. LeGuin’s upcoming short story collections. He takes a very specific perspective on LeGuin’s stories in context, situating LeGuin within the speculative literary canon as a disquieting moralist, a shit-disturber of the highest order who tricks the brain into thinking

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