Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Kij Johnson?
My mother always told me that I was a troll changeling, and that some grabby troll mother had lucked into a quiet, well-mannered, obedient little human girl in the exchange. So one answer is that I am a smallish mountain-troll who passes as human with moderate success.
Another answer is that I am easily bored. I grew up in very small town in the midwest, at a time when climbing out your second-story window at midnight and riding a bike alone to the county park was in the acceptable range of eleven-year-old behaviors. I studied ancient history in college, which prepared me for a career in nothing, so I worked in bookstores for a few years. Then it was publishing: Tor Books, Dark Horse Comics, Wizards of the Coast/TSR. I also did stints in tech. I would move every few years to a new city, pick up some new hobbies, and cut my hair again. At some point I realized that my summer gig — teaching people how to write novels as part of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s SF Summer program — was more fun than any of the jobs I was doing, and I went back to school to be able to do it formally.
Is that who I am? Well, it’s what I’ve done. Now I teach creative writing at the University of Kansas and at various summer programs. Continue reading
It’s an odd occupation, this writing business. You sit alone in a room and make up stuff, and if you’re lucky, you find that someone else likes it, has faith in it, and is willing to put it out in the world for you. If you are even luckier, you make a little money out of the process and find that it becomes a job – a career, even.
A must-read collection of essays
If you have any interest in Gaiman’s thought-processes when it comes to art, creativity, books, popular culture, specific works… Then you will undoubtedly find something fascinating in The View From The Cheap Seats. It’s a substantial collection of essays and speech transcripts. There is some overlap between certain pieces, which I thought was interesting — giving us some insight into those authors and books that most influenced Gaiman, and also the issues that have been most important to him at certain points during his career.
Just stumbled across this in Tor’s new catalogue: a stand-alone novel set in Brian Staveley‘s Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne universe! Skullsworn is due to be published in the US by 
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Ed Lazellari?
Welcome to a world of wind and bone, songs and silence, betrayal and courage.
We humans encounter the world through a very limited set of senses, compared to much of the animal kingdom. Our visual acuity is good but our ability to see colours is crippled by nocturnal ancestors. Birds, reptiles and many grounds of invertebrates see far more bands in the rainbow (if there was a mantis shrimp pride march their flags would be incredible). Our hearing and smell are the shame of Mammalia. What to us is a satisfactory baseline would make dogs cringe with embarassment.
An indispensable, but by no means exhaustive collection
Let’s start with an introduction, for new readers: Who is Helen Lowe?
Silent Hall is N.S. Dolkart‘s debut novel, and it sounds like a fun, epic fantasy adventure:
Civilian Reader 