books

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The Darkness Within available from England

the darkness within

Not quite as exciting as the headline sounds, but an interesting comment on the global market and self-promotion in one. An eBay seller in the UK has managed to snaffle five copies of The Darkness Within, though it was released only in Australia and NZ. At 12 quid plus postage, it’s still a discount on the cover price ($33), even when shipped back to Australia.

It’s also being offered for $A23 at The Book Depository, an excellent UK shop I’ve patronised in the past that has free international shipping.

Three cheers for the global market place, eh?

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Aurealis Awards finalists announced

The finalists for Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards, the Aurealis Awards, have been announced on the website.

Great to see some new names in the mix as well as the stalwarts, and Brisbane’s Peter Ball running for the greatest over-achiever award with his swag of nominations.

The winners will be announced in Brisbane on January 23, which will mark the end of Fantastic Queensland’s tenure as hosts of the awards. No word yet on who will be taking over the prestigious but invidious task.

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australian dark fantasy and horror, volume 4

australian dark fantasy and horror volume 4

The good folks at Brimstone Press have announced the table of contents for their latest volume of Australian dark fantasy and horror, collected from the 2008 crop, and — big smile — my story, “Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn” (one of several to be included from Dreaming Again), is in there. It’s rubbing shoulders with some mighty good yarns:

“The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga” by Peter M. Ball

“The Claws of Native Ghosts” by Lee Battersby

“Pale Dark Soldier” by Deborah Biancotti

“Heere Be Monsters” by John Birmingham

“Teeth” by Stephen Dedman

“Her Collection of Intimacy” by Paul Haines

“A Guided Tour in the Kingdom of the Dead” by Richard Harland

“Moments of Dying” by Robert Hood

“Just Us” by Pete Kempshall

“Painlessness” by Kirstyn McDermott

“The Casting Out” by Miranda Siemienowicz

More details here.

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How to write a novel (the Justine method)

In her acceptance speech at the World Fantasy Awards ceremony this year, Margo Lanagan paid tribute to a blog post by fellow Aussie writer Justine Larbalestier about how to write a novel. Given I’m meant to be doing just that at the moment (writing a novel, that is), I looked up that post, and found it helpful indeed. Here it is. I’ve used the spreadsheet tracking method and it’s uncomfortably illuminating!

I also thought her expurgated version held quite a lot of truth.

Enjoy, and then get to it…

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more Angry Robots

Two out of four ain’t bad, neh?

HarperCollins’ new spec fic imprint, Angry Robot, has released four books to launch itself, showing a wide scope. There’s Aussie Kaaron Warren’s Slights (which I’ve reviewed here previously), Chris Roberson’s Book of Secrets, Tim Waggoner’s Nekropolis and Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland.

moxyland book cover, by Lauren Beukes

Beukes, a South African, riffs off that country’s socio-political injustices with her near-future, Orwellian vision. The tale is told through the viewpoints of four characters, each giving an insight into different levels of that society: the rebels, the corporate ladder climbers, the celebrity blogger, and a dysfunctional artist caught up in the latest corporate skullduggery.
The story unfolds at a pedestrian pace and never really accelerates towards a climax, but the characters are effective and Beukes’ world is wonderfully drawn. The conclusion is gorgeous, for a cynic such as myself.
Unlike some others in the Angry Robot range, the text is delightfully clean of typos, perhaps thanks in part to Beukes’ background in journalism (ah, those heady days when sloppy work could be remedied by a whack to the back of the head with a Concise Oxford, or perhaps a tap with a Strunk & White).

book of secrets by chris roberson

Roberson, who I had the pleasure to meet at World Fantasy in San Jose and is a very cool guy, has delivered a story with many stories within it, a conspiracy tale involving a Biblical secret sought by nefarious, homicidal agencies. Into this is thrown a down-at-heel freelance journo with an unusual past — one that is proven to be even more unusual than he realises thanks to his own family mysteries.
This isn’t my kind of story at all, and its structure didn’t warm me to it. The pulp stories contained within the text didn’t need to be there (I’m sure others will love these homages), vying with interminable info dumps for causing the greatest urge to skim read, and the supernatural conclusion left me cold. As I said, not my kind of story, but I suspect those with an inclination towards The Da Vinci Code will find plenty here to entertain (and what a shame it is that that book has become the benchmark for this style of story).

Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner

Which leaves the most disappointing of the four, Nekropolis. A great idea is so quickly hamstrung by some clunky structure and an appallingly Hollywood ending reminiscent of the ugly denouement forced on Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner. The protagonist is a former cop from Earth who has found himself turned into a zombie in a demon dimension. He has garnered a deep understanding of this bizarre world and its denizens, as well as forging a wide network of contacts of dubious moral worth. It’s a very cool world, filled with neat critters and a bunch of witches and vampires and shapechangers, all competing in a petty pissing contest for status. What wrecked the story for me were the logic potholes: an awful rewind moment regarding a set of lockpicks, a contradictory solution to an ensorcelled door, and a hugely underplayed and slightly farcical showdown with a nemesis. That the author signals that his major characters all survive undermines any suspense, and the aforementioned Blade Runner moment is the salt in the wound. It’s such a pity a little more care couldn’t have been taken, because the premise, and poor Matt the zombie cop, really have legs.

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QWC blog tour

I’m now living in Melbourne, but I’m continuing my membership with the Queensland Writers Centre because it’s a damn fine organisation with plenty to offer, even for an ‘outpost’ member such as myself (a writer who wouldn’t have a book on the shelf were it not for the QWC). The centre has been kind enough to include me in their blog tour, offering a Cook’s tour of writers’ blogs. You can find out more about the blog tour at the end of this post. Meantime, here are the requisite questions answered:

Where do your words come from?
The words themselves probably swim up from a lifetime of reading and study and movie-watching. But of the origin of the ideas that drive them, I’m not sure. Perhaps also in the words that have gone before, adapted by experience and observation, daydreaming and nightmares. I tend to download my stories from the ether of the subconcious, then set about shaping them, making sure the words are the best possible ones to tell the story. And then there’s Roget’s 😉

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I grew up on a Queensland cattle property about half way between Maryborough and Gympie, an hour’s drive to either. It was a fertile place for the imagination, fuelled by books of all sorts. I’ve been leap-frogging my way through gradually larger cities since, most recently to Melbourne where I’m still waiting for my blood to thicken and save me from the embarrassment of being the only person on the street wearing gloves.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
My most recently published story, “Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn” (Dreaming Again, 2008) opens with, “George stood by the bleached skeleton of the Wyandra stockyards, breathing in dust and sun-baked silence.”
The first sentence of the story I’m meant to be working on at the moment is still a work in progress…

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Macbeth’s Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech. It’s stuck with me ever since I had to recite it in high school.

What are you currently working towards?
I’m planning a new novel, probably a follow-up to The Darkness Within, or yet another iteration of a linked story that just won’t behave. Or maybe something else again. November is my self-appointed crunch time.

Complete this sentence… the future of the book is…
… assured, though its delivery method will expand into the electronic realm with much wailing and gnashing of copyright regions.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

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The Last Stormlord/Night’s Cold Kiss

Herewith two reviews of recently released Aussie novels, and a handy link to a very cool review site at The Guardian featuring Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.


Last Stormlord

Glenda Larke, an Australian now living in Malaysia, has lived on four continents, but it is her experiences in arid Western Australia and Tunisia that appear to most inform The Last Stormlord (HarperCollins, $22.99), the first book of the Watergivers series.

Larke impressed with her breakout, big-publisher debut, The Aware, which I loved for its dystopian air and gorgeous world-building.

The Last Stormlord, a saga of an empire facing its demise, is set in a dry coastal realm bordered by mountains and desert where life revolves around the possession and acquisition of water.

Key to the survival of the city states is the Stormlord, the last of the line powerful enough to take water from the sea and send it inland to break in designated areas, bringing rain to the needy. Under the Stormlord is an aristocracy of lesser powered men and women with varying ability to manipulate water, physically moving it or even removing it from living creatures. This apparent magical power over the essential element has kept the status quo against the nomadic desert dwellers for centuries, but now that is changing. Political ambitions give sway to treachery and murder and the world is set for upheaval.

Caught up in this chaos are two teenagers, Shale and Terelle. Both possess considerable water powers of different ilks, and both find themselves being used as tools in political machinations. The star-crossed pair are given precious little time for adolescence.

Like a brewing storm, the story gains weight and power as it gathers momentum, the considerable cast rising to strike clear identities as ideals of honour and survival clash, and love lies bleeding. There are some gentle religious barbs along the way, too.

Larke’s world-building is a great strength of the story, the dryness and heat permeating the fabric of her society, with enough touches of the fantastic to excite the imagination. This, combined with a bloody climax, leaves the reader keen for the next instalment.

NightsColdKiss
Aussie writer Tracey O’Hara has enjoyed some happy hunting in the United States with Night’s Cold Kiss (HarperCollins, $19.99), her debut novel, the first of the three-book Dark Brethren series. Now the paranormal romance has been released in her home country.

Set primarily in New York, it covers familiar ground for those who enjoy paranormal romance, still one of the hottest of genres.

Antoinette Petrescu, deeply affected by the murder of her parents by a death-loving vampire called Dante, is a slayer of the undead, and an unnaturally gifted one at that. But a deadly conspiracy throws her into the path of the charismatic and filthy rich vampire Christian, and sparks erupt despite her best intentions.
Christian is an agent for a covert, quasi-government organisation that polices the paranormal community with a view to keeping an uneasy truce brokered years before between vampires and humans.

Now someone’s rocking the boat and Antoinette’s past is coming back to bite her – quite literally.

Planes, helicopters, fast cars and elegant upstate mansions all figure as Antoinette is exposed to the other side of vampire existence – she truly gets to see how the other half live as she meets Christian’s well-to-do vampire family and household staff.

Vampire society is well-described, with the usual dividing line between those who try to maintain a sense of humanity and those who embrace their inner beast, revelling in the kill and their otherness. There is enough insight into the realm of the shapechangers to suggest further exploration in coming books.

O’Hara hits all the right buttons for fans of the genre with her tale of desire, betrayal and revenge, providing a pacy and at times steamy adventure with a strong, lusty subplot. This makes up for the occasional lack of sparkle on the page and some haphazard editing as the story builds to a fittingly explosive climax, and overdrawn denouement to springboard the reader into book two.

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ctrl/alt/delete: restart

During the week I left Brisbane, I took some snaps on my mobile phone to mark the moments. Not all of them, not even the most important ones: just incidental ones as the to-do list ticked down. It went something like this:

empty winerack

empty winerack

After the giveaways and sell-offs, the eBaying and the Freecycling and the dump run, came the packing. The house emptied out as the boxes filled. The wine rack gave some cause for concern, but I figured, we could rebuild it. And in fact, we have. An empty wine rack is of no use to anyone. Ditto the bookshelves.

 

cafe urbano in stafford heights

cafe urbano in stafford heights


I was extremely grateful that a cafe had opened at the end of my street. And a great cafe at that. One with takeaway coffee and a late breakfast and a BLT to die for. It became something of a hub for last-minute catch-ups, thanks in part to the recent addition of a dinner menu (love the lamb).

shoes off, after the packing

shoes off, after the packing

Men came. They chuckled at the sight of the coffin-table, all bound up, mummy-like, in its blanket and tape. They didn’t seem to blanche too much at the third room, lined with boxes filled with books. Three hours and a cuppa later, they left in a big truck with a promise we’d meet again, and I sat on the stairs, shoes off, contemplating how much an empty house can echo, and how sore I’d be the next day.

spaceman on the ceiling

spaceman on the ceiling

In the absence of, well, anything but a backpack of clothing, it was good to have friends to crash with. They had wine, and coffee, a spare bed and a shower and a loo, and a cute little spaceman stuck to their ceiling. You need friends like these.

 

Dad's garden

Dad's garden

Family is also good. They’re like friends with a sense of ingrained commitment. My Dad has an awesome view from his house and an even more awesome viewpoint, and his partner has done a grand job setting up the house and the garden. It’s good to know that, no matter where you are, you know damn well where they will be: watching your back.

sunset at Shorncliffe

sunset at Shorncliffe

After the truck had gone, I had coffee — an iced one, the day was hot — with a mate at Shorncliffe, one of my favourite places in Brisbane. And after that I went for a meditative trundle on the pier, and watched my last Shorncliffe sunset as a ‘local’. No dawn without a sunset.

Kaliber in Fortitude Valley

Kaliber in Fortitude Valley

Another favourite place in Brissie was Kaliber, a funky, narrow club in the Valley with an amazing range of vodka, cool staff, mean pizzas and a fine line in absinthe. They were playing Concrete Blonde’s Joey when I got there. We had a good night, three of us who have all been through this all before each in our own way, and backed up the next week — the last week — with Mexican and burlesque (not at the same time). One thing I like about cities is that you can have tortillas and tassles in the one night.

angela slatter and me at dinner

angela slatter and me at dinner

On the last night, after the final inspection of the house and the last cuppa at Urbano and the return of the keys and afternoon tea with a pal and the stumbling across of a friend’s Buffy book (Night Terrors) in a newsagent, it was time for a drink. First at the Queensland Writers Centre cocktail party, coinciding with the Brisbane Writers Festival and launching their groovy Industry IQ program which I’m frustrated to be missing — and what a splendid view of the CBD from across the river — and then at dinner, with some old friends and the cool Dexter dude Jeff Lindsay and some other folks beside. I relented and took a people shot on the phone, because how could you not with the likes of the inimitable (and fellow It Crowd fan) Angela Slatter?

Sydney from the Swissotel

Sydney from the Swissotel

My agent has an annual gettogether for her writers in Sydney. This year, because the usual venue stuffed up the booking, it was at the Swissotel in the CBD. Two thumbs up for the Swissotel and their well-appointed rooms — this was the view from the 19th floor — and their fab staff and tasty bar menu. The banquet was amazing — I went back for seconds of prawns and oysters — and scored a wee pavlova. The event was my springboard out of Brissie, but there were a couple of fellow Brissie scribes there — Kate Morton and Stephen M Irwin with entertaining speeches, Grace Dugan, Louise Cusack and Kim Wilkins — and other reliables from around the country who made the bar a friendly place to be (Graeme Hague, Ian Irvine, Richard Harland and Katherine Howell, to name a few, and all kicking mighty goals that make a young wannabe such as myself mighty keen to get fingers on keyboard again).
And then there was the Melbourne writer Kirstyn McDermott, reason enough to empty your house and say goodbye to your cafe and your sunset, and promise to write to the good souls holding the fort.
 

gargoyle in melbourne
gargoyle in melbourne

Now the gargoyles are ensconced, the boxes packed away (mostly), the computer set up and the kettle plugged in. Better get started, then.

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Continuum, Slights from Angry Robots, and some vampires

So I’m in post-convention funk, short on sleep and strong on caffeine, a day back at work and wondering where the weekend went. The receipts tell some of the story: cabs, airlines, two dinners at a Chinese restaurant with lots and lots of chilli and an amazing capacity for seating and feeding 17 people at the drop of a hat, Japanese, innumerable coffees at the Lindt cafe and the State Library and that excellent sandwich bar in the Queen Victoria Building and other places besides…

Cat Sparks’ (as always) fun photo diary helps fill in some blanks, too.

So, the event was Continuum 5, held in the basement of the sprawling Mercure hotel complex in Melbourne, with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro as international guest of honour. She was rather grand, too. I enjoyed my vampire panel with her, and taking a new novel in the making for a walk during a reading session on the Sunday. I enjoyed meeting up with a bunch of folks from around the country, seeing Deb Biancotti launch her first anthology and Richard Harland steaming on with Worldshaker … and Kirstyn McDermott landed an award trifecta with her short story “Painlessness”, which had already won an Aurealis and a Ditmar before taking a brand new Chronos.

Next year there will be another Continuum, in February, and in September there will be a grandaddy of conventions, the Worldcon aka Aussiecon 4, also in Melbourne. If you are in Australia and write any kind of spec fic, you really owe it to yourself to be at the Worldcon.

Slights by Kaaron Warren

Slights by Kaaron Warren

On the flight home from Melbourne, I finished Kaaron Warren’s debut novel, Slights. It’s one of the first books to be released under HarperCollins’ new spec fic imprint, Angry Robot. It’s a weird title for an imprint, especially given that Kaaron’s book doesn’t have robots in it, nor any science fiction at all. The SF component of two of the other first four books also seems non-existent. No matter. What matters is that Aussie writer Kaaron’s book is a real gem. Sure, I had a little rant about the number of literal errors — you can’t get away from them these days — but don’t let that distract you. This is a compelling read, even though it’s not exactly express train pace. It’s a steam train of personality and character, wit and dread; such fully realised characters just don’t pop up that often, especially when they’re digging up family secrets in the backyard, pissing off their brother, tormenting all and insundry — and paying a heavy price. I can’t say Stevie is likeable, but her honesty is refreshing, her barbed one-liners engaging, her relationship with and indeed morbid curiosity about death intriguing and just a tad spooky. She namechecks Aussie writers Richard Harland and Robert Hood, too. Cool.

Kaaron has two more books signed to Angry Robot. So what’s to be angry about, huh? You tell me, robot.

Despite the previously mentioned funk, there is no rest for the wicked. I’m up to my jugular in vampires, and will be till Saturday when I present a wee talk at the Logan library’s SF month about the evolution of the vampire, from Byron to, ahem, Twilight.

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for the love of Aussie books

In The Courier-Mail, Kathleen Noonan makes the case, with her usual passion,  for maintaining our existing territorial copyright.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25659282-5012506,00.html

It’s depressing, reading that more than 18,000 Dymocks subscribers have signed their petition. Makes my decision to quit the Dymocks newsletter seem rather insignificant.

You might also like to check out what Tim Winton, latest winner of the Miles Franklin award for Breath, has to say on the issue: http://www.penguin.com.au/breath/video.cfm