Oh, fine, I'll start a Tumblr

Geekery pokery for N. K. Jemisin. My other home is http://nkjemisin.com .

[nkjemisin]

Uh, so, about... me.

Since I got an ask about this -- guys, I don’t ever look in the “nkjemisin” tag. I went away for a while but before that I was on Tumblr for years and I know how this place works (tho there have been some changes, I notice). I get that most of the folks in that tag are talking about my work, not to me. I will never interact with anyone in this tag unless they reach out to me first, so relax.

I do follow tags specific to my work, however -- e.g. “great cities” or “the city we became” -- in part because I love seeing fanart of my stuff (!), and because I otherwise often miss important media that happens (like say the interview I did with A Very Big-Name Magazine a few weeks back that got posted but nobody told me, sigh) and sometimes that’s the only way I can find out about it. But if that still causes anxiety... Look, y’all.

I don’t care. Like, forreal -- I do not care what you’re saying about me or my work. There was a time back when I was a baby writer when I cared intensely about stuff like that, but years of racists ranting about how I’m The Doom of Science Fiction or whatever pretty much cured me of that urge a long time ago. Review away, bitch away, whatever. Even if I happen to see it, my reaction is likely to be, “Huh. Oh, hey, cat pics/something shiny!” and I guarantee I will forget about whatever I saw in about .024 seconds after that.

Now, this also covers if you’re actually trying to get my attention -- tagging it with nkjemisin won’t work. You’ll need to send an ask, directly.

Re: fanart -- I will always ask before I reblog it! I also get that not everybody wants the attention.

Now to go remember how to pin a post on here.

[dailydccomics]

Jo's fangirling comes back to haunt her adorably Far Sector #2 / DC Power 2024 by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell

[hotdogmexicano]

tiny death roll

[maybeallieart]

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

[theconcealedweapon]

[depsidase]

[nkjemisin]

I just saw you in my suggested follows, and thought “fine I’ll make a tumblr” was funny, then saw the beautiful cliff mesa home behind you and clicked on your profile to see if we have other things in common only to find out you’re literally N.K. Jemisin. 😂 just thought it was a fun organic way to find your tumblr, assuming we may be future mutuals and slowly realizing I’m on the page of one of my favorite authors😂😂 anyway, I love your work and the Fifth Season changed my life. Thanks for existing. 💜

LOL, happy to be found, however it happened! And I do have moots on here -- been here for years -- so it's always possible! Thanks!

[magictransistor]

Paul Sougy. Nerve Tissue, The Spinal Cord, Cell Division, Breathing, The Liver and Pancreas, The Kidney, The Eye. Published by Dr. Auzoux. 1946-1957. 

[mau-illustrations]

Still a WIP 🌀

[nkjemisin]

I have to thank you again for the Dreamblood Duology. Both books resonate so deeply with me, especially in terms of my conflicted relationship to academia.

I want to say something more eloquent, but I can't find the words. Simply: thank you.

Oooch, yeah, as someone who worked in higher ed for 20 years (tho on the admin side), I feel you. Thank you; it always makes me feel better to know I've helped others!

[notchainedtotrauma]

Goldie Williams, Arrested For Vagrancy & Refused to Unfold Her Arms and Stop Making This Face For Her 1898 Mugshot. (Omaha, Nebraska)

[asharomi]

Queen

[thecollectibles]

Art by Geoffrey Bertrand-Gerbaud

[nkjemisin]

Publishing Company

Hello! Discovered your works through The City We Became and loved your writing ever since. Hence why I had to ask, precisely because I admire what you do and what you stand for: will your next novels still be published by Orbit, even though it belongs to the Hachette publishing group, bought by far-right french billionaire Bolloré not long ago? I realize this might be a trickier reality than what it seems but I still felt like asking because I wasn't sure if you were aware or addressed it before. Have a great weekend and best of luck for any project you work on.

Hi there. This is the first I've heard of the sale or Bolloré, so I'll look into it; thanks. But as for whether I'm planning to publish elsewhere... at the moment I still owe Orbit/Hachette a book, so I'm sticking with them, because reneging on a contract tends to kill writers' careers. Yeah, there's self-publishing, but I decided years ago that I wanted to follow the publishing path that would put me in front of the greatest number of readers, including in other languages and libraries everywhere -- and for now that's still traditional publishing. Accessibility is important for all writers, but especially marginalized writers. Especially now.

After I've fulfilled my obligations to Orbit, I can reevaluate. If there's a new owner and new policies are coming, the decision might be made for me. But I guess we'll see.

That said... working in pretty much any field of business dominated by multinational corporations requires moral compromise. It's grotesque and I hate it, but no ethical consumption under capitalism as they say, and it's true. For example: My work is currently sold through Amazon (among other retailers), under the far-right American billionaire Jeff Bezos. I gained my current popularity in part through social media -- including Facebook, owned by the far-right American billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Et cetera. It might be possible to avoid unethical companies/individuals in this (or any) business, but it's hard as hell to do, and I just don't have the energy, resources, or time.

tl;dr, I do what I can, where I can. I think that until we as a society figure out a way rein in billionaires' outsized power and influence, that's all any regular person can do.

[nkjemisin]

Fiction is not reality

Got three or four asks lately about an old Le Guin-inspired short story, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight." Did somebody post an article or something? I haven't gotten any alerts that would explain the sudden interest. (Did see one annoying AI-written summary that hallucinated new characters into it and said I'd written it in 1973, when I would've been one year old. Don't use AI for lit crit, folks.)

Anyway, rather than answer them individually, I'll post this as a collective response.

All of the asks were about the story's meaning, in one way or another, so I'll start there -- but. Y'all. The author is usually the worst person to ask about what their work means; haven't you heard that the author is dead? We're too close to our own work to do good analysis. I can tell you what inspired it, or what I was thinking while I wrote it, but that doesn't mean I put all that into the story, or successfully got across whatever did make it in. Pretty often my writing doesn't mean anything; it's just something I need to get out of my head.

The asks seem to center on whether I actually intended Um-Helat to be a utopia, and -- no. I thought it was pretty obviously a dystopia, actually, like Omelas... but then I constantly run into people who describe Omelas as a utopia, so maybe the problem lies with people's definition of "utopia." (Personally I don't believe utopias are possible IRL. Anytime you've got more than one person in a society, their respective visions of an "ideal" society will vary, and sometimes conflict.) I was exploring my own struggle with envisioning a society free of bigotry, and Le Guin's narrative -- which gently pokes at the reader's skepticism and jadedness -- spoke to me in that moment of need. So I decided to do some poking of my own, from a different angle, to see if that helped clarify anything for me. I liked the result enough to publish it in How Long Til Black Future Month, tho it's since been reprinted in many places.

That said, a couple of the asks went to a weird place, and I feel like I need to address it. You folks do know that a story's narrative voice is not the same as the author's voice, right? So for example, in "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," the omniscient first-person narrator of the story is not Le Guin. What that narrator believes is not necessarily what Le Guin believes, or vice versa. She didn't tell you about the abused child in Omelas because she thought it was A-OK to abuse kids as scapegoats/representations of the evils of the world. Likewise, I didn't tell you about the traumatized child in Um-Helat because I think it's A-OK to stab possible bigots. The narrator is another part of the story. It's fiction, not an essay, or a confessional.

It feels weird to have to say this, because it seems so obvious to me... but we are on the "piss on the poor" site, after all, in a time when critical thinking is under literal attack from The Powers That Be, so I guess I gotta. I do not stab people, not even bigots. I am not pro-stabbing or pro-childhood trauma. I am somewhat pro-transdimensional-travel, but that's neither here nor there.

Oh -- and sidenote, but I've been ridiculously busy lately, and I'm working through the backlog of asks very slowly. If you've sent in something, I will hopefully get to it within a month or two. Hopefully.

[pixel8or]

[zegalba]

[nkjemisin]

I'm new to the writing community. I took your masterclass, and I want to know how you dealt with procrastination when you wrote The Fifth Season.

Procrastination's not really an issue when you're under a book contract and have bills to pay, lol. That said, I've never really had a huge problem with procrastination or writers' block because I genuinely enjoy writing and want to do it. Sometimes I'm too tired or stressed for Life Reasons to write, in which case I listen to myself and do something else -- edit what I've already written, maybe, or work on a different project. But that doesn't work for everyone, and ultimately you're going to have to figure out a work pattern that fits your personality and drive. Good luck!