Bloggasm

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and narrowly escaped being named after Peregrine Took. Given these origins, it’s inevitable that she would become a writer of speculative fiction. She began maintaining a blog in 2002, mostly because all the cool kids were doing it, and it has since taken over much of what she laughingly refers to as her copious free time.

Simon Owens: In a relatively short period of time, you’ve made a rather large number of sales (both in the short story and novel arenas). Based on reading your blog, I know that for years before these sales you had been writing at a very consistent rate. Do you feel that there was a tipping point when your writing finally reached a level of being extremely publishable, or was it a much more gradual process?

Elizabeth Bear: There does seem to be a point where the dam bursts. There’s a lot of slow slogging to get there, and it seems to follow a predictable path: First, there are form rejections; then encouraging personal rejections; then back to form rejections (or the deadly “this didn’t stand out” rejections); then the most frustrating stage, which is “There’s nothing wrong with this story but–” rejections.

Those are the worst, because they’re perfectly true. And you find yourself screaming “If there’s nothing WRONG with it, why didn’t you BUY it?” And of course it’s because, while there’s nothing *wrong* with the story, there’s simply not enough *right.* Which is when, as a writer, I think you really have to dig down deep and find whatever it is that you as a unique individual have to bring to the process, the specialness and verve and voice and daring that make a winning story.

And that’s the tipping point. Before I hit that point, I sold things kind of scattershot–because they appealed to one editor or another, or because I happened to hit something just right at a given time. Afterwards, after I found my voice, so to speak, the sales became a steady trickle.

I still collect rejections, of course. I’ve got over 300 at last check.

There’s a Tina Turner song I love, called “Overnight Sensation,” which talks about the years of singing in dive bars in two-dollar high heels that go into being an overnight sensation.

SO: How successful have you been at using your blog to promote your work? Do you think it places a significant role in your success as a writer?

EB: You know, the funny thing is, I don’t think of my blog as a promotional tool. I think of it as a professional blog, in the sense that I talk about my job there, but I also talk about politics and movies and my dogs, and funny conversations with friends, and recipes, and whether Americans are weird for going into swooning ecstasies every year when the clementines appear in the marketplace. I link bad reviews as well as good ones. What the heck; it’s my blog, and I’m interested in all my reviews, even the hatchet jobs.

It was brought to my attention last month that it’s been cited as an example of a really good writing/teaching blog, because I do talk about process so much–which I think is different than self-promotion, because it’s more in the sense of “here are the difficulties, and here are the ways I am surmounting them, or failing to surmount them, or sort of slapping a patch over them because that’s the limit of my skills right now.”

I find it’s very helpful that way, because my learning process is such that I can’t really internalize a skill until I explain it to somebody else, and my blog lets me do that in a space where it’s okay if I’m monopolizing the conversation, because _that’s my job._ It also lets me do things like keep myself honest–I post daily metrics, and having to ‘fess up to 900 people that I didn’t write today is a powerful motivator to do *something*. *g*

SO: What other methods do you use besides blogging to promote your books? Which have been the most successful?

EB: You know, I’m not sure that author promotion is in particular useful, until you’re a big enough name that people are interested in coming out to see you. I’ve done a few book signings and readings and I do the convention crawl every now and again, but that’s not so much self-promotion as going to hang out with other writers and talk shop until they throw us out of the hotel bar.

And I’m not sure how much my blog drives sales, either. Maybe a little bit, in terms of–there are probably a dozen or even five dozen people who might have bought books because of reading my blog… but fifty books isn’t a lot in terms of sales.

I mean, it can’t hurt, unless I’m so obnoxious that I drive people away. But fifty copies is not a lot.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

EB: Oh, that’s a toughie. Everyone, or everyone who is interested in writing? Because I can provide five for either question. *g*

I really like professional blogs, and one of the best of those is “EnglishCut,” which is “the blog of thomas mahon, bespoke savile row tailor, london.” It’s fascinating, full of wonderful little details of his trade and his life, and I check it a couple of times a month to see what he’s added.

Terry Karney is a must-not-miss for a lot of reasons, including political commentary and food porn; he’s one smart and well-informed guy, an Iraq war veteran, a really good cook, and a filthy liberal like myself.

If the question regards fiction writing, however, I wind up over here: my favorite SFF lit bloggers are Matthew Cheney, of The Mumpsimus who has book reviews, nattering on the genre, and a really fine critical grasp of SF and its various branches; and Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column who keeps a close eye on what’s up and coming in the genre–and who reads widely outside of the genre, too, which gives him a nice perspective. And I don’t think Making Light actually needs the plug, given their readership, so I’ll save it for someone less well-known. *g*

I’m not even going to get into the blogs of other writers, except to note that Scott Lynch, Hanne Blank, and John Scalzi’s “The Whatever” are among my consistent favorites, and mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with writing. Essentially, I read as many writerblogs as I can find, in as many different genres, though not all of them every day or even every week, and I could name a dozen more good ones without even trying.

Whups. I guess that’s eight. Oh, well.

You can find Ebear’s journal over here

Simon Owens: I’ve seen many writers say that you should wait until you have a few novels under your belt and have a strong following before publishing your first collection. As someone who published his first collection before his first novel, do you have any regrets? Was there anything you would have done differently?

Tim Pratt: Hmm, I didn’t see any reason to wait until I’d published novels to sell a story collection. My book Little Gods probably helped me sell my first novel — it got me some good reviews in visible places (Locus, Publishers Weekly), raised my profile in the field, probably led directly to my nomination for the Campbell Award, and helped make me more attractive to agents, all of which improved my chances of selling Rangergirl. Insofar as I’m known in the field at all, I’m known as a story writer, not a novelist, and the collection just made me better known.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I probably should have waited a couple of years before publishing a collection. There are some stories in Little Gods that are pretty visibly journeyman work, and it’s a hodgepodge book with no thematic center. But I’m proud enough of the book that I’m happy to have Prime reprint it (sans the poems) in a smaller paperback size for their new distribution deal with Diamond, so it will be appearing widely in bookstores sometime next year. My next collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, does have more of a thematic heart, and will be a better book overall. It’s coming from Night Shade next year.

SO: You’re one of the few genre writers to sell a reprint to the Best American Short Stories series. Do you think that you’re going to try and cross over to the non-genre side at all now that you’ve had some success in that realm?

TP: No, I won’t try, but if mainstream success comes knocking, I certainly won’t pretend I’m not home. I’ll just keep writing the books I want to write, and sell them wherever I can. Almost everything I write has a fantastic element, so it’s likely I’ll keep selling books to fantasy publishers. That said, my first novel doesn’t say “fantasy” on the spine — it says “fiction” — and the cover doesn’t feature dragons or elves or a guy with a sword, and it’s in trade paperback format, so there might be some attempt on the part of my publisher to position me toward fans of literary fiction (or at least literary fantasy). Which is fine. They could just as easily have put a giant scorpion or a golem on the cover of my book, something that would scream “fantasy,” but they made a different choice. I try not to worry too much about the marketing side. I just write books that make me happy. If I tried to write to market — any market — it would probably be too self-conscious, and fail artistically and commercially!

SO: What methods are you using to promote your new novel?

TP: Doing interviews like this one.

Oh, the usual things you do in these crazy days of the interweb frontier. I made a website, and put up a free spin-off story. I have an online journal that I update a lot. Many people in my little corner of the blogosphere started talking about the book spontaneously, which I appreciated. Here in the world of the physical, I’m doing a couple of signings, and lots of interviews for websites and a couple for newspapers, and radio interviews. I’ll make myself visible at conventions. Doing a bigger publicity push would probably help a little, but word of mouth and the esteem of booksellers is what drives book sales, and that’s largely out of my hands. Me wandering around Santa Cruz in a cowboy suit handing out free bookmarks probably wouldn’t make an appreciable bump in sales anyway.

SO: What are the five blogs that everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

TP: I’m not a screenwriter (not yet, anyway), but I enjoy Query Letters I
Love

The Adventures of Art Lad is wonderful

I like Mistress Matisse’s journal, for its witty and intelligent look at an interesting subculture, and for her posts about idiots making stupid phone calls.

Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything is a frequently fascinating
blog/radio show.

Preshrunk, the t-shirt blog, because t-shirts make me happy.

(I read all those usual SF type blogs too, of course, but thought I’d branch out a little to try and hit some your readers might not already read)

You can find Tim’s blog over here

Simon Owens: When the Hugo awards were hosted in the UK, many people noticed that a lot more UK authors were on the ballot. Does this frustrate you at all when the ceremony is being held in the US that there is a certain kind of “home field” advantage to it?

Charlie Stross: No, I’m not worried. The preponderance of UK authors on the ballot was only a feature of the novel shortlist, and two-thirds of the voters were American worldcon members; what appears to have happened is that a vintage year for British SF coincided with a year in which the normal US suspects were all between novels for some reason. In general, Hugo voters aren’t that parochial; as long as the story is good they don’t care about the nationality of the author.

SO: As someone who has had success in both short fiction and novels, which do you prefer? Do you find yourself wishing you could spend more time on short fiction?

CS: To tell the truth, I find novels more satisfying. A short story (or indeed anything shorter than a novella) is a vehicle that only gives you limited space: there’s room to get one neat idea or scene or emotional punch in, two at the most. This limits your ability to engage with the reader. Some ideas are just too big to get across in their full depth in anything less than a book — indeed, many ideas take more than one book to develop. (I’m thinking of Stephenson’s huge Baroque Cycle here; while there are numerous shorter books inside it struggling to escape, I don’t see how he could have delivered its cumulative message with anything much shorter.)

SO: How do you think the UK book market differs from the US market?

CS: The market, or the readers?

The market itself is similar, albeit smaller and probably more cut- throat as a result. The readers, however, are a different matter. If SF reflects the authors preoccupations with the present on the wide screen of the future, then SF that sells is SF that speaks to the reader’s preoccupations — be it a desire for escapism from the present (reassuring tales of derring-do in a future where the present has a happy ending), or a playground for fears or hopes. Right now there seems to me to be in the American zeitgeist a desperate worry about Empire, while the British zeitgeist has finally laid the ghost of empire to rest, a half-century after the empire itself died. And this is probably subtly skewing our output. In the current decade, is an American Ken MacLeod or Richard Morgan even possible? Or a British John Ringo or David Weber?

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

CS: 1. Making Light By Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, plus others. Two very smart, very talented SF editors hold a unique literary salon. It’s the comment threads that make it work …

2. Terra Nova is a group blog about the sociology, economics, and politics of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs to their friends). Pay attention at the back: MMORPGs are the first widespread, networked, consumer-oriented virtual reality environments, and the first that are popular enough that people will pay money to use them. Today they are about where the web was in 1995. In 2015 they will affect your life the way the web affects it in 2005. This is your guidebook to the future you’re going to live in.

3. Juan Cole’s weblog. Don’t understand what’s going on in Iraq, or middle eastern politics in general? Confused by CNN or the BBC? Professor Cole is that rare thing, an expert on middle eastern and Iraqi politics who reads Arabic, transcribes news reports, and provides the background that non- specialist news sources simply can’t cover.

4. Crooked Timber. Get a bunch of philosophers, economists, statisticians and argumentative non-right- wingers and give them a group blog: hilarity and multi-way discourse ensues on topics as diverse as the limits of statistical measures, multi-blogger seminars on SF and fantasy novels, and (groan) more on
Iraq.

5. Bruce Sterling’s weblog. Chairman Bruce has always lived at least fifteen minutes in everyone else’s future. Currently he’s obsessed with eastern Europe, design, universal fabrication, security, and Bollywood. But that could change any minute now.

You can find Charlie’s blog over here.

Eugie foster calls home a mildly-haunted, fey-infested house in Metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew, and her pet skunk, Hobkin. She is an active member of the SFWA, winner of the Phobos Award, Managing Editor of Tangent, and Submissions Editor for The Town Drunk. Her fiction has been translated into Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and French, and her publication credits include stories in Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, Paradox, Cricket, Cicada, and anthologies Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown, edited by Orson Scott Card; Sages & Swords, edited by Daniel E. Blackston; and Writers for Relief, edited by Davey Beauchamp–a charity anthology to benefit the survivors of Hurricane Katrina with contributions from Brian W. Aldiss, Gardner Dozois, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, and Larry Niven.

Visit her online at www.eugiefoster.com and read her blog at www.livejournal.com/~eugie.

Simon Owens: As a short story writer, you’ve had experience with chapbook publications of your individual work. What has this taught you about self-promotion and do you think this will be in any way similar to when you publish your first novel?

Eugie Foster: Actually, while there was self-promotion involved with my Scrybe Press chapbooks, Nathan Barker, the editor, also did a large amount of promotion on my behalf–soliciting reviews and sending out review copies to a slew of places. On the self-promotion front, a chapbook is the perfect size and price to take to a convention. People seem more inclined to try out a writer unknown to them for under $5 than to invest in a trade paperback for double and triple that cost.

I honestly don’t know how promotion will be with a novel–although I’m keeping my fingers (and toes and eyes) crossed that my agent will find a home for my middle-grade novel soon. I’ll be ecstatic to get the chance to find out what novel promotion will be like. I do expect the publisher to take on the lion’s share of that area, because isn’t that their job? But I also fully expect to continue lugging my basket of goodies around with me to conventions and doing what signings and plugs I can. And, of course, posting and plugging on my blog and website. Honestly, I don’t really consider myself very savvy when it comes to any of the marketing ins and outs of publishing. I write what I write, and then try to find someone who likes it enough to buy it.

SO: You’ve been published in both the large and small press. What are your opinions about the small press and do you think it has helped you grow as a writer?

EF: One of the virtues of being published by smaller presses is they often go out of their way to promote and publicize their authors. For example, Jason Sizemore, the editor of Apex Digest, published an interview with me in one of his issues (#2), encourages me routinely to submit to him, and nominated my story appearing in #4 of Apex, “Oranges, Lemons, and Thou Beside Me,” for a Pushcart. And likewise, Aberrant Dreams invited me to do a book signing to promote my story “The Son that Pain Made” and their interview with me in their January issue. Now that’s personal care and attention!

The virtue of large presses, of course, is their circulation and name recognition, and that the Best Of anthologies tend to select works almost exclusively from them. Generally speaking, for a writer who is where I’m at, career-wise, I’m delighted to be published by both large and small presses. The combination seems to work especially well in tandem to increase name recognition and form a readership.

SO: You’re someone who believes in writing a little everyday. Do you think this hinders or helps your creative process?

EF: Oh, no question, it helps. When I write on a nearly daily basis, it keeps the creative juices percolating and the language centers lubricated. For me, writing is a skill that requires practice to stay adept at. Like a muscle, if it’s not exercised, it becomes flabby, and there’s nothing more frustrating for a writer (this writer, at least) than having a fat and lazy writing muscle. I sit at my keyboard and find the inspired story and scintillating prose that’s been clamoring for release has been reduced to “Larry see scary monster. Run, Larry, run!”

Also, it makes me feel like a grown-up writer if I work consistently at it.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

EF: I don’t know about should, but here are five that I’m especially fond of, and that I hit on a daily or near-daily basis:

Tangent - Although not technically a blog, it’s your one-stop click for SF short fiction reviews, laid out in a blog-familiar style. A must-read for anyone in the SF short fiction biz. Plus, I’m the managing editor, which of course does not make the recommendation biased in any way. Nope, uh-uh.

Americablog - Funny AND insightful. Although also oftentimes depressing.

Baaaaabyanimals - “The Pyramid Scheme of Cuteness with a twisty ending.” After reading Americablog, this LiveJournal community is a refreshing break.

Fosteronfilm - My husband, Matthew’s, film criticism and ponderings.

Escape Pod – I guess this isn’t technically a blog either, but it’s a podcast, which is close ’nuff isn’t it? It’s run by Stephen Eley, and it’s full of short SF stories and related commentaries. I love kicking back and listening to one of the excellent selections Escape Pod offers.

Jenn Reese has been writing speculative fiction since 1995 and blogging about it since 1998. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and ‘zines, as well as online at cool places like Strange Horizons. She lives in LA, studies martial arts, and is currently at work on her second novel.

Simon Owens: You’re someone who has had several publications in both online and print venues. Is there one you prefer over the other? Which gives you more reader feedback?

Jenn Reese: I love having stories online at places like Strange Horizons and Lenox Avenue. My friends and family can read them without shelling out money for a book, and if people like my stories, they can email the link or post it in their blogs. There’s a warm glow you get from being a part of the online genre community.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like holding a book in your hand, seeing your name in black type, smelling the glue and hearing the rustle of pages. It’s a high like no other. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer books.

As for reader feedback, I get the most email from Strange Horizons readers, who are generally, in my experience, also writers. I also get a lot from my appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Those books are reprinted in several languages, and I’ve received email from readers (who are not writers) in such places as Norway, Germany, and Australia. DAW anthologies seem to reach a vastly different audience than online venues.

SO: You’ve had a series of connected flash fiction pieces running in Strange Horizons for the past year? How did writing these compare to writing a single (longer) short story?

JR: I started my “Tales of Chinese Zodiac” series as a creativity exercise during a deep, dark writing lull. Although I am normally an ardent outliner, I would not allow myself to plan these stories, even one sentence ahead. I never knew how they were going to end when I started them. I tried to surprise myself. I threw out the first few ideas that came to mind and forced myself to find alternatives. I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much fun writing as I did with those tales. Since then, I’ve been using those techniques more and more in my longer fiction.

SO: Does participating in martial arts influence your writing at all?

JR: Martial arts has influenced my life more profoundly than any other activity upon which I’ve embarked, outside of reading and writing.

Of course, I put more martial arts into my stories now. The first novel I wrote was an action-adventure kungfu romance, and I’d love to make it into a series someday. Then there are a whole host of Life Lessons I’ve learned, including big ones about embracing the beginner’s mind, working hard, pushing oneself, finding one’s limits and exceeding them. When I started writing, I wanted to be good right away. When I started martial arts, I was happy to spend an hour working on a simple punch or technique. That alone has taught me how I view the difference between mental and physical skills. I’ve since tried to tear down that distinction in my mind and approach writing with more of a “white belt” mentality.

I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my biggest idols, Bruce Lee: “If you always put a limit on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must
go beyond them.”

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

JR: First, people should only be reading my blog if they care just as much about my martial arts adventures and my cats as they do about my thoughts on writing. High-brow entertainment it aiin’t. But I guess that philosophy holds true for the blogs I read, too: I’m more interested in following the lives of people I like–both real-life friends and friends I just know through their journals–than in reading blogs with more controversial or industry-packed content. I do enjoy the latter type of blog, and have occasionally been pulled into a controversy or two, but my online community is generally a personal one.

You can find Jenn’s blog over here.

Simon Owens: You recently released a new edition of your collection with Prime Books. How does this differ from the first edition and which do you like better?

Paul Tremblay: I wouldn’t have released a new edition of the book if I didn’t think it was an improvement upon the first. Now, it’s not that the first edition was a booger, and I’m certainly grateful to Jeffrey Thomas for his introduction and David Ho’s cover art. But the redesign offered an opportunity to appeal to a wider audience. The cover and interior black and white photography (all original) by the talented Mairi Beacon, it being published both as a hardcover and paperback, and the introduction from Stewart O’Nan works toward the goal of wider appeal. Also, I thought adding “Lies and Skin” (co-written with Steve Eller) and the extended “City Pier” improved the collection.

SO: Your “City Pier” stories are arguably your best. How did you set out writing them? Did all the ideas come at once or were they three different storylines that just eventually connected?

PT: “City Pier” grew out of an image I had of a futuristic city built above a giant wooden pier. I wanted it to be an out-of-time and out-of-place setting that would allow me to mix and match genres: SF, fantasy, noir, satire. “Meat’s Story (City Pier)” was written first with no thought of the other three stories that followed. “Dole as Ribbit” and “The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas…” came later, and after a considerable period of time. Both started as a stand alone story but as I wrote, I found or discovered tangential connections to the first story. The fourth and final story of this arc, “She Wants to Be Alone” connects most of the other stories’ dots. These four stories are still live at LENOX AVENUE and will be released as a novella by POINT BLANK in 2006. Also, I’m currently shopping a novel that is set in the same “City Pier” world. Anyone want to publish it? Don’t be shy!

SO: How has your experience as a Chizine editor affected your writing?

PT: I’m definitely a better writer and reader because of the editing gig. Wading through a-thousand-plus submissions can’t help but build stronger critical muscles. Editing has helped me refine my focus; helping me map out what I like and what I think works in fiction. Also, and just as important as knowing what works, is define what doesn’t work in fiction. While writing now, if I’m honest with myself and decide that a particular scene or character or plot point wouldn’t fly with the editor-me, I know it won’t fly with another editor. So I’ve become quite doppelganger-esque, whatever that means.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

PT: My blog-reading tends to be pretty incestuous; mostly other writers and friends. With that warning in mind, here’s my top five:

Matthew Cheney’s SF/Fantasy critical blog, The Mumpsimus

The next four are all writers who blog on a variety of topics and are either entertaining or informative, but never both!

Poppy Z. Brite (author of LIQUOR and PRIME) /

Nick Mamatas (author of MOVE UNDER GROUND)

Elizabeth Bear (author of HAMMERED)

Douglas Lain (author of LAST WEEK’S APOCALYPSE)

You can find Paul’s blog over here.

Greg van Eekhout has published around two dozen short stories in places like Starlight 3, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s. His story “In the Late December” was a Nebula Award nominee. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Simon Owens: You’ve recently completed a young-adult novel. How does writing young-adult fiction compare to writing adult fiction? Did you constantly find yourself analyzing and weighing the reading-level of your prose as you wrote the novel?

Greg van Eekhout: “Down the River Havoc” is about a 14-year old Kung Fu student who travels to an alien world for a cryptozoological expedition, and I did make a conscious effort to write a character who thought and acted like a 14-year-old, based on my recollections of having been a 14-year-old. I tried to include elements that would have appealed to me as a 14-year-old reader, like Kung Fu, humorous dialog, sarcasm, and squid monsters. On the other hand, at no point did I ever try to dial down the level of sophistication, not in terms of the vocabulary, the themes, the ideas, nor the relationships among the characters. Teenagers sometimes have different concerns than adults, and they don’t necessarily perceive or experience the world in the same way as adults, but I wouldn’t define those differences in terms of degree of sophistication. Kids live in a different world, and they’re adapted to that other world. They may be imperfectly adapted to their world, but then, I’m imperfectly adapted to the my world, too. I think an adult forced to live in their world would seem hopelessly awkward and weird and unsophisticated. If the book lacks sophistication, it’s probably due to my lack of sophistication as a writer and a thinker, and due to the fact that this was my first book, rather than the result of an effort to keep the reading level to less-than-adult. That being said, I hope my next book will be more complicated in every way, reflecting my growth as a writer and as a human being.

SO: Your story “In the Late December” is arguably one of your best. When you wrote it, did you just set out to write a Christmas story or was the story idea there first?

GvE: I knew I wanted to write a story about the end of the universe, and I wanted to portray it as a really bleak, cold, wintery place. I figured the environment itself could be the antagonist, like in a Jack London novel. Then it was a matter of deciding who might be around to struggle against this environment, and the answer was pretty obvious: Santa Claus would still be around, and he’d be trying to deliver toys, even if there weren’t any little boys or girls left to bring Christmas to, because, you know, Santa’s like that. I didn’t want to play Santa for laughs, or Christmas itself for laughs. I’m certainly capable of cynicism, but I didn’t want this to be a cynical story, or a satirical story. I wanted it to be a heartfelt Christmas story, which brings with it certain expectations of poignancy and warmth and all that stuff that can be really corny and nauseating if you’re not careful. I truly felt that Santa was important, that even after all the commercialization and saturation, there was still a mythical grandness and a nobility and a poetry to the figure. I’m still waiting for a phone call from Rankin-Bass.

SO: It seems that there’s a small close-knit group of speculative fiction bloggers you’re a part of. How has this helped your writing in terms of support and encouragement?

GvE: I used to say that, though it’s possible to write without the support and encouragement of a peer group, it’s just so much more fun when you have the camaraderie. But now I actually think socializing with a peer group is essential, as much as friendship itself is essential. If I tell someone at the day job that I sold a story to Asimov’s or got nominated for an award, they’ll be happy for me, but the people I connect with through blogging really understand, so maybe their “woots” mean a little more. Blogging is a congenial and enjoyable way to find conversations about the industry, to find first readers, to help me feel like I’m not the only person in the world who cares about the stuff I care about. And I’ve made actual friendships through blogging, and I feel immensely privileged to be writing at a point in the history of technology where it doesn’t have to feel like such a lonely occupation. So, I guess my answer is that blogging hasn’t just helped my writing, but it’s helped me in general as a person.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

GvE: Like many people, I depend on BoingBoing to keep up with cool tech and products and social phenomena. Bookslutis great for finding out what’s going on in the world of publishing. Over at ESPN.com, I read My So-Called Career, a blog by Paul Shirley, a pro basketball player who reveals a little of what life is like for the guys who aren’t stars, who play most of their careers for minor league teams or overseas. I don’t think he’s quite found his legs as a writer yet, but his blog is a good reminder that people are more interesting and complex than their stereotypes. At Shaken & Stirred, Gwenda Bond posts a lot of little items, many related to writing and publishing, and she has just the best list of links to other blogs. And I read Making Light, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog. They were instructors of mine at the Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop, and they’re both superb writers with broad interests, and it’s rare that I read one of their entries without learning something about something.

You can find Greg van Eekhout’s blog over here.