Blogging about worldbuilding

I'm talking worldbuilding at Ivy Book Bindings today. While I do get flashes of character and plot in the early stages of storywriting, it's the worldbuilding that I love designing the most, along with the impact it has on human relationships.

This is part of a Book Crush series so I've also listed three of my favourite books - a classic, a recent fantasy (yes, I occasionally read one), and this year's standout (ahem) from my other half.

Computers as movie directors?

Here's a nice reference to Song of Scarabaeus on the Mac Observer. Think about it: what if computers were powerful enough to make a digital movie from a book with no human input necessary?

The computing power of the biocyph in SoS is fast enough to terraform entire ecosystems. I think biocyph could probably handle animating a novel. Whether an Apple Mac could ever do it is up for debate. I'd love to see how a computer handled the musical analogy I used for Edie jacking into the datastream. It's not visual concept, and movies need to be pretty to look at.

Talk about Song

If you're on Goodreads, Song of Scarabaeus has been picked as one of the two reads this month at the Vaginal Fantasy Hangout, which is a segment on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel from Felicia Day (et al). The YouTube discussion comes in a few weeks but meanwhile you can talk about the book on Goodreads here.

In last month's YouTube episode, Felicia introduced the two books at the end (the other is Ghost Planet by Sharon Lynn Fisher) and not only said both my names correctly but succeeded with her second attempt in pronouncing Scarabaeus (check out 1:07:44 so that you, too, can achieve this rare feat). In my experience that's about three attempts fewer than most people, and I don't blame them. It's a silly word. (Don't even ask what it means.)

I don't actually know how it's pronounced, by the way. It's just how I say it.

As for spelling it... good luck with that. Even my own publisher misspelled it in a promotional flyer (fortunately I caught it in the draft).

MCP interview

I know all I'm blogging about these days is MCP's new book, but that's because I don't have a whole lot to talk about in my writing life these days. Progress is slow, but always exciting.

This month MCP is interviewed in Clarkesworld Magazine, and has some interesting things to say about The Kassa Gambit, shoes, Jack Vance, and dogs:

Accepting a More Profitable Shoe: A Conversation with M. C. Planck

Release day! The Kassa Gambit

Pretty much the first thing MCP and I did when we met was exchange manuscripts - mine was an early version of Song of Scarabaeus, his was the first novel in a fantasy trilogy. While I fell in love with his writing, I admit that fantasy is not really my thing. (At least it wasn't until Game of Thrones (the TV show), which really isn't that fantastical anyway.)

Evidently this discrepancy didn't hinder our relationship, especially as MCP is also a huge sci-fi fan. So he wrote me an adventure sci-fi book "where everything blows up on the first page", as he put it. The book was called Prudence Falling, which is the protagonist's name and I think a lovely evocative title, but Tor disagreed and it became The Kassa Gambit.

It's out today! - hardcover and ebook formats. MCP also has some blog interviews and posts coming up around the traps (includes updates I've made a few days later):

• Interview at Layers of Thought
• Interview at The Qwillery
• Guest post at To Read or Not to Read - "Which writers have influenced you the most?"
• Guest post at Starmetal Oak Reviews - "Books that aren't read as much as they should be"
• Interview at Book Brats
• Interview at Poisoned Rationality
• A nice review from Open Letters Monthly, which laments the hc price and calls the book "a tasty science fiction snack".

Links to buy the book are here on MC Planck's website.

Congratulations to my amazing man! xxx