Kelly Robson's Blog

In September 2025, I’m going to be at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for the two week Science Fiction residency with faculty Ai Jiang, Premee Mohamed, and Amal El-Mohtar.

I’m excited about this for a bunch of reasons. First, getting to hang out with Premee, Amal, and Ai for two weeks would be reason enough to go. (Not to  mention a bunch of other writers. I don’t know who else is going, is it you?). Writers, hanging out and writing. Yes, please.

The Banff Centre also has a lot of cache...

My new horror story LANDLINE is out now. A high school teacher is about to board a plane for school trip when her six year-old son phones from home to say the power is out and his dad has disappeared.

A true thrill of writing is getting covers like this:

Art by the amazing Elijah Boor.

I guarantee this will scare the shit out of you, if it hasn’t already :D

If you’re an ebook reader, you can buy the story for your Kindle.

A true thrill of writing is getting covers like this:

Art by the amazing Elijah Boor.

My new horror story LANDLINE will be out at Reactor next week. It’s about a high school teacher who’s about to board a plane for school trip to the UK, when her six year-old son phones from home to say his dad has disappeared and the power is out.

I guarantee this will scare the shit out of you, if it hasn’t already :D

If you’re an ebook reader, you can pre-order the story for your...

My new story “The High Cost of Heat” is coming to The Sunday Morning Transport very soon — June 2, 2024! Edited to add: Now out, link here!

The Sunday Morning Transport is an email magazine edited by Fran Wilde, and distributed via Substack. It does what it says on the box — a new story via email every Sunday Morning. You can sign up for a free 60 day trial subscription here, or choose the no cost subscription option which gives you the first story of the month for free. Either way, you get my n...

My new story “The High Cost of Heat” is coming to The Sunday Morning Transport very soon — June 2, 2024!

The Sunday Morning Transport is an email magazine edited by Fran Wilde, and distributed via Substack. It does what it says on the box — a new story via email every Sunday Morning. You can sign up for a free 60 day trial subscription here, or choose the no cost subscription option which gives you the first story of the month for free. Either way, you get my new story in your inbox on Sunday!

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I’ve always found description really hard. Though some writers see a scene in their mind’s eye, I don’t see a darned thing so describing something from imagination it is hard. But a daily exercise lately has been making a difference

For a few months now, I’ve been making #witchyskeet 
posts on Bluesky with photos of interesting houses I find on my Google Street View rambles. This fun little activity puts to good use my passion for exploring on StreetView, and lets me post interesting and beautif...

MEDIAN is newly out at Tor.com/Reactor. It’s also available as an ebook. I wrote this story when my mother-in-law was dying of cancer, one of the lightning strikes in a recent storm of deaths.

Writing horror is good therapy for real-life horror. I’ve written several horror stories lately, but that storm of death really put a kink in my writing practice. I haven’t been as productive as I want.

When you’re a new writer, one of the big problems is how to write. What you ...

Rarely can anyone point to a turning point in their life, but here’s mine. Ten years ago today, April 1, 2013, I was laid off my job. I was devastated, but it doesn’t sting anymore because I can mark that moment as the beginning of becoming…

Becoming myself.

The next day, I took a stalled story and started rewriting it from scratch, in a new way, with a style and confidence that had eluded me for years. The story was Waters of Versailles, and it felt right. It felt like me. I’d fou...

After I wrote this little post about being surprised that High Times in the Low Parliament is a Nebula finalist, I realized I didn’t say why I was surprised by it getting a Nebula nod. I was surprised because it’s a comedy, and comedies are a risk and a hard sell. Drama is universal. What’s dramatic to me is probably dramatic to lots of people. But what’s funny to me isn’t necessarily funny to you, or anyone.

Nothing fails harder than a failed comedy (except a failed musical — that fa...

I am incredibly surprised and pleased that High Times in the Low Parliament is a finalist for the Nebula Award this year.

This is the fourth time I’ve received a Nebula nod. Waters of Versailles was a finalist in 2016. A Human Stain won the Nebula in 2018. And Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach was a finalist in 2019.

I’m that lucky. I get pushback when I call it luck, and yes, it also takes hard work and dedication. Luck comes in when your story manages to say the right things,...