This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

Just a note to those readers who receive my blog post via email: The service that provides this, Feedburner, is shutting down in a couple of weeks, so I'm going to be migrating my subscribers to a new service. If you get an email from me in the next couple of weeks, please pay attention, because you may need to reconfirm your subscription with the new service!  Thanks, and stay tuned!

Hi everybody. The question I get most is: "Where do you get your ideas?" Generally, when I'm asked this question, it's at a book event where it's difficult to answer, because… Well, the answer is long, and complicated, and hard to pin down, and most of the time, I don't really remember how it happened. When an idea starts to arrive, I get to work. I'm not paying attention to how it's happening, or how it would look to an outsider.  But — a few weeks ago, a new book idea started knocking on the door of my mind. And this time, I decided to pay attention! What follows is probably the most detailed explanation I'll ever give of where my ideas come from. More specifically, where this particular idea came from, because it's not always the same. But my experience of the past few weeks has been fairly typical for me, and I'll add that there are a few activities I need to engage in every single time, if I want an idea to take root. Namely: PATIENC

Connie Willis's Doomsday Book is one of my favorite books, and also one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece. It's also extremely sad, and happens to be about deadly epidemics. So I'll start by saying that depending on what you've experienced in the past year, this may not be the book for you right now. Alternately, it might be exactly the book for you right now. I think it depends on whether and how much you're grieving, whether you've been traumatized, and whether it helps you, as you process, to share those feelings with people inside a book. For me, this can be a touch-and-go sort of question… When is a book comforting, and when is it exacerbating my difficult feelings? I've read this book before, so I knew what I was getting into last week when I sat down to reread it. For me, it helped me access, and settle, my own overwhelmed, confused feelings from the last year. But I say that as a person who is not a COVID nurse or doctor and has no

 Hi all, Today I finished a draft of a brand-new writing project. I started it on December 14, which means that I wrote it faster than I've ever written anything. And though I already know a lot of its revision needs, and though the draft isn't really done (because I still have to transcribe an entire notebook of handwritten scribbles), and though I'm feeling that unsettled sense of not being sure yet where I'm going with it… And though I expect it to be a while before I can focus on it again… I feel hopeful about its potential.  I've recently (maybe in the past year or so) entered a writing pocket that I call Less Angst. I don't think my writing is any better or worse than it ever was, but I'm enjoying the work more, and worrying about it less. I can probably list a lot of reasons for this, but I suspect the biggest factor is experience. The feelings of doubt and worry, anxiety because the book isn't right yet, uncertainty about how many attempts it wi

There's still time to register for my virtual book events happening today and tomorrow. For those of you who receive my blog post as emails, your email got weirdly cut off yesterday right before all the event information. You also missed some photos of my notebooks while I was writing Winterkeep . Sorry about that. For event details and to catch up on what you missed, please visit yesterday's post on my Blog Actual! http://kristincashore.blogspot.com/2021/01/winterkeep-ish-stuff-for-release-week.html

Winterkeep is now out in the world, and can be purchased at your favorite book retailer. I am happy for you to buy the book wherever you prefer, but do keep indie retailers bookshop.org , Libro.fm , and Kobo in mind! This week, I'm on the podcast First Draft with Sarah Enni ... Sarah is so skilled at insightful conversation, and so warm, too. We had a lovely chat. Check it out ! I have two more virtual events to round off book release week, and you're invited. The first is Sunday at 5PM ET (2PM PT), with Malinda Lo , moderated by Tui Sutherland , and presented by Mysterious Galaxy Books in San Diego. The nice thing about this event is that Malinda, Tui, and I are all in the same book group. So we're used to getting together to talk about books. Just not usually our own books! Of course, our last eleven meetings have been virtual, but normally, the group meets in one of the homes of our lovely members. If I were hosting book group in January, I would have a fire roaring in

  Hi, everyone. In the midst of all this difficult news, Winterkeep is about to be released. So it's time to share the dates and details of my virtual tour events. If you're looking for a happy escape from all that's going on — and let's face it, probably some conversation about how books help us absorb/understand/frame current events — please join us! I'm going to be talking to a lot of super interesting people: Author and podcaster Sarah Enni . Authors Malinda Lo and Tui Sutherland . Agent Faye Bender and editor Andrew Karre . Here's a link to my tour page: http://www.penguinteen.com/ event/kristin-cashore-on-tour/   And I'll also spell everything out here: First up, on Tuesday, January 19 at 7PM ET, I’ll be in conversation with Sarah Enni, hosted by the Brookline Booksmith. Sarah’s an author and journalist who’s the host of the wonderful First Draft podcast. More details and registration here: https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/event/kristin-cashore-sa

I took a break from my craft series for a couple months. And then I handed in the first draft of a new book this week! Which means that this weekend I can finally turn my attention to writing about craft in The Housekeeper and the Professor , by Yoko Ogawa. Yoko Ogawa's slender, stunning book, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is a challenging one to use as a writing lesson, because while I can describe a hundred smart and wonderful things about it, that doesn’t mean I know how to translate its beauty into advice to other writers. It’s not helpful for me to say, “See how perfect this is? Now go do that."  And it is that kind of book, the kind that pulls you into a narrative dream and holds you there so gently, with such soft hands, that it's hard to figure out how you got where you are. When did it happen, and how? For me, it had already happened by the time I'd gotten to the end of page 3. And I think that the "how" has something to do with a

U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann speaking to the only lawyer still willing to argue Trump's case in Pennsylvania, Rudolph Giuliani, on Tuesday: “You’re alleging that the two individual plaintiffs were denied the right to vote. But at bottom, you’re asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth. Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?” Hello everyone. You might expect that while we are having to endure this comical yet terrifying attempted coup, my subconscious mind would be having a field day, giving me creative dreams as usual . But here's the dream I had Tuesday night, after that disgraceful show in Michigan : A Republican demagogue, anticipating his loss in the next election and wanting to prime public opinion, begins shouting as loud as he can about how the Democrats are going to steal the election. He loses the election. Then he tries to steal the election, again by accus