a starred review, an awards nom, a new year
Welcome to the new year, readers!
We are deep in the January gloom here in the Pacific Northwest, which I am going to blame for my year-end/new-year post being two weeks late, even though newsletters do not, in fact, suffer from rain delays. Let's call it a world-weary, time-has-no-meaning, has-everybody-given-up, do-days-even-pass-if-there-is-no-sunshine delay.
But I'm glad I waited, because that means I can share two exciting pieces of good news.
The first is that Hunters of the Lost City has received it's first trade review, and it's a glowing starred review from Kirkus! You can read the full review here, and this is the punchline:
Reminiscent in feel to Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, this lovely fantasy introduces a complicated, brave, and believable heroine navigating grief, friendship, and the possible first stirrings of a (same-sex) crush while asking hard questions about power and community. This quiet fantasy gem renews and refreshes an old chestnut of a premise. An absolute delight.
Let me just say that being compared to The Girl Who Drank the Moon--one of my favorite MG fantasy books ever--has me swooning and fluttering in a slightly embarrassing manner.
I hope to be able to bring you information about bookstore events as the book's April 26 release date gets closer, but of course a lot depends on the whole rest of the world. There will be an audiobook available too at some point, although I don't yet have any info about that. In the meantime, Hunters is of course available to preorder from all the usual places:
Indiebound, Powell's (Portland), Annie Bloom's (Portland), Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego), Tattered Cover (Denver), Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon
Preorders are more important than ever these days, because everybody from your local bookstore on up to the publishers and printers are dealing with supply chain and distribution issues. Knowing how many books are needed to fulfill demand is key to avoiding delays and problems!
The second bit of good news is that Dead Space is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award! Here is the full short list:
DEFEKT by Nino Cipri (Tordotcom Publishing)
PLAGUE BIRDS by Jason Sanford (Apex Book Company)
BUG by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall (Restless Books)
FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
THE ESCAPEMENT by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications)
DEAD SPACE by Kali Wallace (Berkley Books)
I am extremely honored to be in such fine company. Congrats to all the finalists!
You can buy Dead Space in paperback, ebook, and audio forms in all the usual places, including: Indiebound, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.
I feel like the time for a review of my work in 2021 has passed, so let's just do a speed-run of the last year: an adult sci fi novel about murder and capitalism, a short story about monstrous nuns, a short story about aliens invading during WWII, and essays about Persona 5, learning to love anime, anime and Omelas, and Demon Slayer. I also did a few fun interviews: with J. Dianne Dotson, Mayday Magazine, and the Piled Higher and Deeper podcast.
To get things rolling for this year, I have a new essay up at Tor.com: From Now on I’m Taking All of My Storytelling Lessons From This Wild Epic About Love, Loyalty, and Necromancy, in which I talk about writing craft from the perspective of making readers care about our stories, using the wildly popular Chinese novel Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu as an example:
It’s a bit strange, I think, how little writing advice is about feelings. There is abundant writing advice about everything else—from saving the cat to killing our darlings, to never/always using “said,” writing what we know, info-dumping and more—but not a whole lot specifically focused on the fundamental question that faces every writer when we sit down to write: How do we make people care?
I had a lot of fun writing this one, especially in thinking about stories in a way that I think quite a lot of writing advice glosses over rather than digs into. I hope you enjoy it too.
I don't do new year's resolutions or words or themes or whatnot, but there is something I have been thinking about over these past weeks that sort of fits into the whole idea of consciously deciding how to go forward.
A few months ago I decided I wanted to learn how to draw. There was no more motivation behind it than that: I had never learned or tried to learn, I thought I might like it, so I decided to do it. I enjoy having creative hobbies that have nothing to do with my job as an author. So I picked up an instruction book for beginners (You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler), a sketch pad and some pencils, and got started.
I was, of course, terrible. Really terrible. But I realized at some point very early on--I'm talking like the third or fourth day, very early--that I didn't care if I was terrible. I just did not care. What did it matter? Nobody was going to see anything I was drawing, not unless I forced them to look at it. I was starting at rock bottom. This was not something I had ever even tried to do before, much less something I had spent any time or put any effort into working on. Even though I've long known, intellectually, that talent is a questionable concept at best, and all artistic skills require a great deal of work, I'd also sort of gone along believing that if I was meant to be good at drawing, I would already know.
Which is ridiculous. No skill, artistic or otherwise, works that way. Of course I was bad at drawing. I had never tried to be good at it!
I am still not good, but the difference between where I was when I started and where I am now is vast. When I flip through my sketchbook, I can see myself getting better. I can feel myself thinking about lines and shapes and light and shadows differently. I can sketch a face that kinda looks like the person it's supposed to look like! I am becoming more patient with myself; I am relearning what it is to take a long, long time to get something right. I have so much appreciation for the artists who put their expertise and knowledge on the internet in the form of tutorials and demonstrations. I practice just about every day; it is very enjoyable in a quiet, soothing, meditative sort of way. It has become part of my day that I look forward to quite a lot: sit down at my kitchen table, put on some music, spend an hour or so drawing eyes or noses or trees or figures or whatever.
Much like taking a walk, it never fails to untangle whatever mood I'm in. When I watch TV in the evenings, I do so with a sketchbook on my lap, and I pause the shows constantly to draw faces. (Which would be massively annoying if I watched TV with somebody else, but the cats don’t mind.) Doesn't matter what show it is. True crime documentaries. Scottish mysteries. Chinese dramas. A rewatch of the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender series from beginning to end. All of them are great for sketching. There are so many fascinating faces in the world.
There is one thing that all the instructors and books and tutorials emphasize over and over again: when you want to capture something in a drawing, what matters is what you actually see, not what you expect or want to see. That is what I am focusing on. I figure the part where I draw from my imagination can come later.
I think about this piece of advice a lot these days, even when I'm not drawing. Not as a mantra or anything like that, as that is not the way my mind approaches things. Just as a little chime in the back of my thoughts, a little reminder to pay attention. So much about the past few years has made the world feel very small, has made everything turn inward, to curl up in a protective ball, and I think I am feeling the need to push back against that. It's all a bit too much unwanted internalization, even for me, a person who comfortably lives very much in my own head.
Pay attention to what I actually see when I look at the world, not what I expect to see, not what I want to see, not what I fear to see. That’s what I’m thinking about as the new year begins.