Coeur de Lion has released the table of contents for its forthcoming anthology Anywhere But Earth, and wow, I’m very glad indeed to be in this one. Editor Keith Stevenson’s summary of my ‘Messiah on the Rock’: “Arse kicking atheists and messianic alien vampires”. Twenty-seven yarns all set somewhere that isn’t there — this is gonna be fun! This isn’t necessarily the final cover, and the anthology is due out late 2011.
Victoria’s popular-vote awards for locals, the Chronos Awards, have opened. Details at this LJ site. The awards are to be presented at Continuum 7, in Melbourne at June. Continuum members are eligible to vote, and voting memberships are available for $5 if you aren’t attending the con.
It’s worth noting that the con is appealing for panellists if you’d like to get involved.
The Man Booker International shortlist (NOT the Man Booker, for a book, but rather for a lifetime achievement) features John Le Carre and Philip Pullman, and Aussie David Malouf is in the 13, too. I find it cool that Le Carre wants to stay out in the cold — he’s not competitive, it appears, and the organisers have politely declined his equally polite request to be withdrawn.
And FableCroft has opened pre-orders for After the Rain, which includes my cyberpunk homage to misspent RPG days. The story has been fine-tuned since it was included in FableCroft’s flood relief charity e-version. The physical release is due out for Easter.
And it would be remiss to fail to mention the ongoing Year of the Shaun Tan, with the Aussie artist adding the mortgage-killing Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award to this year’s Oscar. Huzzah!
And the reviews, briefly:
Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King, collecting four yarns all uniformly bleak. The opening novella, ‘1922’, is classic obsession/haunting stuff, I had a couple of wee niggles, but I can’t go past the man’s command of character and, in this collection, the economy of words and gorgeous phrasing. ‘Big Driver’ is an ugly tale where the ugliness is not just foreshadowed but announced — you’d think that’d kill the suspense, but it doesn’t. The short story ‘Fair Extension’ is probably the least engaging, a Faustian exercise in human bitterness with surprisingly few twists. And ‘A Good Marriage’ is another simply domestic bliss gone bad, an one way in which we can handle home-grown evil. Even when the story has a kind of happy ending, there are no real winners here: such an apt title. King at his best or even his mediocre is a great salve.
And the other novel to have travelled from the to-read pile to the finally read one is Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard, a fetching alternative reality in which the poets Byron, Keats and Shelley battled very literal demons. It’s clever and I can only imagine how much fun the author must’ve had digging up the poetic extracts to head each chapter, selecting not only for theme but to set the mood on the action to follow. It’s a pedestrian pace but well worth the stroll through this superbly imagined fantasy.
Hot on the heels of the Aurealis Awards finalists, comes the Ditmars — a fan-based set of unjuried awards, to be awarded this year at Swancon at Easter. Kirstyn finds herself in strong company in the novel and short story sections *smiley face*.
In the past couple of weeks, a wee group of us have been trotting down to the local and setting up laptops for a writing session.
The boozer has comfortable booths that offer some seclusion from the hurly burly, such as it is on a weekday afternoon — the occasional zombie stumbling in from the pokies room, that blinking expression that suggests, Has anyone seen my life?; tradies catching a quick liquid lunch; suits huddled over their meal. So not too distracting. The pub also has a really neat ceiling of timber trusses and panelling, a bit like a cathedral, so it rewards that desperate heaven-wards stare for inspiration. And the staff don’t mind us hanging out there, occasionally feeding off their power and keeping the coffee machine burbling away.
Usually we’ll have a chat over lunch (the pub’s got a pretty keen menu) and a glass or two of red, and then it’s down to it. Though the last time, we got down to it first, and then finished off with dinner, because it was parma night. Regardless of the schedule, this is the beauty of the pub session. Our needs are catered for, no one has to wash up, and the loos are clean. And most importantly, there are no domestic distractions: no wifi to tempt a quick google check or email perusal, no sudden urge to go hang out washing or feed the cat; no, ahem, blog post to write instead. No escape from the blinking cursor and the blank page waiting for ideas to fill it. It’s the equivalent of walking up to a brick wall of creativity and bashing your head against it.
We are each other’s dictionary, thesaurus, sounding board. Sympathetic ear (‘yeah, it’s annoying when characters go bad’; whip (‘just right the damn thing!’).
It’s interesting that the three of us who meet regularly are all at different stages of our manuscript: one is editing those final scenes (yay!), another is pushing on past the first one-third mark, and me, I’m still trying to work out what the hell this story is about. Yup, actually doing some planning, trying to work both forward from the start that I’ve got on the page and backwards from the ending I’ve got in my mind.
And the pub session seems to be doing the trick for all of us. Especially now that we’ve figured out the line between greasing the machine and bogging it — somewhere between two and three glasses!
Ellen, one of my cohorts, shares her thoughts about the pub outings here.
The finalists for Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards have been announced. The Aurealis Awards recognise excellence by Australian writers and editors across the spectrum of fantastic fiction: science fiction, fantasy, horror and all points in between. The winners will be announced at a gala ceremony in Sydney on May 21. The judges had a bumper year to contend with — I judged for anthologies and collections, so I have an inkling of the array of quality shorts the other panels had to choose from — and the lists show some wonderful diversity, with newcomers rubbing shoulders with much-published authors, and a self-published fantasy novel making the final running, which is great to see. And of course, also great to see is Kirstyn’s Madigan Mine in the shortlist for horror novel, along with the most deserving Death Most Definite, by Trent Jamieson, and Jason Fischer’s After the World: Gravesend.
2010 Aurealis Awards – Finalists
CHILDREN’S FICTION (told primarily through words)
Grimsdon, Deborah Abela, Random House
Ranger’s Apprentice #9: Halt’s Peril, John Flanagan, Random House
The Vulture of Sommerset, Stephen M Giles, Pan Macmillan
The Keepers, Lian Tanner, Allen & Unwin
Haggis MacGregor and the Night of the Skull, Jen Storer & Gug Gordon, Aussie Nibbles (Penguin)
CHILDREN’S FICTION (told primarily through pictures)
Night School, Isobelle Carmody (writer) & Anne Spudvilas (illustrator), Penguin Viking
Magpie, Luke Davies (writer) & Inari Kiuru (illustrator), ABC Books (HarperCollins)
The Boy and the Toy, Sonya Hartnett (writer) & Lucia Masciullo (illustrator), Penguin Viking
Precious Little, Julie Hunt & Sue Moss (writers) & Gaye Chapman (illustrator), Allen & Unwin
The Cloudchasers, David Richardson (writer) & Steven Hunt (illustrator), ABC Books (HarperCollins)
YOUNG ADULT Short Story
Inksucker, Aidan Doyle, Worlds Next Door, Fablecroft Publishing
One Story, No Refunds, Dirk Flinthart, Shiny #6, Twelfth Planet Press
A Thousand Flowers, Margo Lanagan, Zombies Vs Unicorns, Allen & Unwin
Nine Times, Kaia Landelius & Tansy Rayner Roberts, Worlds Next Door, Fablecroft Publishing
An Ordinary Boy, Jen White, The Tangled Bank, Tangled Bank Press
YOUNG ADULT Novel
Merrow, Ananda Braxton-Smith, black dog books
Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey, Allen & Unwin
The Midnight Zoo, Sonya Hartnett, Penguin
The Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher, Doug MacLeod, Penguin
Behemoth (Leviathan Trilogy Book Two), Scott Westerfeld, Penguin
BEST ILLUSTRATED BOOK/ GRAPHIC NOVEL
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nicki Greenberg, Allen & Unwin
EEEK!: Weird Australian Tales of Suspense, Jason Paulos et al, Black House Comics
Changing Ways Book 1, Justin Randall, Gestalt Publishing
Five Wounds: An Illustrated Novel, Jonathan Walker & Dan Hallett, Allen & Unwin
Horrors: Great Stories of Fear and Their Creators, Rocky Wood & Glenn Chadbourne, McFarlane & Co.
BEST COLLECTION
The Library of Forgotten Books, Rjurik Davidson, PS Publishing
Under Stones, Bob Franklin, Affirm Press
Sourdough and Other Stories, Angela Slatter, Tartarus Press
The Girl With No Hands, Angela Slatter, Ticonderoga Publications
Dead Sea Fruit, Kaaron Warren, Ticonderoga Publications
BEST ANTHOLOGY
Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, edited by Angela Challis & Dr Marty Young, Brimstone Press
Sprawl, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, Twelfth Planet Press
Scenes from the Second Storey, edited by Amanda Pillar & Pete Kempshall, Morrigan Books
Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan, SF Book Club
Wings of Fire, edited by Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon, Night Shade Books
HORROR Short Story
Take the Free Tour, Bob Franklin, Under Stones, Affirm Press
Her Gallant Needs, Paul Haines, Sprawl, Twelfth Planet Press
The Fear, Richard Harland, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, Brimstone Press
Wasting Matilda, Robert Hood, Zombie Apocalypse!, Constable & Robinson Ltd
Lollo, Martin Livings, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, Apex Publishing
HORROR Novel
After the World: Gravesend, Jason Fischer, Black House Comics
Death Most Definite, Trent Jamieson, Orbit (Hachette)
Madigan Mine, Kirstyn McDermott, Pan Macmillan
FANTASY Short Story
The Duke of Vertumn’s Fingerling, Elizabeth Carroll, Strange Horizons
Yowie, Thoraiya Dyer, Sprawl, Twelfth Planet Press
The February Dragon, LL Hannett & Angela Slatter, Scary Kisses, Ticonderoga Publications
All the Clowns in Clowntown, Andrew McKiernan, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, Brimstone Press
Sister, Sister, Angela Slatter, Strange Tales III, Tartarus Press
FANTASY Novel
The Silence of Medair, Andrea K Höst, self-published
Death Most Definite, Trent Jamieson, Orbit (Hachette)
Stormlord Rising, Glenda Larke, HarperVoyager (HarperCollins)
Heart’s Blood, Juliet Marillier, Pan Macmillan
Power and Majesty, Tansy Rayner Roberts, HarperVoyager (HarperCollins)
SCIENCE FICTION Short Story
The Heart of a Mouse, K.J. Bishop, Subterranean Online (Winter 2010)
The Angaelian Apocalypse, Matthew Chrulew, The Company Articles Of Edward Teach/The Angaelian Apocalypse, Twelfth Planet Press
Border Crossing, Penelope Love, Belong, Ticonderoga Publications
Interloper, Ian McHugh, Asimovs (Jan 2011)
Relentless Adaptations, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Sprawl, Twelfth Planet Press
SCIENCE FICTION Novel
Song of Scarabaeous, Sara Creasy, EOS Books
Mirror Space, Marianne de Pierres, Orbit (Hachette)
Transformation Space, Marianne de Pierres, Orbit (Hachette)
Publishers Weekly has posted reviews of two forthcoming Ticonderoga Publications anthologies — Dead Red Heart (“solid”) and More Scary Kisses (“beguiling”) — and that’d be a thumbs up for both — yay! Both anthologies are due out around Easter. And yup, I’m chuffed to say that I’ve got stories in both of them.
The longlist for this year’s Miles Franklin award has been announced, and there’s Honey Brown on the list. Brown won the Aurealis Award for best horror novel a couple of years back with Red Queen, and last year, Miles Franklin winner Andrew McGahan took the gong for best science fiction novel. I wonder how many others have managed to likewise span the annoying, unnecessary genre gulf?
Last year’s Miles Franklin caused some forelock tugging when it went to a crime novel, Peter Temple’s Truth. This year, it seems, the forelocks will be safe. Here’s the longlist, with an annotated description based on the blurbs:
The shortlist will be announced on April 19, with the winner announced on June 22.
Melbourne’s a great town for dining out — it prides itself on its culinary culture, in fact. Which makes the reason for it to cling to the foul tradition of smoking in al fresco dining areas rather puzzling. Just recently the Monash City Council caved to business pressure and gave up a proposed ban; the businesses were more concerned about losing their smoker market — who would continue to eat out anyway — than attracting the much bigger non-smoker market. A curious piece of business intelligence, but there you go. Old habits — and old smokers, for that matter — die hard. And it looks as if the council will continue to chip away, so good on ’em. But that’s not the point of this here rumination
Rather, it’s to direct your attention to the rather groovy Butterfly Club in South Melbourne. We went there a couple of Sundays ago, not so much for the show, but the decor. How very hipster of us! But seriously, it’s such a lovely venue, long and narrow in an old shop/residence, with a bar downstairs and another up, both with lounging rooms attached, and the most wonderfully squeaky wooden stairs to the loo with a view of who’s waiting in line, and in the front room, the performance space with its fold-down theatre chairs and the most rudimentary of lighting. It’s like having a cabaret in your own lounge room. And everywhere, there is kitsch: old books and here a Robocop action figure and there some island masks, vintage lamps and bits of boats … wonderful stuff.
We chanced upon Christine Moffat, performing Really Nice Day, with able support from a male pianist who had his role to play, and even the audience was dragged into the conceit. It was a lovely kidnap tale with a healthy dose of psycho, interspersed with musical numbers that helped move the narrative along. I’ll never listen to ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ in quite the same way again!
Anyhoo, after the show we had dinner around the corner at the Groove Train (with Butterfly Club discount, no less), which probably isn’t up there on the city’s fine dining guide but ain’t to be sneezed at (billowing clouds of nicotine notwithstanding) for a filling well-priced meal, and then — penguins!
One benefit of daylight saving is you can have your 6pm show and a meal and still get to St Kilda by twilight. Twas a chill little breeze plucking at our coats and the sea was a metallic cobalt colour when we got there, kind of grateful we hadn’t tried to squeeze into the crowded beachside eateries — especially the one with Eddie Maguire bellowing at people to come eat their entrees over the PA. Yikes!
No, much better the slow walk along the jetty and out to the rock wall, where some intrepid little penguins (formerly known as fairy penguins) had braved the city side of the protective mesh fence. There’s a rookery out there, amazing given the proximity to smelly old humanity with its dogs and lower order specimens who have, in the past, delighted in destroying little penguins (hence the fence).
How amazing is it to be able to wander a manmade structure in a busy bay, and be able to spy wobbling penguins climbing the rocky ramparts, extending their fragile little community into foreign territory? And even more amazing is it to be able to snaffle a soft-serve ice cream — with nuts — on the walk back?
This is Lucia Micarelli, whose violin is a favourite attraction of the HBO television series Treme (available on DVD any minute now…). There’s a lot of soul in that playing, isn’t there? That violin appears on a couple of tunes on the Treme soundtrack, which has been on high rotation here while outside the house the world continues to find its own little slices of hell: floods, fires, cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis — and that’s just in our little corner of the globe.
It’s a grand soundtrack, lifted from the first series, with an eye focused on post-Katrina New Orleans, one blink blame, one long stare at recovery and pride, and plenty of winks at simply enjoying life, whatever may come. The album’s resonance reaches further than Louisiana, right across the Pacific to rubble and mud and houses and lives thrown asunder. There’s comfort in the fact that American’s inability to care for their own (cf Steve Zahn’s ‘Shame Shame Shame‘) isn’t replicated on the grander scale; that citizens and nations rally in support of those in need. Japan and the Pacific: it’s your turn now, and how sorry are we that you need it?
I realise that tectonic plates are one thing and global warming is another, but honestly, would it really hurt us to take a little better care of Spaceship Earth, even if — egads — its passengers might have to tolerate a little inconvenience? There’s nothing quite like a natural disaster to remind you just how delicate an ecosystem is, especially when it’s the one you rely on to keep you breathing.
Inspired by The Runaways movie, I finally added some serious Joan Jett to the CD collection and haven’t been disappointed — great rock ‘n’ roll to bop away at the keyboard to. Hard to go past ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me (Yeah)’!
Also making noise is the latest from Theatres des Vampires, Mephisto Waltz. The Italian outfit don’t quite scale the same symphonic heights as Nightwish, but their tunes are lush and grand; Sonya Scarlet’s voice offers distinctive warmth and wide range, a real femme fatale feel, with her accent to the fore. Buzzing guitars, thumping drums, strings and piano: all the bases are covered in a theatrical but not overblown presentation.
Rounding out the play deck is an oldie but a goodie from Velvet Acid Christ, lust for blood. This synth-driven industrial/EBM album is perfect accompaniment for editing and, turned up, urban action scenes of the spooky noir variety, but damn me if the door bell sound on one track isn’t STILL fooling me every time…
Here’s ‘Carmilla’, from Theatre des Vampires: probably not what Sheridan Le Fanu had in mind, but I’m not going to disapprove.