Julia Rios - News

I'm on the Galactic Suburbia Honours List!

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:59:36 +0000

This week has been very exciting! I decided to sign up for the Month of Letters project, I went to my friend Lisa's book launch for her YA novel, The Between, and then I found out I was on an Awards Honours List created by one of my favorite podcasts!

Here's my official writeup of the Award and Honours List. I'm amazed and thrilled to be recognized alongside such wonderful people.

Here's a really funny thing: You know how I said I was going to use February to write thank you notes to authors who'd written things I love? Well, one of the people on my list was Tansy Rayner Roberts. On Thursday afternoon, I e-mailed her asking for her postal address so I could send her a thank you card. She wrote back and said she was happy to hear from me, but she didn't mention that the very next day I'd be getting awards recognition from her! I'm glad I sent the address request before I found out, so Tansy knows it's genuine and not as a response to my Honours List inclusion. Lucky timing!

February is Letter Writing Month!

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:20:25 +0000

The fabulous Mary Robinette Kowal has deemed February a Month of Letters. I've decided to use it to send thank you notes to some people who've written things I love. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to make for this project, but I do love a good excuse to muck about with papercrafts. Here are some cards I've made, in case you're curious.

I already have my first few addresses all picked out. Exciting! If you want to participate in this project, you can sign up on the lettermo website. I'm pretty sure there will be some pen pal address exchanges happening there. Also, if you really want to exchange letters with me, drop me a message at julia@juliarios.com, and I'll give you my address.

I've got a story in the latest Fantastique Unfettered!

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:41:30 +0000

Issue #3 of Fantastique Unfettered contains my short story, "The Lesson of the Phoenix". It's my first print magazine sale! Yay! And it has gorgeous illustrations! That link above is to the Barnes & Noble ordering page. I think it will eventually be available elsewhere, too.

Issue #5 of Stone Telling is also available now (free online, as always), and I led another roundtable discussion. This one's about story and identity, and it certainly gave me a lot to think about.

New OA Podcast and New PodCastle Story!

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:58:09 +0000

This week is a big week for my voice going out into the aether.

I've just put up the latest Outer Alliance Podcast episode, and I'm super chuffed about it, because I got to have two of my favorite podcasters on as guests. Ian Mond and Kirstyn McDermott host The Writer and the Critic, which is a hilarious and intelligent book discussion podcast. I adopted their format for this episode, and whacky hijinks ensued.

The other exciting thing that just went up is the latest episode of PodCastle. I read a story by Claire Humphrey, which was very cool because I know and like Claire, and I really loved the story. It was excellent to spend time with her characters and words, trying to bring them to life. I hope I did the story justice.

New Outer Alliance Podcast with Ellen Klages

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:35:53 +0000

After Readercon, I got the chance to meet up with Ellen Klages and talk about her work, LGBTQ history, and other awesome stuff. That interview is up on the OA site today. Yay!

Readercon Recap and the Broadly Speaking podcast for July 2011

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:03:48 +0000

Last month I mentioned I was busily preparing to host an Interstitial Arts Exchange Party at Readercon. I did, and it was a blast! Lots of people came and had fun filling in the Interstitial Arts Passports I made, and participating in the Leaving Dakota and Thackery Lambshead contests. I wrote up a big Readercon recap post over on my journal.

While I was at Readercon, I also got to interview C.S.E. Cooney and Gwynne Garfinkle (and the spirit of Mary Robinette Kowal as manifested in Claire's left hand...) for the July episode of the Broadly Speaking podcast. This episode is on writing humor, and it is absolutely hilarious! I laughed out loud a bunch even while I was doing the tedious work of editing the audio files. Definitely worth a listen if you need a laugh.

Excerpt of my interview with KJ Kabza

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:56:15 +0000

My esteemed friend and writerly colleague, KJ Kabza has just released a short story collection, and as a bonus feature, there's an author interview conducted by yours truly.

Here's a short snippet of that interview!

You mentioned Philip K. Dick and Tim Burton. Were they major influences for you?

I admire PKD for his bizarre yet successful patterns of rising action, and the kind of male protagonist that Burton usually favors in his scripts has always spoken to me. But I didn't discover PKD until 4 years after my first story ("You Make Bath Times Much More Fun") was published, and Burton wasn't my only favorite director as a child.

The question of influence is a problematic one, because it implies that as writers consume media—films, books, comic books, manga—they find something that makes them consciously decide, "I want to write like this." But I never set out to write like anyone else. I set out to write like me. I only bring up PKD and Burton because we all describe unknown things in terms of known things. I don't even know if my assessment is accurate, since I'm hardly an impartial observer.

But you're basically saying you feel like Johnny Depp.

Sometimes. When I'm feeling like the emoest emo that ever emoed.

A lot of people say favorite books or movies from childhood helped form their creative style. What were some of your go-to books and movies when you were a wee KJ?

Picking favorite books is like picking favorite children (attention parents: this is a big no-no), but I would be a horrid parent, so here goes: the My Book House series (first published in 1920—I grew up reading the 1937 printing), The Chronicles of Narnia (my favorite Christmas present when I was 8), The Phantom Tollbooth (which is only one of two books I have ever read that blew me away so hard that, after reading the last page, I flipped to the first page and started reading all over again), and Slake's Limbo.

For movies, I was primarily obsessed with Disney's Robin Hood and Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven. These films had a much more obvious, visible impact. To wit: there's a compound bow in my closet that I can shoot with quite well, and there's a pocket watch in my card catalog that I strung with a blue ribbon and wore around my neck in 5th through 7th grade, just like Charlie B. Barkin. (Picture me sporting this watch at age 10, with a Stetson proudly perched atop my head despite the perpetually overcast upstate New York weather. As you can imagine, I was not a popular child to befriend.)

Okay, you brought up the card catalog, so now you're going to have to explain that one to the rest of the class.

What's to explain? A woman I know who used to be a librarian at Harvard took one of their discarded card catalogs, and she doesn't have room for it right now, so she's letting me have it on extended loan. Naturally, I have filled it with crap that is arranged alphabetically, with drawers labeled "harmonicas", "metronomes", "umbrella bits", and so on.

I'm sure you will agree that this is totally normal.

I think KJ's sparkling personality comes out pretty clearly in this excerpt. To read the full interview and a bunch of fun and interesting stories, click on the book cover below and get your own e-copy at Smashwords!

At $2.99, it's a great bargain!

Catching up

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:57:45 +0000

Wow, I've had a busy time, and I've been remiss in posting here. Sorry about that! Here's what I've been up to:

*I attended WisCon 35 in the end of May, and had a blast there.

*I interviewed more awesome poets for Stone Telling Issue #4.

*I interviewed my excellent writer friend, KJ Kabza, as a bonus feature for his short story collection, In Pieces.

*There have been two new episodes of the Outer Alliance Podcast! The Big Gaylaxicon Extravaganza Episode went up at the end of May, and the June episode (featuring interviews with David Levine and Dennis Upkins) just went up last week.

*And finally, I started planning a big Interstitial Arts Exchange Party for Readercon, which is coming up in just a few weeks.

More about the Interstitial Arts Party and about the interview with KJ very soon!

Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and Special Mini OA Podcast Episode

Mon, 16 May 2011 17:54:46 +0000

Over on the OA Blog, I've just posted the 2010 Gaylactic Spectrum Award winners for short fiction along with a special mini podcast episode. Gaylaxicon was a blast! I should have pictures up soon, and a much bigger Gaylaxicon Podcast Episode is in the works, too, but right now I have to go collapse in a post-con coma.

Off to Outlantacon/Gaylaxicon

Wed, 11 May 2011 16:32:14 +0000

I'm heading to Atlanta for the weekend. If you're attending Outlantacon/Gaylaxicon, come say hi! I'll be on an Outer Alliance panel on Saturday at 2:00, a panel discussing Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness on Saturday at 5:00, and a panel about podcasting on Sunday at 11:00. I'll also be hanging out at the Hellebore & Rue launch party on Saturday evening.

New Outer Alliance Podcast

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:32:34 +0000

This month's podcast is up, and it has two really great discussions about gender and trans characters and lots of other good stuff. My guests were Cheryl Morgan and Elizabeth Bear, both Hugo winners! Rock! I love that I got an all-star podcast lineup.

Off to travel and visit family for a few weeks now, and then heading back for Convention Month May! I'll be a guest at Gaylaxicon in Atlanta, Georgia, and then I'll be attending WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin on the last weekend of May (which is also my birthday weekend!). More news about those cons when I have definite schedules.

Hey, if you listened to the podcast and you have stuff to say, leave a comment on the OA blog, or send me an e-mail, okay? I'm julia@juliarios.com, and I love hearing from listeners.

New Outer Alliance Spotlight

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:37:38 +0000

Shweta Narayan and J. C. Runolfson joined me to talk about diversity in speculative poetry, and what they're interested in seeing in the submissions pile for Stone Telling #4.

Read the interview here, and guidelines for submitting poetry here.

Pictures from MidSouthCon

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:38:07 +0000

MidSouthCon was lots of fun, and I was right! Mary Robinette Kowal totally didn't eat me (and no one else did, either). Probably the coolest part of the weekend was seeing Mary's puppet demonstration. You can see some pictures of that, and of some of the amazing costumes people wore (a lot of them homemade!) in my MidSouthCon Flickr set.

Now I'm off to catch a plane back home.

Broadly Speaking Podcast

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 03:28:20 +0000

I hosted this month's episode of Broadly Speaking (the Broad Universe discussion podcast). I talked to Joyce Chng, Kate Kaynak, and Phoebe Wray about the Singaporean speculative fiction community, strong female characters, and the origins of Broad Universe. There's also a special guest appearance by Joyce's angsty cat.

Podcast, Interview, Convention!

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:26:19 +0000

I just realized every news item I have posted so far has had an exclamation point in the title. I guess news makes me excited?

Anyway, I mean to update this news page more frequently, but lately I've been so busy that it's slipped my mind. Oops. But! I've been busy because I've been working very hard on getting new stuff out there for you to see, and some of that stuff is available now!

The latest Outer Alliance Podcast went up last Friday. It's a fun one. I talked to Catherine Lundoff, Jean Marie Ward, and Lisa Nohealani Morton about Hellebore and Rue, an anthology about lesbians who do magic. We also talked about horror movies, art, poetry, and Viable Paradise (among other things). And of course there are some excerpts from the anthology, too.

Issue #3 of Stone Telling went live yesterday, and in addition to a bunch of awesome poems and articles, it's got another roundtable discussion at the end. The roundtables are sort of like DVD commentary tracks, and I never quite know where they're going to lead when I start the conversations. In this case, the discussion went into very interesting territory. Jo Walton even wrote a brand new poem in the course of it! Very exciting.

And now I am off to Memphis, Tennessee for MidSouthCon, where I will be discussing things like doing historical research for stories with Literary Guest of Honor, Mary Robinette Kowal (among others). I'm nerv-cited about this one because it's my first time being an official program participant at a convention. I met Mary last August at another convention, and I know she's very gracious, though. It is nigh unto certain that she will not eat me. I'll report back to let you know how it goes.