books

Going backstage – how a Heart album inspired the vampire novella Cruel Nights

Cruel Nights cover @ Brain Jar Press

Ever since I first heard the Brigade album by Heart, sometime around 1990, I reckoned there was a story in it. Not just the micro stories of each song, but a bigger narrative.

I wrote a short one, melding tracks All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You) and The Night*. Didn’t much like it, too simplistic, one note. It’s still in the drawer.

Then, in 2019, emerging from four years of PhD in climate change fiction, I felt ready to take a shot at a longer treatment of the Brigade project. But wait. Just around the corner, in March 2020, the Queensland Writers Centre was having a weekend novel-writing ‘boot camp’ with Kim Wilkins. Perfect. Stop writing, get some ideas together, work on something else to fill in the time**.

(Kim, by the way, ran the first QWC workshop I attended after I moved to Brisbane in 1998. It’s where I met my tribe. To a large extent, that workshop set me on this path.)

Brigade, Kim reckoned, probably wasn’t Heart’s best album, when I said during our introductions that my project for the weekend had been inspired by it. I was too slow to add that it might not be their most lauded, but it is the one with the vampire!

It was a fun weekend, bouncing around story ideas and character arcs with each other, emerging weary but also energised, with a note book full of trajectories and ideas that lit a fire under the project. Needless to say, I played a lot of Heart writing the book, especially Brigade, tapping the moods and themes. Cruel Nights (yep, from a song on the album) is still anchored around the meshing of those two key songs, but the entire album is in there.

I did check in with the rights holders about using a stanza for an epigraph*** but it was a bit pricey for this project. Still, I like the compromise of using Heart song titles as chapter headings. Picking appropriate ones from across the catalogue reminded me again of how diverse and accomplished this band is, what a set of pipes Ann Wilson has.

So yes, the long wait between books is finally over, and yes, it’s another vampire story. Also a kind of love song. With Heart.

  • Cruel Nights is available for pre-order at Brain Jar Press and will be out on 21 May.

* funnily enough, All I Wanna Do is not one of my favourite Heart tunes. The Night, it’s right up there, though.
** still working on it.
*** there are some lyrical Easter eggs in the text, but I had to wrap them carefully to avoid any copyright issues.

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Friends, we have a new book

I’m very pleased to share the news that I have a new book coming out! The novella Cruel Nights is slated for release through Brisbane’s Brain Jar Press on 21 May 2024.

Says the publisher: Brain Jar Press is pleased to present Jason Nahrung’s Cruel Nights, a vampire novella which harks back to the vampire novels of Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice while also asking what might have happened to those characters once the nineties were over. It’s an extraordinary read for anyone with fond memories of the grunge era and the horror which sprang up around it.

And the blurb:

…a grunge-soaked tale of love and vampirism in ’90s Seattle.

Charlie died in Nevada, 1973, after seeing Led Zeppelin live on stage and making the wrong choice on the long drive home.

Corey meets him at a TAD gig seventeen years later and feels an immediate attraction. They both swear their night together will be a onetime thing, but neither can stay away.

Corey and Charlie spend two decades building a life together, a mortal and vampire in love, but there are some things Corey’s not willing to give up. She can move cities when Charlie’s eternal youth raises suspicion and she can rebuild her career as a music journalist after every disruption to their life, but as she gets older, it’s harder and harder to be satisfied with their nocturnal existence.

Then a moment of weakness delivers Charlie and Corey the one thing they never expected to have…and their relationship gets more complicated than either of them ever dreamed.

Find out more at Brain Jar Press

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Oz Is Burning ebook now available

The ebook version of Oz Is Burning is now available, with a print version to follow.

The anthology, from B Cubed Press, is centred on Australia’s horror bushfire period of 2019-20, and supports wildlife charity WIRES.

The book features stories and poems ranging from the darker side to the optimistic, and some leaven the volume with touches of humour, too. No prizes for guessing where my ‘Wollemi Dreaming’ falls in that spectrum.

Here’s the full table of contents:

And Gaia Screams by Ann Poore
Across the Ditch by Clare Rhoden
Burn, Burn! by Almas Alexander
Red Sky at Morning by Sue Bursztynski
Fires of the Heart by E.E. King
Pay Back by Alex Isle
By the Grace of God by Harold Gross
Should Fire Remember the Fuel by Kyla Lee Ward
Welcoming the End by Aura Redwood
Beef by Zena Shapter
The Last Wish by Lauren E. Mitchell
Wollemi Dreaming by Jason Nahrung
Firestorm Sounds by Suzanne Newnham
Red Sky, Blue Dream by Jack Dann
Infestation by Paula Boer
Writing on the Wall by Gillian Polack
Dire Insurance by Jared Kavanaugh
Divorce by Donna J.W. Munro
Inconvenient Visitor by Lucy Sussex
Burning Hearts by Eleanor Whitworth
Harvest by Narrelle M. Harris
A Town Called Hope by Silvia Brown

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Festivals going online

calendarThe calendar of Australian literary events is piling up with cancellations and postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but numerous writing organisations are heading online to keep the words flowing and the connections intact.

I’ve listed festivals offering online programming at the top of the calendar as well as in chronological order, and I’m curating a page at Ballarat Writers listing activities available online, such as joining in spoken word and poetry gigs, tuning in to award ceremonies, and listening to readings.

Please share recommendations here.

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Double the adventure

and then vol 1 and 2 by clan destine pressThe And Then… double-volume set of dynamic-duo adventure yarns has been unleashed.

A packed room at the Rising Sun Hotel in Melbourne was treated to a thoroughly entertaining launch by Jane Clifton (‘make it annual, Lindy?’), who highlighted the genre diversity and high level of thrills offered by the yarns packed into the handsome volumes.

Sadly, I had to slink off to work before the drinks were flowing, but it was great to see the project come to its fruition.*

Still, it was great to squeeze in quick hellos with fellow contributors Alison Goodman, Lucy Sussex, Amanda Pillar, Emilie Collyer and Amanda Wrangles, and to put a couple of new faces to names too: Evelyn Tsitas, Fin J Ross and James Hopwood.

Lindy Cameron launches And Then anthology

Lindy Cameron , with Michele in the background, doing the not-so-hard sell

It’s been a long road for publisher Lindy Cameron**, but finally the quest has been achieved!
The blurb:

… page-turning stories by 32 award-winning, established and emerging Australian writers of science fiction, crime, speculative fiction, horror and fantasy.
The settings are futuristic, contemporary and historical; the heroes are human, animal, alien and mythical; and their adventures are real-world, far-out, speculative, scary, mysterious, speculative and fantastical.

Head over to the Clan Destine Press website to check out the double anthology: in paperback and ebook.

* One day, I should really return to my broken Brisbane mythos. It really is a lot of fun.
** Vol.1 came out in 2016, if any of this sounds familiar!
 

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Heading to Continuum for a climate disaster or two

continuum convention logoSpeculative fiction convention Continuum runs at Melbourne’s Jasper Hotel June 8-11 (gosh, that’s starting tomorrow!), and I’ll be heading along to talk about climate change (as well as many other things, no doubt, but officially: climate change).

The guests of honour are Alison Evans and my fellow climate fiction writer and researcher Cat Sparks, so that’s excitement enough right there.

This year the convention has added a Deep Dive stream, in which folks give (mostly) 20-minute talks on topics of interest. I’m presenting some research from my PhD-in-progress outlining the mosaic approaches of three Australian SF climate fictions (Sue Isle’s Nightsiders, James Bradley’s Clade, and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming). Other dives include body horror, convict women in Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), the metaphorical use of monsters, and Cat’s talk on ecocatastrophe and Anthropocene fiction, to name a few.

I’m also on a panel on the Friday night talking about climate science and climate fiction, and the state we’re in.

Day tickets are available for the convention, which celebrates pop culture, geekdom, fandom and speculative fictions in all their forms. Visit the Continuum website to find out more.

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‘Slither’ finally sees the light

cthulhu deep down under vol 2My contributor copy of Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol 2 has arrived. It contains 10 stories*, as the title suggests, drawing inspiration from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, all set in the southern hemisphere.

Peter Rawlik, in his generous and knowledgeable introduction, describes the yarns as “unique and vibrant interpretations of the weird, the cosmic, the Lovecraftian Cthulhu, even in his absence”.

So there are two stories to my story in this anthology.

The first, is that this three-volume set being published by IFWG arose out of a crowd-funded megavolume called Cthulhu Deep Down Under (it’s great to see a couple of the illustrations from that delicious volume reproduced here) that came out in 2015. My story in that original was a reprint, in which I proposed an occult cause for the disappearance of skindiving prime minister Harold Holt off a Victorian beach. But a reprint wasn’t cutting the mustard for this revamped three-book set. A new story, please.

Which leads me to the second story, the story of the second story. Okay? Cool.

CDDU Vol 2 is now available for pre-order, and goes on sale on August 1. Vol 1 is in the wild!

The earliest version of ‘Slither’ on my hard drive harks back to 2003. I remember it being critiqued at a Vision critique group meeting in Brisbane … sometime. But it never sang. I’d revisit it on and off over the years, trying to work out what was wrong with it. Brought in a second character, changed the focus … I ended up with a second version that’s quite different, might even have legs of its own. But this version, this intense single POV and intensely personal version, just wouldn’t behave.

Until CDDU2 hit me up for a new story.

Maybe a little pressure was all it needed. I straightened out the narrative, finally framed the ending in a way I was happy with … I think it works. The editors certainly think so (whew!). Your mileage may vary. But I’m grateful that story is finally at some kind of rest, after all these years of haunting the periphery, its little black tentacles reaching out, refusing to be forgotten, begging to be set free.

So now I’m wondering, what else is lurking in folders of unfinished work? No doubt some will be, rightfully, left to lie dormant, but what others are just awaiting the right spark to bring them to life?

* It’s worth noting among this splendid company is one Kirstyn McDermott, an uncommon occasion in which we share a table of contents of original fiction.

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Dark Imaginings: Gothic Tales of Wonder

image from Dark Imaginings at Melbourne Uni
 
What a wonderful title for an exhibition — how can you resist? For the University of Melbourne has prepared just such a show, running 1 March to 31 July.

It features artists, body snatchers, and some of the renowned writers and poets, and trick photography and magic lantern slides to get a little ghosty.

As well as wonderful art, there will also be some events, such as a curator’s talk, a workshop on writing horror/Gothic with Dmetri Kakmi (he knows his stuff, people!), lectures by Mary Luckhurst and Ken Gelder (on vampires!), and an “in conversation”.

This last item includes Kirstyn McDermott, Michelle Goldsmith, Narrelle Harris and yours truly, hosted by Louise Swinn (of Sleepers Publishing and Stella Prize fame, amongst other things).

We’ll be yarning about speculative fiction noon-1pm on 14 June at the uni’s Parkville campus: details and bookings here.

All events are free but bookings are required. More here on Dark Imaginings.
 

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We have launch: Shadows on the Wall by Steven Paulsen

Steve Paulsen launches his collection Shadows on the Wall

Steve and Kirstyn


 
Kirstyn and I were stoked to be asked to launch Steve Paulsen‘s Shadows on the Wall, a collection of 14 spooky, at times extremely poignant, occasionally funny short stories penned over the past 30 years.

The launch was held yesterday at the Printers Room, the new home of Words Out Loud in Ballarat, and what a splendid venue it is. It was an excellent launch, with an eager and appreciative audience helping to celebrate the milestone. (Steve had a Melbourne launch earlier in the week, shared with IFWG stablemate and fellow good guy Jason Franks.)

The picture above is of Kirstyn and Steve chatting about the book and his career to date: very gratifying to hear he has more tales on the drawing board, and one might just be set in Ballarat!

Find out more about the book, and where to snaffle a copy, at Steve’s website.