Most Anticipated Books (and other things) for 2016

Hello, January! What a nice year you've brought behind you. Today I want to share the books I'm most looking forward to this year. Like every year there will be huge surprises, but there's already outrageous promise for what we can read. I've added a couple of games and movies to the end, because anticipation isn't reserved just for writing. But damned if I won't be unreachable the week Children of Earth and Sky releases.

The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster
(Right Now, Tor.com)

The first book on my list is actually releasing this week! One of Tor.com's hot novellas, The Drowning Eyes is a tale of the high seas, and the people that control the wind behind your sails. Wind mages are a great idea for pirate stories. Their power stopped raiders for years, but that magic has been stolen, forcing an intrepid captain to risk her ship and crew to get it back.

Viable Paradise 17

I'm home again from the last big trip of my year. This one was the hardest physically, but easily the most rewarding. The Viable Paradise workshop is is one of the best writing environments I've ever been in, stewarded by such professional instructors, staffed by compassionate graduates, and everyone I worked with in the class belonged there. It was a solid week of working with people who were at or above my level in various areas of craft, sometimes challenging the ego, but usually exciting the mind. I met so many people who I want to help succeed. You're going to see amazing work from these folks.

The workshop itself is world-class. Group critiques of submitted work began at 9:30 AM, though on Friday Teresa Nielsen Hayden had me over before breakfast for a one-on-one at 8:30, and Debra Doyle saw me as late as 7:00 at night. Ultimately I got four one-on-ones and one group critique just on the manuscript sample and synopsis I'd submitted. And that was a tiny part of everything we covered that week.

There were lectures and collegiums spanning the craft throughout most of every day in addition to a challenging assignment we'll call The Horror That Is Thursday. It's as stressful as they could reasonably make it, never cruel, simply packing the week they had. It was supplemented by the staff providing moral support and excellent meals, and some wacky evening fun, like a group improv performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Any emerging writer that can handle criticism would benefit greatly from this sort of environment.

It's all organized by James Macdonald and Debra Doyle, who have been publishing and editing all manner of fiction for many years. Additional instructors included Elizabeth Bear, Steven Brust, SFWA-President Steven Gould, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Tor Books, and Scott Lynch. Scott was with us for the announcement that he'd cracked the New York Times Bestseller List for Republic of Thieves.

I was giddy to get critiqued by Scott, whose novels aren't just splendid, but are also the closest to what I'm trying to do that I've found in the current market. For his first time as a full-on instructor, he fit right in (full disclosure: some of his critiques made me do a little dance). The crew is a diversity of successful writers and editors who, at many points, respectfully disagreed with each other in front of the entire class. Everything was steeped in the sincerity of deeply experienced and intelligent people who taught and tipped on things ranging from inspiration to submissions.

It never felt unreasonably stressful, but if you know me, then you know my body isn't reasonable about stress. Each night I woke up at least twice from health-related problems, such that by Tuesday I was fighting the losing battle against a sleep-deprivation migraine. Asthma blindsided me for Thursday; hotels typically have carpets, and that means prolonged exposure to dust and residue. It will be a couple of weeks before I can pull myself together. The syndrome pain is extremely disorienting, and really started to get to me on my second bus towards home. My lungs are caked, my ears are ringing, my legs keep locking up, and I don't regret a thing. Just please excuse me if I'm a little radio silent for a while.

I feel so damned lucky for all this.David Twiddy was a great roommate to me, and I could babble about conversations and people I met for an entire blog series. Instead I'm going to finish a short story and leave you with a photo I've shamelessly stolen from Shannon Rampe's blog. These are the fine folks who granted me the best week of my year. Thank you, one and all, and to Bart, Chris, Jen, Mac and Pippin, who are not in any of these photographs because they were busy taking them.

ReaderCon 2013 Recap

I attended my first ReaderCon this weekend. ReaderCon is a lovely Speculative Fiction convention in Massachusetts, this year held on the ground floor of its host hotel. The Marriott was under construction, which meant no bar, no Irish pub and fairly jammed hallways. However, the hundreds of visitors were remarkably polite and maybe the best crowd I've ever seen when it comes to not stopping two paces in front of a door. Other cons take note: it's not that hard to walk out of the flow of traffic before pausing to check your iPhone.

Being a newcomer, I missed the controversies about sexual harassment at previous ReaderCons. They seem to have confronted this ardently by implementing a clear policy on prohibited behavior and greenlighting at least a dozen panels that critiqued various angles on privilege. There were two consecutive panels on "Writing Others" (after the second, John De Lucca joked that the room was hosting panels like this all the way to dinner),"Egalitarian Character Trauma," "The Gender of Reading Shame," "Agency and Gender," "Sociolinguistics in SF/F," and many more. Such topics fascinate and always worry me, and so I attended three on my first day. Part was for the pleasure of hearing so many smart critical thinkers weigh in, like Anil Menon, Rose Lemberg and Daniel Jose Older. And part was to keep challenging my notions of inclusion and compassion.

But the highlights of conventions are usually face-to-face exchanges. It was good to meet Neil Clarke and thank him for running such a fine venue as Clarkesworld. I met Scott Lynch three separate times; he's the author of The Lies of Locke Lamora, one of my all-time favorite debut novels, and a very sweet man. He was alerted that he'd been signed to do a reading five minutes before it started, and ran in to call it off when he saw the people outside.

"Are you guys here for me...?" he asked with an adorable pity. In a minute he convinced himself to grab his laptop and improvise a reading for the seven people who'd waited it out. In an amazing event of spiritual dissonance, he then settled in to read about a thief tyrant breaking the spirits of orphans. Then he stayed late to take questions.

I attended two "kaffeeklatches," which is German for "a dozen of your fans sit around drinking with you." One was with the brilliant short story writer Ken Liu, who went frank and deep into his anxieties over copyright law and transition into longer works like novels. I am a huge sucker for earnest shop talk. I gained an entire additional level of respect for Liu in how much he was willing to reveal about his personal projects and even reading habits. Many of the best parts of panels across ReaderCon had writers and editors similarly letting you in on their internal lives regarding why a social issue scares them or excites them to type faster. I probably saw more people talking like that than at any other convention I've yet hit. And there's always more to be learned from hitting intimate readings and studying how authors present themselves.

The capper on my weekend was a special dinner with all of the Viable Paradise students and alums in the area. We assembled at a nearby Thai restaraunt, and I got my first chance to meet my roommate and chat about kaiju fiction. We walked in just late enough to miss all 24 seats at the table and ate in the adjacent corner next to the giant VP conversation, which still seems to funny to me. Two VP alums, Kate and Fran, sat with us and dropped some knowledge about pacing and getting the most out of the workshop. I'm going to strive to take Fran's advice to rise early and go for dawn walks on the pebble beach.

Especially for its cramped space, ReaderCon did a wonderful job of feeling open and having plenty of events available. It's a convention I'm marking to try to hit again next year. The only thing I'd change is not commuting into the hotel every day. By the lunch drive on Saturday, I averaged 400 feet of road every fifteen minutes.

ReaderCon and the River of Stars Invitation

This is a hub post for the weekend. I'm abroad right now, at ReaderCon in Massachussetts, the first of my many business trips this summer. It's my first time at ReaderCon. I'm pretty excited, if only for the amazing roster of authors who lecture and schmooze there. Kelly Link, Peter Straub and Scott Lynch have written some of my favorite works.

I may livetweet some of the more interesting panels, or blog up the highlights here. It all depends how my Kindle Fire holds up and how strong the convention wifi goes. If you see something on the schedule that looks highly appealing, hit me up on Twitter. You can find me @wiswell - unless my Kindle implodes.


This is also my first chance to meet my fellow Viable Paradise students and possibly meet some of the instructors. If things go according to plan I'll be having tea with Elizabeth Bear while you're reading this. Tonight the students are gathering for a big dinner in town. I've chatted with a few by Twitter (all have been friendly), but it'll be good to have faces to go with screen names.

I also want to give a shout out to a little reading program starting next week. Beginning July 17th, Sonia Lal and I will be reading Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars. It's Fantasy inspired by the Song Dynasty of China, set centuries after the previous novel so that it can stand alone, being about the conflict between rival factions as its world moves forward.Kay has repeatedly impressed me with his words about anthropological fiction, and particularly his unpopular stance that characters from other cultures shouldn't be "relatable" or "likeable." There is a tendency to make The Other just like us, which can be welcoming, but also often ignores significant external and internal life.

Sonia and I will be chatting about River of Stars as we make our way through. Anyone is more than welcome to pick up a copy and join us.

Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.