Writing adventures and related musings.
Look at what arrived a couple of weeks ago: the ARC of the Inhuman Peace, the second book in my Commonwealth Empire trilogy! I’m told by Gautam Shenoy that the books have already started showing up in bookstores, so . . . it’s out?? It’s out!So I’m actually quite happy that this book is out, because it’s easily been one of the most difficult parts of my career so far… Read More »The Inhuman Peace is out!
I’ve been reading Robin Sloan’s video game development diary with much interest. Partly because his joy of creation that shines through – and the world desperately needs more of that in these COVID-19 times. But also partly because he’s using machine learning to generate descriptions of castles for his video game. A bit of background: the three people who actually do read this blog of mine (and the significantly largely… Read More »Adventures in machine-generated text: short-burst creativity, and why classical CS has it wrong
2019 might have had some real low notes in it, but it ended well: I finished the second book in the Commonwealth Empire series, and booped it off to Swati Daftuar at HarperCollins India. I’ve written about this particular beast before. I had a great deal of trouble with the thing. I finished the first version quite early – somewhere in March – but it just didn’t feel right: there… Read More »The second Commonwealth Empires book is done!
In which a Twitter argument forced me to think about my evolving personal definitions of science fiction.
In which I read the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a writer and talk about the things I’ve learned, from handling themes to the tradeoffs of branching storylines to shaved knuckles in the hole.