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.