Women in SF&F Month: Sylvia Izzo Hunter
Apr
19
2017

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Today I’m thrilled to welcome fantasy author Sylvia Izzo Hunter! Her debut novel, The Midnight Queen, is an absolutely delightful story with magic, romance, secrets, a plot to foil, and two great main protagonists (plus one wonderful, outspoken little sister!). It’s set on our world if it had followed a different course of history and is followed by two more books in the Noctis Magicae series, Lady of Magick and A Season of Spells.

The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter Lady of Magick by Sylvia Izzo Hunter A Season of Spells by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

How Fanfiction Made Me a Writer

As any member of my extended family will tell you, I was telling stories long before I learned to write (or read). Wherever we were living, my mom supervised me by ear: if I stopped narrating for more than half a minute, she knew I was Up To No Good. What they won’t mention—because it would never occur to them—is that most of my stories were fanfiction. I was Laura Ingalls; I was Dorothy Gale; I was Jim Hawkins or David Balfour or the unfortunate cabin boy from Kidnapped; I was Tom Sawyer and/or Huckleberry Finn; I was Caddie Woodlawn. In Grade 6, as a Language Arts assignment, I began writing an epistolary novel, which ultimately grew to engulf more than a dozen exercise books (without ever reaching any sort of denouement); its narrator was a young Jewish girl who lived on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth century. (I can’t remember her name, which seems like a bit of a betrayal.) She had many sisters; they Had Adventures, including brushes with potentially fatal illnesses. If you’ve ever read a book by Sydney Taylor, you will already have guessed where I—an 11-year-old in the mid-1980s, born and mostly raised on the Canadian prairies—got that premise and those characters. I knew you couldn’t just steal other people’s stories, of course, but I think I figured that if I diligently filed off the serial numbers…

See, I was a Jewish kid in a not-at-all-Jewish social environment, longing for representation (just one of many, many ways in which I didn’t fit in), and the All-of-a-Kind Family were the only fictional Jewish kids I’d ever met.

All 0f a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts

The next thing I started, worked on for years, and never finished was inspired primarily by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which I borrowed from my mom’s nightstand when I was eleven-ish and officially read in English class in Grade 12, and secondarily by Willo Davis Roberts’ The Girl with the Silver Eyes and all the Shoah memoirs I read as a teenager, from the sweet and hopeful When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr to Elie Wiesel’s Night. This epic dystopian saga featured, in no particular order, anti-Semitism and ethnic cleansing, orphans of war/resistance, plucky kids looking out for one another, a black-market economy, medical experiments, sweet teenage romances, telepathy, tragic death, cross-dressing, children surviving Gestapo-esque raids by hiding in kitchen cupboards, underage prostitution, and daring escapes. Years later, as some of my less pleasant life experiences started to need some kind of outlet, it also featured cancer, miscarriage, infertility, sexual assault, painful breakups, and an enormous amount of confusion about how relationships actually work.*

Talk about breaking down genre barriers: for at least 15 years, my writing was alternately and simultaneously fiction, fanfic, RPF, and journalling, all in the same series of exercise books, spiral-bound notebooks, and blank-books.

Sometimes—usually as class assignments**—I wrote short stories, which (more or less) had beginnings, middles, and ends. But my own writing, the writing I did because I wanted or needed to, was always open-ended, unending. I often wrote little vignettes, the understanding of which depended entirely on a deep background knowledge of one of the worlds I’d made up. (In the world of fanfic, I would later discover, “missing scenes” like this are practically their own genre.) I didn’t tell people that I wrote fiction; I didn’t think of myself as a writer, even though I wrote A LOT; and I would never in a bazillion years have let anyone (especially anyone I knew) read anything I wrote for fun.

And then, in the early 2000s, at the ripe old age of 20-something, I discovered—don’t laugh—Fanfiction.net. I had just read Tamora Pierce’s Immortals Quartet and wanted more of those characters, and by that time I had heard of fanfiction,*** so I went a-googling until I found some. I read a whoooole bunch of Daine/Numair fic. And then, one day, I wrote some. I made an account. I posted a story. (I say “story”, but that implies it had a plot; it didn’t.)

And people liked it.

Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce Wolf Speaker by Tamora Pierce Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce

That first little story, which I now find deeply embarrassing, is still up there, because people liked it.

The next thing that happened was that, a few little vignettes later, I wrote something in parts, with a plot. I finished it. People liked it. Then I started writing a longer thing. People liked that, too, and commented wanting to know what happened next. I finished the story—the very first long-form thing I had ever written that had a beginning, a middle, and, crucially, an end. A couple of other writers in that fandom contacted me: Did I want to join their crit group? Yes, yes I did. And so the next time a scene and some characters spontaneously happened in my head, as they sometimes do, and I started writing that down, my new crit friends wanted to read what I’d written. And having read and critted it, they wanted to read more. They read my non-fan stuff, and I read theirs, and we all taught each other an enormous amount, and by the end of 2007, I had written a book. And I had showed it to people, and I had survived the experience.

Now, it wasn’t a book I could sell, not yet—that took five more years, several more drafts, a lot of query letters to agents (and almost as many rejections), even more drafts, and extensive editing by my agent and my editor. But if it hadn’t been for honing my skills in the safely anonymous playground of fic, the self-confidence I gained from positive reactions to my stories, and the other writers I met in the comments section (who helped me learn to write better and also taught me how to skate through a check, so to speak), it almost certainly wouldn’t have been written at all.

Writing someone else’s characters in someone else’s world pushed me to go beyond what I was already good at (inventing characters, writing dialogue) and work on what I had more trouble with (plot, action, story arc). Through writing alternate universe fic—putting those characters in a new setting while keeping them recognizably themselves—I got better at understanding and conveying what, deep down, makes a given fictional person who they are. Fic writers push all kinds of boundaries all the time, and as a deeply anxious person I think I needed to see people trying these {brave | ridiculous | inexplicable | hilarious | disturbing | off-the-wall} things and (mostly) being supported by their peers in doing so. And putting my pseudonymous fic out there for the whole Internet to (potentially) see and criticize was, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the first step towards being able to send out query letters and partials to actual agents with my real name and address attached to them—not to mention the crucial writer skill of getting a 15-page revision letter in your inbox and going “Oh, OK, here are some helpful comments” rather than “OMG WHAT WILL I DOOOOOOO”.

The popular image (or one popular image) of the writer is of a creative genius / tortured artist / “crazy” person / Certified Intellectual toiling away in splendid isolation until A Book is produced. Of course everyone’s different, and of course there will always be a lot of sitting down by yourself at your keyboard (or whatever) and Making Shit Happen on the page; but for me, community has become key to the writing process, and to my growth, confidence, and identity as a writer—and fandom is where I first experienced that sense of supportive-plus-challenging community among writers and readers.

I sort of hesitated to make fanfic the subject of this post, because I know of much-famouser-than-me pro writers who write fic (or used to write fic) and get a lot of grief about it. But this is a post I was invited to write for Women in SFF, and the writers I’m thinking of are, like me, women. It would be nice to suppose that the experiences they describe are unconnected to gender, but let’s be real: unpaid fan writing is still a majority-female space (or, at any rate, it’s thought of as such), and I think it would be naïve to suppose that’s not a big part of why it’s so often mocked and so seldom taken seriously.

I also don’t want to suggest that writing fic is a valid and valuable activity only as some kind of rehearsal for or stepping-stone to “real” writing—which is an argument I hear fairly often and with which, for the record, I strongly disagree.

That said … I have written fic, and I still write fic when I feel like it, and I’m quite proud of some of it, nor have I tried particularly hard to conceal my fic-writing tendencies—so, I said to myself, why start now? (I realize I may yet regret that decision.)

So, to close out my patented “Yay fanfic!” rant (which all of my friends have heard at least once before), here are some true things about me and fic:

  • I am 100% a better writer because of the tens of thousands of words of fic I’ve written in the past dozen-ish years.
  • I am 100% a better writer because of the mutual critique I’ve engaged in with fic-writing friends.
  • I still read fic, though my fandoms of choice have changed, and there are fic writers I admire every bit as much as my pro-writer idols.

And, finally:

  • Fanfiction helped make me a pro writer, but even before that happened, it had already made me a writer. Fic writers are writers—whether or not they (we) ever “go pro” or even have any interest in doing so—and if you write fic, you are a writer, and don’t let anyone make you believe you’re not.

§

*I also wrote what I have since learned to call “RPF” [for the uninitiated, that’s “real-person fic”] about myself and my high school friends. This portion of my literary output, however, remains much, MUCH too embarrassing to be discussed outside my own head. Ever.

**I even had one prof, in a course on satire in my second year of university, who assigned us to write a story or poem in the style of one of the authors we’d read in the course, which I think is the closest I’ve ever come to being asked to write fic. That prof was awesome.

***Fanfiction by some semi-accepted contemporary definition, that is. I had of course been consuming fanfiction for well over a decade without realizing it, since I spent a non-trivial amount of time from Grade 10 onward reading and/or watching Shakespeare plays.

Sylvia Izzo Hunter Sylvia Izzo Hunter lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her spouse and daughter and their slightly out-of-control collections of books, comics, and DVDs. Over the course of her working life she has been a slinger of tacos, a filer of patient charts and answerer of phones, a freelance looker-up of unconsidered trifles, an Orff-singing stage monk, and an exam tutor, but has mostly worked in not-for-profit scholarly publishing. When not writing spec fic, she works as a freelance editor and writer, sings in two choirs, reads as much as possible, knits things, and engages in experimental baking.

Sylvia’s favourite Doctor is Tom Baker, her favourite pasta shape is rotini, and her favourite Beethoven symphony is the Seventh.
Women in SF&F Month: Maureen Eichner from By Singing Light
Apr
18
2017

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Today I’m delighted to welcome librarian and blogger Maureen Eichner! She can be found sharing her love of reading at her wonderful blog By Singing Light, where she discusses a variety of books including lots of speculative fiction (as you can see from her favorite authors page). She has excellent taste in books and authors, and I very much enjoy seeing her take on the works she reads!

By Singing Light Header

When Women Teach You To Love Fantasy

I learned to love fantasy in my middle school library, a long room on the second floor of the school which is always, in my memories, filled with light. My parents were not fantasy fans, but I took to it immediately. It satisfied a hunger I hadn’t known I felt. The librarian, Mrs. Hughes, gave me special permission to check out as many books as I wanted, so for three years I stuffed my backpack full and snuck them into the house.

One of the great things about that library is how haphazard the collection was. From an adult and professional point of view, I kind of wince over the fact that Rosamund Pilcher was side by side with JK Rowling. But at the same time, I felt a freedom to read all kinds of books: books that challenged me, and books that comforted me. Books that were too old for me and books that were too young.

And of course I devoured Lord of the Rings over and over. I read Lewis, and Piers Anthony. But crucially, my definition of fantasy, my understanding of what the genre fundamentally is was formed by the books I read at that point. And most of those books were by (white) women; most of them were what would be considered YA today. Here are six of those authors, and what I learned from them.

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper Chrestomanci Volume 1 by Diana Wynne Jones The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

Susan Cooper: From the Dark Is Rising series, a sense of the past always being part of the present, of magic always being present just under the surface of the world. Also: children working together in the face of adult indifference can save everything. And, to be fair, a sense of crushing disappointment when your favorite series doesn’t end the way you wanted it to. (#Janedeservedbetter)

Diana Wynne Jones: The sheer funniness of it all. There are plenty of authors who write fantasy as Serious Business, but DWJ threw in genetically modified griffins, and walking castles, and gaudy dressing gowns. Her books don’t lack heart, but they also don’t take themselves too seriously. Also, the way the mundane jealousies and worries and cares don’t go away just because you’re also fighting an evil enchanter.

Robin McKinley: That the beloved fairy tales I was raised on could be reimagined and made into something new and beautiful and rich. And that sometimes you find your place almost by accident, that it’s okay to return to a favorite story again and again, that girls can go on adventures and also fall in love.

Elizabeth Marie Pope: Via The Perilous Gard and Kate Sutton, that girls can be prickly and snappish and brave and smart and get the guy. That you could mix history and fantasy to marvelous effect, and that forests have power. That if you keep your head and use whatever you’ve learned, sometimes you can find a way out by the oak leaf, with never a bough.

Tamora Pierce: A sense of girls doing things in different ways (even though I wasn’t drawn to Alanna at all, I loved Kel and Daine both). That books can make you uncomfortable and push you to consider your own beliefs and assumptions and also be valuable.

Anne McCaffrey: Primarily, that it’s possible to deeply love a thing and also know that it is flawed. Because dragons, which I always love, but even at the time, I could see the problematic aspects of the books. Also, that books can be not quite fantasy and not quite science fiction, which was mind-blowing.

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope First Test by Tamora Pierce Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey

Now, I want to note that all of these authors are white, and fairly privileged, just as I am. At the time, I don’t believe I was aware of any SFF being written from marginalized perspectives. This is a problem, and it isn’t as much fixed as we often want to think. However, I do believe that the feeling of seeing myself reflected in books for the first time reinforced the importance of having stories where all readers see themselves truly reflected.

From these authors and others, I gained a sense of fantasy as contentious, and sometimes flawed, and sometimes outright wrong. A sense that fantasy can and should push you a little bit, asking you to reconsider your world and your framing of it. I learned the bones of high fantasy, but also the bones of everyday fantasy, of stories rooted in the quiet details. I learned that the world is worth saving, but that your family is worth saving as well. I learned that stories about and for girls—girls like me—are important. Justina Ireland has said that, “Women built this castle” and they certainly built my love of fantasy and what the genre can do.

Maureen Eichner Maureen Eichner is a children’s librarian and long-time book blogger, who lives in Indiana. She loves fantasy and hates Lord Byron. Predictably, she named her cat after a fictional detective and is constantly battling an overflowing TBR shelf.
Women in SF&F Month: Katherine Arden
Apr
17
2017

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Today I’m thrilled to welcome fantasy author Katherine Arden! Her debut novel, The Bear and the Nightingale, was released early this year and is absolutely fantastic: it’s atmospheric with lovely writing, and it has a compelling heroine at the center of it all. Since it’s my favorite 2017 release and one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, I’m incredibly excited that there will be two sequels—and the first of these, The Girl in the Tower, is scheduled for publication in January 2018!

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden

My first books were dusty, yellowed hardbacks with the pages stitched in, and one of my earliest memories is the smell of old paper. I started reading early, and once I got the hang of it, you could not pry books from my hands. I would finish one and reach for the next, as if they were Oreos. Old and dusty Oreos.

Why old and dusty? In those days before YA, there were not many options available for a precocious reader between books for children and books for adults. My parents, doing their desperate best to feed my book habit, started steering me toward novels written before 1930 or so; mostly, I think, because the romance in older books leans towards euphemism and not bodice-ripping.

I had a passion for adventures—fantasy, history, or science fiction, it didn’t matter. So I happily spent my childhood pinging from old copies of Treasure Island to The Three Musketeers to Dracula, Captain Blood, and Tarzan, barely aware that there were people today, right now, also writing books. Who cared? I had all the books I needed.

But in my middle school years, I began vaguely, and then painfully, to notice that the female characters in all my beloved books didn’t really do—anything. Mina and Lucy, Arabella Bishop, Constance Bonacieux and Jane Porter—they spent a lot of time getting rescued, or being beautifully helpless. However, none of them ever made a decision that drove the plot. Or even affected their own lives. That sort of thing was left to the hero.

It annoyed me. I always wanted to be Tarzan. I never cared about being Jane.

This irritation, the beginnings of youthful independence, and a very good local librarian, finally acquainted me with authors writing in my own decade. I was twelve or so when I discovered characters like Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond, Robin McKinley’s Aerin Firehair, just two examples of many. I discovered young heroines who did things.

I still remember my delight when I saw the cover of Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, with an armored girl on a white horse, facing a dragon. I opened that book and started reading and after that Tarzan never had a chance.

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

My particular conundrum is not one faced by young girls reading today. In 2017, girls have a legion of heroines for role models: powerful women, who create their own stories. We have come a long way since Dracula or Dumas. Passivity is not considered a prerequisite for femininity.

However nowadays it seems to me that young women reading face another problem. And that is that so many heroines are—perfect. This modern heroine is perfectly beautiful, of course, but also modestly unaware of her beauty. She must possess unusual if not superhuman skills, be chosen for a special destiny, and finally be utterly oblivious that every man in the entire book is madly in love with her.

Demanding perfection of women—even fictional ones—is in some ways the third cousin of the marble passivity of their 19th century forebears. It is just as impossible, just as unrealistic, just as restrictive.

I didn’t want to land in either extreme when I finally got around to trying my hand at a book—with a heroine—of my own. But when I started writing my own first novel, The Bear and the Nightingale, I had no idea how to walk the line between passive and perfect, between flawed and extraordinary. How does a writer balance the desire to write someone remarkable, with the equally powerful desire to create a human being, not some paragon?

My book is set in 14th century Muscovy. How do you make a woman powerful, writing about an era when women were not allowed power?

My answer, for what it’s worth, was to try to give my heroine something that I had rarely encountered in any of my reading, recent or not.

I gave her self-acceptance.

Such a small thing, right? Well, in some ways yes. In other ways no. My main character, Vasilisa, is a strange girl; she sees the world differently than other people. But she refuses to be afraid, and she refuses to doubt her own senses. No matter who tells her otherwise (and at one point in the novel, pretty much everyone is telling her otherwise) she accepts herself and the world as it is.

That, I came to realize, was what I wanted most from a main character. I wanted to write about a person who, even when she is afraid, or lonely, never thinks—it literally never occurs to her—to be anything less than she is, or to live her life with anything less than integrity.

It seems to me that our heroines—even the brave ones, even the beautiful perfect ones, even the modern ones—are too often drenched in self-doubt.

It seems almost to be baked in the modern girl’s DNA. If you are extraordinary, of course you must long to be ordinary, to fit in, to be a normal girl with a normal life. But if you are ordinary, of course, then you berate yourself for not being beautiful enough, clever enough.

It’s a conundrum that we—and our heroines—just can’t win.

Except by being ourselves. Bravely. Unquestioningly. No matter how hard it is.

Katherine Arden Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden spent a year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrollment for a year in order to live and study in Moscow. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature. After receiving her BA, she moved to Maui, Hawaii, working every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and making crêpes to guiding horse trips. Currently she lives in Vermont, but really, you never know.
Women in SF&F Month: Week 3 Schedule & Week 2 Summary
Apr
16
2017

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Thank you to all of last week’s guests for another great week! It’s now time to announce guests for Monday–Friday, but first, here’s a brief summary of last week’s articles in case you missed any of them:

Yesterday I also announced a giveaway of one book from the list of recommended science fiction and fantasy books by women. Click here for more details.

And now, I’m excited to announce this week’s schedule of guest posts, beginning tomorrow!

Women in SF&F Month 2017 Week 3

April 17: Katherine Arden (The Bear and the Nightingale)
April 18: Maureen (By Singing Light)
April 19: Sylvia Izzo Hunter (The Midnight Queen, Lady of Magick, A Season of Spells)
April 20: Leanna Renee Hieber (Eterna Files, Strangely Beautiful, Magic Most Foul)
April 21: Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Women of Futures Past, Retrieval Artist, Diving Universe)

Women in SF&F Month: Readers’ Recommendations Giveaway
Apr
15
2017

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This week I’m giving away one book from the list of nearly 2,000 recommended SFF books by women! In 2013, Renay of Lady Business came up with the idea of issuing an invitation to add some favorite science fiction and/or fantasy books written by women to create a recommendations list. We’ve increased the number of books every year since by continuing to ask for 10 SFF books written by women read and loved in the last year. (If you haven’t already contributed 10 of your favorites this year and would like to do so, you can add books here.)

For this giveaway, the winner can pick one book from the list that is available from the Book Depository for less than $15 (in US dollars). This is an international giveaway, but to be eligible, you must be from a country qualifying for free shipping from the Book Depository.

There are many excellent books that apply, such as:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Giveaway Rules: To be entered in the giveaway, fill out the form below OR send an email with the book of your choice to kristen AT fantasybookcafe DOT com with the subject “Book List Giveaway.” One entry per household and one winner will be randomly selected. Those from a country qualifying for free shipping from the Book Depository are eligible to win this giveaway. The giveaway will be open until the end of the day on Friday, April 21. The winner has 24 hours to respond once contacted via email, and if I don’t hear from them by then a new winner will be chosen (who will also have 24 hours to respond until someone gets back to me with a place to send the book).

Please note email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting the winner. Once the giveaway is over all the emails will be deleted.

Good luck!

Update: The form has been removed since the giveaway is over.

Women in SF&F Month: Kat Howard
Apr
14
2017

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Today I’m thrilled to welcome World Fantasy Award-nominated author Kat Howard! Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, is an immersive story involving art, dark fairy tales, and two sisters with a complex relationship—and was one of my favorite books published in 2016! I’m very much looking forward to the release of her second novel, An Unkindess of Magicians, in September 2017, as well as her short fiction collection, wonderfully titled A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, in 2018.

Roses and Rot by Kat Howard An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

“Why are there so many women in your stories?”

I was at my colleague’s class to guest lecture, not to snark, and the guy asking the question seemed genuinely interested. So I bit back my automatic response, which was, “Why shouldn’t there be?” and explained.

I talked about things like seeing teams of heroes on the page or on the screen where there was only one woman in a group of five or seven people, and how that tricks us into thinking that small percentage is the normal amount of space women should take up in society. I talked about the issues around the women that do show up in media, only to be defined solely by their relationship to men—the characters who are nothing more than someone’s wife, someone’s daughter, someone’s mother. I explained how that was made worse when the female character was fridged—when that wife, daughter, mother existed in the story only to have something horrible happen to her, so that her pain and suffering resulted in a male character becoming a hero. And so part of what I wanted to do as a writer, I said, was to push back against these defaults—to make a point of including women in my stories, as both main characters and in minor roles, so that people would get used to seeing them on the page.

I don’t know how much of my answer got through.

At the end of the day, my most honest answer is still: “Why shouldn’t there be?”

I’ve always been a reader, and when I was a kid, I would play pretend games with my favorite books and stories. I would imagine that I was in those worlds. And, quite often, I would imagine that one of my favorite characters was actually a girl in disguise. I didn’t want to be a boy, you see, I just wanted to be in the story. I wanted to have a thing to do, other than wait around to be rescued. Pretty much the only time I didn’t gender flip my favorite was when I pretended to be Princess Leia (though, I did give her a lightsaber in my version. Lightsabers are cool.)

Even before I could articulate that there were books I loved that also frustrated me because I couldn’t see myself in them, that was what I felt. And look, I’m an able-bodied, cis, white woman, so I know that when it comes to representation on the page, I have it better than a lot of people.

Still. I have frustration.

There aren’t enough women on the page. There weren’t enough when I was growing up, and there aren’t now. How do I know?  Because we still notice them, when they do show up. I don’t mean that women should be invisible in stories—that’s pretty much the opposite of what I want to see. But I do mean that I want female characters—lead characters, antagonists, secondary characters, red shirts—to be so common that their presence is as unremarkable as that of the men. I want to read stories where women have adventures, and where they lead quiet lives. I want them to be portrayed as imperfect assholes, and as chosen heroes. I want them present in the same number, and having the same range of human experiences as the male characters.

And so because I’m a writer, when I write, I consciously choose to tell stories about women, to make them present. Because we exist, and our stories matter.

Because “Why shouldn’t there be?” is a sufficient answer, after all.

Kat Howard Kat Howard’s debut novel, Roses and Rot, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best SFF books of Summer ’16. Her next novel, An Unkindness of Magicians, will be out in September ’17 from Saga Press. Saga is also publishing her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone in early 2018. She’s written a novella, The End of the Sentence, with Maria Dahvana Headley, and a variety of short stories. She currently lives in New Hampshire and you can find her at: http://www.kathowardbooks.com/ and on twitter as @KatWithSword.