If you’re around Chicago, any day now you can witness a corpse flower in bloom, a rare event. A titan arum named Spike is getting ready at the Chicago Botanic Garden.   Read all about it at the garden’s special Spike 2.0 web page. I saw a titan arum at the Houston Museum of Natural … Continue reading A corpse flower is about to bloom in Chicago

How do you write a novel? That’s a hard question, and I wish I knew the definitive answer — because I’m writing a novel right now. (I’m always writing a novel, in fact. Writing a novel is fun.) But there’s no definitive answer. Generally, though, writers use one of two approaches: plotter or pantser, sometimes … Continue reading The Writing Process: Minimalist Plotting

Thrillist calls Semiosis one of the best books of 2018 so far. Alvaro Zinos-Amaro reviews the novel at the InterGalactic Medicine Show. The Quillery asks me some questions, including my two favorite lines from the book. Fictional Frontiers interviews me in a podcast. Anderson’s Bookshop asks me Three Questions (and a few more) in a … Continue reading A few reviews and interviews

I’ll be at C2E2, the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, on Sunday afternoon, April 8. I’ll appear on a panel called The End of the World As we Know It: Dystopian & Utopian Futures in Fiction, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in Room S405b. “From 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale and everything in between, the … Continue reading I’ll be at C2E2 on Sunday, April 8

On Earth, plants are active, aggressive, and sometimes they fight to the death for sunlight. They employ cunning weapons and strategies, both offensive and defensive. For example, strangler figs (several varieties of Ficus) start as seedlings that germinate up on tree branches and trunks in jungles. As they grow, their roots wrap around the host … Continue reading Tree vs. tree: why kapok trees have big, nasty thorns

Veggies in space! If we’re going to go on long space missions, we’ll need to grow food, and plants respond differently in microgravity. NASA is growing plants on the International Space Station. Here’s more about the experiment, and how accidentally overwatering lettuce turned out to be the right thing to do. Long ago, well before … Continue reading A few links: News and posts about the vegetable kingdom

Once was not enough fun! I’ll be in another Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), this time in the Books subreddit on Monday, March 19, starting at about 1 p.m. CST. At the Fantasy subreddit last week (you can see it here) I got some serious questions about my novel Semiosis. In the Reddit spirit, I … Continue reading Ask Me Anything on Monday at Reddit