There’s this thing that happens sometimes where someone asks about book recommendations from an author and that author — probably a white guy, like me — rattles off some names of other authors who are also probably white guys like me. I don’t believe this to be an actively racist kind of thing, but more a product of an industry that doesn’t publish as many writers of color. And when they do publish them, they tend to remain marginalized because of various institutional reasons. Plus, then you get that excuse that’s meant to be a positive — “I don’t see color!” — which is a noble thought that ultimately fails, because while you mean I don’t give into preconceived divisions between race, what often results is, I don’t see color because mostly I see only white and if I don’t see color then I don’t have to acknowledge people of color.

I made an effort a couple years back to include a far deeper bullpen of women writers on my shelves, and I’d say at this point about half of my SFF reading is of women authors. This isn’t because of some kind of diversity bingo — I’m not reading books that are bad just to read them because they were written by a woman. I’m reading awesome books by awesome authors. The single result of expanding my reading has been that I am reading more amazing books.

I’ve been making the same effort to include more writers of color — and so it seems like this is a good time to open the comments up to recommendations of writers of color in the SFF space (or, more broadly, feel free to wander into horror and YA if you need to). I recognize there’s some danger in making this a Very Special Post like it’s an Afterschool Special or That One Panel At A Con About Women Authors Where All The Other Panels Are Assumed Then To Be About Men By Default. The ideal goal is, when we recommend books, to have a more diverse slate of books to recommend and not sequester them in their very own marginal post — at the same time, my hope is this post serves as a seeding ground for myself and for others where we learn about awesome books we’re not yet reading. And then we read them and we include them going forward in the books about which we proselytize.

HEY LOOK, MORE AWESOME BOOKS FUCKING YAY.

Right? Right.

Here’s a dollop of reading suggestions on my part, but for your part — get into the comments, recommend some writers of color and what they’ve written. Short stories and novellas are totally on the table, though I’ll recommend only novels right now as my reading of short fiction lately has been woefully shallow. If any work is free to read on the web, feel free to drop links.

(I do recognize that not all writers of color are self-identified, and the same goes for some women and QUILTBAG authors — but, many are, so the effort must be made.)

(Also, this really isn’t meant to be a proving ground for arguments about whether or not we should read more diversely or whatever your stance happens to be — please use the comments as a recommendation engine only. In this instance, be a fountain, not a drain. Thanks.)

The Recs

Nnedi Okorafor: Lagoon. I just started reading this a few days ago and my mouth cannot make the proper pleasing sounds. This woman’s prose is fucking astounding. Cinematic, yet also occasionally dreamlike — science-fiction, but also occasional fantastical? It’s a weird, wonderful book so far. The plot is fine and all, but her prose is a place I wanna live.

Daniel Jose Older: Half-Resurrection Blues. This is how I like my urban fantasy. Real, monstrous, street-level stuff. (I have an unattainable dream of mashing up this series with my own The Blue Blazes given how both are set in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan.) It’s funny, too, and grim, and all the things I want. I have Shadowshaper, his newest YA, but haven’t cracked the cover yet as my tbr pile threatens to crush me beneath its weight.

Maurice Broaddus: King Maker. The Arthurian myth recast in modern-day inner-city Indianapolis. Good stuff — neat analogs to the mythology here (Excalibur becomes a gun, the Caliburn, f’rex). It’s a fantasy novel but occasionally pretty brutal about the lives of these characters. It’s harder stuff than you realize — not fluffy fantasy.

Aliette de Bodard: Obsidian & Blood. This is three books in one, and it was a jaw-dropper for me in what it does with your expectations of genre — what I mean is, this is essentially a detective novel set in the Aztec Empire, and is chockablock with blood magic and necromancy and the drama of the gods and goddesses. An ARC of her newest, House of Shattered Wings, just landed across my doorstep, and I’m excited to read it.

Greg Van Eekhout: California Bones. I dunno why this book is $2.99 right now, but do yourself a favor and fling yourself upon it. It’s this cool LA urban fantasy about unearthing ancient things — but just as it’s sometimes about digging up real bones of old creatures, it’s also about digging up the bones of the past.

SL Huang: Zero Sum Game. Listen, I don’t like math, so when you tell me this is a book about a person whose superpower is math, I’m not interested. More the stupid on my part, because this first book is a blast from start to finish. Huang writes with hella energy — whatever mad calculus she’s doing, she’s doing it right. Curse her for making me care about math.

Now?

Your turn.

You read that right.

Today, I’m not asking for 1000 words of fiction.

I’m asking for a 1000 word essay (meaning, blog post).

And I want it on this subject:

WHY I WRITE.

That’s it. I wanna know why you write. What it is that makes you want to tell stories and write them down. What drives you? Something biographical? Something internal? Dig deep. Be thoughtful. Write it out like the bad-ass that you know you are.

The standard rules apply, otherwise:

Write it at your online space. Drop a link to it here in the comments.

Due in one week: 7/31.

Your time is now: tell us why you write.

*loads shotgun, fires a hot load of NEWS-SHOT into your gut*

So, first up, I’m going to be at GenCon next week in support of the Writer’s Symposium.

And maybe you’re gonna be there too. (Are you? Say hi!)

As such, my schedule, should you so require it:

Thursday, 11AM: Writer’s Craft, Eliciting Emotional Responses, with a pack of COOL HUMANS like Aaron Rosenberg, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory A. Wilson.

Thursday, 4PM: Business of Writing: Recovering from Controversy, with Jaym Gates, James Minz, James L. Sutter, and now I’m weirded out because I don’t have a James-flavored name.

Thursday, 6PM: Storium LIVE! A live Storium game with Sam Sykes, Stephen Blackmoore, and Delilah S. Dawson — three of my favorite people gathering with me for charity!

Friday, 1PM: Writer’s Life 101 with a glorious bunch of miscreants: Gwenda Bond, Christopher Rowe, Anton Strout.

Friday, 2PM: Q&A with… well, me. Come! Query me and I will answer you.

Saturday, 1PM: Writer’s Craft: Sustaining the Tension in Novels, with a passel of bad-asses named Lauren Roy, Matt Forbeck, and John Hornor Jacobs.

Saturday, 5PM: Character Craft: Supporting Cast — Real People Vs. Plot Devices, starring holy shit Terry Brooks, and Maxwell Alexander Drake, and Geoffrey Girard.

Holy shit, I’m gonna be busy! Good stuff.

(Bonus: download the entire symposium schedule here.)

What Else?

• Blackbirds remains $1.99 for Kindle, but only for one more week.

• You read the Star Wars: Aftermath excerpt at Entertainment Weekly? If you want a signed copy, there will be a signed, limited edition of the book — pre-order now at B&N or Books-A-Million. You will apparently receive a book that I have defaced and devalued with my autograph.

• One month till Zer0es, holy shit-wicker. I actually got a couple of early hardcovers, and they look freaking cool. (I always love the books where you touch the cover and it has texture and it’s shiny and you then get naked and rub it on your body wait what). You can pre-order now from a variety of favored book locations. Indie bookstores through Indiebound, for instance. Or Amazon. Or B&N. (For some reason it’s at a pretty deep discount at Amazon.) There will exist a pre-order bonus, too, which is that you’ll receive the first couple chapters of my next Harper Voyager novel, Myrmidon. (It counts if you pre-order now, by the way, no need to wait — I’ll post a link next week to a site that allows you to enter in pre-order details to Harper, and Harper will send you the two chapters of Myrmidon in August.)

• Hey, Kirkus reviewed Blackbirds! Full review here, but a glimpse: “The first in a series, this delightfully vicious and bloody urban horror novel provides a perversely entertaining introduction to a dangerous fugitive with a little something special up her sleeves.”

• Two scheduling additions: first, I’ll be at the 92Y in NYC on August 25th, helping to kickoff the launch of Libba Bray’s newest: Lair of Dreams.  Then, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop on September 2nd helping Fran Wilde launch her debut novel, Updraft!

• One woeful scheduling subtraction: I will no longer be attending the Central Coast Writer’s Conference in Cuesta College due to some family things. I may still attend in spirit (er, Skype!), and may be able to attend next year, but we’re all kinda working that out, still. Apologies in advance, but I have to make room for life stuff, sadly.

• You really need to read Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts because holy fuck.

What the fuckity-snacks is wrong with you, dude?

Sorry, let me back up.

Earlier today I got a bit of hate mail — though I guess hate mail is strong, as the writer of said email was not like, threatening to murder me with a brick or anything — from what appears to be a male, adult reader of my young adult series. In particular, he read the third book in the series, which came out last week: The Harvest.

I won’t reprint the email here, but he said, and I quote, “I didn’t like that you had a main gay character reviling [sic] in a homosexual sexual relationship.” (Reveling, I guess he means?) He feels I “corrupted” the book with the presence of “gay male relationships.” He then added that he feels I was jumping on some kind of “bandwagon,” which I assume (he did not clarify) means that I was doing this to fill some kind of diversity bingo card. Finally, he concluded that it “didn’t matter” or “effect [sic] the story” that the character was gay so why include it at all?

Here is my response that I won’t actually bother sending to him, but maybe he’ll read it here:

Dear Pouty McGee:

Thank you for reading my book. That’s nice of you.

I’m sorry* the book features gay characters who love each other and engage in sex. I suppose the more pleasing alternative to you would be for the characters to suffer in loveless abandonment and quietly pray to themselves while looking directly at heterosexual pornography, but that feels fucking goofy to me, so I didn’t write it that way.

I’d much rather write characters who are nuanced and complicated and who also are free to partake in the human spectrum of love and sex and sexuality (and their opposing sides which is betrayal and breakups and the loneliness that results).

I did not do this to jump on some kind of gay male bandwagon, though I would assume that a gay male bandwagon would be a lot of fun. I love both bands and wagons very much.

That said, while I do not subscribe to the notion of diversity bingo or writing books simply to fill some kind of imaginary social justice quota, I do like to think that it’s important to write books that feature people who aren’t me because I really, really hope that my readership is not just a room full of beardo white dudes with grumpy sourpuss faces staring at each other. Diversity matters to my readership, and I don’t mean that in a salacious “equates-to-sales” way, but rather in a, “equates-to-acknowledging-the-vast-complexity-of-the-humans-who-exist-around-us” kinda way. I also think it’s vital to read books that aren’t by people like me so that my own perspective is opened up. You should try that. Maybe you thought because I looked like you in some way we shared a certain bigoted point-of-view, like how sometimes white guys go up to other white guys and then say racist or misogynist stuff thinking that our whitemaleness is enough of a self-selected symbol, like it’s basically an invisible Swastika or Confederate Flag imperceptibly branded across our foreheads to indicate a shared social shittiness.

I did not write the character into the story because he affects the story, but at the same time, he does reflect it — the Heartland begins as a world where teenagers are forced to marry each other, and that means very explicitly that the Empyrean government enforces heterosexual couplings and nothing else. Which is a pretty horrible place to be as a person who isn’t heterosexual like, say, how America was just a few short months and years ago. Also, is gayness supposed to be a “plot point” if the character features? Is that essential? Why does that not apply to straight people? Why weren’t you mad that the character’s straightness didn’t matter and affect the story? And how exactly is that supposed to happen? The bad guys build a machine meant to run on one kind of sexual orientation or another? “BRING ME MORE GAYNESS THE MACHINE MUST FEED.”

I think your complaints are weird. What the hell, man. What the hell. Maybe you’re a parent, and that’s what this is? Certainly a lot of the complaints I receive from the readers of my YA work are from adults who have teenagers. These parents tend to be mad because I acknowledge that teenagers sometimes (gasp, I know) have sex and do drugs and say naughty words. One reviewer once said that teenagers, carte blanche, don’t say bad words. Like it’s never happened in the history of teenagerdom. But ignorance of teen habits is how you get abstinence training which is how you get pregnant teenagers and bad MTV reality shows about those pregnant teenagers. Teaching abstinence is like telling people not to ever get in a car (ever!) instead of teaching them where the fucking seatbelts are. Either way, your kids will not be harmed by fictional exposure to gayness, or gay sex, or bad words, or sex in general, or drugs, or any of that. I got bad news, Jack — your kids go to school and live in the world and that means they’re in the middle of it. That’s just how it is. Better to lend narrative context instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

Your teenagers are probably socially way ahead of you, by the way.

Is it just that you think two dudes making out is gross and weird? Because that’s gross and weird if you think that. Don’t be gross and weird. Be awesome and cool instead.

Oh, and as a sidenote, you’re on the third book of a series and this character isn’t new, so…? The whole gay thing has kinda been in there since the first book. (Not to mention: the book is filled with violence and yet, none of that seemed to bother you at all. Ah, Puritanical handwaving. Violence is cool. Love is bad. Good times.) How’d you get here? There were signs. Big gay signs. That had to be a willful choice on your part, or you don’t know how to count. If it’s the former, then I ask again: what the hell? If it’s the latter, I remind you: it’s 1 then 2 then 3, not 3 then 2 then 1. I’ll let my four year old teach you about counting and I think I’ll also let him tell you about loving consensual relationships between adults of any stripe because he literally has no idea that any of this is wrong and in fact I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even notice at all.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Here is a picture of a cuddly pug** to help soothe you.

*not sorry

**not a photo of a cuddly pug

The mantra of the writer — both published and unpublished and soon-to-be-published-again-someday-maybe — should really be: HURRY UP AND WAIT.

The career comes in fits and starts, feast and famine. A flurry of activity and a dead run into Nowheresville — a cursor spinning, crickets chirping, tumbleweeds tumbling, zombies gumming each other with rotten teeth just outside a Bed, Bath and Beyond.

It’s like drinking a glass of ice water and suddenly an ice cube dam releases and your face is suddenly the target of an ice cube avalanche and then your shirt is wet and your pants are wet and people think you aggressively urinated on yourself. Then you’re out of water and it’s like, “Hey, when do I get more water?” and the only response is a bewildering, sympathetic shrug. The glass sits empty for months and your mouth goes dry until suddenly — a firehose knocks you back.

You write a book, you put it out there.

Agent, editor, self-pub, whatever.

And maybe something happens, and maybe it doesn’t.

You sit, you wait, you gnaw your hand watching your email or your sales numbers.

Then maybe, movement — you claw your way to the next level but then that level is just another waiting room, another soul-crushing DMV line, another Satanic circle-jerk inside the deepest folds of Purgatorial Fuck-All. You get an agent, you wait. You get a book deal, you wait. The book releases, you wait. You wait for sales numbers. Royalties. Advances. This thing. The next thing. The thing after that. The career is a lot of you putting yourself out there and then you standing alone in a cornfield waiting until you’re pretty sure you’re going to be eaten by scarecrows.

That’ll kick you right in the spirit.

I’ve been there.

Every writer has been there, or gets there, eventually.

It’s normal.

It sucks.

And you can fix it. (Or, at least, make it easier.)

All those things are outside your control. Your publisher, your sales numbers, which editors bite, which editors don’t, what reviews you get, all of that — you don’t control it. You vaguely affect it, ideally by writing a book that’s really good, though plenty of writers have written not-so-good books that tickled the pop culture pineal gland and made a success anyway, and certainly plenty of writers have written amazing fucking books that either got published and then promptly pooped the bed or never even got published in the first fucking place. It is what it is. This career is unpredictable and success is sadly not predicated on producing quality material, but screw it.

You do what you can do.

And what you can do is:

Think about writing.

Then plan your writing.

Then fucking write.

Then edit the unholy shit-demons out of it once it’s finished.

Then you do it all again.

Think, plan, write, edit, repeat.

Purity exists in this simple sequence. It’s elegant. It’s direct. And it’s entirely within your control. The other gears and flywheels will turn, and sometimes they need you to give them a push or check in to make sure they’re oiled and whirling appropriately, but then? Get back out and get back to work. Many stories swirl around your head. This is how you exorcize them and stop them from possessing your brain so that you can trap them in the containment unit of ink and page. Focus on what matters. Don’t get lost in the tempest of the industry. Stay on target.

Think, plan, write, edit, repeat. Each stage takes the time that it takes. There’s no clock, there’s no gun to your head. It’s on you to decide how much time you need to take. But take the time. Thieve the time from other activities. Make effort. Be active. Push, urge, growl, fight, fuck, spit, get shit done. Don’t stop. Don’t languish. Don’t give into inertia or ennui. Don’t fall to doubt or fear. Don’t stare overlong at the industry. Be a maker, a creator, a teller, a doer.

Think.

Plan.

Write.

Edit.

Repeat.

Times infinity, until dead.

HEY, WRITER TYPES.

What’s troubling you, lately? About craft, story, the industry, the culture? What difficulties are you having? Talk it up. Having trouble with a particular character? Or a genre? Or a business concern? What’s the state of your work-in-progress and what’s preventing you from getting all the way? Let’s whip out our scalpels, because it’s DISSECTIN’ TIME.

(Further, let this be a conversation amongst you — if someone offers up a question or a concern, someone else jump in and offer thoughts. Writing feels like a solitary thing but it doesn’t need to be. We’re all in this shit together if we allow ourselves the advantage, and so there’s no reason we cannot combine forces like WRITER VOLTRON and help one another out. This is a community if we want it. And what I mean by that is, I’m in your house right now. I’m watching you sleep. Also, you’re out of cereal. And industrial-grade sexual lubricant. GET SHOPPING.)