End of the Month Report: December 2011

Submissions: 3
Rejections: 1
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 10
New stories completed: 1.5
Extra achievement category added to pump up my final stats for 2011: my story The Nameless Seamstress was a semi-finalist in the 4th Quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest.
Mood: optimistic and raring to go. I've been trying not to compare my 2011 with at all the amazing 'Year in Review' blogs posted by writers who are, I keep reminding myself, further ahead in their careers. They write of achieving many publications, and receiving awards, and winning arts grants that will give them time off from their day jobs to just write and do research, and one can't help but feel a teensy bit deficient. This is a classic mistake to make, of course, because you should NEVER COMPARE YOURSELF WITH OTHERS. That way lies the Desolate Road to Self-Imposed Misery, a terrible highway travelled by insecure people who insist on flagellating themselves with psychological cat-o'-nine-tails. The writers in question have all weathered their own ups and downs, and worked hard and consistently to achieve their successes. Instead of feeling inadequate, I choose to be inspired to follow their worthy examples and focus even more on my writing in 2012.

So, repeat after me: "You get out of it (whatever you choose 'it' to be) what you put into it. You get out of it what you put into it. You get out of it what you put into it. You get out of it what you put into it. You get out of it what you put into it..."

Now, which way to the fireworks? Happy 2012, everyone!

Having fun, fun, fun.

So I tore apart my chinese steampunk/wuxia story and ditched A LOT of what I wrote on Tuesday, got to know my main character better and designed a stunning wardrobe for her, changed the plot and pumped up the backstory of another character after coming across a scrumptiously must-use piece of information whilst looking up some geographical data, thought of a different and much better ending, and, most importantly, found the story's voice.

Once you've got a story's voice, it's all uphill. And then, eventually, hopefully, it's a downhill cruise :)

Oh, and I stuck in a few dragons. I was trying to stay away from them, but it felt wrong to so deliberately excise them from the tale. They mostly appear in walk-on parts anyway, sort of dragonish guest artists, but they need to be there in the background, otherwise their absence is too distracting. Besides, one should exploit every possible opportunity to pop a dragon into a story, especially if you write a lot of SF.

I love holidays. It's so nice to luxuriate in a new story rather than squishing it in between the daily grind and, sometimes, forgetting to enjoy the process.

And apropos dragons, here's a cool, very musical Oriental Dragon site.

Crackered animals

So I'm seeing a lot more of these guys and/or gals now that I'm at home during the days:
The chook has taken to wandering into the kitchen and clucking indignantly for her breakfast when she arrives. She almost made it all the way to my writing cave on Tuesday before I realised what was happening. Cute as it is, this is definitely not a behaviour I want to encourage.

The blue-tongue keeps turning up by the Xmas swing while I'm reading, or is sunning itself on the patio of a morning when I open up the house. Right now, it's scurrying around amongst the dead leaves about the back shed, poking its head up every now and then to scowl at me. You didn't think skinks could scowl? Believe me, they can. Possibly there's more than one - I'm not adept at distinguishing lizardy individuals. Sometimes I hear a hiss and look down to see one at my feet warning me off, and once it's sure I'm suitably impressed, it arrogantly, and not too hurriedly, exits the stage. And just like the chook, they keep the cats entertained (my mighty hunters just plop themselves down next to any passing blue-tongue and curiously regard their every move.)

***Here's a freshly snapped (12.30 pm) update featuring Polly:

Very interesting, and not the least bit stupid.

There's plenty of science fiction and fantasy relevant TV, movie and book industry information in this i09 post: The Power List: 23 Movers and Shakers in Science Fiction and Fantasy. I know I loosed a few hmms and aaahs as I read it.

And that's it for today - I've been shopping (gift cards to use, sales to go to) and visiting and traipsing all over Melbourne. I am thoroughly pooped. Now I'm going to put up my frazzled feet and enjoy one of my purchases, namely the BBC science fiction series Outcasts, which I've been told is a sterling piece of work with smart writing and a great cast. Crossing fingers.

Creak!

Writerlywise, I warmed up my Xmas-addled brain today with 2 x 1.5 hours worth of work on the Chinese steampunk/wuxia story, research for another story, about 2 hours of reading out in the backyard on the Xmas swing (1 x a short story + China Mieville's The City and the City) and sending off 2 submissions.

Allow it

I'm just back from a double at Star Cinema - we saw 'The Debt' and 'Attack the Block'. Because of the latter, I'll probably be saying things like 'check it' and 'shizzle' for the next few days. I must say, I respect the fact that ATB bothered to come up with a reasonably plausible sci-fi reason for the scenario - aliens attacking a single London housing estate and focusing on one gang - which is more than can be said for some of the spineless SF movies I've watched this year that were served up by much bigger Hollywood productions.

And while we're on the topic of fudged SF storylines, if you're one of those people who were mightily displeased by the inane ending of Battleship Galactica, here's an in depth essay on why it didn't work the big one. Needless to say, it's chock full of spoilers.

To give or not to give? (1)

'A book is a gift you can open again and again.' - Garrison Keilor

I meant to write this post last week after receiving my Lovecraftian Kris Kringle present, but couldn’t quite find the time. However, as we’re all still enjoying the spoils of the past few days, and, as far as I’m concerned, if you’re lucky, that booty includes a few books, I can squeeze it in now.

It centers on a piece by Jane Sullivan in the Age last weekend titled ‘Unwrapping the gift of childhood rapture’, which was about how you can divide children into two classes: those who love to get books as for Christmas (and I would add here, for any other occasion), and those who are appalled at being denied a “proper present”. She went on to wax lyrical about receiving a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy when she was 11, and wrote about feeling a special kinship with author Rick Riordan, who also treasured his memories of a yuletide LOTR gift (I myself came relatively late to LOTR – when I was about 15, via an Australian exchange student in Denmark, and promptly fell deeply in love with Strider/Aragorn. Back then, as Jane Sullivan points out, Tolkien wasn’t world famous, and to be a LOTR reader was to be part of a secret club. New members were recruited by the archaic word-of-mouth method, and when, in the wilderness of the mundane world, you came upon another LOTR reader – oh, the joy!)

Anyway, I was definitely a child who loved to receive books as presents. I didn’t get many fiction books for Xmas, but I did get stacks and stacks of encyclopedias, history, animal (mostly about horses) and science books (which sometime included things like the evolution of horses...) Basically, books that were, oooh, educational. Oh, to see that tell-tale cubic present under the tree, to sneak in prior to Xmas Eve and lift it and feel the weight of the knowledge to come – there was not the least sense of deprivation in that for me, only extreme happiness. In the Xmas photos, I’m the one in the corner leafing through some massive tome with a rapt expression on my face.
I did, however, receive a memorable fiction book for my eight birthday – Rennie Goes Riding by Monica Edwards (A quick Google reveals that I was far from the only little girl who adored that particular book - and there I thought it was my special book. Sometimes, one really should resist the urge to Google. But I did find the cover for the edition I had back then.) I think that only Black Beauty tops it in my personal ‘Horse Books that have Deeply Affected Me’ category. It’s all about a poor and suitably orphaned city girl with a great theoretical love for horses who lands a dream job in a riding stable far out in the country. She is much mocked initially because she can’t even handle the creatures she loves so much, or even ride them, but she knows what she knows, feels what she feels, preservers and ultimately triumphs. I read that book over and over until it turned to dust. Whoever it was who gave it to me, even though you no doubt forgot all about it decades ago – thank you very much.

Well, I’m running out of time again. I’ll post this and continue the ‘books as gifts’ theme later. *** oops, I tidied this post up a bit later, including the incorrect link.

Happy Holidays!

Christmas conundrum

After a morning finishing up at the Arvo Job, a lift home, a quick shop, a nap and a few cups of tea, I was just getting stuck into Xmas preparations for tomorrow when disaster struck - my wooden spoon snapped in half. As anyone in the know will tell you, it is nigh impossible to make ris a la mande without a wooden spoon. Other, non-wooden spoons just don't cut it, for they do not handle in the same way when it comes to swirling around rice, nuts and cream.

So, what with it being a beautiful, cool evening after a sultry day, I thought I'd go get a new spoon and fit in a nice twilight walk as well. My wanderings took me down the mean backstreets of our country town, where I came upon a mother duck with four tiny ducklings scooting across the road into an industrial courtyard full of dumpsters and sheds full of rubbish. I followed, wondering where the heck she was going, and soon realised that she was quite stressed and didn't really have a clue what to do except keep moving. As I watched her and tried to think how I could help, dark things began to move at the periphery of my vision. It was like those horror movies where shadows slip in and out of the frame, but whenever the protagonist whirls about, there's nothing there. In this case, I glimpsed fleeting images of feral cats - lots and lots of very tough looking and obviously very hungry feral cats, and all of them intent on the ducklings. Alas, there was nothing I could do in the time I had - the stupid duck mother pushed under a mesh and squeezed down a narrow drain between two buildings, taking her young ones with her. The cats flowed after them. Tragedy, I'm sure, soon ensued.

I was thinking about how sad it was that those tiny lives should be snuffed out so horribly as I walked home with my new wooden spoon when it occurred to me that as far as the shadowy slips of starvation were concerned, what had happened was a genuine Xmas miracle - when their bellies were empty and their feline need was great, fresh Christmas ducks were home delivered by random chance (or the Cat Goddess) to a group of lowly outcasts struggling to survive in their rundown alleyway. Those cats are probably still celebrating their good luck.

Besides, the fact that their Xmas dinner was fluffy and adorable and chirped prettily as it waddled along doesn't really make the consuming of it, no matter how messily it happened, more reprehensible than all the anodyne lumps packed in plastic that we humans will devour in vast amounts over the next few days. For, it should be remembered, those anodyne lumps on the decorated table also once gamboled, clucked, swam and whatnot, and they probably didn't have a great time getting from the home where they grew up to our plates.

Still, those poor little critters. They were cute...

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

Obeying the strict, yuletide tenets of my Danish ancestry, I'm in the middle of a midnight ris á l'amande making session - rice is being cooked, cream is being whipped, almonds are being chopped, and vanilla is being whacked in, giving the whole place a yummy odour.

So, just one more day of Arvo Jobbing, then it's 2 weeks off and the fun part of Xmas starts.

Feeling outshausted

In a few days, my presently hired out brain will belong to me again. Thoughts unrelated to the Arvo Job will hopefully occur then. Bring it on.

And speaking of long days at work, a certain despot (I will not sully my blog with his name) just carked it. According to official and entirely believable sources i.e. rich and powerful apparatchiks with no interest whatsoever in maintaining the status quo, this much loved leader's heart attack was the result of his being exhausted from selflessly slaving away, year after year, to make life better for his poor, downtrodden, persecuted, starving, bled dry and dying-in-droves people.

Yeah. He was a real saint.

Made it!

Time has been extremely tight the past 2 weeks, and it didn't help in the least that I spent yesterday either sleeping or coughing or blowing my nose or raging against the silence imposed by a dodgy throat (be warned, world - my voice is starting to come back), but I wanted to finish and send off my SF pony story for today's anthology deadline, so after sleeping in again this morning, I spent 7 hours on this rainy Sunday afternoon, in between coughing fits, on getting it done and dusted. Typically, even though I thought I knew what was going to happen, the story changed as I wrote the final section and edited it. Instead of being dark and cynical, it morphed into something dark and cynical but with a quite tender love story. And there's a pony in it, of course. Mustn't forget the pony.

Anyway, I'm just glad I made the deadline. Whether it cuts the mustard for the antho is a different matter. Now for all those things I didn't get done today because I was writing. What time is it anyway? Whoa - would anyone like to pop by and do my ironing?

Vale, Christopher Hitchens

In Memoriam:

Christopher Eric Hitchens
1949-2011

Love him or hate him, this hard-living contrarian, who passionately crossed intellectual swords with both the flabby and rigid minded, was never boring or safe. The world sorely needs more such informed literary provocateurs who do not shy from a rousing stoush with orthodoxy.

Silent Night

Attending a Christmas bash is not much fun when you've completely lost your voice.

Just saying.

Or rather, not saying.

Lovecraftian Kringle

We did Kris Kringle (a.k.a. Secret Santa) at the Arvo Job today. You just know when the box under the tree with your name on it looks like this and wishes you a 'Cthulhu Christmas' that you're not going to get chocolate or soap or a sparkly thingamajig. I swear, I would have been happy with just the box, but it got better.

Inside was a book (yay!):

Of course, a present this precise pretty much narrows down the pool of possible givers.

Loco-motion

The Xmas rush, rush, rush is upon us at the Arvo Job. It's nuts. The days are long and stacked high with deadlines. There aren't too many writerly thoughts in my head at the moment. It's just keep moving, full steam ahead, chugging through the dreary tunnel of endless tasks, don't stop until I burst out into the light at the other end.

And then, by golly, I shall write again.

Arabian days

My sister and I went riding through the Wombat Forest today. We went out by ourselves in the morning and had a good natter as we rode along at a relaxed pace, then did the hard, fast, daredevil ride with other experienced riders in the afternoon.

Today was unique in that I rode a white Arabian horse for the morning ride - my old friend M, who is getting on in years, but is still lively and very personable - and then K, a brand new, very energetic and willful, white Arabian horse for the afternoon ride, who, I think, has been brought in to be M's replacement in the years to come. He was a bit of a handful, but I had a ball.

Unfortunately, the afternoon ride ended with an accident and an ambulance ride for one of our fellow riders, a timely reminder that horse riding is a high risk activity. I was right behind the rider who was injured when it happened and saw the whole thing. Not good. I'll check back tomorrow to see how she is.

Paradox revisited

With my emails once more observable, the countless quantum superpositions of writerly outcomes collapsed into a single, measurable state. Possibly other versions of this post from those of me presently blogging in alternative realities contain slightly different and possibly more uplifting information, but here, in this universe, my inbox revealed not one dead cat, nor a single living cat, but no cats of any description at all.

Another me

Aaaaah, Ive got email problems. There are probably thousands of acceptances awaiting my perusal that I can't access. Or hundreds. Or three. Maybe one, if I'm lucky. The potential for good news held in some electronic limbo allows me to imagine all sorts of wild, writing-related scenarios. Possibly there's the chance of a lifetime sitting snug in my inbox, but I have to respond by exactly 11.58 today for it to happen, and thus my life, even as I write this, is being diverted down a different, drearier path, while a me in a parallel universe has just accessed her emails, promptly sent a reply, and is now whooping with joy.

Of course, I'm happy for her (cow!), but I'd rather be the whooper. I hope this situation is fixed before I get the shakes.

Time to build that rocket ship

Just as things are starting to get seriously crowded here on planet Earth, NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun. The host star lies about 600 light-years away from us toward the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus. The star, a G5 star, has a mass and a radius only slightly smaller than that of our Sun, a G2 star.

Some are caught up in the scientific wonder of this discovery, but there are already many articles discussing whether this poor, innocent planet will be humankind's next home. They' re very catchily calling this apparently balmy world Kepler-22b, though I'm sure enterprising real estate agents will come up with something more appealing when they start to flog off subdivisions in a year or two. They'll probably advertise plots as 'supersized lots on a super-world for the super-people of the future', and heavily promote the image of moving to another planet as a trendy alternative lifestyle choice that guarantees peace, quiet, happiness, contentment and suitable neighbours. And then there's that word 'balmy' that they keep using. Any time you use the word 'balmy' you're bound to get hordes of tourists and all the glitzy paraphanalia of tourism. If you hurry, maybe you can beat the crowds.

My guess is that they'll probably end up calling Kepler-22b 'Paradise' or 'Pandora' or some such thing.

Watch out universe, here we come!

Books with fluffy pink covers

Tipped off by this article in the Age about celebrity inventors which I read in the train on the way home, I googled Barbara Cartland and The Bishop Wright Air Industry Award and discovered that yes indeed, the Pink One did make a recognised contribution to the development of aviation. I did not know that, though it's probably a well-known fact amongst her legions of fans. I'd previously read about Hedy Lamarr helping the war effort by inventing a device meant for radio-guided torpedoes, and knew about Samuel L. Clemens' fondness for taking out patents, but that Dame BC was a recognised pioneer of aviation technology comes as a complete revelation, and a pleasant reminder to watch those tendencies to take short cuts when judging people.

According to Wikipedia :

Privately, Cartland took an interest in the early gliding movement. Although aerotowing for launching gliders first occurred in Germany, she thought of long-distance tows in 1931 and did a 200-mile (360 km) tow in a two-seater glider. The idea led to troop-carrying gliders.

I love it when people so thoroughly surprise me in a good way. I love it not so much when they do it in an intolerant, small-minded, ignorant or just plain nasty way, but hey, let's focus on the good way and celebrate the agile minds, free spirits and rich personalities of people like Hedy and Samuel and Dame Barbara Cartland. Here's to them!

Sci Fi Santa and some cyclists

So I kicked off the Christmas season yesterday with Aardman's latest movie Arthur Christmas. It was a lot funnier than I thought it would be. I laughed til I cried and discovered The True Meaning of Xmas. It's certainly jam packed with sci fi jokes, and I'll have to watch it again to catch the scattershot of countless yuletide jokes fired off by the elves.

Today I watched the tired but elated cyclists finishing the last stretch of the Great Victoria Bike Ride, which ended in our town, and made promises to myself about participating in it next year, maybe, but definitely the year after. Definitely!

In between, inspired by this upcoming anthology, I've been working on a sci fi pony story. As the site quite rightly states:

“A pony is better than a unicorn because he doesn’t know how cute he is! Unicorns are all glitter and sass. Very pompous.” and “I think we have room for at least 500 more pony stories in the f&sf genre.”

The inspiration behind the anthology is Kij Johnson’s Nebula winning short story “Ponies”, a very disturbing piece of writing. Her involvement is also what makes me want to be a part of this most noble project to bring more pony stories to the sf & f reading public. I was thinking of pulling out the first draft of the evil miniature horse story I wrote a while back and changing him to a pony, but it didn't feel right. Miniature horses are not ponies. Besides, an actual SF pony story popped into my head on Tuesday, and I've been working on it each morning on the train on the way to the Arvo Job. Today I changed quite a few things and almost finished it. I know how it ends, so I'm pretty confident it'll be done and polished by the deadline even with all the stuff coming up over the next few weeks.

Me? Why, thank you!

Good news on a Friday night is always welcome, so I was very pleased to get the following email instead of the traditional end-of-the-week rejection:

Dear Gitte,
Congratulations, your story - The Nameless Seamstress - was a semi-finalist in the 4th quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest!

I'm pretty happy with that! I entered this competition once many, many, many moons ago (Hmm, maybe I should dig out that old, typewritten* story and have a look at it. Dilmun was the title, I think) so that makes The Nameless Seamstress my second submission to WOTF.

I think it's safe to say that I'm now officially hooked. I'm already scanning my stock of stories for something to send off for the next quarter.

*Meaning written on a typewriter, clack, clack, clack, after which it was put into an envelope and posted off the US. Ah, how I love email submissions.

End of the Month Report: November

Submissions: 7
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 9
New stories completed: 1
Mood: :) :) :) :) with high hopes for more :) :) :) :)

Always look thrice, and then look again.

Writerly heart stopper: this morning, after checking and rechecking my cover letter, and giving a certain story another edit, I was half a mouse click away from sending it off with a typo in the submission title as the email's subject.

That would have impressed the editors for sure.

To market, to market

This weekend, which included a torrential Saturday perfect for keyboard work, I focused on looking over rejected stories and submitting them again. Most publications will be winding up 2011 soon, and I wanted to catch the final reading periods for the year. I also went in search of new markets, checking out sites like Ralan's and cruising the different publishers to see what's coming up in 2012 anthologywise so I can plan new stories, or pull out half finished ones that fit the themes and bully them into being.

There were a couple of anthologies that caught my attention, especially one with a steampunk/wuxia theme. I absently pulled from my bookshelf Views of 18th Century China, compiled from works by William Alexander and George Henry Mason that were published in the early 1800's, the book which, as I've mentioned before, inspired my story The Viper-Seller's Son, and came across an engraving titled 'A Mender of Porcelain'. Well, this book worked its magic again (I knew there was another story hidden somewhere within its pages). The image reminded me of a story idea I've started and abandoned quite a few times because I couldn't get the voice right or come up with a satisfying ending or shape the main character to my liking, but the phrase a mender of porcelain did the trick and by the time I hit the Xmas swing for lunch this arvo, instead of reading while I ate, I was staring at the garden and imagining the opening scene of the story.

I love it when stuff comes together.

In the meantime, Jenny spent most of the day focused on one particular spot in the garden. Late last night, she wouldn't come inside, and when I checked what had caught her attention, it was a toad the size of my hand, probably out and about because of all the water, which seemed majestically unperturbed by her presence (I went to take a photo, but of course the camera battery was dead) Jenny was agog each time the toad hopped, and squealed in protest when I carried her inside. First thing this morning, she shot across to where she'd last seen the toad and went looking for it, and regularly returned every few hours to hopefully peer about again.

So, a toad, an obsessed cat and a new story...

Seussed!

I don't suppose it qualifies as an ear worm, what with there being no music involved, but I've had these words whizzing around inside my head this week as persistently as any ABBA tune:

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

These lines are, of course, from 'Oh, the Places You’ll Go!' by the one and only Dr. Seuss, and probably give a fair indication of of my current restless state of mind.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

What bolstering words.

And with that in depth post filed, this is Gitte, Seussing off for the night. The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play...

Good one, Steve!

After the absolute joy of acceptances, and the happiness of holding in one's hands books that include one's own work, the third thing that most brightens the writerly part of a writer's heart is when people speak kindly of one's beloved stories.

When it comes to reviews, Steve Cameron has just scored a beauty, with So Sad, The Lighthouse Keeper being named as one of the five best stories in the Anywhere But Earth anthology by Thoraiya Dyer, who is no slouch when it comes to writing award winning stories and knows her stuff. Congratulations, Steve. You must be floating as high as a kite on the fumes.

Thoraiya's in depth review of ABE can be read here, but be warned, it includes much talk of book huggling.

So, have you huggled a book lately?

Vale, Anne McCaffrey.

R.I.P.

Anne McCaffrey

1926-2011

I can't even begin to guess how many hours I've spent reading and rereading her books. She caught my imagination hook, line and sinker. The Crystal Singer, The Ship Who Sang, The White Dragon, Get Off the Unicorn, To Ride Pegausus... I'm so sad she's gone, but so happy she gave us so many wonderful, memorable characters - Helva, Nerilka, Moreta, Killashandra, the Rowan, Sara, and all the other McCaffrey non-simpering, many-dimensional, independant but fallible heroines.

I must give a special mention to her very first novel Restoree, which one site states was written as a protest against the absurd and unrealistic portrayals of women in s-f novels in the 50s and early 60s. All I know is that I still have the copy I bought as a young gal, and that I absolutely adored that book in my teens. There was a time when I read it about every six months, and could quote lines from it. But then I also read The Ship Who Sang so many times and wept with every, single reading, and bought one Pern book after another in quick sucession back in the eighties, and enjoyed The Tower and Hive series and the Petaybee books and...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Anne.

Some light blogging

I'd love to stop and blog at length, but this is giving me pause for thought:

"Not many people realise this but the internet is a major energy consumer. Think of all the electricity consumed by all the PCs in the world when they are on, as well as the local hubs, regional data centres, company servers, the transmission lines run by telecoms and intermediate routers. Over the next decade, it is projected the internet will count for half of the world's energy consumption — unless we can switch from using electrons to transmit information to photons of light instead."

Half the world's energy consumption? Apparently, the solution is a worldwide internet operating solely with light. Click here for further illumination.

I can feel a bad 'beam up my blog' pun or joke at the back of my mind wrestling to get free, so I'll bow out now before I give in to the temptation.

Crepuscular kangas

It still surprises me. I get off the late train, I'm walking through the very dark, empty streets, usually looking up at the amazing starscape we have out here without Melbourne's light pollution, I hear the ominous sound of cracking and crashing vegetation or a subdued but strange thump, thump, and suddenly a kangaroo comes hopping from the shadows, sees me, and without a pause, veers around me or off up a side street.

Tonight's late night bounder appeared on the footpath just meters from home, and we didn't see each other until the last moment. I'm not sure which of us was the more surprised. I just hope I don't see its corpse somewhere up the road tomorrow.

Curses! It's a beautiful, sunny Sunday.

I'd planned a flat-out writing day, but woke up to one of those gorgeous, come-hither-and-enjoy-me Spring days that make it mightily difficult to stay inside and stare at a keyboard. The air is scented, the birds are chirping, the cats and chook are dozing amiably together in the sun, so when the phone rang with an invite to pop out for a walk and a hot beverage this arvo, my already weak defences instantly crumbled.

Ah well, if I get a move on, I can fit in a few lines now. Also (she protested, staving off the you're-not-getting-enough-writing-done guilt that stalks every waking moment) it is important to smell those roses too. And what's more, I'll brazenly justify my tardiness with a quote:

"Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure."- Ambrose Bierce

Put on your pith helmet

With much whooping, I can now officially announce that my story Whale of a Time** will appear in the anthology 'Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations', edited by Eric J Guignard. This anthology is a collection of dark tales of Horror, Speculative Fiction and Science Fiction relating to civilizations that are lost, or have been forgotten, or have been rediscovered, or perhaps merely spoken about in great and fearful whispers.

It will be published by Dark Moon Books, and be released next spring (US) for the 2012 World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City.

So I've got the hat, but where did I park my Lear Jet?

**And yes, there are cetaceans in this story, Jim, but not as we know them.

It's past midnight!

Happy Birthday, Cindy.

The Andromeda Strain

My thalassophobia story was rejected by Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine this morning – it made its way to the final round of their selection process, was put in their story pool and held for a few months, but wasn’t chosen by any of their editors, so they released it back to me with the dreaded Unfortunately, while we liked your submission, so far we have not found a place for it ... and it is against our policy to hold onto a story indefinitely.. letter.
I’m beginning to think I’ll never get another story into ASIM. Since they published The Six Solvers and the Mystery of the Sad Boy way back in 2009 (now there's a piece that had a long gestation), I’ve had quite a few stories make it into the final round, but none of them have been the right story at the right time to catch the right, left or third eye of any of their rotating roster of editors.

I will keep trying though, of course, and not just because I’m a glutton for punishment. The great thing about ASIM is that they send their readers’ reports with the rejections/releases, and over the years, I’ve found these to be enormously useful. One story of mine, a personal favourite that hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet, is still doing the rounds solely because of very positive, and positively flattering responses from two out of three of their readers (can't please everyone). With my thalassophobia story, one of the readers went to a great deal of trouble to write a few comments about what worked and didn’t work for him/her. I had a little think about these whilst walking to the train, agreed with a couple of them, and spent the trip down to Melbourne shoving sentences around and tweaking a few facts to make certain pieces of relevant information clearer. The story is now better than it was before. I’ll let it sit a few days and submit it again to some lucky publication on Sunday.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that although it's always a pain to have another story rejected/released by ASIM, I've always appreciated their feedback. And one day, as God is my witness, they will accept another of my tales!

Arboreal conundrums

Thought experiment: If a tree, say one exactly like the one in the photo to the left, falls on a Wednesday evening, but someone, say me, doesn't notice it until Saturday afternoon, did that tree really fall on the Wednesday if it still existed upright for another three days in my head? Besides which, I definitely did not hear it hit the ground.

It's not as if I noticed it yesterday morning either. I pottered around the house, hung out some washing, went to the movies (we saw the Irish film 'The Guard', which was an-greannmhar, which is supposedly 'very funny' in Gallic, but hey, someone on the Internet might be yanking my chain) and when I got home, I headed out the back for lunch on the Xmas swing and started to read. But something seemed not quite right. The light seemed different. I decided that the Lawnmower Man, who came by Tuesday, must have cut back the vines over the chook shed. I went to investigate.

Lo and behold, there was a massive tree trunk on the narrow strip of ground between the chook shed and the back fence. The luck of it is mind-boggling. I don't think I can fully convey how amazing it is that it didn't take out the chook shed, any of the trees in the back yard, the house...
What I, pipe in hand and deerstalker upon my head, surmise from the evidence at hand is that when storms swept across our fair state Wednesday night (I was at the Arvo Job and missed the whole spectacular), the tree internally combusted, collapsed downwards like one of those buildings that are expertly demolished with carefully placed explosives, then toppled parallel with the fence, and seems to have followed a curved trajectory out through the back gate. The gate is squashed but the fence still stands, though it is somewhat aslant.

A few of the upper branches are now suspended in the greenery over the other shed, and the top part of the tree is up against the track that runs behind the house, but doesn't block it. It's all very impressive, very convenient (if it had to happen) and amazingly graceful - like those ancient, dignified characters who decide it's a good day to die, choose their time and place, make an effort to not be a bother to anyone and lie down with a minimum of fuss and just go...

I absolutely didn't have a clue until yesterday afternoon. In my defense, it did happen way up the back of the garden, which is compartmentalised by multiple barriers overgrown with roses and vines, and everything looks fine until you get up close. Still, it was a big thing to miss. The birds have probably been lamenting the loss for days. That old tree was a regular pit stop for many a long-haul flock. Local cockies and parrots often brightened its branches and entertained the cats (though they're massively entertained by this new, fallen tree toy too.)

So, what to do now? This is a situation that requires chainsaws and utes. Like vagabond chooks, uprooted trees are not something I ever had to deal with in St Kilda, which, I suppose, is why I've written such a long post about a relatively simple, everyday occurrence. The occasional pot plant upturned by a marauding possum was about as bad as it got back on my old city balcony. Onwards to another lesson in country living.

Saturday morning swot

If you've ever wondered fictionwise what 'weird' is, or you'd like some impressive phrases to use when trying to convince more hidebound folk of the legitimacy of the fantastika literatue, pop over to this interesting piece on templates for understanding shaping how we engage with narratives, and the tolerance for ambiguity that each reader brings to a story. It states:

Fantastic and weird stories explicitly eschew, to varying extents, the dualism of real/unreal and often genre-mapping as well. They utilize metaphors to contextualize the ineffable so that the unexplained and the unfathomable become a part of the story, not a distraction.

Not a distraction. Exactly!

I love stories full of crunchy bits set in outlandish universes as long as the internal logic holds up to scrutiny. But if the writer glosses over serious structural errors, or cobbles together strange scenes and happenings just because they're pretty or interesting but have no real foundation, or tries to hide that he/she is winging it with bags and bags of cheap, hi-falutin fudge, then, well, hell hath no fury like a reader deceived.

11-11-11

TRENCHES ON THE SOMME

by Mary Riter Hamilton

Mirrors for my brain

Rejections of the we-liked-it-but-no-thank-you-but-please-send-us-more-of-your-work kind are dribbling in, no stories are going out, no tales are being tweaked and polished, and lately, my regular writing routine has been seriously blocked, clogged, diverted, inverted, stymied, stomped upon and just plain neglected.

It's time to feng shui my writing head space, increase my energy flows, channel the powers of Heaven and Earth, and just get on with getting those words down.

Spots before their eyes

Ancient artists 25,000 years ago were not abstract, symbolic, dadaist or post-paleolithic painters expressing some deeper truth about their inner workings, but realists who recreated what they saw in the natural world around them on cave walls, according to research which proves that the 'leopard' phenotype seen in modern horses did indeed exist in those distant days. Read here how our ancestors didn't willy-nilly daub black spots on their white horses simply because they thought it made them look pretty or wacky or magical or meaningful, but because dappled horseflesh was exactly what they saw trotting past their caves.

So, sometimes a spotted horse is just a spotted horse.

Man of means

I enjoyed reading this: The Scotsman interviews Stephen King

He says, proving again that no matter how wealthy and successful you become, if you're a writer, it's still all about getting those words down on a regular basis:

“Because we do this and nobody really knows what it is we do or why we need the time to do it, even in the minds of people who are participating in our good fortune. They don’t seem to have the understanding that you need time and tranquillity to work and that anything on top of that is a diversion from the main job.”

At the moment, I could do with a little of that time and tranquility myself. Too many diversions, too many diversions...

Grrrrraffiti

So two nights ago**, the local council once again repainted the railway underpass a nice grey colour to cover up the rude / angry/ philosophical graffiti that I usually peruse as I return home from the Arvo Job. I wonder how many times they can do this before the accumulated layers of paint start to noticeably narrow the thoroughfare? Decades? Centuries?Anyway, tonight, as I entered the tunnel, I spotted this, and another similar patch further in:

Further investigation revealed these general public friendly, cuter than your average graffiti cut-outs:

It won't be long, however, before these little fellas' messages are drowned out by the next round of riotous tagging, crude renderings of the ruder bits of the male and female anatomy, and lots of texta scribblings slagging off Shazza and Dazza.

Then it'll be time for another coat of battleship grey.

***Well, I suppose they didn't do the actual painting during the night... That was just when I noticed it.

Heavens above

The world is buzzing with talk about the Chinese space program, for on the 3rd of November 2011, the unmanned Shenzhou 8 craft, launched earlier this week, made contact with the 8.5-ton Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace) space lab at 1729 GMT. The union occurred 343 kilometers (213 miles) above Earth, over China itself.

What does it all mean? Are we in for another space race? Or endless rounds of paranoia and xenophobia? Who will control the high ground? Who will open the first space hotel? Who will set up the first base on the Moon? Who will plant the first flag on Mars? Who will first mine the asteroid fields and make a fortune? Who will be the first to hit the interstellar brick road?

All the rhetoric revolves, in varying degrees of fearfulness and excitement, around the biggest question of all - will we ever seriously get off this rock?

Anyway, with this particular dah bien-hwa, it might be time to brush up on my Mandarin. In the meantime, I have an overwhelming urge to sing the theme from 'Firefly'.

Yay, homegirl

Good news over at Locus online: the World Fantasy Awards 2011 winners. And just look who won the Special Award, Non-Professional - our very own Alisa Krasnostein, for Twelfth Planet Press. Congratulations!

So now we Aussie Spec Fic folk have not only 'Our Shaun', but 'Our Alisa' as well making waves out there on the international scene.

End of the Month Report: October

Submissions: 2 (not many rejections, my stories are being kept longer, and I have a lot of almost ready to go stuff but it's all in need of a final spit and polish)
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
Published: 1 (Quick Fix in Bards and Sages October Issue)
Stories out in the wild: 7
New stories completed: 1 (the harpy story - but it needs to sit a while)
Mood: Optimistic about the way my backlog of stories are slowly finding homes. I keep a diary in which each story has its own section, and I diligently record its ups and downs in the world, and give it a gold star when it's accepted (childish, I know, but fun and immensely satisfying). Some stories are snapped up "quickly" i.e only rejected once or twice, which is about six months worth of waiting, while others take years to find the right editor at the right time, so one's sense of continuity easily becomes skewed. However, sticking in a star for the latest antho acceptance, I realised that I have a section where eight consecutive stories have all been published, small gaps on either side, and then more sporadic stars. Perhaps some of those earlier stories will never find homes, but it was a very visual and very encouraging reminder to me that writing and publishing work in time frames that are almost geological. I know I've been through a few Ice Ages.

So, once more, the key words writers need to cling to are our old friends PATIENCE and PERSISTENCE.

Have a Horribly Happy All Hallow's Eve

From Cooper (a.k.a. Demon Cat)

and his spectral sidekick, Chopper Chook.

I can't help myself

I really should stop, but this one is just so damned funny. Here's another in my series of filched quotes from the NSW Writers' Centre's newsletters:

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

-Isaac Asimov

Two of a kind

First it was Game of Thrones making the often-derided, many-volumed fantasy genre featuring a cast of thousands cool with the general public. Now George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards superhero series is set to hit both big and small screens.

You can read about GRRM's latest ace here, and all over the internet.

Wooed by Woody

If I wasn't already a struggling writer, I'd certainly become one after seeing Midnight in Paris. Artistic suffering never looked so good.

Oh, for an attic studio somewhere just off the Champs-Élysées, convivial geniuses gathered in shabby-chic cafés, salons brimming with brilliant tête-à-têtes, and everywhere bons vivants spouting bon mots as sparkling as genuine French champagne.

Oh, and Gertrude Stein perusing my manuscripts in a motherly fashion would be nice too.

I know I said I wouldn't.

Possibly I was influenced by the upcoming Halloween horrors, and most assuredly it had to do with my needing something light and silly to brighten the past few weeks at the Arvo Job, but the fact remains that even though I swore a while back that I would not risk contaminating my pristine Austen with the popular mashups, I must confess that my lunchtime audio book at the moment is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It's not entirely as amusing as I had hoped it would be, and some parts are heavy-handed and tedious, but it has elicited enough snorts and smirks to keep me listening. It's best when it pokes fun at women working hard to maintain their decorum under trying conditions i.e. slaying zombies, which, by the by, Austen herself does most beautifully without the aid of ninjas or the undead, but hey, where's the splatter and vomit in that? And apropos society's expectations of ladylike demureness and modesty, a literary parody that always makes me giggle is the Bret Harte version of Jane Eyre Miss Mix by Ch--l--tte Br--nte from 1867, which has great lines like: I saw from the way that he wiped his feet on my dress that he had again forgotten my presence and He seized a heavy candlestick, and threw it at me. I dodged it submissively, but firmly.

Anyway, the Bennett girls' reactions to the insufferable Mr Collins are especially entertaining, and I'm enjoying Lady Catherine's martial arts snobbery, which dictates that Japanese techniques are superior and desirable, whilst training with Chinese monks, as the less wealthy Bennett girls have done, is decidedly déclassé.

Lining up at the barrier

The upcoming weekend + Melbourne Cup public holiday (an Aussie horse race, one that famously 'stops the nation' for any non-racing, overseas visitors who might be wondering)+ an extra day off from the Arvo Job = FOUR days off in a row!

So I'm sharpening my keyboard, revving my brain, limbering up my characters, and organising my storylines in readiness. As soon as the starting gates open, I'll be off! It's time to hit that YA novel that still doesn't have a kick-ass title yet, and hit it hard. These things don't write themselves.

Pugilist poets

I started and left the Arvo JOb early yesterday, and braved the madness of peak hour commuting (blah!), to get home in time to attend the local Victorian heat of the Australian Poetry Slam 2011. I also wanted to meet up with people from the local writers' centre again. The Slam was a lot of fun, although not necessarily about the best poems winning so much as the best spoken-word performers. It was good to see poets of all shapes, sizes and ages, ranging from the painfully shy, whispering kind hunched over the microphone to the perennial, young-Byron types oozing confidence, waving their arms and loudly delivering highly polished acts. It's nice to know that some things never change, and that no matter how hi-tech, lazy-minded or complacent society becomes, there still exist genuine, sensitive, outraged, rebel poets to point out the beauty of life or slap us awake with their words.

But now I must go. I did much much chatting, drinking and chip eating, for poetry seems to call for that sort of thing, and my bed beckons.

Sidetracked

So I wasn't going to blog tonight, or even check up on other blogs, but I peeked at one, which led me to Mary Robinette Kowal's link to The Oregon Regency Society's very horsey post about side saddles, which also has lots of useful links, and voilà, before I knew it, I was reading interesting information about riding etiquette and making medieval saddles instead of closing up shop and getting to bed.

Still, it's fascinating stuff (riding side saddle is something my sister and I often talk about trying at some point) and very useful information for...well, I'll just have to write a story that involves someone, a heroine I suppose, leaping into a side saddle to justify all this mucking around in the middle of the night. Although, now that I think about it, having a hero gallop off riding side saddle might be more interesting.

I don't know about this jumping with a side saddle though. My spine hurts just thinking about it.

Infectious thoughts

I saw Steven Soderbergh's movie Contagion on the weekend. Travelling on the trains and trams today took on a decidedly ominous air. All those surfaces. All those sniffles. All those bodies. All that touching. All that breathing in and out. All those vectors. All that exchanging of DNA.

I didn't get phobic, but was mostly amused by my own sudden hyper-awareness of the perils of everyday modern living. Today we might catch a mere cold or flu from pushing the wrong door open, but tomorrow...

So sad the story of what might have been

So it's out now, the Anywhere But Earth anthology that I would absolutely have loved to have had a story in (I mean, just look at that unbelievably cool cover, all retro and rocket shippy) but since one actually has to submit something to be considered for such things (life is soooo unfair sometimes), well, that didn't happen.*Sniff*. However, let's not go there again (damn my obsessive tinkering, and damn those deadlines!) Instead, let's celebrate another fine contribution to the genre, which can be purchased here.

It's a fabulous TOC: Calie Voorhis ‘Murmer’, Cat Sparks ‘Beautiful’, Simon Petrie ‘Hatchway’, Lee Battersby ‘At the End There Was a Man’, Alan Baxter ‘Unexpected Launch’, Richard Harland ‘An Exhibition of the Plague’, Robert N Stephenson ‘Rains of la Strange’, Liz Argall ‘Maia Blue is Going Home’, Chris McMahon ‘Memories of Mars’, CJ Paget ‘Pink Ice in the Jovian Rings’, Penelope Love ‘SIBO’, Donna Maree Hanson ‘Beneath the Floating City’, Erin E Stocks ‘Lisse’, William RD Wood ‘Deuteronomy’, Robert Hood ‘Desert Madonna’, Steve de Beer ‘Psi World’, Damon Shaw ‘Continuity’, Wendy Waring ‘Alien Tears’, Patty Jansen ‘Poor Man’s Travel’, Jason Fischer ‘Eating Gnashdal’, Kim Westwood ‘By Any Other Name’, Brendan Duffy ‘Space Girl Blues’, TF Davenport ‘Oak with the Left Hand’, Sean McMullen ‘Spacebook’, Margo Lanagan ‘Yon Horned Moon’, Mark Rossiter ‘The Caretaker’, Jason Nahrung ‘Messiah on the Rock’, Angela Ambroz ‘Pyaar Kiya’, Steve Cameron ‘So Sad, the Lighthouse Keeper’

Congratulations Steve!

I'm especially looking forward to reading this story because, as I've mentioned before, I read SSTLK back when it was a brand new piece that Steve had whipped up for a workshop and submitted for critique. I'm sure it's quite a different story now, and it'll be fascinating to see what it evolved into.

A bird in the head

I'm doing long and busy days at the Arvo Job this week, so suddenly commuting is not much fun. Right now, trains = a chance to grab a nap rather that writing time. My harpy story is listlessly flapping its wings and squawking for attention somewhere in the back of my real world saturated brain, but it'll have to hang on. Still, at least I know it's there waiting for me.

So, one more loooong day. *yawn*

Tiptoe to the Tuber

I completely forgot to mention that Moonlight Tuber #3, which seems to be called Derek, is out now. It's free. And it's here.

While you're at it, you can also pop over for a freebie Aurealis #45 here. Apparently, this venerable old Aussie mag of over twenty years, which over a decade ago had the good taste to publish a science fiction story of mine called Voyage to Abydos, will eventually become a monthly emag. Editor Dirk Strasser (whose TAFE science fiction writing course I once attended for a semester and even got a certificate for, she casually name dropped) writes: Up until issue #44, the magazine has been confined by paper pages and the three dimensions of the book format. Now we've escaped. And there's no going back. We believe a publication devoted to fantasy and science fiction should be at the forefront of change. So here we are. Right on the edge.

So, electric Aurealis? Indeed the publishing times they are a changin'.

Hippo-ailuro-alektoro-therapy

After a rough week at the Arvo Job, some saddle time was just what the doctor ordered, although when I got up at 4.30 this morning, I had a hard time convincing myself that a session of hippotherapy would be more beneficial than sleeping in. Thank goodness I went. Alas, our usual, lovely Daylesford ride was unavailable this month (the owner is in hospital) so my sister Cindy and I headed off towards the Whittlesea-Wallan region to try out a new (for us) place that other riders have recommended. Funnily enough, when we got there we saw familiar faces, namely other Daylesfordian refugees also looking further afield for a dose of horse riding. After a shaky start, once we got used to the more chaotic nature of this new place, it turned out to be great fun. The horses were energetic and full of character, and we experienced riders split off from the main group and did some serious, pounding, landscape-as-a-passing-blur galloping as well lots of companionable chatting. We had a couple of High County Mountain Men old blokes as guides, and when they questioned my sister and me about the places we usually go riding, we found ourselves entangled in High Country Mountain Men politics that went back generations, the complexities of which we didn’t fully grasp, but a lot of it seemed to have to do with the filming of The Man from Snowy River. Believe you me, HCMM take the intrigues involved in the making of that film very seriously. Conversely, Daylesford and the other ‘lowland’ places we go riding didn’t interest them at all.
Because it was only a 3-4 hour ride, I got home this afternoon with enough time and sunshine left to head out into the backyard and grab some Xmas swing and cat and chicken therapy. During this chill out session, a great mystery was solved. Last week, I became aware of a perimeter breach when my cats went into intruder mode, lined up and all stared at the same spot. The chook then positioned herself behind this feline phalanx, looked over their crouched forms and also intently eyed the bushes (was she, I wondered, their backup chicken?), but I couldn’t see anything.

Today, following their communal gaze, I zoomed in with my camera. Keep looking, you'll see a rather mournful figure eventually, or click the photo to enlarge it. Poor thing, but, I’ll leave them all to sort it out. Still, watching the chicken using the cats as her heavies, her moving in with us suddenly makes strategic sense. Perhaps I should call her Commando Chook.

All in all, my little menagerie made me laugh, which really is the very best kind of medicine.