welcome to the written world!
a monthly-ish email reflecting on something i’ve read or seen and what makes it so great, + self-promotion.
who are you?
alix e. harrow. ex-academic historian, recovering adjunct, writer of speculative fiction. my debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, is out september 10th, and this year i’m a finalist for the hugo, nebula, locus, and world fantasy awards in the short fiction category (see my author website for more publishing stuff). i live with my husband and our semi-feral kids in rural kentucky.
why subscribe?
i’ve written two novels (forthcoming). i’ve published half a dozen short stories in top-tier markets. i’ve been nominated for a couple of awards.
i still don’t know wtf i’m doing. i still want desperately to get better.
i don’t have my MFA. i’ve never even taken a creative writing course or been to a critique group. i learned to write by reading, and thinking about reading, and writing about reading. every journal i’ve ever kept eventually devolved into lists of books and authors and call numbers, quotes surrounded by frilly doodles. one of those quotes was this line from All the Pretty Horses:
“...they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
the vision of those two young adventurers riding into the abyss, side by side, choosing from ten thousand worlds--it pierced me. lived in my heart for ten years like a shard of ice. when i drew it out, it was my first novel.
i want to keep finding stories that rattle around in my heart. i want to figure out why. join me?
(plus you’ll get news about new publications, events, sales, giveaways, and other shameless self-promotiony things!)
why don’t you capitalize your sentences??
because i have a switch in my brain that says capitalization is for Work and lowercase is for friends. because lowercase says: just-for-fun, between-you-and-me, listen-to-this. it says text messages between siblings or late-night emails to long-distance friends or middle-school conversations on AIM. also because i write for a living and the shift key gets my tendonitis going.