Mary Robinette Kowal

I’m going to try a newsletter thingie because people keep being surprised when I’m on book tour. They miss the posts, or the tweets, or the social media what have you and are then sad that they didn’t get to come visit and I’m sad too. Sad. So– I thought I’d try a mailing list/newsletter/digest/occasional […]

“What are the parts of the job that nobody told you about?” Or, you know, WARNED you about… It’s a question somebody sent to us, and we all had different answers, so Brandon put together a list, and we made a whole episode out of it! We talk about reviews, physical pain, dietary excitement, deadline-driven

So… yesterday’s Alternate Reality Day prank included only four true things. I did beat Patrick Rothfuss at being Patrick Rothfuss, although I did not take his account over later. I wrote a short story trying to match the style of Scalzi, for kicks, which I presented as the first chapter of Young Man’s War: First Contact.

The new Writing Excuses is up. We talk about characters a lot, which is fitting since character are what make things go in most of our favorite books. Brandon introduces a new model for examining characters in which three primary attributes – Competence, Proactivity, and Sympathy – are contrasted. We treat each one as if