End of the Month Report: February

Submissions: 7 (with a lot of crossover - SF:5 / Fantasy: 1 / Horror: 1)
Rejections: 5
Acceptances: 1
Published: 1 (Nullipara)
Stories presently out: 12
Mood: tentatively hopeful

Sunday Score!

Good news, everyone - I've just sold a story to 'Arkham Tales.'

So after being submitted 11 times (which, of course, means it was rejected 10 times) 'Rajiv and the Bn Stalks' has finally found a home - just in time for my end-of-the-month status report.

This story first went out 26/11-08, was well received a few times, and bagged a few times too, but hey, that's all water under the bridge now. Yay!

This is my first, and hopefully not last, acceptance for 2010.

Give the dog a bone

I catch movies for different reasons – not always because I have a burning desire to see them. Sometimes it’s because someone else picked the movie, or it was highly recommended, or I want to force myself outside my comfort zone, or simply because I’m curious about some aspect of it. The reason we saw this movie today was because, once the shopping was done, it was on at a convenient time, and besides, we reasoned, the critics might be wrong about it.
They weren’t.
This was a most unsatisfactory movie –contrived characters, so-so acting, unresolved quests and promises (to the viewer) not kept. It all seemed a bit pointless. Even the great Gothic setting was abused – constantly galloping about on black or white steeds under a stormy sky does not automatically constitute drama. Now I know what they mean by ‘chewing up the scenery’. There were a few good scenes in the middle revolving around a werewolf loose in Victorian London, but that was about it. I rate it two howls and a whimper.

But hey, that meant that afterwards, whilst walking back to the car, we had the fun of rewriting the entire movie.

Doing Dr Who

Apparently (I heard it on the train so it must be true) "Chicks totally dig Dr Who."

After which came the very loudly screeched agreement from an excited female, "Yes, I would so do him, I would soooo do Dr Who!"

But, I have to ask, which one?

Ssssssh!

Leslie Cannold has a piece in the Age today about how noisy libraries have become, especially the State Library of Victoria - I myself could not believe the racket that filled that place last time I went there. Leslie contends that for those of us who value silence as a precious resource, all libraries should have sections where quiet is found and enforced.

Hear! hear! Bring back the scolding librarian, I say.

The tale of an 'umble umbrella tree.

Once upon a time, I lived in a tiny, squalid room in pre-trendy St Kilda. In an attempt to brighten up the place, I bought an unidentified, half-dead, 75% off plant from the supermarket. This plant and I drooped together in that sordid box until a quirk of fate landed me a top floor flat with a balcony just up the street. Our drooping days were over.

The plant, which turned out to be an umbrella tree, grew and grew on the sunny balcony until one day it reached the roof. Then it became a possum highway. All my plants were nibbled back to the nub, and gangs of adolescent possums screeched and fought every night on my balcony. Reluctantly, I snapped the umbrella tree in half. I thought I had killed it, but lo and behold, the thing sprouted again.


Decades passed and I suddenly had to leave St Kilda and the flat with the balcony. Towards the end, it was all a bit hurly burly, and the umbrella tree ended up in the back of a ute, heading across the Bolte Bridge and up the highway at a most unplantlike speed. It lost its leaves. It lost its umph. I nursed it, I gave it pep talks, but the poor old thing looked dead for sure this time.

However, yesterday, after seven months of neglect and hot, waterless days, as I was tidying up out the back I discovered:

It's baaaaack, and ready to give life another go.

It's all so symbolic.

Signs of Sunday: The People Speak (2)

I'll shutter up...

… about this movie. If anyone mentions they’ve seen it, throw up your hands, back away, then turn and run, because this is one of those films where you have to go in with a clean mind-slate to enjoy the ride.


I’ll just say one thing - it’s very 1950s.
Oh, and (in a prophetic voice) 'trust The Scorsese'.

Now, while my bread does its hour and a half rising thing (hopefully), I’m going to scrounge around the Internet for submission opportunities and catch up on blogs (i.e. specfic gossip), especially the 2010 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction.

You can read interviews of our local luminaries at:
http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/

Once the bread is done, I’ll sit back and watch the Winter Olympics. Nah, just kidding! I’ll get started on the first season of ‘True Blood’, which my sister handed over last weekend when we went horse riding.

SF Scoop!

Exciting news, scifi scribblers - Coeur de Lion, publisher of the much recommended anthology X6, is now doing a science fiction anthology. It's right up my alley - deep space, alien worlds, strange civilizations, and best of all, the maximum word length is 15k. Finally a place to send off those longish pieces like the space faring sea creatures story, and the whirlpool story, and maybe ... no, that takes place on Earth, but then there's ...

Hmmm, I wonder if they accept multiple submissions.

'Anywhere But Earth' will be edited by Keith Stevenson.

No train tonight

As a nice, almost-end-of-the-week surprise, my brother, who was passing the Arvo Job office at the right time, gave me a lift home tonight and dropped me off right at my front door. So I got home earlier, which means I can get to bed earlier, which means I can wake up earlier, which means I can squeeze in some extra writing time tomorrow morning.

It always comes back to those two things: time and writing.

Book finished, book begun

Book finished: 'The Broken Shore’ by Peter Temple. People have been telling me for years to read this book, so I finally picked it up, read the first page and was hooked. The train trips to Melbourne and back seemed to take about 5 minutes each whilst reading this beauty. Phew! To think I might have missed that dialogue. And that prose! And Cashin, the coolest cop ever.

Book begun: ‘number9dream’ by David Mitchel. I'm already rereading passages just for the sheer pleasure of letting the words wash through my eyeballs - if that actually makes sense.

Bloomers on, bloomers off ...

I’ve just finished reading 'Letters to Henrietta' by Isabella Bird, edited by Kay Chubbuck. It’s basically missives sent from all over the world by Isabella Bird, a famous traveller of the Victorian Age, to her sister back in gloomy Scotland.

What I especially enjoyed was her love of roughing it and horse riding alone through exotic landscapes like Hawaii, Colorado and Australia. She hated using a sidesaddle, as was expected of a lady in those days, and revelled in the opportunity to escape the constraints of civilization and ride astride whenever possible. To that end, she adopted the Bloomer Suit, Turkish trousers with a divided skirt falling mid-calf, a practical garment devised for women in the 19th century by the reform dress movement.

I came to love the snippy passages about changing clothes every time she arrived at, or left a town, e.g. (and I'll just point out that Isabella wasn't much for commas): 'I got off and took off my skirt a mile from Denver being in very bad pain and you cannot imagine the unspeakable relief of getting on astride.' and 'I got off put on a skirt and rode sideways but it did not look like a place where any deference to foolish prejudices was necessary.'

I can just imagine her quick changing behind trees, grumbling about the silly conventions that necessitated so much bother.

Zen and the Art of Horse Riding.

Experienced riders, good, fresh, eager horses, beautiful weather, cantering through the Daylesfordian countryside, zipping through the Wombat Forest, up and down hills, turning tight corners, ducking branches, leaping logs, swerving around trees, long, lazy walks just looking at the greenery and the sky, clippity clop, chatting, but not too much ... just being in the moment and being extremely happy.

Nice.

Zeus alors!

This morning, I indulged my inner teenager with ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief’. As an aficionado of anything with giant, squabbling, Olympian gods, minotaurs, snake-haired ladies and many-headed monsters, I couldn’t have asked for a more mottled mythological mélange.

Throw in a few manly men in body-hugging armour and skirts (luv yas Sean Bean and Kevin McKidd) and aaahhh, matinée heaven.

Now, as this weekend’s only contribution to my writing "career", I’ll send off a few stories (this week’s rejections), as tomorrow will be a dawn to dusk riding day.

And by the way, have I mentioned that Chris Lynch's 'The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution' is out now? It's a beautiful book.

Roll up, roll up...

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution has launched! The anthology, which marks the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species, features over 100,000 words of speculative fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays about evolution.

An international line-up of nearly 50 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, and Carlos Hernandez (and me!!!!)

Just US$4.99, The Tangled Bank is now available for download as a PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-tangled-bank-love-wonder-and-evolution/8340048

Check out "Darwin's Daughter" by Christopher Green (a free short story from the anthology)http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/darwins-daughter/8339953

And, should you feel inclined to do so, might I humbly submit that you should also take a peek at 'Nullipara'. It was many years in the making, and I'm so glad it has found a place in such illustrious company.

Now, if you'll all excuse me, I'm off to browse through my complimentary contributor's copy.

Darwin Day

And now it's tomorrow. Which means it's Darwin Day. Which means it's the launch day of 'The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution.' Which means my SF story 'Nullipara' will be out there for all the world to read, along with the stories, poems and artwork of other (far, far better known) folk as well, of course. Which means I'm a tad excited.

Notes from a stormy today:

Lightning strikes have taken out signals on most Victorian country train lines, so I might have to get home by bus tonight AND because they're dealing with passenger backlogs there might be significant delays ….

Oops, it’s storming AGAIN. The second front is here right outside the office NOW. The windows are shaking.

Oh dear. It looks wet. Very wet. Gitte’s Adventures in Stormland, that’s what I’ll call today.

Maybe I’ll sleep under my desk.

Nope, it's all okay. I got a train, it left on time, no worries.

Home now. At the station, as I got off, a bus pulled in full of harried people who left Melbourne way before I did . Sometimes you're lucky.

Kwik blog

Click here and Nicola Morgan tells you how to decipher rejection letters.

Click here and Deborah J Ross tells you how to write when you haven't got much time.

How to blog when you're in a hurry - whack in some links.

Good rejection, nice rejection

This morning I got one of those personal rejections that are almost as good as an acceptance. It was from a highly regarded, beautifully presented speculative fiction magazine that I would love to get into.

The story was rejected because it was 2400 words over the recommended 5k submission (and no, I can’t bang it down any further – believe me, I’ve tried), and even though they do take longer stories, mine wasn’t quite exceptional enough to bump 2-3 other stories to make room for it. Fair enough. I usually don’t push my luck with editors, but publications that will look at stories over 4-5 k are few and far between, so I thought I’d risk their ire and give it a go.

I’m glad I did submit it, because now I know that someone else in the world thinks the story is good (it's been rejected before because of the language style, but since the language style is an integral part of the plot...) and that gives me the confidence to send it out over and over and over and over again until someone finally buckles and publishes it. I shall ruthlessly persist in my quest to inflict this tale upon humanity.

Nice comments that will keep me 'eart warm for days to come: "I liked the energy of this piece as well as the imaginative content," and "I was impressed by the writing here and would love to see another submission."

Of course, grrrr, I’ll dig something else up to send them. I’m a dog with a bone now.

That is ALWAYS the question

To write or not to write? Vicki Hinze has written a good piece here about being a writer, or rather, about not being a writer if you have any control over the matter and can possibly avoid it.

I've lost track of how many times, feeling miserable about my lack of writerly progress, I’ve gone cold turkey, swearing off that word stuff forever and vowing to put all my energy into becoming a filthy rich and/or useful member of society, but within 3 weeks, I crawl back to the keyboard and reach up with trembling hands to tap out a letter to some newspaper editor ... and then off I go again, agonising over adjectives and contemplating commas.

On the way home in the train tonight, I saw a young man deep in a book. He was in another world. After much discreet contorting of my body, I saw that the book was Raymond E Feist's 'Magician', so that other world was Midkemia, a place I frequented myself many many years ago. It was nice to see the power of a book in action. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what it is all about.

Signs of Sunday: The People Speak (1)

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a fang.

This morning, with my wake up cups (3) of tea, I read the VWC’s magazine ‘Victorian Writer’, the 'Getting your writing out there' issue. The advice given by Melbourne poet Peter Bakowski particularly stuck in my mind - he says that the "three P's" are essential for any writer wanting to be published: practice, perseverance and positivity. People often go on about the first two, but forget to mention that you have to keep a gigantic barrel of optimism on tap as well.

Then, after a teeny bit of writing and a spot of shopping, it was off to the movies for ‘Daybreakers’, a vampire movie that bravely tackles intimate human topics such as greed, megalomania and fear of death, as well as big picture matters like evolution, ecological niches, the husbanding of natural resources, famine, political dictatorships, parental tyrannies, the making of civilizations and society's attitudes towards its disenfranchised citizens, all while giving us an insight into vampiric haute couture (1930s Blade Runnerish), kicking ass, wielding knives, firing guns, shooting crossbows, impaling vamps and driving very fast to get away from bad guys in soldiermobiles. Add combusting bodies, lots and lots and lots and lots of blood and gore, and you’ve got a fun, but deep (well, up to your knees, maybe mid thigh), movie.

Then it was cups of tea and bikkies and discussing vampire societies, gravity, time, branes and other scientific viscera.

Now it's time to close up the blogshop and get ready for a day of glorious writing tomorrow.

Some stories have to work a little harder than others.

I came home tonight to my first February rejection - it was for a submission that I've already sent out 10 times, which is my current record for the most knockbacks for one story. But I do often get nice feedback for this story, and I will persevere with submitting it because: 1) I think it just needs to find the right editor at the right time (don't they all?); and 2) I like it.

Also, one doesn't want to give up too soon. I recently had a story picked up after 6 rejections, my previous record, and I was just beginning to think that maybe my gut was all wrong about that particular tale, and I was seriously considering turfing it because it had actually garnered quite a few snippy remarks along the way from readers and editors who seemed to loathe it (I felt SOOOO misunderstood) when I sent it off to a certain anthology on a whim and, what do you know, it was accepted.

A few years back, I read about a short story that was rejected 27 times and then went on to win all sorts of awards. I always use that as my yardstick and inspiration.

Train tips (1)

Upon entering a train, avoid, whenever possible, sitting in front of excessively lounging folk with agro-bored expressions. You’re just going to end up getting into a conversation about whether or not them sticking their knees or feet into the back your seat is acceptable public transport behaviour.

Now I can tune out music and chatting (earplugs help) and other distractions as I read (Clarkesworld, in this case) on the train, but I cannot ignore two bulges constantly pushing into the small of my back every time the aforementioned lounger moves.

Sorry to be such a fuddy duddy.

Also, today is a special day for this blog - I got my first comment. Thank you, parlance.

Plans, plans, plans.

So I'm working on the colourful monkey-folk story in the mornings, and when that's done, I'll do the Egyptian tart story. After that I'll finish the space faring sea creatures story, then rewrite the ending of the naughty couple in the castle story, then cook up some flash fiction, then do the music story, then ...

Don't read this

Go read what everyone else is reading today and cheer for all the Aussies: Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List.

On a more personal note, I still haven't quite forgiven Peter M. Ball for writing such a wonderful story that includes both Copenhagen and the statue of the Little Mermaid, feeling as I do that I sort of have dibs on them. Ah well, the race goes to the swiftest...

It's that time again

Oops, it's February already. Everyone seems to agree that the holidays are DEFINITELY over now. But, more importantly, it's a send-something-off-to-Abyss-and-Apex month. I shall get onto it in the morning.

In keeping with the back-into-the-usual-routine theme, I'm reading short stories again on the way home at night. Tonight I finished off the September 2009 issue of Asimov's . Better late than never.

Vale, Kage Baker

Kage Baker
1952-2010
R.I.P

SFWA report: here