And the Oscar goes to...

In my befuddled state, I only just remembered to google to see if there was any news about Shaun Tan and got this.
He won! He won! He won!
I sooooo knew he would! It's nice when the good guys win :) So yay, Shaun, and congratulations.

Now, back to bed.

Jim-Jams

Cough, cough. Sniff, sniff. Snot, snot.
Ah well, at least I can wear my jammies all day.
Snuggle, snuggle. Drink, drink. Snore, snore.

Countdown to the Oscars (2)

Go Shaun, go Shaun, go, go, go.

Garden pirates

I just went to the kitchen for a bucket of brain-boosting coffee so I can finish an uncooperative story (I’m a bit addled and snotty with what I suspect is the cold presently doing the rounds at the Arvo Job). I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Jenny trotted in and meowed for attention. I looked. I squinted. I gasped.

What I saw: a large, black, cockroachy insect attached to her, its barbed legs viscously* gripping her tender eyeball.

What it really was: a leaf nattily secured to her head by cobwebs, an eyepatch of the sort that pirate fairies might place on a passing feline.

I did check that all was well before I took this photo of her wondering why I didn’t just get on with my job of making her life comfortable and remove the irritating accessory. Once I performed the task, she did a bit of a buck and a skip, and galloped back out into the garden.

* I meant 'viciously'. I think it was the upcoming word 'eyeball' that influenced that typo.

All it takes

Sometimes I get so used to clicking emails and seeing rejections that it takes a moment or two before I register that a story has actually been accepted.

But yes - triple yay and a jump of joy! - I've just received acceptance #1 for 2011 from Bards and Sages Quarterly.

So now there are wings on my feet, the dark clouds of doubt have once more dissipated, and I want to pound my keyboard until it cries out for mercy.

Song for a non-physicist.

"I wish I understood string theory."

Bloody Printers

Alas, over at Tangled Bank Press you can read:

Unfortunately, the print edition has had to be recalled.
Anyone who has bought a defective copy will have their copy replaced free of charge–please contact TBP with your proof of purchase.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before the print edition is available again.

Bloody printers stuffing up is something I usually only have to deal with in the Real World.

*sigh*

Countdown to the Oscars

Give us an S, give us an H, give us an A, give us a U,

give us an N, give us a T, give us an A, give us an N.

*jumps high and shakes pompoms*

SHAUN TAN!!!!!

What have you got to lose?

Have you got a genre novel tucked away somewhere? A manuscript that is perhaps a little bruised and battered from doing the rounds? Or maybe a shiny new work that needs a home? If so, you should head across to Angry Robot and check out their Open Door Month:

In March 2011 we will be accepting submissions from unagented authors for the first time. The clock starts ticking on March 1st, and we close the doors again on March 31st.

What they're looking for:

All our books are “genre” fiction in one way or another — specifically fantasy, science fiction, horror, and that new catch-all urban or modern fantasy. Those are quite wide-ranging in themselves; we’re looking for all types of sub-genre, so for example, hard SF, space opera, cyberpunk, military SF, alternate future history, future crime, time travel, and more. We have no problem if your book mashes together two or more of these genres, but they must have that genre foundation – no thrillers with the merest touch of SF, for example.

This is exciting stuff. Actual invitations to submit novels are few and far between. I'd write more about how exciting it is except I'm too busy heaving the first book of a space opera series that I completed long ago from the bottom drawer.

What the heck, it's worth a go.

Only a physicist

This response, in a New Scientist interview a few weeks ago with physicist Brian Green, to Is there any question that keeps you up at night? comes as such elegant relief to the usual background blather of comments and opinions that it has stayed with me. There’s no talk of mortgages, commodities, price indexes, the correct way to do this or that, creative fixations or human idiocy, no hint of what everyone should think, wear, understand and do, but a clear, crisp focus on the fundamentals of existence:

I wish it was just one. There are two that, if I allow myself to think about them, make my heart sink. Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a simple question that’s been asked for so long and the idea of nothing seems logically sensible. But when I truly imagine nothingness, well, I find it almost scary. Why isn’t there nothing?

The other question is the nature of time. Time is with us, every moment. I can’t even say a sentence without invoking a temporal word – moment. But what is time? When we look at the mathematics of our current understanding of physics, time is there, but there’s no deep explanation of what it is or where it came from.

So: nothingness and time. The mind of a physicist is indeed a beautiful thing.

Viewing the world through my own tiny, cracked prism, what woke me up last night was a writerly nightmare of the type I don't usually have. In it, I had just written a spectacularly brilliant piece on Rover, I was walking through the park holding my notebook triumphantly aloft and feeling euphoric about my accomplishment when a flash flood tore across Albert Park and ripped the notebook from my grasp. I floundered though the water, recovered Rover just as it was about to go down a drain, but alas, its circuitry was sodden and the Great Work was gone. The final, dramatic scene had me standing limp and lost as the light darkened around me, staring despairingly at the useless little computer in my hands.

Talk about self obsessed.

Four the record

... today's movie was all my fault. I thought it was a preview of the upcoming clone movie. It sounded like a clone movie. I didn't check the details. We rushed in. The credits rolled. Lo and behold, it wasn't the upcoming clone movie. It was a teen movie based on a teen book, which I would have enjoyed more if I were way way younger. In fact, I'm sure I would have loved it decades ago. I would so have swooned back then for the teenage Superman/ Starman. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't very big on the kind of details I now like in my aliens-on-Earth movies.

That said, checking up on the book here, I think it would have been better if they'd incorporated more of the background material that is obviously in the original work. Henri, John's guardian, for example, seems a more rounded character in the book.

Ah, Henri. The older guy. The dad. Played by Timothy Olyphant. I did a little swooning whenever he was on the screen. Which just goes to prove I was definitely not the target audience.

Addendum

Do I know those Gods of Train Scheduling or what?

Why? Why? Why?

So I've just spent a couple of hours battling the bureaucracy and the confused customer services staff ( I kept hearing the phrases "That's weird!" and "That's strange") of two different power companies and then finished off with a nice chat with the Water and Power Ombudsman's Office.

I'm hoping the outcome of this time investment (I could have written an entire piece of microfiction in that time) will be that I don't come home one night to no electricity and / or gas. Alas, I have a horrible feeling on that score.

The very worst thing of all is that I didn't do a single thing to bring about this situation. Somewhere, someone or somecomputer back in October dropped the ball, account names were switched and turned up and flipped around and whatnot, and poor me is left with the mess to cleanup.

Now, off to the Arvo Job, although I'm wondering whether I should brave the inconsistencies of the world beyond on a day like this. The Gods of Train Scheduling just might want to put the boot in while I'm down.

One by one they capitulate

Breaking news over at SFScope:

Effective at 11AM Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, February 22, Analog Science Fiction and Fact will begin accepting—and preferring—submissions in electronic form. Electronic submissions will be accepted through http://analog.magazinesubmissions.com, where full instructions can be found.

I love electronic submissions - sitting in my PJs in my study on a Sunday night and sending stories out into the world, my little writerly dreams flaring bright everytime I hit 'enter'.

Now if only SF&F would cave in too...

Oh, the pain.

Ow, ow, ow - from horse riding.

Ow, ow, ow - from another nice rejection for another story that almost made it.

Hey, hey, it was a horse riding day.

My sister and I didn't do any riding over the holidays - she was way too busy with her pet minding business - but we're back in the saddle again for our regular horsey get togethers.

Today we went to Daylesford and rode through the Wombat Forest. The morning ride was magical. The ferns were lush and frothy after all the recent rain, and clouds of Monarch butterflies and glittering dragonflies filled the air as we cantered along. Bliss.

The afternoon hoon ride was great too, once it settled down. We were a group of 5 experienced riders, but there were a few alpha male issues and rules about what constituted safe riding that had to be set with the 2 riders who joined us before we could get down to enjoying ourselves and tear about the forest. But enjoy ourselves we did, and mightily so too.

And here's your Foalwatch update.

Yay, yay, it's Darwin Day

Which means the print edition of The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution is FINALLY out!

Chris Lynch informs us that the book is slowly making its way through the bowels of various online retailers, including Amazon.com. In the meantime, the print version is available from Lulu.com for US$24.95 + postage.

All the details are on the Tangled Bank Press website: http://tangledbankpress.com.au/. Readers can read both the introduction and Christopher Green's story Darwin's Daughter for free. In addition, readers who buy a print copy in the next month will receive the ebook for free. Yes FREE!!! There's even a competition - you can win a copy of the ebook by following @thetangledbank on Twitter.

Chris Lynch has also posted an interview with Sean Williams about his haiku sequence The Origin of Haiku By Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Renga in the Struggle for Meaning, around which the anthology is structured. It provides a map of Darwin’s book Origin of Species, chapter by chapter, using Darwin's own phrases to capture the arguments he was working through, while at the same time illustrating the evolution of the haiku form down the centuries.

Anyway, get your copy now. You won't be sorry,

Baking for biodiversity

February 12th 2011 is Darwin's 202nd birthday (or would be if he were alive) and nothing quite says happy birthday like a "Host Dependant Replicate" cake or a "A Phylogenetic Tree of Darwin's Books" made up of cupcakes.

Each year, to celebrate Charles Darwin's birthday, the Beaty Biodiversity Museum organizes a contest in which participants create cakes in honour of Darwin and his achievements.

Go here to see a few results of the "Bake a Cake for Darwin Contest".

I'm not so sure about the "Primordial Pudding" entry, but please, cut me a slice of that venomous coral snake. Or is it the copycat species you're about to knife?

Sucky schoolie semantics

More proposed legislation: the Victorian Coalition government wants to give teachers and principals the right to force students to open their bags or lockers or turn out their pockets if said teacher or principals “reasonably believed” they might contain harmful items. What’s more, the government proposes that teachers would also be authorised to search any vehicle used for a teacher-supervised student activity.

So far, so authoritarian. People can argue the pros and cons of teachers going through the car boots of parents who are dropping off the kids according to their own fears, beliefs, political inclinations, and paranoia, whatever. The bit that many find interesting is that these laws will only apply to government schools.

The reason given by the Education Minister Martin Dixon for authorising these new search powers is a wonderful piece of backhanded spin: “Violence in our schools escalated under the Brumby Labor government. The Coalition government is determined to improve the safety for our children in government schools.”

So all in all, what our present government is saying is:

1) State schools suck (it’s not our fault).
2) State school kids suck.They’re rowdy, ungrateful little beggars who need to be kept in line.
3) Private school kids don’t suck. They’re inherently better, brighter and more upright than state school kids. The government trusts them implicitly.
4) Parents who send their kids to state schools suck. State schools are dangerous places. Parents who really love their children would mortgage the house or work four jobs to ensure that their kiddies go to a nice, safe private school.
5) Fixing up the state school system sucks. It’s boring, and it’s hard work, so let’s come up with a whizz-bang, media-attracting solution full of innuendo that will pit the haves and have-nots against each other to distract from the fact that the government won’t hire good teachers and pay them what they’re worth, invest in infrastructure and technology, or engage in other such commitment-heavy solutions.
6) Being the Education Minister sucks. Sometimes you actually have to go to state schools (yuk) and pretend to care about them.

Killing kangas

In the local paper this week: the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia is lobbying to replace the present system of government controlled kangaroo culling with a commercial harvesting plan. They say their program will ensure better animal welfare, and that they will closely monitor the population to ensure that no more kangaroos will be shot than is sustainable.

Put me firmly in the camp of the cynics who point out that when the destruction of wildlife becomes profit-driven, well, perhaps a few decisions might be made that are not 100% in wildlife’s best interests. Then there’s that old bugbear of commercial entities always wanting to expand and grow richer and more powerful. I don’t quite see mushy feelings about the fate of orphaned joeys influencing the board directors of a commercial harvesting organisation that counts the dead bodies of the mothers of those joeys as their source of revenue.

Yeah, I’m thinking seal cubs*, collapsed fishing industries...

Later: I mean 'pups' of course, though you can add bear cubs to the list if you like.

Invasion Alert

I think my neighbours have been replaced by pod people.

Quiet pod people.

Not all alien invasions are bad...

True Artist strikes again

I got this on Thursday, but had to dry it and press it flat before I could critique it.

There's a signature style here that I think shows great promise. I like the confident circles, I like the bristles and the hint of a curled tail.

I don't know about you, but I think it's a cat.

Two out of three

Antipodean SF #152 is online now, and the very first story in this issue is Blame Games by yours truly.

You can read it here.

I got the idea for this story 5/2-09, according to my notebooks, although the core of it is based on a newsletter I wrote for The Emerald Hill Times way back in *gulp* 2003. I used to be quite engaged in local community affairs when I live in St Kilda, and I wrote some very long, passionate and (at least I thought so) witty letters for EHT which usually ended up as Letter of the Week. I also got hate mail, private as well as public, with slurs about my Ozstralianess based solely on my name, which I, of course, subsequently responded to, but hey, that’s another story. I haven’t written it yet, but...

Blame Games first went out under a different title 1/8-09 but was rejected. It has since been accepted for publication twice. Two out of three ain’t bad for such a little story.

Mayhem in Melbourne

The heavens opened. Water dumped down. Within ten minutes, the Arvo Job office building was surrounded by rivers and lakes, and the foyer was flooded. An hour later, it was still raining heavily. I paddled across the park and waited in the pouring rain for half an hour only to discover the trams weren’t running, so I waded up Clarendon St and swam past the casino, offering the occasional scampering stranger shelter beneath my umbrella as I went. By the time I finally reached the train station, my pants were wet up to my knees, my shoes were sodden, my coat was dripping, and the rest of me was merely saturated. Waterlogged, I lumbered to the usual platform only to find a portly train man dispensing the news that the trains weren’t running either. A squelchy jog to the distant bus terminals was then required.

Finally - oh, joy - a long bus ride home in clothes I could wring water from. And then a nice (not) rejection waiting for me when I got home to round off the work week.

TGIF. Or at least it was an hour ago.

I love libraries

And so does Phillip Pullman.

Read his piece about the travesty of money and spin and lazy politicians versus common sense and civilisation and decency here