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Guest Post: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started – Thoughts on Finishing a Trilogy by Jacey Bedford

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I committed trilogy accidentally—twice! It all started back in 2013 when I sold my first book to DAW and on the back of that sale was offered a three book deal for EMPIRE OF DUST (science fiction), WINTERWOOD (fantasy), and a sequel to Empire, CROSSWAYS (sold on the basis of a one page synopsis). Wow, it was the offer of my dreams; a fabulous speculative fiction publisher was paying me to do what I loved doing best—making up stories. In the bad-old (but fun) unpublished days, I’d made the classic mistake of starting to write a trilogy without having sold Book One, only to realise that the two years of work put into Book Two was a waste of time. I was never going to sell Book Two before I’d sold Book One. That should have been obvious, of course, but I was having such fun writing it that I never really stood back and asked myself what I was doing.

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Book Review: Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion

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Our world is dark and full of terrors. I won’t bother enumerating them here. Either you already know them or you’re already hiding in the peace and safety of your own personal new dark age. And anyway, it all will have changed utterly by the time we hit publish on this review. Bummed out? Now think about the people of Iraq, the cradle of civilization that we’re only the most recent society to have somehow decided would be better off blown to splinters. As exiled Iraqi artist Hassan Blasim reminds us in the introduction to Iraq + 100, the ordinary people of Iraq haven’t known peace in anyone’s lifetime, and that’s just for starters. But some people have gotten out, including some amazing artists, including the aforementioned Blasim, primarily a filmmaker, but also a writer and anthologist, who, from faraway Finland saw that if there was one thing his beleaguered countrymen (and the rest of us) needed these days, it’s some speculative fiction, some stories created under the assumption that Iraq (and the rest of us) will still be around in 100 years. And thus was born Iraq + 100, an anthology of fantastic, disturbing, wondrous and deeply historically grounded stories by authors and translators who now live all over the world but once called Iraq home.

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Guest Post: Tremontaine's Karen A. R. Lord shares her Philosophy of the Sword

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This blog post originally appeared at Serial Box, where you can find serialized fiction released in episodes week after week. Karen Lord is one of the writers on Tremontaine season 3. Tremontaine is the critically acclaimed prequel to Ellen Kushner’s beloved Riverside novels, which developed a cult following beginning with Swordspoint in 1987. The “Fantasy of Manners” focuses on decadent world building and interpersonal intrigue, and has been noted for its progressive expression of gender and sexuality. Team-written by some of today’s most exciting authors, Tremontaine season 3 is brought to you by Ellen Kushner, Joel Derfner, Karen Lord, Delia Sherman, Racheline Maltese, Paul Witcover, Tessa Gratton, and Liz Duffy Adams. The first episode is available for free at Serial Box and can be found here. Being a writer is like being a director with a crowd of characters demanding ‘So, what’s my motivation?’ Like real-life actors, they don’t always listen when you tell them your plans, which is why flexible plots and rewrites are a part of my process. It’s a process that works when I’m writing a book by myself, but a joint writing project like Tremontaine is a different beast. The world belongs to Ellen Kushner, the characters belong to Ellen and the full team of Tremontaine writers, and being on the same page is not a mere metaphor, but an absolute necessity. The Tremontaine writers are passionate about the world and the characters, and it’s been an exciting experience to work with them.

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