writing

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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rec160: Billy Summers

NOVEL

Title: Billy Summers

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, 2021

We’ve heard this one before. Maestro Stephen King knows it. His titular character knows it. And that’s just the start of this clever, assured tale of an assassin seeking to plump up his retirement fund on a last dicey job. King rounds the edges off his hired gun by giving him a conscience – he only hits bad men, while acknowledging the reality that he, too, is, if not a bad man, not a good man – and making him a reader and also, potentially, a writer. So we find a story within a story, the hitman telling his past as he navigates the perils of his last job. There is a nod to one of King’s early, most successful successes, and tips of the hat to the writer’s craft. There is the humanity that King does so well in creating his characters, the eye for the detail that brings locations alive.  And there’s a fittingly killer ending for an adroit thriller.

>> Read an extract

A version of this reviewed has previously appeared in the Herald Sun

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2024 Calendar of Australian Literary Events

calendarNovember is still an action-packed month for literary events, and Oz Comic-Con has added some excitement to December, but next year’s calendar is already looking healthy with events scheduled through to November.

Interesting to note that the Bendigo Writers Festival has moved back to August (Melbourne Writers Festival has stayed put in May, which must be a relief for all concerned after this year’s date clash), and props to Milton’s StoryFest, which has already staked its claim for 2025!

The 2024 calendar of literary events is now live with plenty more to be confirmed. Updates, notifications and corrections are appreciated.

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Vampires, climate fiction and getting our goth on with Bohemiana podcast

In which the extremely personable and knowledgeable host George Penney chats with yours truly at Bohemiana about locating vampire fiction in Australia, the importance of fiction in the climate crisis, and some of our favourite goth rock.

I also name drop the superb albums Lotus Eaters by Wendy Rule and Crater Vol.1 by Android Lust, which were on high rotation when I was writing my island Gothic Salvage.

I note quite a few familiar names from across the literary spectrum on George’s interview list – a valuable opportunity to get behind the scenes in the writing process.

Listen to the podcast here

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2023 Calendar of Australian Literary Events

calendarNovember is still an action-packed month for literary events, but next year’s calendar is already looking healthy with events scheduled through to September. So let’s get planning! The 2023 calendar of literary events is now live with plenty more to be confirmed. Updates, notifications and corrections are appreciated.

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The Art of Being Human: A Speculative Fiction Anthology

In which FableCroft Publishing presents its first anthology in six years, ‘celebrating the connections and creativity that make us human’.

Image: Bru-n0 @ Pixabay

In which I have a story, my first in two years. One of 24 from writers from here and overseas.

The invitation to submit a story for The Art of Being Human came during a period of Covid-induced turmoil – restrictions and lockdowns, broken supply chains, working from home. Deaths.

At a time when live entertainment and the arts were among those sectors especially suffering, they were also elevated: online performances and gatherings became a lifeline, as well perhaps as a reminder that, like the natural world around us, these pursuits were too easily taken for granted. As were their practitioners.

And so ‘Exposure’ came to light, a combination of some of my favourite subjects as I tried to find a way to address the anthology theme: the place of art in our society, what it means to me, and what it can offer in a time of cataclysm, whether it be the short-term upheaval of a pandemic or the ongoing catastrophe that is climate change. I find it hard these days to write anything that isn’t touched by climate change – it is, as we are finding as a society and as a species, ubiquitous.

The story developed from a mental image of a Polaroid camera in a box in a dusty, warehouse-like room. You can read the result for yourself, with the Kickstarter now available – this is the only place to go if you’d like a print copy, and digital copies are also available.

As Tim Winton recently told the ABC,

I don’t think art needs an excuse to exist. We need beauty in our lives so we don’t go mad.

Hopefully, ‘Exposure’ has captured some of that sentiment.

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An ekphrastic outing: Covid 19, Lake Wendouree and photographer Ian Kemp

Artwork on invitation is detail from timber furniture by Neale Thompson, showing in SHAC & CO

Last year, as Ballarat stumbled from one set of pandemic restrictions to another for the second year in a row, Lake Wendouree became an important outlet for us. We’ve always been drawn to the Botanic Gardens and the lake, where the turn of the seasons is in on full display and there’s an overriding sense of calm: birds, trees, water. During peak Covid, having the lake within our permitted 5km radius was a blessing, a place to walk and to breathe.

So when photographer Ian Kemp last year invited me to write a response to his beautifully composed, atmospherically processed photographs of the western side of the lake – an area largely comprised of Fairyland and ‘the lagoon’ – I had no hesitation in agreeing,

Ian and I had worked together before, in organising collaborative ekphrastic exhibitions combining the forces of the Soldiers Hill Artist Collective and Words Out Loud, but this was our first creative collaboration.

During our harshest period of lockdown in 2020, Ian used his one hour of permitted exercise a day to capture the mood of the time, his monochromatic images, printed on aluminium, showing immense depth even as they fade away at the edges, capturing a sense of isolation, transition and, yes, tranquility.

You don’t need to know the lake to sense the emotion of Ian’s images, but seeing the familiar locale rendered in such a different way focused my response and encouraged me to pay new attention to the area and my relationship to it. The mood of the photographs triggered my response, the essay ‘Hours in Fairyland’, which directly references some elements of the images while expanding outwards to a broader context of pandemic, nature and climate change.

The original concept was entitled Making landscapes…one hour at a time, featuring a range of Ian’s images and my essay, and now there is to be an outing: one of Ian’s splendid photos (at 900mm x 1300mm, it’s seriously striking), ‘There is rapture in solitude and space’, and my words are part of the exhibition SHAC & CO.

The exhibition, involving SHAC members collaborating with others artists, in on show at the Mercure Ballarat Hotel and Convention Centre, Main Road, Golden Point, from 20 June to 31 July 2022. Free entry. The official launch is on 23 June at 6.30pm. I can’t wait to see what my fellow artists have cooked up!

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2022 Calendar of Australian Literary Events

calendarThere are plenty of events already hitting the 2022 calendar of literary events, with some postponed from the Covid disruption of the past couple of years – more strength to them! As I wrote last year, with hit-and-miss results, here’s hoping the new year runs smoothly, with plenty of chances to gather in person to celebrate writing, reading and spoken word. Updates, notifications and corrections to the calendar are appreciated.

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2021 Calendar of Australian Literary Events

calendarThe 2021 calendar of Australian literary events is showing plenty of signs of life as the community dusts itself off from the devastation and chaos of 2020. Here’s hoping the new year runs more smoothly, with plenty of chances to gather in person to celebrate writing, reading and spoken word. Updates, notifications and corrections to the calendar are appreciated.