Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.
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Daniel Abraham has the following works available at Clarkesworld:
Endings are hard. There are a lot of reasons for that. First off, figuring out just technically how to stick an ending is nearly the last thing that a writer has to figure out. All the other stuff—writing a good sentence, writing a good scene, the tricky bit with adverbs, avoiding infodumps, celebrating infodumps, being […]
One of the many, many times I started figuring out how to write fiction, I was early in my college career. I had a couple of resources: creative writing classes and how-to-write books whose titles I will omit here out of an abundance of charity. One of the things that I found back then was […]
My father is a songwriter and has been since before I was born. Many of the songs he writes take the form of stories with narrative arcs, characters, and resolutions at the end. One of the things he told me was that personal style—as a musician or a songwriter or a novelist—is made from all […]
When you start out wanting to be a writer, you’re screwed. You haven’t read enough to really understand what writing is. There are all sorts of different genres, and you may not know if you’re better at detective novels or literary vignettes or personal essays. You’re pretty impressed by some of the stuff you’ve done […]
I’m not telling anybody what they should do. I’m guessing that since you’re here reading essays on Clarkesworld, you’re most likely a fan of genre fiction and maybe spend a little time on the Internet. Seems pretty safe as assumptions go. And because of that, you’re probably aware of the conflicts that have been troubling […]
There are only a few books that I reread. Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit, some of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, Camus’ The Plague, and a few others. They’ve become like having coffee with an old friend or watching Casablanca again; a place of comfort and familiarity. A way to reconnect with part of […]
My attitude toward pseudonyms has always been a little idiosyncratic. I started off using them as a way to tell readers what kind of book to expect. Daniel Abraham? He writes third-person epic fantasy. MLN Hanover? First-person urban fantasy, complete with the tramp stamp tattoo and complicated love life. James SA Corey (of whom I […]
One of my favorite movies of all time is 2007’s The Lookout. It’s a gorgeous, twisty little noir that manages to co-opt all the expectations of the genre and do something just a little different with all of them. In particular, there’s a scene where Jeff Daniels’ blind protector-figure Lewis sits down with love interest […]
I was in Seattle a few weeks ago for the Locus Awards, and I had the very real pleasure of meeting a few of the students who were attending the Clarion West workshop this summer. I attended the workshop back in 1998, and it was a watershed both in my artistic and commercial careers. The […]
“Consider greatness as a business strategy.” —Michael Swanwick I worked front-line tech support for a little mom-and-pop Internet service provider for almost ten years. I started off as the guy who asks you to check if your caps lock key is on. Slowly, I advanced to being Director of Technical Support, which in the context […]
When I grew up, I knew what a fantasy novel was. I had my examples right there close to hand: Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Barbara Hambly, Louise Cooper, Lloyd Alexander. They were the stories deep within other worlds, where there were elves and dwarfs, or something like them. There was magic. There was a dark […]
“I am a firm believer in whatever gets you through the night.” —William “Bill” Boettcher, my high school Biology teacher. A while ago, I was talking to a woman who is a Much Bigger Name in Genre Fiction than I am. She’s been publishing since I was just learning how to do all this, and […]
There was a time, not in my daughter’s life but in mine, when information was hard to get. I can still remember a friend of mine struggling to describe a new programming trick that he was working with. He called it a hyperlink. At the time, it sounded like it might be an interesting way […]
I graduated from college with a BS in Biology. That’s not what you’d call a terminal degree, and the job opportunities that opened before me weren’t exactly in my field of study. I was engaged to a lovely woman who had plans to travel, and so it followed that I did too. In the meantime, […]
There's a puzzle I don't know the answer to, but the more I look around for it, the more I see it. Most of the time, it's amusing. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me. So, funny story. Back in 1998, I was at Clarion West. One of my classmates turned in a story […]
A few years ago, I was at a workshop with an author who I deeply admire and personally enjoy. We were talking about community, and what made up our community, and it became clear very quickly that we had completely different definitions of the word. She meant something like “people who mutually acknowledge themselves to […]
My main complaint, and reason my interest flagged, was that both the characters and setting seemed flat.—SF Reader on A Shadow in Summer . . . an imagined world of this quality: for a city as graceful and fascinating as Saraykhet, and for such persuasively human characters.—Strange Horizons on A Shadow in Summer One of the things […]
