Ruth Nestvold's Blog

By Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake

This article first appeared in IROSF in July, 2008

Note: I skipped a couple of weeks uploading these articles because I was escorting my granddaughters around to visit relatives. It wasn’t a vacation, exactly, and I had very little free time. When I did, I wrote rather than uploading blog posts. (g)

Genre gives the writer a narrative framework to shelter in, a structure, a place to start.

Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Al...

By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published in IROSF, April 2008

We’ve written before about where ideas come from and how to work with them, in “Anatomy of an Idea.”  This month we thought we’d take on the generation of ideas.

Stories flow through all of us, all the time.  We think in narrative structures, we sometimes dream in terms of plot.  Myth and religion are based on story, psychoanalysis as well.  Stories are the fabric of life.  Children come home from school laughing ab...

By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published in IROSF, Fall 2006

One of those questions seemingly subject to endless debate by aspiring writers (and general indifference by established writers) is whether to focus on novels or short stories in building a career.[1],  The debate itself assumes that a writing career can be a matter of calculation, which both of us tend to regard as a myth. To answer the question right up front in the most obvious way possible,  write what you care ...

My mother died when I was sixteen, but for 40 years, I was very lucky to have a fabulous bonus mom in Nancie Fadeley. Nancie would have been 95 years old today, July 11, 2025. Unfortunately, she left us last year in April, while I was on a visit to the States. I’m just glad I was able to see her one last time before she was gone.

There was a memorial for her last year on her birthday, where I was able to say something. Here’s what I shared ...

by Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake

Originally published in IROSF, September 2006

We have talked about voice before in this column in connection with slipstream, especially reader perception of voice.[1] This time we’re going to tackle the author’s use of voice, the elements that contribute to voice and how it is created.

Every work of fiction has a voice, be it the voice of the fictional first-person narrator, or the voice of the implied author — the ...

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published in IROSF. April 2005

Slipstream, slipstream, we all got slipstream.  It’s been a hot topic these last few years, at Tangent Online[1], in the pages of Asimov’s[2], and elsewhere in print and across the Internet.  What is slipstream and why do we care?

We have Bruce Sterling to thank for the nomenclature.  In his seminal essay on the topic in SF Eye #5, the Bruce defined the new genre as follows:

This genre is not “category” S...

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published July 2006 in IROSF

A funny thing can happen to writers on the way to the post office.  We become afraid of what we can do.  People freeze up in all sorts of ways — cat waxing, rejectomancy, pathological revision, drunkenness, sheer wall-eyed panic.  Some folks talk about fear of failure, but if we truly feared failure, we wouldn’t be writers.  Writers are those people who’ve mastered failure, gotten very good at it even, and kept on pluggi...

By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

“Where do you get your ideas?”

This is of course the classic eye-rolling writer question.  In speculative fiction, the question can run much deeper than it does in other genres.  There are as many ways to address this with serious intent as there are writers to address, but we have chosen two main aspects to emphasize.

The first aspect of this question is a matter of definition.  What is an idea?  Wha...

By Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake

This article was originally published on IROSF in January 2006.

Recently we talked about some of the things editors in our field care about, how they are looking for the strange, the different, the new — and not in the cover letter.  Now we’re going to talk about some of the things writers care about, the aspiring author in particular.  We’re going to say some things aspiring authors probably don’t want to hear, and we’re going to say some things that they’ve...

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Continuing my series of articles I wrote with Jay Lake a couple of decades ago. This one was originally published in IROSF in November 2005.

Consider the poor editor, slaving away at her overheated desk, surrounded by piles of manuscripts.  She finds herself amid vales of verbiage, stacks of sonorous prose, wondering where and how she’ll pull together a meaningful selection of work that won’t get her drummed out of the Editor’s Club, bar privileges revoke...