News & Blog by Sue Bursztynski
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
If you write, you have to look up stuff. In my case, it could be anything from “When did Carl Williams leave school?” to “What would the tides be like on a planet like ours that had three moons?” I’m a librarian, so I know how to find good stuff. The Internet is wonderful for answering questions; for background, I prefer to absorb whole books, though I’ll never use everything. Between book commissions,...
In my opinion, every writer should read slush sometimes, to understand the other side. I read submissions for a small speculative fiction publication called Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. We read slush blind. A story we like goes into the selection pool. Otherwise, it goes back to the author, with personal comments. That last gets us thousands of submissions. The quality ranges from,...
When I launched Wolfborn at my school, I told the students, “Vampires? They might look like teenage boys, but who wants to date their great-grandad? Who wants to cuddle a guy who’s cold as marble?” “Me!” called one of my Year 8 girls. We all laughed, but the point was a fair one. Even if the cold-as-marble vampire does belong to Twilight, there’s something weird about the notion of a permanent...
During my teens, computers were for university labs and NASA. I started my stories in longhand, because typewriters didn’t let you change errors (I should mention here that one of my English students, a girl who has just won her first writing prize, carries around a notebook, as I did, only typing when she must). I carried my notebook everywhere. Only when I was satisfied would I type my story...
Years ago, I wrote a series of sword and sorcery tales about a female warrior called Xanthia (the name is coincidence – this was the 1980s, well before a certain TV series). The stories, eventually published in a small fantasy magazine called Eye of Newt, were set in a world that later became the universe of Wolfborn. When I read them aloud at my writers’ group, Sean McMullen - later a bestselling...
