End of the Month Report: February 2013

Submissions: 1 (my brand new, big, shiny SF story)
Rejections: 2, both princess stories (so that's 2 princess stories for the princess antho down - sexy-bad princess just got dumped too - with 2 princesses still in with a chance)
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 13
New stories completed: 0.5? Okay, I suppose that doesn't really count, so make that a big, fat 0. But I did do a lot of tinkering...
Mood: Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting...

Juggling Stories and Stuff

So there's a certain story which, although of humble and simple construction, I consider one of my better efforts out in the world with a magazine that usually returns my submissions within a couple of weeks, but this time, so far, they've held it for 7-8 weeks, which may not mean anything in the greater scheme of things, but then again it might! However, if they're going to reject it, I really wish they'd reject it quickly, like sometime tonight would be good, so I can send it off for the themed issue of another magazine, deadline tomorrow. Alas, it probably won't happen so conveniently. The temptation to simultaneously sub is overwhelming, but bound to lead to trouble if I succumb, so I shall resist. Drats! Ah, all this waiting for outcomes, sometimes it drives me batty.

Today I should have been putting up my tent for an airing and getting my gear ready for a weekend of horse riding through the Victorian High Country, the one I'd been "training" for on our last two rides, but unfortunately my sister has just this week been struck down by illness (get well soon, Cindy), so we've had to postpone the trip for a few months. Because I thought I was off on a strenuous ride in a few days, I'd more or less reluctantly (but not wholeheartedly quite) dismissed the idea of heading off to the Spec Fic Festival in Sydney I posted about a while back - I'm still not well enough for consecutive weekends of pushing the energy envelope -  and it's probably too late to organise things now. Another drats!

It's Official Now

Suddenly remembering the date, I popped across to the HWA site and have a quick look at the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards Final Ballot before hitting the sack, and in a must-share-right-now moment, to my delight I discovered that Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, edited by Eric J. Guignard, is now officially a Bram Stoker Award Nominee in the Superior Achievement in Anthology category. How cool is that?


A huge congratulations to Eric J. Guignard for pulling it all together.

Good luck, DToLC.

Now, where's my bed?

Stella! Stellaaaaaa!

I'm a bit behind, I think, but I read in the Age today that 12 books have been longlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and one of them - how exciting! - is our very own Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts, which I must read ASAP. She is one of my favourite authors, someone (along with a few other brilliant spec fic writers who aren't Margaret Atwood***) I'm always pushing I-don't-like-genre-fiction-I-only-do-litfic people to read. I've read and loved her short story collections and adored Tender Morsels - I still have no clue what all the kerfuffle was about. In fact I was well into the book before I realised I'd already scooted through the witchy-dwarfy sex scene that had raised a few hackles. Where was my outrage? I'm convinced certain people were reading a different version of the book from another, far more sordid dimension. That's the only way I can account for their perception of it being so vastly and wildly and so emotively different from mine.

But anyway, back to Sea Hearts. Must read it. I'm sure it's brilliant. How can it not be?

And go, Margo!

***whom I also love, but so do the I-don't-like-genre-fiction-I-only-do-litfic people to the extent that they don't count her as spec fic. Literary cherry picking. 

Mid-Week Reflection

I got through two days of Arvo Jobbing in a surprisingly sprightly fashion after Sunday's many gallops through the Wombat Forest, but mostly because I knew Wednesday was coming up fast so I could pace myself. Today, however - no, make that yesterday as the blog clock has just clicked over - I was not so full of beans. No matter, as I simply languished in my reading chair all morning and did a lot of, well, reading as I recuperated, then later on managed to get in three hours of writing. My Post-Singularity story got a good going over, resulting in a pair of AIs suddenly indulging in some rather cruel banter and me roughening up my main character a little, so the day was not complete loss. Any day that includes a nice big block of writing is a good day.

Feeling Like A Real Rider Again

At 6AM this morning, I had a hard time convincing myself I really wanted to get up and go horse riding, firstly because, well, it was Sleep-In Sunday, and secondly because our all day ride three weeks ago, my first all dayer in over ten months after languising in the greylands of not being well, was pure torture and had me hobbling around for a week afterwards. However, I also knew it was necessary to get my sorry butt out of bed and to participate in Operation Whip Those Riding Muscles Back Into Shape if I ever wanted to enjoy galloping across fields and through dales again, or heading off for weekends wending through distant mountains, so off I went.

It was good I did, as today went far better than last time. My sister and I went out by ourselves for both the morning and afternoon ride so we could control the tempo and toughness of the rides, knowing it would be easier for a certain stubborn person (not my sister) to ask for a slowdown with just the two of us than if third or fourth parties were involved. We still did some quite fast and challenging runs, and were interrupted three times by kangaroos bounding across the trail and spooking the horses, but also just did a lot of hacking along and getting our bottoms used to spending long days in the saddle again. It was all a lot easier than last time, my ankles gave me only a twinge of bother, my legs remained under my control, and now, at the end of the day,  I don't feel like a zombie rider - hey, there's  story idea. Zombie rider on a zombie horse? I'm sure it's already been done. Anyway, mission achieved!

So, the upshot of today is that riding from dawn til dusk is fun again. Yay! Point me towards some distant mountains.

(Not sure who the people in this picture are - it was taken a while ago. But the view is nice.)

Great Balls of Guilt

So today's frightening news was all about a meteorite hitting the Russian Urals:

At least 112 people have been seriously hurt among the 1100 injured, according to the Interior Ministry. About 200 children who had been at schools were among the hurt from flying glass and debris.

The meteorite, which weighed about 10 metric tons and may have been made of iron, entered Earth's atmosphere and broke apart 30-50 km (19-31 miles) above ground, according to Russia's Academy of Sciences.

The energy released when it entered the Earth's atmosphere was equivalent to a few kilotonnes, the academy said, the power of a small atomic weapon exploding.

All of which immediately made me feel irrationally guilty about yesterday's lighthearted post on Asteroid 2012 DA14. I know, I know, I didn't make the Russian fireball happen, I'm not that powerful, and I truly wouldn't even if I could control the stars and planets and every bit of space debris in between, but still...

Luckily, updates such as this soon soothed my troubled conscience:

NASA said that the Chelyabinsk fireball had nothing to do with the approaching 2012 DA14 asteroid, as some scientists had previously suggested.

"The trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object,” the space agency said on its website. 

 Events like this are a timely reminder that there's a lot going on out in the great unknown beyond the comfort of our cosy Spaceship Earth as it negotiates the universe's highly unregulated interstellar traffic.

Duck!

So here it comes, Asteroid 2012 DA14 (they couldn't have come up with a snazzier name?) which will flyby just 25,000 kilometres above out heads, the closest-ever known approach by a large near-Earth asteroid. 45 meters across and whizzing past inside the ring of GPS, weather and communications paraphernalia presently in geosynchronous orbit, it'll be 8000 kilometers closer to us than any of those satellites. Not to worry though as researchers say that both the satellites and our planet are safe from impact. Wouldn't want our smartphones out of action. Now that would be a catastrophe!

Lucky Australia will be afforded one of the better views of this non-happening Armageddon. Look under the Southern Cross from 4.30am AEDT. And here you can read about everything you need to know about Asteroid 2012 DA14 (Happy Harbinger?)

The interesting thing about this record event, apart from the cosmic bullet burn suffered by Earth, has been reading about all the asteroid deflection research going on around the world. Bandied about with abandon are plans to use kinetic impactors or gravity tractors, fitting asteroids with rockets, vapourising space rocks to force them to move in a different direction, and painting asteroids white so the pressure of sunlight will force the asteroid into a safer orbit etc. I was amused to read a slightly dismissive quote by a scientist in New Scientist stating that "These are in the realms of science fiction for now" (oh, the insult) but then a few paragraphs later, there was talk of the viability of designing a nuclear missile to blow apart a dangerous asteroid or comet, and a real, upcoming test mission called Deep Impact 2 to smash a spacecraft sans nuclear explosive into a small asteroid. So did that theory go from science fiction to science fact in one rah-rah Hollywood movie? Did the coolness of Bruce Willis give it instant street cred? Just asking on behalf of those other poor, cruelly put-down theories.

Anyway, people of Oz, if you want to get up in just a few hours, look to the Southern Cross and behold the wonders and the dangers and the harsh, arbitrary nature of the universe (just ask the dinosaurs). If somewhere out in the dark beyond, the course of Asteroid 2012 DA14 (Flyby Fred?) had been bumped just a smidge by a piece of cosmic grit or a gravitational tug...

Easy and Not So Easy Days

The Lawnmower Man is here, making sure the place doesn't look like it's inhabited by a hobo, though he has an easy job of it today. With heat of an Aussie Summer hammering the place, there's not much growing going on. Weeds and plants alike are just grimly hanging on, not wasting any enery on frivolous things like growth, and awaiting the coming of rain. But that's okay. The LMM will more than make up for today's cruising session once that growing begins again and the jungle-like tendencies of my garden once more come to the fore.

Alas, this is one of those weeks when I do more Other Stuff That Isn't Writing than any real, get-stuck-into-it scriberly work. That's okay too. Sometimes you have to clear the decks so you can clear your mind.

And now I'm off to the Arvo Job. Everything is being restructured at the moment. Things have been slowly dismantled over the past few months, and over the coming months, we'll be swapping and clipping and pruning and weedbombuing duties and procedures that have been in place for years, which is anxiety inducing for many people and makes for a tense atmosphere. I wouldn't have minded more certainty this year, if only for the enery-saving component of predictability, but what can you do? It'll be okay, I'm sure, although even as I type them, I sense an air of 'famous last words' about that statement.

*obviously I couldn't type the word 'energy' this morning. Possibly saving myself the effort of including a 'g' each time was in itself a subconscious effort to save calories.

Happy Talk

I wasn't going to blog tonight, but was just reading Justine Larbalestier's excellent post about how you don't have to be a tormented soul to be a writer - and no, there's no 'but it helps' punchline to go with that - when I came across, and just had to nick, her link to this Forbes list of The Ten Happiest Jobs, because there, in the top 5 no less, we have:

4. Authors: For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existent, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness.

So true. Money, believe it or not, and gasp, gasp, gasp, isn't everything. That said, covetous soul that I am, I would still prefer to be paid a decent amount for my scriberly work and be both happy and well paid, because:

Ya gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream,
How you gonna to have a dream come true?

Amusingly, if you scroll down,  below the list of the Happy Ten, there is also the list of the Ten Most Hated Jobs which were generally much better paying and have higher social status. What’s striking about the list is that these relatively high level people are imprisoned in hierarchical bureaucracies. They see little point in what they are doing. The organizations they work for don’t know where they are going, and as a result, neither do these people.

So, rich, poor, got lots of stuff, haven't got much stuff, happy, not happy - things are not always as they possibly superficially seem...

So I Finally Dared Do It

Today I gave the big SF no-humans-just-aliens story I wrote over the Xmas break a final polish and a pat on the head, and then sent it off out into the big wide world. Not just to any publication, mind you, but one of the Big Three. Might as well aim insanely high.

I haven't sent anything off to pro publications for a while, but I'm gearing up for more assaults on those divine heights this year. I'm still weeping over the near misses last year - so close, so close - but moping about what might have been ain't gonna get those mountains scaled, so off we go again.

In other news, as if to counterbalance the new story going out, one of my princess stories for the bad princesses anthology has just been knocked out of the royal race (I have to admit, this particular princess's royalty credentials are pretty tenuous, and of an alien nature, so fair enough). Anyway, that's one princess down, with three (sexy-evil princess, morally-ambiguous-ending princess and rebellious, steampunk warrior-princess) still in the competition. It still amazes me that I had so many princess stories tucked away on my hard drive. And I have one that's still a WIP, although technically the protagonist is a queen, and as we all know, queens are a different kettle of fish altogether.

Print Me A Moon Base, Pronto.

Always happy to come across news that there are teams of dedicated people with wide-ranging and creative minds out there working hard to make my space dreams come true, I was fascinated to read about UK-based architects Foster and Partners being hired by the European Space Agency to design a potential lunar base on the southern pole of the Moon. Go team!

But wait, there's more.

The truly nifty thing is that instead of dragging truckloads of materials from Mother Earth to the Moon, a wasteful and expensive process that reeks of financial and political dependency on the homeworld (okay, I'll admit it, I've been mightily brainwashed influenced by KSR's Red Mars series) they're investigating a cheaper option using lunar soil, or regolith, as the building matter. Or rather, as the "printing" matter, for they plan to whip up a concoction that they can pop into their moon bound 3D printer and, hopefully, out will come the components they need to create a "catenary" dome that can house four people and shield them against radiation and meteorites.

So maybe it'll soon be a matter of simply printing up a spaceship to get there too. Possibly the future will look like something along the lines of "Have Space Suit and a Printer Under One Arm - Will Travel".

 Anyway, science. Love it!

Three Philosophical Phrases Of Life

I feel the universe is sending momentous messages my way this week, although as is usual with such randomly acquired input collected by my obsessively pattern-searching brain, I have yet to decipher the full depth of this cosmic communication in a way that satisfactorily suits my own agenda. Anyway, whilst reading articles about different topics in various publications over the past few days, I've come across this scattering of philosophical clues to the Meaning of Life.

There's plan de vida, a Costa Rican term to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. It doesn't have to be big and world-changing, it just has to be there.

And ikigai, a Japanese term used in Okinawa, meaning "the reason for which you wake up in the morning".  If you've got this covered, apparently it adds to your happiness index and life expectancy.

Finally, wu wei, the Taoist principle of non-action, is about not forcing a solution or seeking to gain control but being aware and going with the natural flow of things. It sounds like a few stories I've written.

So what does it all mean? Does it mean even anything? Is the universe targeting me as a special snowflake, or am I just another grubby mortal scrambling about in the mud to make sense of the chaos around me? Who knows? Who cares? I shall ponder this as, taking a deep breath, relaxing and going with the flow, I head off to the Arvo Job. I'm deferring my usual midweek collapse day until tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how that goes. I haven't worked three days in a row in the city since May last year. Crossing fingers.

To Pop Up To Sydney Or Not To Pop Up To Sydney?

'Tis the question on my mind for the past five minutes since I opened a certain email from a certain organisation.

And why this particular Shakespearean quandry? Because the NSW Writers' Centre is having a one day Speculative Fiction Festival on March 16, and you don't get too many of those in these parts. Many topics of spec-fic relevance will be discussed. Great names abound:

Presenters include: Juliet Marillier, Ian Irvine, Marienne de Pierres, Alison Croggon, Richard Harland, Melina Marchetta, Lisa Hannett, Garth Nix, John Flanagan, Cat Sparks, Kim Wilkins, Sophie Masson, Russell Farr, Dionne Lister, Pamela Freeman, Belinda Murrell, Ben Chandler, Kate Forsyth,  Robert Hood, Jason Nahrung, Kirstyn McDermott, Angela Slatter and Dirk Strasser. 

Details are here

So I know where Sydney is, approximately (northwards and to the right), but the truly big question is, would I be able to find Rozelle?