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.

Wow, all of this is high praise, and I'm honored! Thanks.

I'm sorry that your own childhood was unpleasant. That's one of the reasons why I made Sieh himself unpleasant, in many ways -- because he's all of childhood. The cute and the disturbing, the well-behaved and the feral, the fat happy kids who get to grow up and the starving abused kids who don't always. I'm glad some of that resonated.

Thank you again.

Because they've generally treated me well for a genre publisher*, and I don't mess with good things unless I have to. I'm not averse to working with other publishers (I do have secondary publishers for my special editions, etc. -- mainly Subterranean Press), and a few have tried to poach me over the years, but for the most part if I'm happy in a place, I'll stay.

*Folks may recall Publishing Paid Me on Twitter, back in the distant days of 2020, where people were shocked at how small my advances were. Thing is, for science fiction/fantasy, they're pretty good. It's just that SFF pays most writers peanuts.

Fairly early on. I usually poke at anything that feels like a cliche or an assumption that's gone unquestioned too much imo, and depictions of Earth as maternal/feminine/nurturing bother me.* We're thoroughly adapted to it and should regard it as the only home we've got or might ever have, but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to kill us at any given time. For obvious reasons, I wanted to play this up for the Broken Earth trilogy, so Father Earth was born.

*Lots of cultures regard the Earth as feminine, but there's something about Western lit's treatment of this that feels... weirdly gender essentialist? It's hard for me to articulate without writing an essay, and I'm busy today.

ID: Photo of a street corner; cars are parked on one side, and buildings on the other. Centered is a large cherry tree in full bloom, covered in pink blossoms, lit from behind by the sun.

Already posted this on Bluesky, and I like it so much you get to see too. I don't usually take good photos. That's mostly bc I'm a) too cheap and lazy to bother keeping up with the latest tech, and b) too slow on the draw to catch good shots. I always get entranced by the ephemeral moment, start thinking the kind of weird-ass thoughts that sometimes lead to novels, and then I remember to grab my cellphone ten minutes later. Anyway, this is with a Samsung Galaxy S22, portrait mode. And I got lucky.