End of the Month Report: June 2013

Submissions: 8
Rejections: 5
Acceptances: 0 (but there's a very nice maybe...)
Published: 1 (Nullipara in 'Aliens: Recent Encounters')
Stories out in the wild: 10
New stories completed: 1 (I just sent it off.)
Mood: I'm writing much and feeling good about it. Also, I'm in anthology sharing a TOC with names that make my head spin. What's not to grin about?

Shadowy Figure

Well, it's official now. A bit scary, but official.

If you pop over to the Australian Horror Writers Association's website, click to the Australian Shadows Awards and check out the 2013 Shadows Awards judges, you'll spot yours truly suspiciously lurking on the Short Works / Collections / Edited Works panel.

How did this come about?

Well, I received an email in 2012 inviting me to participate, and I almost jumped on board then, being both interested in the behind-the-scenes process and wanting to give something back to an organisation that has so many sterling volunteers giving up their precious time to help their fellow writers. One cannot just be a taker.  I'd just had major surgery and knew I was going to be off recuperating for 8-10 weeks. I thought I'd quickly recover and have oodles of time for reading (and writing.) But I also worried things might go pear-shaped and that I wouldn't be able to fulfil my obligations, so I declined, telling the awards director to try me again this year (and thank goodness I did, given that I spent most of my days until the end of October napping, and my brain was mostly zonked out on painkillers.) One year later, almost to the day, in comes another email. This time, after much thought, I decided to do my bit for the organisation, and so there I am, on a panel, judging...

I'm already well into it, reading a story a day and letting each one swill around inside my head for a goodly while before I make my call. And believe me, being one of those anal, overly responsible types, I take the whole business very seriously.

So, yes, much to do until the end of February 2014

Heigh-Ho

...it's off to hospital we go. Yep, it's one of those weeks.

Fortunately, I've become an expert at ignoring the chaos around me and writing in waiting rooms. Sometimes, I'm even annoyed when a nurse comes along and disturbs me for medical crap. Then there are the train trips in and back, which are worth a couple of hours of wordsmithing, so I plan to have a decent amount of work done by the time I get home again.

And, of course, there's that book shop with the book sale between the train station and the hospital...

Legend of the Luminous Last Lines

There was a book sale in town today. I almost bought The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson but opted for a couple of more modern tomes instead. Coming home tonight and finding out that the great man himself  had just passed away, I wished I had bought it.

Silly me. Tomorrow I'll go back and remedy my mistake. In the shop, leafing through it, I read again that almost last, tragic but full of wonderment, bittersweet-with-a-touch-of-hope line, which always gets me:

"If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence."

Then there's the kicker of a very last line, but I won't spoil it for those who haven't yet dipped into this classic yet.  

He did last lines well. I cannot even begin to guess how many times I read I Am Legend. I loved the entire book (let's politely ignore the movies for now), but I mostly reread it just to relive over and over the full impact of that final prison scene and the very last, now very famous words which, when I first read them as a teenager, completely blew me away:

 ...a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.

 Some writers fudge endings. Not Richard Matheson. Just as you (if you hadn't read his work before) with the last page turned, might have been winding down, he slammed an image or an idea or a possibility right into your brain, and there it stayed put, sending your thoughts skittering off into multiple, deep, dark, moving and twisty philosophical places. All that, and frightening and touching and entertaining too! I loved his books. I loved his Twilight Zone episodes. And who wasn't scared out of their wits by every passing truck for at least a month after watching the movie Duel?

Thank you, Richard, for all those great stories.

Richard Matheson

1926-2013

R.I.P.

Zombies, Zombies Everywhere

NO IMPORTANT SPOILERS, I THINK. I MEAN, IT'S A ZOMBIE MOVIE, FOR GOODNESS SAKE. WHAT'S TO GIVE AWAY?

As, supposedly, the first zombie movie in with a chance to win an Oscar, World War Z is a zombie movie for people who don't like zombie movies. In other words, it's classier than your average zombie movie - possibly even art house zombie?

 There are no scenes of gory evisceration, strewn body parts, intestines being slurped like spaghetti or close-ups of livers and brains being chewed with messy relish. Sure there are splashes of blood tastefully spurting across faces here and there, but that's about it. There are no cheap gross out shots of ripped off limbs being passed around to upset the audience here. No mumbled utterances of 'braaaaains!' either. Even the zombies themselves are quite nice looking. Not as nice looking as the walking dead in Warm Bodies, but they're not missing jaws and cheeks, rotting in horrible places or flaking all over the carpet.

But they're still very scary. They're scary because there are simply so so many of them (I was wondering whether there was an overpopulation subtext tucked away in the movie, but that's probably overthinking the script), they're fast, and they're a monolithic force of unthinking, unrelenting undeadness coming straight at you. You can't even take a rest from their scariness by making fun of their ridiculous shambling gait or making silly groaning noises, because these former guys and gals are silent and swift, agile hunters that bring folk down within seconds of targeting them. They're deadly efficient killing machines designed for the sole purpose of replicating themselves.

Which is why WWZ is really more of an international medical thriller than a zombie movie, sort of Contagion with speedy corpses in lieu of an invisible virus. That said, plagues that move swiftly and have a high rate of attrition are panic-inducing at a primal level - I kept thinking about the Black Death diary entries I read a long time ago which recorded how people woke up feeling fine, had boils by lunchtime, and were dead by the evening. The scenes of mass, blind terror in the face of unbeatable odds are effectively portrayed. I mean, what can your average person do when overwhelmed by a veritable tsunami of undead monsters? One tensely watches the screen and hopes that in  similar situation one would be as cool as Brad Pitt's character, but...hmmm. Zombies or viruses, people are mostly not good at being calm and rational when everyone around them is screaming and scrambling to save their own butts. While still entertaining us, WWZ does good job of showing how quickly society can break down and revert to the rule of gun-power and elite connections. Useful and rich people are saved. Non-skilled folk and the unwashed masses are left behind as zombie bait. A certain amount of the film's scariness comes from acknowledging deep down inside that, come the Zombie Apocalypse, most of us would probably end up tackling the rampaging hordes as best we can all on our own with a pointy stick.

 So yeah, WWZ was deliciously fright-inducing, as any good zombie movie should be, and, ditto, fun to watch, with splatterings of supernatural, Hollywood-style social commentary added to the mix to give it that much desired, mainstream respectability that many genre pieces subconsciously crave.

Playing Hooky Silver Linings

Staying home with a head cold last week turned out to be a good thing disguised as a bad thing. Getting a whole lot of submissions out and about again kick started my competitive nature and reminded me that if I want to come home to nice emails about stories being considered or accepted, well, those stories have to be out there, in the world, rather than languishing on my hard drive. A simple truth, but one often forgotten :)

Since I also went through my notebooks and lined up a few promising ideas I'd jotted down, plus pulled forth a number of stories that I remembered as being half-baked but which turned out to be surprisingly close to completion, I regained a sense of many works in progress all jostling for attention. Days of cocooning with my keyboard whilst blowing my nose got me back into pushing those almost-dones to their thrilling conclusions. Organising the notice boards over my writing desk gave the place a more bustling vibe that adds energy to whole feedback loop - things to do! deadlines to make! I wrote over the weekend, and when I returned to the Arvo Job on Monday, I found myself going over stories in my head as I walked across the park to work, and again in the evening walking from work. Aaaah - I felt so back to normal, and loved it!

So writerly structure is returning to my life, in between all the hospital crap, which will, alas, go on for a while yet. Rather than dabbling, I'm re-establishing old habits like writing on the train instead of napping. I'm off all painkillers and am periodically feeling quite chirpy - my sister and I have even tentatively agreed to go for a short horse ride in 4 weeks. And today, setting myself a challenge (it was a bit of a brain check, really), I actually came up with an idea, then started and finished a brand new short story, which just rolled off my fingertips, so my confidence is up and my self-satisfaction levels are skyrocketing. I'll polish it and send off by the end of the month.

Anyway, the upshot of this post is that rather than being an uphill slog, writing is actually fun again.

If I've Told Myself Once, I've Told Myself A Thousand Times...

You just never know, so stop trying to second-guess the market, Gitte!

Example: I just came home to an email from a certain pro market (not one of the Big Three) telling me that a story I submitted two days ago is being considered for publication.

I almost, of course, didn't send this particular story to them. Everything I've ever submitted to them before (and I've sent many stories their way, believe me) has come back quick smart. I thought this would be just another speedy turnaround.

But I made myself do it, gritting my teeth at the ridicule I imagined would most certainly be heaped upon it at the other end (it's the relatively new story I've previously described  as a hopefully amusing SF quest story featuring a human-alien, Sherlock-Watsonishy team with a dash of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor! Richard Francis Burton).) It's already been rather abruptly rejected twice, so even though I enjoyed writing it and like it myself, I've been feeling a bit unsure about it's worthiness as a piece suitable for a more general audience. Humour is difficult to gauge. Maybe it wasn't so amusing after all...

Now it's being considered for pro publication. The odds are still staggering, and my chances are slimmer than the slimmest of slims, but at least I know now that story must be reasonably okay. It must have tickled one or two editorial funny bones to make it out of their mountainous slush pile.

And so it goes.

A Box of Tissues is a Girl's Best Friend

I've been doing a lot of sneezing and nose blowing the past two days - not so good for Arvo Jobbing, so I stayed home today from that badly ventilated place from whence my dreaded lurgy originated (the air con has been dodgy since a rather dramatic rooftop fire and evacuation early last week, and people throughout the office have been coughing and sniffing, filling the stagnant air with goodness knows what microbial yuckiness, and, well, it was a matter of when rather than if...), but excellent for catching up on my woefully behind submission count.

Yesterday and today I looked over, tinkered with, wrote cover letters for, formatted according to each publication's specifications, and sent off 8 stories (one to one of the Big Three - how's that for optimism?), so now I have 13 of my presently finest out there circulating once more, and, of course, I'm positively certain I've targeted my markets so precisely and exactly matched hitherto hard-to-sell stories with sympathetic editors that for sure 75% of them will be snapped up sometime over the next month.

Anyway, I must make sure I don't fall behind again.

Now, please excuse me while I go grab a tissue.

Vale, Iain Banks

We knew it was coming, but we, I, thought, well, as we always do in such cases, for sure he'll be around for a few more months... He was such a force... Over at Banksophilia, where you can read the overwhelming love and respect that so many people felt for him and his work, he seemed perky enough... I meant to leave a comment myself, to tell him how much I loved his books, but I didn't... I was still composing it in my head, trying to make it special... Now I wish I had just written a simple 'thank you'. Why do we always wait too long?

I'm floundering in ellipses because it's impossible to absorb that he's really gone, and so soon.

Iain Banks
 

16 February 1954 - 9 June 2013

R.I.P.

 

*** Neil Gaiman shares a few wonderful memories of Iain over at his blog in a piece titled 'Iain. With or without the M.'

 

Who Cats

This is an ongoing problem for me: I slip a Dr Who disc into the Blu-ray and pop put to the kitchen to pick up a waiting tray of tea and toast (or unhealthy goodies), but when I get back, there are multiple cat-shaped silhouettes lurking in the half-dark blocking my view. This only happens with Dr Who.

Lured by the wildly swirling time tunnel through which the TARDIS hurtles, the hypnotised moggies sit right up close to the screen staring at the psychedelic movements. Occasionally, they raise paws to bat a particularly enticing vortex. I need to shoo them away quick smart and with rough words or they just keep coming back for more. I thought it was amusing when it first happened, but I soon discovered that they can actually sit there for an entire episode blandly staring at The Doctor and his doings, or walking backwards and forwards in front of the screen, waiting, waiting, waiting until the amusing, feline-friendly visuals return at the very end, at which point they get excited again. I've almost broken the habit, but, as these photos from last night prove, Jenny still hasn't quite got the message.

And yes, posting about my cats means I didn't, alas, make it to Continuum today. There was simply not enough oomph left in my already well squeezed-out toothpaste tube of energy to get me down to Melbourne and then through more than a couple of hours of keeping up with lots of bustling, challenging people before I would have had to head home again, which, given the door price for a single day, would have been bad economics. Plus, for added energy-drainingness, the trains are partially out this weekend, the last leg of the journey replaced by buses. So I stayed home instead and rewrote a story that I'll submit tomorrow, which made me feel good and pleased and happy, although it probably wasn't as career-furthering as a spot of strategic networking (unless it sells to the intended market!), or as fun as all the wining and dining happenings at Continuum that folk are blogging about.

Ah well, we do what we can do as best we can.

Note From Editor: Aliens Spotted in Dallas

Even though the official release day for Aliens: Recent Encounters is 17 June 2013,  editor Alex Dally MacFarlane reports here on her blog that she saw, and actually fondled, copies of the anthology  in a Barnes & Nobles in Dallas. She even provides a cool shelf photo.
  
Sooooo, things are hotting up. It's sooooo exciting. I sooooo still can't believe I somehow squeezed into that amazing TOC!

There's also an interview with Alex about the anthology and her own writing over at SF Signal.

Now to get some writing done in between loads of washing. Here in Australia, this is the Queen's Birthday long weekend, so I'm eager to get the domestic stuff out of the way so I can catch up with my muses, a few movies, some rest, and hopefully a day of socialising with the good folk down at Continuum tomorrow.

Note To Self: Must Read This

Let me just make one thing clear before I continue - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is MY special book. I found it, all by myself, without reviews or recommendations, in a school library during one of my lunchtime wanders there when I was about ten years old, years after the book was first published. In fact, the book itself might have mysteriously drawn me to its shelf and compelled me to pick it up and take it home. I know the word 'Brisingamen' certainly attracted me, for being something of a junior mythology buff, I recognised the name of the goddess Freya's necklace and was intrigued. And who can resist a word like 'weirdstone'?

Anyway, just so you know that no matter what kind of a connection you might think you have formed with the book, your "relationship" with TWOB is but a trifling, superficial thing compared with MY deep and meaningful bond with it. So there , now you know. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is MY special book. Ditto with The Moon of Gomrath.

The reason I've brought this up is because thanks to a review over at  Book View Café, I was reminded this morning that I need to read Boneland by Alan Garner to see how it all ends for Colin and Susan. When Boneland first came out, I decided to reread TWOB and TMOG and then clear a bit of dedicated reading time for what I was told would be a difficult  but worthwhile job. Alas, stuff happened, I got sidetracked, blah, blah, etc. But now, thanks to BVC, I'm on it again.

I mean, with a review like this from Ursula LeGuin, how can I not? The circle must be completed. The puzzle must be at least attempted. And how lucky are we that the author has seen fit to bring closure to the saga?

I just hope I understand it. :)

Bad Idea

I just clicked the link provided by a certain anthology to check the status of one's submission and discovered my story is number 973 in the queue. Given that the deadline has passed and they've already been reading for a while, and that most places will be going to commissioned writers, well, wow, I'm not sure even my dreamiest optimism can sustain the hope of a sale there. I should have let it be and simply wandered about in blissful ignorance thinking that maybe, just maybe I'd come home one night to an email...

No matter. It's June! That means that the Aliens:Recent Encounters anthology will be out in 2 weeks (hurrah!), and that the Bram Stoker Awards will soon be announced (go, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, go!). Who knows what other good things might happen? Well, not another ASIM sale, not this month anyway - I just got a bounceback there.

Anyway, onwards and upwards.

973. Wow.

End of the Month Report: May 2013

Submissions: 6
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 8
New stories completed: 0
Mood:  Feeling much perkier after this past month of medical crap and ready to seriously hit the old writing keyboard again. I've been slowly getting back into the submitting game this week, and am presently rereading and mulling over the readers' feedback - which is always much appreciated and seriously considered - from the traditional Friday night rejection I received yesterday for a short story (2110 words only) that I'm particularly set on getting published some time this millennium. The first reader enjoyed this very much. The second reader reported that It's a great concept and the writing is brilliant - very clear and I got a real sense of the characters and the world they inhabit. liked the POV, but wanted more conflict and drama. The third reader started with An ambitious idea for a short story.  but, as the least enthusiastic of the group, then wanted more back story for the second non-POV character and possibly to make that character the "real story" rather than the old gent I have telling the tale, and was quite insistent that I provide a more in depth explanation of a certain belief system. 

So should I expand the story? Change the focus? Change the POV? Add a few dreaded infodumps? Whip up a religious thesis? Slip in some hand to hand combat and a spot of gunfire? Regale at length about my characters' lives up until the point where they meet? Have them argue more? Take another look at the ending? There's a line I could add that might ratchet up the tension... 

Hmm, things to ponder and honestly weigh up, always remembering, of course, that you can't please everyone, so ultimately...

But that will have to wait until tomorrow. Right now, there's a Dr Who Season 7: Part 2  Episodes 6-13 box set waiting for me in the lounge room. And the 2012 Christmas special, which I haven't seen yet because my ABC reception has been atrocious out here in the country ever since we went digital. Yay!