Back in February, I found inspiration in a tweet. I banged out a short story in a weekend. Over the past few months, that story has been given the whole treatment: beta readers, copy-editing, a cover, ARCs. A few weeks ago, I sent it to the proofreader for a final polish.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Just shy of her 16th birthday, Kayla and her dad move to Unity Station to reunite with Kayla’s mother. In their new life, they’ll live, work, and study alongside aliens. Jam-packed with teenage insecurity and awkwardness as well as adrenaline-fuelled life-and-death action. I’ve knocked one star off because it was confusing at times. For …
I awoke at half five this morning with the tentacles of a thought wrapped around my brain. It wouldn’t let go and three hours later I’m still pissed off. I’m not angry about being woken up; I’m furious about what I realised in that pre-dawn, half awake moment. Last night, the Twitter-sphere went a bit …
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lovelace is the AI that manages the Wayfarer — until she finds herself freshly rebooted, no memories, and migrated to a human body. Pepper, my favourite character from Long Way, finds herself playing mother-figure to Lovelace. Becky Chambers is the master of character-driven science fiction. No one else creates characters that readers get deeply …
Kimiko is a starship pilot with nothing left to lose. She’s already lost her family, her money, her ship – even her ability to find work. So she hatches a plan to steal a ship from the corporation that took it all away from her. But to do that, she’ll need help from the elusive hacker, …
Two pretty puppers Firstly, this newsletter will be shorter than usual. This week, my attention is focused on Oz, my eight-year-old Anatolian shepherd. He’s got acute pancreatitis. He’s slowly getting better, but … well, I’m exhausted. Secondly, I commissioned a drawing of the talking dog, Spock, in the novel I’m working on. I’m pretty pleased …
Hi there. You may remember me from … er, no, you’ve probably never heard of me. In fact, you’re probably only here because I linked to this post in some writers’ group or forum or on Twitter. I’m SI CLARKE, indie author of science fiction. I’ve got several books and stories under my belt. In a …
Weird Christmas A few weeks before Christmas, there was a knock at my door. It was, as you might expect in 2020, a courier. But this delivery was an enormous, heavy cardboard box covered in stickers in Polish. Erm… What? As I dug through the mountains of styrofoam peanuts that filled the box, my mind …
Unexpected dragons, jaded dogs, and imaginary corpses Read More »
The Voyages of the Starship Teapot When the world is rubbish, I just have to look at these guys to feel a bit better about things. Here they are, waiting for walkies. They’re good boys. One month on and I’m still working on a novel about an IT project manager in Toronto who gets kidnapped by bounty hunters from …
Excessive Silliness In October, I got the edits back for Livid Skies. It’s got a cover now and the whole thing has been typeset. The proofreader is hard at work on the final version. But in the meantime, I’ve released almost-final ARCs into the wild. You can get one here if you’re interested. With that done, it was time for …
