I've spent a nice, lazy Good Friday sleeping in, pottering about the house, reading, and messing around with a couple of SF themed prose poems, one a horror piece about alien sex, the other about the love between a married couple of different species growing stale. This is my new, fun thing to do, or rather, it's an old fun thing that I loved doing as a kid and which I've started doing again recently. There's something about train travel that seems to be conducive to the assembling of a poem, and working on one perks me up more than a cup of coffee. I love the playing around with delicious sounding words and rhythmic sentences and amusing ideas, and since I have no illusions about ever becoming a Poet Laureate, or even a Poet Averageate, there's no self-imposed pressure of creating something publishable.
However, that said, following Heinlein's Rules of Writing (send out everything you finish) I did submit my first effort, and it was - knock me over with a feather - accepted!!
So now you can read Paradigm Shift over in issue #142 of AntipodeanSF.
This piece was conceived 18/8-09 on the train as a Very Dark and Serious Short Story, but once I sat down at a keyboard and the first line came out, it changed to a much lighter poem. I submitted it the first time 15/9-09, but it was rejected. I sent it out again 4/10-09 and it was accepted seven weeks later. I hope you enjoy it. I was certainly mightily entertained by the writing of it.
Oh, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Hans Christian Andersen. You were a huge influence on me when I was a child, both because of your stories and because of your Danishness. Danny Kaye had something to do with it as well.
These pictures are by Anne Anderson, an art nouveau illustrator of children's books. She illustrated more than 100 books, some with her husband, Alan Wright, whose style is somewhat similar.
2 comments:
I had noticed your name when that edition landed in my inbox. I've received Antipodean SF for years, I think. I must have signed up once and I haven't even been reading it, much less logging in.
So, I think it might have been the influence of reading your blog that made me actually open it and read it, and there was your name as author! (I don't think you've already mentioned that you'd submitted to that magazine, had you? My memory's terrible.
I registered and voted, because I thought the poem was very good. I like a piece of writing where I have to read at least twice to get all the subtleties, which I did for the poem.
Very scary and dark.
Thank you, thank you. I can tell you, I was very unsure about whether I should send it off, but hey, what was the worse thing that could have happened? Another rejection, that's all.
AntipodeanSF is a great publication, as regular as clockwork. If you look at the bibliographies of Australian SF and Fantasy writers who are doing quite well now, you'll usually see a whole lot of AntiSF publications back at the beginning of their careers.
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