The only thing I truly have control over (April 2024)

This April newsletter has four parts: Narrative Worlds, News, Comments, and Finn. Be happy it isn’t taxes, taxes, taxes, and Finn, although at least then you would still have Finn.

First things first.

NARRATIVE WORLDS

Since 2020, I have hosted Narrative Worlds, a vidcast/webinar sponsored by SFWA and hosted on their Nebula Conference Online platform, in which I talk with a guest about writing craft and career. People with conference memberships can attend (and ask questions) at the live event, which takes place on the Nebula Conference online platform (to which they have access). The recording is then uploaded onto SFWA’s YouTube channel a few weeks later for any and everyone to view.

If you have a 2023 Nebula Conference membership, please join Ryka Aoki and me this coming Sunday, April 21, at 1 pm Pacific Time. I usually ask the guest to choose a topic of interest to them, and thus, we are going to discuss “Identity and Identities: How much of the worlds we come from can, will, or should come into the worlds we create.”

Recent recordings include:

A fantastic conversation with Grandmaster Nalo Hopkinson on “Creativity as a Lifelong Journey” -- this was very personal for us both, and of course Nalo is brilliant.

Navigating the Pressures of Writing: Coping, Caring, and Re-calibrating, a deep dive with lots of real talk about the pressures so many of us face, with the always generous and excellent Susan Dennard.

The prior three seasons and current season four episodes can all be found on SFWA’s YouTube channel.

As a heads up: John Scalzi joins me on Narrative Worlds on May 19 to talk about social media.

NEWS (such as it is)

1. Still waiting on edit notes for an as-yet-unannounced project to be published in 2025. You’ll hear about it as soon as I can tell you.

2. THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD BEGINS IN ICE: Stories and Essays from the Cold Magic Universe is coming together nicely. I’m super excited by how good it looks.

I got the rights to reprint the maps drawn by Jeffrey L Ward for the Orbit editions. I’m awaiting three more illustrations. The publisher, Patrick Swenson (Fairwood Books), has an almost final layout, as well as a workable (cost) quote for a (very) limited edition Deluxe hardcover edition to go with the trade paperback and the ebook, as well as a tiny chapbook version of the so-called smut scene, Cold Fire Chapter 31.5.

No preorders available yet. You will know as soon as the preorder button goes up so you can mash that button, as you wish. Publication date remains October 2024.

3. I plan to attend Glasgow Worldcon this coming August, and 2024 World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, NY in October. The Cold Magic collection should be available at WFC.

4. Work proceeds apace on LADY CHAOS (Sun 3). I have reached the all important 100,000 word mark, although I am still a long way from the end of a story being told in a blend of the epic and the intimate modes.

I again apologize for how long this first draft is taking me to write. It’s an incredibly complicated story with about a thousand moving parts, and I want to do it right more than I want to do it fast.

The only thing I truly have control over in my writing career is the care I take with my fiction. While it is true that I write for the commercial market, I also write because I have a story I want to tell. My goal remains, always, to make my best effort, with the skills and energy I have at any given time, to translate the story in my head onto the page for readers with maximum vividness and impact. I don’t want to cheat readers of my best, and I also don’t want to cheat myself of my best. So, thank you for your patience.

COMMENTS?!

Yes, Buttondown now allows comments.

If you have a query or comment for me, please try out the comments feature! I haven’t used it yet with my newsletter, and I’m eager to see how it works. I’m still figuring out Buttondown as I haven’t produced many newsletters yet here. So please, at least one of you needs to either comment (so I can see it works) or email me to say I didn’t push the correct button and no comments feature is enabled.

As always, most of my online writing these days takes place on Patreon, where I have many posts on the craft of writing, discussions of my own work, some specific material related to the suspended Black Wolves trilogy (no news on that for the moment), as well as a 2024 ongoing series focused on world building.

This Buttondown newsletter will remain free as a venue for news. Thank you all for being here and being interested. For a midlist writer like myself, with scant margins and lesser visibility, readers like you are what keeps my career afloat, and I appreciate every one of you more than I can say. Being Danish-American also tends to make me less effusive even (maybe especially) when I feel strongly about something, so let me just add, once again: Thank you.

And now, as I know some of you have been waiting for all through the many paragraphs of this newsletter, the obligatory photo of Finn, in his natural habitat, that of demanding pats.

As always, I could not do this without you. Thank you.

Kate Elliott