Mary Robinette Kowal is very kindly hosting my essay about my favorite bit in The Third Kind of Magic on her website. The essay is about how certain essays in Le Guin’s Cheek by Jowl helped me understand what I was trying to do, enabling me to finish it.
The only time I had a conversation with Ms. Le Guin, at a book signing, we coincidentally talked about dragons. It was after a panel at a Book Expo in SF and for reasons I can’t precisely remember, the audience was not best pleased by what she had said about dragons in other books. (I suspect she was implying Smaug had barely scratched the surface of what dragons could be, which would hardly be controversial nowadays, so it was probably just the idea of criticizing the Master…)
The full essay is here.
Let me know what you think.