If N.K. Jemisin‘s name (okay, well, initials) hasn’t already caught your ear, it will. Soon, with the impending release of her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (REVIEW), her name will be on the lips of bloggers and reviewers everywhere. Every year, a handful of debut novels catch fire and set themselves, and their authors, above the rest and Jemisin seems poised to do so with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a confident novel that stands head and shoulders above other debuts.
So, I teamed up with Ana of The Book Smugglers to round up Jemisin and get her to talk about everything from her novel (natch), #racefail, my own potential #generfail, and even Squeenix (you’ll find out).
The Interview
Welcome, Ms. Jemisin, to A Dribble of Ink! Anything you want to say to start things off? To set the tone?
Hi? =) I dunno, what do people usually say here? How’s it going? I like chocolate. Buy my book!
Chocolate, huh? I like chocolate, too. You’d think I was a woman, I love it so much. Speaking of which, the name, N.K. Jemisin. What’s it stand for and why the initials? And don’t tell me its to appear gender neutral on store shelves (like Robin Hobb or K.J. Parker).
It’s not, but what if it was? There are a lot of good reasons to go for gender neutrality in this business. Like, say, if I was a male writer in the romance genre — there are quite a few, but it’s hard to tell, because they usually use female or neutral names. I don’t blame them; they don’t want readers’ biases interfering with the stories they’re trying to tell. Of course, there’s a fine line between short-circuiting reader biases and encouraging those biases by concealing the truth, so I don’t bother hiding the fact that I’m female. I figure if anybody really has that much of a problem with it, they’re not going to like my work anyway, so better that they figure it out quickly.
But the real reason I use initials is just that I prefer to keep some separation between my day job and my writing life. That doesn’t work very well because people keep asking me what the initials stand for. =) Oh, well. But anyway, it’s Nora Keita.
“Yeine Darr is heir to the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She is also an outcast. Until, that is, her mother dies under mysterious circumstances.
Summoned by her grandfather to the majestic city of Sky, Yeine finds herself thrust into a vicious power struggle for the throne. As she fights for her life, she comes ever closer to discovering the truth about her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history – as well as the unsettling truths within herself.
With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate are bound inseparably together, for both mortals and gods alike.”
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